Dark Matter (3 page)

I laughed at her naivete. "There won't be an autopsy. Not a public one, anyway."

"David—"

"I really can't say more. I shouldn't have said that much. I just wanted you to know . . . that it's real."

"Why can't you say more?" She held up a small, graceful hand. "No, let me answer that. Because to tell me more would put me in danger. Right?"

"Yes."

She rolled her eyes. "David, from the beginning you've made extraordinary demands about secrecy. And I've complied. I've told colleagues that the hours you spend in my office are research for your second book, rather than what they really are."

"And you know I appreciate that. But if I'm right about Fielding, anything I tell you now could put your life at risk. Can't you understand that?"

"No. I've never understood. What sort of work could possibly be so dangerous?"

I shook my head.

"This is like a bad joke." She laughed strangely. "'I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.' It's classic paranoid thinking."

"Do you really believe I'm making all this up?"

Rachel answered with caution. "I believe that you believe everything you've told me." .

"So, I'm still delusional."

"You've got to admit, you've been having disturbing hallucinations for some time now. Some of the recent ones are classic religious delusions."

"But most not," I reminded her. "And I'm an atheist. Is that classic?"

"No, I concede that. But you've also refused to get a workup for your narcolepsy. Or epilepsy. Or even to get your blood sugar checked, for that matter."

I've been worked up by the foremost neurologist in the world. "That's being investigated at work."

"By Andrew Fielding? He wasn't an M.D., was he?"

I decided to go one step further. "I'm being treated by Ravi Nara."

Her mouth fell open. "Ravi Nara? As in the Nobel Prize for medicine?"

"That's him," I said with distaste.

"You work with Ravi Nara?"

"Yes. He's a prick. It was Nara who said Fielding died of a stroke."

Rachel appeared at a loss. "David, I just don't know what to say. Are you really working with these famous people?"

"Is that so hard to believe? I'm reasonably famous myself."

"Yes, but. . . not in the same way. What reason would those men have to work together? They're in totally different fields."

"Until two years ago they were."

"What does that mean?"

"Go back to your office, Rachel."

"I canceled my last patient so I could come here."

"Bill me for your lost time."

She reddened. "There's no need to insult me. Please tell me what's going on.

I'm tired of hearing nothing but your hallucinations."

"Dreams."

"Whatever. They're not enough to work with."

"Not for your purpose. But you and I have different goals. We always have.

You're trying to solve the riddle of David Tennant. I'm trying to solve the riddle of .my dreams."

"But the answers are bound up in who you are! Dreams aren't independent of the rest of your brain! You—"

The ringing telephone cut her off. I got up and went into the kitchen to answer it, a strange thrumming in my chest. The caller could be the president of the United States.

"Dr. Tennant," I said from years of habit.

"Dr. David?" cried a hysterical female voice with an Asian accent. It was Lu Li, Fielding's Chinese wife. Or widow . . .

"This is David, Lu Li. I'm sorry I haven't called you." I searched for fitting words but found only a cliche. "I can't begin to express the pain I feel at Andrew's loss—"

A burst of Cantonese punctuated with some English flashed down the wire. I didn't have to understand it all to know I was hearing a distraught widow on the verge of collapse. God only knew what the Trinity security people had told Lu Li, or what she had made of it. She'd come to America only three months ago, her immigration fast-tracked by the State Department, which had received a none-too-subtle motivational call from the White House.

"I know this has been a terrible day," I said in a comforting voice. "But I need you to try to calm down."

Lu Li was panting.

"Breathe deeply," I said, trying to decide what approach to take. Safest to use the corporate cover the NSA had insisted on from the beginning. As far as the rest of the Research Triangle Park companies knew, the Argus Optical Corporation developed optical computer elements used in government defense projects. Lu Li might know no more that this.

"What have you been told by the company?" I asked cautiously.

"Andy dead!" Lu Li cried. "They say he die of brain bleeding, but I know nothing. I don't know what to do!"

I saw nothing to be gained by further agitating Fielding's widow with theories of murder. "Lu Li, Andrew was sixty-three years old, and not in the best of health. A stroke isn't an unlikely event in that situation."

"You no understand, Dr. David! Andy warn me about this."

My hand tightened on the phone. "What do you mean?"

Another burst of Cantonese came down the wire, but then Lu Li settled into halting English. "Andy tell me this could happen. He say, 'If something happen to me, call Dr. David. David know what to do.'"

A deep ache gripped my heart. That Fielding had put such faith in me . . .

"What do you want me to do?"

"Come here. Please. Talk to me. Tell me why this happen to Andy."

I hesitated. The NSA was probably listening to this call. To go to Lu Li's house would only put her at greater risk, and myself, too. But what choice did I have? I couldn't fail my friend. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"Thank you, thank you, David! Please, thank you."

I hung up and turned to go back to the living room. Rachel was standing in the kitchen doorway.

"I have to leave," I told her. "I appreciate you coming to check on me. I know it was beyond the call of duty."

"I'm going with you. I heard some of that, and I'm going with you."

"Out of the question."

"Why?"

"You have no reason to come. You're not part of this."

She folded her arms across her chest. "For me it's simple, okay? If you're telling the truth, I'll find the distraught widow of Andrew Fielding at the end of a short drive. And she'll support what you've told me."

"Not necessarily. I don't know how much Fielding confided in her. And Lu Li hardly speaks English."

"Andrew Fielding didn't teach his own wife English?"

"He spoke fluent Cantonese. Plus about eight other languages. And she's only been here a few months."

Rachel straightened her skirt with the flats of her hands. "Your resistance tells me that you know my going will expose your story as a delusion."

Anger flashed through me. "I'm tempted to let you come, just for that. But you don't grasp the danger. You could die. Tonight."

"I don't think so."

I picked up the Ziploc bag containing the white powder and the FedEx envelope and held it out to her. "A few minutes ago I received a letter from Fielding.

This powder was in the envelope."

She shrugged. "It looks like sand. What is it?"

"I have no idea. But I'm afraid it might be anthrax. Or whatever killed Fielding."

She took the package from me. I thought at first she was examining the powder, but she was reading the label on the FedEx envelope.

"This says the sender is Lewis Carroll."

"That's code. Fielding couldn't risk putting his name into the FedEx computer system. The NSA would pick that up immediately. He used 'Lewis Carroll'

because his nickname was the White Rabbit. You've heard that, right?"

Rachel looked as if she were really thinking about it. "I can't say that I have. Where's this letter?"

I motioned toward the front room. "In a plastic bag on the couch. Don't open it."

She bent over the note and quickly read it. "It's not signed."

"Of course not. Fielding didn't know who might see it. That rabbit symbol is his signature."

She looked at me with disbelief. "Just take me along, David. If what I see supports what you've told me, I'll take all your warnings seriously from this point forward. No more doubts."

"That's like throwing you into the water to prove there are sharks in it. By the time you see them, it's too late."

"That's always how it is with these kinds of fantasies."

I went and got my keys off the kitchen counter. Rachel followed at my heels.

"All right, you want to come? Follow me in your car."

She shook her head. "Not a chance. You'd lose me at the first red light."

"Your colleagues would tell you it's dangerous to accompany a patient while he chases a paranoid fantasy. Especially a narcoleptic patient."

"My colleagues don't know you. As for the narcolepsy, you haven't killed yourself yet."

I reached under the sofa cushion, brought out my pistol, and thrust it into my waistband. "You don't know me either."

She studied the butt of the gun, then looked into my eyes. "I think I do. And I want to help you."

If she were only my psychiatrist, I would have left her there. But during our long sessions, we had recognized something in each other, an unspoken feeling shared by two people who had experienced great loss. Even though she thought I might be ill now, she cared about me in a way no one else had for a long time.

To take her with me would be selfish, but the simple truth was, I didn't want to go alone.

Geli Bauer sat within the dark bowels of the Trinity building, a basement complex lit only by the glow of computer monitors and surveillance screens.

From here electronic filaments spread out to monitor the people and the physical plant of Project Trinity. But that was only the center of her domain.

With the touch of a computer key, Geli could interface with the NSA supercomputers at Fort Meade and monitor conversations and events on the other side of the globe. Though she had wielded many kinds of power during her thirty-two years on earth, she had never before felt the rush of knowing that all the world bounded by electronics could be manipulated by the touch of her finger.

On paper, Geli worked for Godin Supercomputing, which was based in Mountain View, California. But it was her company's quasi-governmental relationship with the NSA that had lifted her into the stratosphere of power. If she deemed a situation an emergency, she could stop trains, close international airports, retask surveillance satellites, or lift armed helicopters into the skies over U.S. soil and order them to fire. No other modern woman had wielded such power—in some ways her authority rivaled that of her father—and Geli did not intend to give it up.

On the flat-panel monitor before her glowed a transcript of the conversation between David Tennant and an unknown White House functionary, recorded at a Shoney's restaurant that afternoon, but Geli was no longer looking at it. She was speaking on the headset phone to a member of her security team, the man who was watching Tennant's residence.

"I only heard conversation in the kitchen," she said. "That makes no sense. He and Dr. Weiss had to be talking elsewhere."

"Maybe they were getting it on."

"We'd have heard it. Weiss looks like a screamer to me. It's always the quiet ones."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Get in there and check the mikes."

Geli tapped a key on the pad before her, which connected her to a young ex-Delta operator named Thomas Corelli, who was covering Andrew Fielding's house.

"What are you hearing, Thomas?"

"Normal background noise. TV. Bumps and clatters."

"Did you hear Mrs. Fielding's end of the phone call?"

"Yeah, but it's hard to understand that Chinese accent."

"Are you out of sight?"

"I'm parked in the driveway of some out-of-town neighbors."

"Tennant will be at your location in five minutes. He has a woman with him.

Dr. Rachel Weiss. Stay on this line."

Geli clicked off, then said clearly, "JPEG. Weiss, Rachel."

A digital photograph of Rachel Weiss appeared on her monitor. It was a head shot, a telephoto taken as the psychiatrist left the Duke University hospital.

Rachel Weiss was three years older than Geli, but Geli recognized the type.

She'd known girls like that at boarding school in Switzerland. Strivers. Most of them Jews. She would have known Weiss was Jewish without hearing her name or seeing her file. Even with fashionably windblown hair, Rachel Weiss looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had the dark martyr's eyes, the premature lines around the mouth. She was one of the top Jungian analysts in the world, and you didn't reach that level without being obsessive about your work.

Geli had been against involving Weiss. It was Skow who had allowed it. Skow's theory was that if you held the leash too tight, you were asking for trouble.

But it was Geli's head that would roll if there was a security breach. To prevent that eventuality, she received transcripts of Weiss's sessions with Tennant and recordings of every telephone call the psychiatrist-made. Once a week, one of her operatives slipped into Weiss's office and photocopied Tennant's file, to be sure that nothing escaped Geli's scrutiny.

That was the kind of hassle that came from dealing with civilians. It had been the same at Los Alamos, with the Manhattan Project. In both cases the government had tried to control a group of gifted civilian scientists who through ignorance, obstinacy, or ideology posed the greatest threat to their own work. When you recruited the smartest people in the world, you got crackpots.

Tennant was a crackpot. Like Fielding. Like Ravi Nara, the project's Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. All six Trinity principals had signed the tightest possible security and nondisclosure agreements, but they still believed they could do anything they wanted. To them the world was Disneyland.

And doctors were the worst. Even in the army, the rules had never quite seemed to apply to M.D.s. But tonight Tennant was going to step far enough over the line to get his head chopped off.

Her headset beeped. She opened the line to her man at Tennant's house. "What is it?"