Dark Matter

“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.

THREE (#ulink_36c1addd-75cc-5690-84c4-ec6a10289e29)

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?”

“I’m inside. You’re not going to believe this. Someone put painter’s putty in the holes over the mikes.”

Geli felt a strange numbness in her chest. “How could Tennant know where they were?”

“No way without a scanner.”

“Magnifying glass?”

“If he knew to look for them. But that would take hours, and you’d never be sure you got them all.”

A scanner. Where the hell would an internist get that? Then she knew. Fielding. “Tennant took that FedEx delivery. Do you see an envelope anywhere?”

“No.”

“He must have taken it with him. What else do you see? Anything strange?”

“There’s a video camera set up on a tripod.”

Shit. “Tape in it?”

“Let me check. No tape.”

“What else?”