The Footprints of God (35 page)

Rachel instantly read my reaction. "What are you hoping for? An electric shock? A voice from heaven?"

I turned to our guide, who was shaking his head. "What have I not seen, Ibrahim?"

"Many things. Most important is Golgotha. In Latin called Calvary. The place where Jesus was crucified."

"It's inside the church?"

"Of course, sir. Follow me."

He led us out of the Catholicon and over to a steep staircase. I counted eighteen steps as I plodded upward, my spirits sinking lower the higher I climbed.

The moment I reached the top of the stairs, I felt a quickening in my blood. The room was crowded, but to my left, above the heads of the people, I saw a life-size sculpture of Jesus hanging on a cross. He wore a silver cloth around his waist and a crown of silver on his head. It wasn't the sculpture that moved me, but something in the room itself. I felt as if I were standing close to a high-voltage cable, with static electricity raising every hair on my body.

"What?" Rachel asked. "What is it?"

"Something in me is vibrating."

"You've felt that before. That's a textbook precursor to a hypnagogic hallucination."

"No . . . this is different."

"Ibrahim?" said Rachel.

"Yes, madam?"

"We're going back to the car."

"Yes," he said with relief.

I stepped away from them. To my right, a mural showed Jesus lying on the cross, which lay flat on the ground. Some people standing before the mural parted, revealing a cabinet with panels of hammered silver. As I walked toward the mural, pain radiated up my arm from my left hand. For a moment I thought I was having a heart attack. Then pain shot up my right arm as well. I clenched both hands into fists, but it did no good. I turned to Ibrahim.

"What is this place?"

"This is the eleventh station, sir. Where Jesus was nailed to the cross."

I moaned.

"We have to get him out of here," Rachel said. "Can you get help?"

"He is walking," Ibrahim said. "Let us go now."

"I don't think he'll go."

Some people in the room were staring at me as if I might be mad.

"I can get soldiers," Ibrahim said. "But I would rather not do this."

"No," Rachel said quickly. "I mean, yes. That's not necessary."

A group of pilgrims moved away from the sculpture of Jesus, revealing a fantastically ornate altar. I stepped forward, my eyes locked on a silver-clad Madonna standing below the cross. The altar before her seemed to be sitting on a large glass case, and under the glass I saw rough gray rock.

"What's that?"

"Golgotha," Ibrahim answered. "The place of the skull. That is the mountain itself, where the rock cracked when Jesus' blood fell down from the cross. Then came the earthquake."

Searing white light blotted out the scene before me. I saw the mountain as it had been before the church was here, a bare, rocky hill beside a mountain riddled with tombs. Three crosses stood on the hill, but no one hung from them. The sky darkened and went black, and I fell to my knees.

I found myself staring at a shining silver disk with a hole in it. The disk lay on the marble base of the altar, a foot off the floor. I put out my shaking right hand and laid my palm on the disk.

The pain in my hands instantly eased.

"This is the place," I said. "This is where Jesus left the earth."

"He is right," said Ibrahim. "That disk marks the spot where the cross stood in the ground. To the right and left are black disks where the thieves' crosses stood, one being good, another being bad. Afterward, Jesus was taken away to the tomb of Joseph of Aramathea and rose from the death three days later."

"No," I said.

Ibrahim blanched. "Sir, you cannot say such things here!"

"Whisper," Rachel pleaded.

"What's the hole in the disk for?" I asked, my hand caressing the cool silver.

"You may put fingers through and touch Golgotha. The rock of Calvary."

I closed my eyes and slipped two fingers through the hole. My fingertips scraped rough stone.

"Did you dream of this?" Rachel asked.

I couldn't speak. Something was flowing into me from the living rock. Rachel's voice receded and did not return. I felt as if my bones were singing, vibrating in sympathy with something in the earth. At first the feeling was something like joy, but as the intensity built, I began to shake, then to jerk spastically.

It
s
a seizure,
said a familiar voice in my head. My medical voice.
A tonic-clonic seizure.
Through the fog of receding consciousness, I heard people yelling in several languages. Then I fell, and Rachel screamed.

The impact of the floor was like water.

CHAPTER 
31

White Sands

At 7:52 a.m. mountain standard time, Peter Godin went into code blue. Ravi Nara wasn't in the hospital hangar, but he was sleeping nearby, and he got to Godin's bedside in less than two minutes. He'd been expecting the old man to crash. Without a shunt to relieve the pressure in the fourth ventricle of the brain, hydrocephalus was inevitable. But when Ravi arrived in the Bubble, he found the old man suffering a garden-variety heart attack.

Godin's two nurses had already intubated and bagged him, and one was defibrillating his heart. Ravi read the EKG and confirmed their diagnosis: ventricular tachycardia. They were using the paddles because Godin had no pulse. It took two drug combinations and a 360-joule shock to bring the heart back to a sinus rhythm. Ravi drew blood to check for cardiac-specific enzymes that would tell him how much damage had been done to the heart muscle. Then, since Godin remained unconscious, Ravi sat down for a moment to decompress.

He hated clinical medicine. Something was always coming out of left field to surprise you. Godin had had a coronary bypass fifteen years ago, and a cardiac stent implanted in 1998. The risk of an MI was constant, but under the strain of treating the brainstem glioma, Ravi had let the cardiac risk recede in his mind. The nurses had noticed his hesitancy during the code. Not exactly what they expected from a Nobel laureate in medicine. After years in research labs, he was out of practice. So what? A veterinarian could run the protocols of a code blue.

As a nurse started to attach the ventilator to Godin's breathing tube, the old man tried to speak, but his effort produced only squeaks.

Ravi leaned down to his ear. "Don't try to talk, Peter. You had a little arrhythmia, but you're stable now."

Godin held up his hand for something to write with. A nurse gave him a pen, then held a hard-backed pad up to his hand.

Godin scribbled:
DON'T LET ME DIE! WE'RE SO
CLOSE!!!

"You're not going to die," Ravi assured him, though he was far from sure himself. Hypoxia could easily trigger the fatal hydrocephalus he'd been expecting. He squeezed Godin's shoulder, then ordered the nurses to put him on the ventilator. It would make the old man furious, but he would endure it.

To avoid Godin's protests, Ravi left the Bubble. As he closed the hatch, he saw Zach Levin rush into the hangar.

"What is it?" Ravi asked. "What's happened?"

Levin had to catch his breath before he could speak. "Fielding's model is cracking the final algorithms! He's got the memory area linked to the processing areas, and he's creating all new interface circuitry. I've never seen anything like it."

"You mean Fielding's
model
is doing all that."

"Yes, yes. But I've got to tell you, even with the machine running at only fifty percent capacity, I can feel him in there. It's like talking to the man I worked with for the past two years. Like he's alive again."

"You're at fifty percent efficiency?"

Levin grinned. "And rising. I should have had more faith in Peter's instincts."

Ravi tried to conceal his shock. Ninety percent efficiency was the point at which Godin had predicted that a neuromodel would become fully conscious—a condition he had termed the
Trinity state.

"You said 'talking,'" Ravi thought aloud. "Is the voice synthesizer working? Is Fielding talking to you?"

"He's trying. He can't really explain what he's doing, but the efficiency is creeping steadily upward. We've got a definite timeline now."

Despite the complexities of his personal situation, Ravi couldn't suppress his excitement. "How long?"

"Twelve to sixteen hours."

"To Trinity state?"

Levin nodded. "And I'd bet closer to twelve. We've got a pool going in Containment."

Ravi looked at his watch. "How certain are you?"

"As certain as anything gets in this business. I've got to tell Peter what's happening."

Ravi didn't want Godin hearing about this until he had talked to Skow. "You can't go in right now. He won't hear you. Peter coded twenty minutes ago."

Levin stiffened in alarm. "He's not dead!"

"No, but he's on the ventilator."

"Conscious?"

"Not enough to understand you. And he can't speak."

"But he has to know this! It will double his will to fight."

Ravi tried to look sympathetic. "He's never lacked that."

"No, but this will change everything."

"I'm sorry, Zach. I can't allow you to go in."

Levin looked down at Ravi with disdain. "You don't make decisions like that. Limiting Peter's access to critical information?"

"I am his physician."

"So, do your fucking job. It doesn't take a doctor to see that the best thing anyone could do for Peter's health right now is to give him this information."

Levin turned away and stepped into the UV decontaminator. Ravi started to argue, but the engineer stamped on the start button, making conversation pointless.

If Levin insisted on entering the Bubble, Ravi couldn't stop him. Godin would probably ask for him soon anyway.

Ravi hurried to the exit. He needed to talk to Skow immediately. Because Zach Levin was right: with Trinity twelve to sixteen hours from becoming a reality, Godin would almost certainly live to see it. And that changed everything. Skow was preparing the president for Trinity's failure, setting up to blame Godin for everything, and using Ravi to help him do it. If Skow went too far—and Godin at the eleventh hour delivered the revolutionary computer he had promised—Ravi could find himself in a precarious position. Peter Godin would not take betrayal lightly. He would exact his own form of justice. An image of Geli Bauer came into Ravi's mind. He was damned glad she was lying in a hospital in Maryland.

Jerusalem

Rachel braced herself against the side of the ambulance as it tore through all but impassable traffic. David lay unconscious on a gurney on the floor. The paramedic in back spoke enough English to communicate with Rachel, but he could tell her little and do even less, given his patient's condition.

When David collapsed in the church, Rachel had known instantly that he was having a seizure. She'd knelt and cradled his head to keep him from banging it on the floor, but that was all she could do. Seizure victims swallowing their tongues was a myth, and you could lose fingers trying to prevent it. Ibrahim had used his walkie-talkie to call the ambulance, and Rachel got the feeling he'd done it before.

Israeli soldiers quickly cordoned off the chapel. By the time the ambulance arrived, David's seizure was over, but he had not awakened. The paramedics checked his blood sugar and found a normal glucose level. With coma, that was the limit of what they could do at the scene, so they fitted a collar on him, put him on a backboard, and had the soldiers carry him out to the ambulance in the courtyard.

As they careened though the streets, Rachel mentally raced through the possible causes of coma. Drugs were the most common cause after hypoglycemia, but David had no history of substance abuse. He hadn't hit the floor hard enough to cause head trauma, and forty-one was old even for late-onset epilepsy.

take his money belt and clothes and put them into a plastic bag.

A man in white came to the door and spoke Hebrew to the paramedics. He glanced at Rachel, then entered and in heavily accented English asked her to summarize what had happened at the church. She complied, then gave David's medical history as best she knew it.

He had been unconscious for thirty minutes. Most patients suffering a grand mal seizure would be coming out of it by now. The doctor ordered blood work; X rays of the chest and cervical spine; a CT scan to rule out stroke, tumors, or subarachnoid hemorrhage; and a spinal tap to rule out meningitis.

After a nurse drew the blood, an aide moved David to radiology for the CT scan, which took nearly an hour. When he returned to the treatment room, he was still unconscious. Next the ER doctor performed the spinal puncture. The escaping spinal fluid had normal pressure, and Rachel breathed much easier when she saw that the fluid was clear. Infection was highly unlikely.

The next step was a referral to neurology, and at that point Rachel began to panic. A neurology referral meant admission to the hospital, which would bring questions about medical insurance and payment. There was $15,000 in the two money belts, but she didn't want to raise suspicions by showing that kind of cash. She nearly hugged the ER doctor when he informed her that there were no beds available in neurology. David would have to remain in the emergency department.

When an EEG tech wheeled in a portable machine to do an electroencephalogram of David's brain, Rachel saw instantly that he was sharp. He switched off most of the electrical equipment in the room before performing the test, which eliminated background interference and made for a much clearer tracing.

As the tracing emerged from the machine, the tech looked concerned, and Rachel soon saw why. David's brain showed only alpha wave activity, of uniform frequency and amplitude. The tech leaned forward and clapped his hands near David's right ear, but the alpha waves did not desynchronize. They didn't change at all.

Rachel's heart sank. David appeared to be in a state known as alpha coma. Few patients emerged alive from alpha coma.