Dark Matter. Greg Iles
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flashed back to Fielding’s corpse. The termination had gone smoothly enough, but it was a stupid move. They should have taken out Tennant as well. She could easily have manipulated both men into the same vehicle, and after that … simple logistics. A car accident. And the project wouldn’t be in the jeopardy it was in now. “Has Tennant actually talked to the president, sir?”
“I don’t know. So keep your distance. Monitor the situation, but nothing more.”
“He also took a delivery from FedEx. A letter. Whatever it was, he took it with him. We need to see that.”
“If you can get a look at it without him knowing, fine. Otherwise, talk to FedEx and find out who sent it.”
“We’re doing that.”
“Good. Just don’t—”
Geli heard Skow’s wife calling his name.
“Just keep me informed,” he said, and rang off.
Geli closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. She had made the case to Godin for taking out Tennant along with Fielding, but the old man had resisted. Yes, Godin conceded, Tennant had broken regulations and spent time with Fielding outside the facility. Yes, Tennant had supported Fielding’s effort to suspend the project. And it was Tennant’s tie to the president that had made that suspension a reality. But there was no proof that Tennant was part of the Englishman’s campaign to sabotage the project, or that he was privy to any of the dangerous information Fielding possessed. Since Geli did not know what that information was, she could not judge the risk of letting Tennant live. She had reminded Godin of the maxim “Better safe than sorry,” but Godin did not relent. He would though. Soon.
Geli said, “JPEG, Fielding, Lu Li.” An image of a dark-haired Asian woman appeared on her monitor. Born Lu Li Cheng, reared in Canton Province, Communist China. Forty years old. Advanced degrees in applied physics.
“Another mistake,” Geli muttered. Lu Li Cheng had no business inside the borders of the United States, much less in the inner circle of the most sensitive scientific project in the country. Geli touched the key that connected her to Thomas Corelli in the surveillance car outside the Fielding house. “You see anything strange over there?”
“No.”
“How easily could you search Tennant’s car when he arrives?”
“Depends on where he parks.”
“If you see a FedEx envelope in the car, break in, read it, then put it back. And I want video of their arrival.”
“No problem. What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. Just get it.”
Geli removed a pack of Gauloises from her desk, took out a cigarette, and broke off its filter. In the flare of the match she caught her reflection in her computer monitor. A veil of blonde hair, high cheekbones, steel-blue eyes, nasty burn scar. She considered the ugly ridged tissue on her left cheek as much a part of her face as her eyes or mouth. A plastic surgeon had once offered to remove the discolored mark at no cost, but she’d turned him down. Scars had a purpose: to remind their bearer of wounds. The wound that had caused that scar she would never let herself forget.
She punched a key and routed the signals from the microphones in the Fielding house to her headset. Then she drew deeply on her cigarette, settled back in her chair, and blew a stream of harsh smoke toward the ceiling. Geli Bauer hated many things, but most of all she hated waiting.
We drove in silence, the Acura moving swiftly through the dusk. At this time of evening, it was a quick ride from my suburb to Andrew Fielding’s house near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rachel didn’t understand my demand for silence, and I didn’t expect her to. When I first became involved in Trinity, the xenophobic level of security had stunned me. The other scientists—Fielding included—had worked on defense-related projects before and accepted the intrusive security as a necessary inconvenience. But eventually, even the veterans complained that we were enduring something unprecedented. Surveillance was all-pervasive and reached far beyond the lab complex. Protests were met with a curt reminder that the scientists on the Manhattan Project had been forced to live behind barbed wire to ensure the security of “the device.” The freedom we enjoyed came with a price—or so went the party line.
Fielding didn’t buy it. “Random” polygraph tests occurred almost weekly, and surveillance extended even into our homes. Before I could begin my video today, I’d had to plug pinholes in my walls that concealed tiny microphones. Fielding discovered them with a special scanner he’d built at home and marked the bugs with tiny pins. He had made something of a hobby out of evading Trinity surveillance. He warned me that speaking confidentially in cars was impossible. Automobiles were simple to bug, and even clean vehicles could be covered from a distance, using special high-tech microphones. The Englishman’s cat-and-mouse game with the NSA had amused me at times, but there was no doubt about who had got the last laugh.
I looked over at Rachel. It felt strange to be in a car with her. In the five years since my wife’s death, I’d had relationships with two women, both before my assignment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn’t a “relationship” in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and discussed the most disturbing aspect of my life—my dreams. Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.
She’d come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psychiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentration, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face—and particularly her eyes—became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I confided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would question me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.
“David, you don’t have to drive around all night,” she said. “I’m not going to hold this against you.”
Right, I thought. What’s wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? “Be patient,” I told her. “It’s not much farther.”
She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. “What’s the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?”
“About a million U.S. Fielding got a little less than Ravi Nara, because …” I trailed off, realizing that she was only probing again, trying to puncture my “delusion.”
I focused on the road, knowing that in a few minutes she would have to admit that my paranoia was at least partially grounded in fact. What would she think then? Would she open her mind to my interpretation of my dreams, however irrational it might sound?
From our first session, Rachel had argued that she could not make valid interpretations of my “hallucinations” without knowing intimate details of my past and my work. But I couldn’t tell much. Fielding had warned me that the NSA would consider anyone who knew anything about Trinity or its principals to be a potential threat. Beyond this concern, I felt that what I saw during my narcoleptic episodes had nothing to do with my past. The images seemed to be coming from outside my mind. Not in the sense of hearing alien voices, which was