Dark Matter (6 page)

I see a woman's face, angelic yet common, and a pair of eyes I know like those of my mother. They don't belong to my mother, though, not the mother who raised me in Oak Ridge. Yet they watch me with pure love. A bearded man stands behind her, watching me with a father's pride. But my father was clean shaven all his life. . . .

I see donkeys . . . a date palm. Naked children. A brown river. I feel the cold, jarring shock of immersion, the beat of my feet on sand.

I see a young girl, beautiful and dark-haired, leaning toward my face for a kiss, then blushing and running away. I'm walking among adults. Their faces say, This child is not like other children. A wild-eyed man stands waist deep in water, a line of men and women awaiting their turn to be submerged, while others come up from the water coughing and sputtering, their eyes wide.

Sometimes the dreams had no logic, but were only disjointed fragments. When logic finally returned, it frightened me.

I'm sitting beside the bed of a small boy. He can't move. His eyes are closed.

He's been paralyzed for two days. His mother and aunt sit with me. They bring food, cool water, oil to anoint the boy. I speak softly in his ear. I tell the women to hold his hands. Then I lean down and speak his name. His eyes squeeze tight, expressing mucus. Then they open and light up with recognition of his mother. His mother gasps, then screams that his hand moved. She lifts him up, and he hugs her. The women weep with happiness. . . .

I'm eating with a group of women. Olives and flat bread. Some women won't meet my eyes. After the meal, they take me into a bedroom, where a pregnant girl lies on the bed. They tell me the baby has been inside her too long. Labor will not begin. They fear the child is dead. I ask the women to leave. The young mother fears me. I calm her with soft words, then lift the blanket and lay my hands on her belly. It's distended, tight as a drum. I leave my hands there for a long time, gently urging, speaking softly to her. I can't understand what I'm saying. It's like a soft chant. After a time, her mouth opens. She's felt a kick. She cries out for the other women. "My baby is alive!" The women lay their hands on me, trying to touch me as if I possess some invisible power. "Surely he is the one," they say.

"These are stories from the Bible," Rachel said, "known by millions of schoolchildren. There's nothing unique about them."

"I've been reading the New Testament," I told her. "There's no record of Jesus healing a little boy of paralysis. No description of him eating a meal with only women, then inducing labor."

"But those are both healing images. And you're a physician. Your subconscious seems to be casting Jesus in your image. Or vice versa. Perhaps the problem really is your work. Have you moved further away from pure medicine? I've known doctors who fell into depression after giving up hands-on patient care for pure research. Perhaps this is something like that?"

She'd guessed correctly about my moving away from patient care, but my lucid dreams weren't some strange expression of nostalgia for my days in the white coat.

"There's another possibility," she suggested. "One more in line with my original interpretation. These images of divine healing could be subconscious wishes that you could bring Karen and Zooey back. Think about it. What were two of Jesus' most notable miracles?"

I nodded reluctantly. "Raising Lazarus from the dead."

"Yes. And he also resurrected a little girl, if I'm not mistaken."

"Yes. But I don't think that's the significance of these dreams."

Rachel smiled with infinite patience. "Well, one thing is certain. Eventually, your subconscious will make its message clear."

That turned out to be our last session. Because that night, my dreams changed again, and I had no intention of telling Rachel how.

The new dream was clearer than any that had come before, and though I was speaking in a foreign language, I could understand my words. I was walking down a sandy road. I came to a well. The water was low in the well, and I had nothing to draw it with. After a time, a woman came with an urn on a rope. I asked if she would draw me some water. She appeared surprised that I would speak to her, and I sensed that we were of different tribes. I told her the water in the well would not cure her thirst. We talked for a time, and she began to look at me with appraising eyes.

"I can see you are a prophet," she said. "You see many things that are hidden."

"I'm no prophet," I told her.

She watched me in silence for a while. Then she said, "They speak of a Messiah who will come someday to tell us things. What do you think of that?"

I looked at the ground, but words of profound conviction rose unbidden into my throat. I looked at the woman and said, "I that speak to you am he."

The woman did not laugh. She knelt and touched my knee, then walked away, looking back over her shoulder again and again.

When I snapped out of that dream, I was soaked in sweat. I didn't lift the phone and call Rachel for an emergency appointment. I saw no point. I no longer believed any dream interpretation could help me, because I was not dreaming. I was remembering.

"What are you thinking about?" Rachel asked from the passenger seat.

We were nearing the UNC campus. "How you got here."

She shifted in her seat and gave me a concerned look. "I'm here because you missed three sessions, and you wouldn't have done that unless things had taken a turn for the worse. I think your hallucinations have changed again, and they've scared the hell out of you."

I gripped the wheel tighter but didn't speak. Somewhere, the NSA was listening.

"Why don't you tell me?" she said. "What could be the harm?"

"This isn't the time. Or the place."

The UNC theater was up ahead on the left. To our right the Forest Amphitheater lay in the trees below the road. I made a hard right and coasted down a dark hill on a street that ran between two rows of stately homes, a single-entrance neighborhood that housed tenured professors and affluent young professionals.

Fielding had lived in a small, two-story house set well back from the street.

Perfect for him and the Chinese wife he hoped to bring to America.

"Where are we?" Rachel asked.

"Fielding's house is right up here."

I looked in the direction of the house but saw only darkness. I'd expected to find the place ablaze with light, as my own had been after I lost Karen and Zooey. I had a moment of panic, a premonition that I'd driven into one of those 1970s conspiracy films where you walk up to a familiar house and find it vacant. Or worse, with an entirely new family living there.

A porch light clicked on thirty yards from the street. Lu Li must have been watching from a darkened window. I turned my head and scanned the street for suspicious vehicles. I frequently spotted the NSA surveillance cars assigned to tail me. Either the security teams didn't care if we saw them or, more likely, they wanted us to know we were being watched. Tonight I saw nothing suspicious, but I did sense that something wasn't as it should be. Perhaps there were watchers who did not want to be seen. I turned into Fielding's driveway and pulled up to the closed garage door.

"A Nobel laureate lives here?" Rachel asked, gesturing at the modest house.

"Lived," I corrected. "Stay here. I'm going to the door alone."

"For God's sake," she snapped. "This is ridiculous. Just admit this is all a charade, and let's go get some coffee and talk about it."

I grabbed her arm and looked hard into her eyes. "Listen to me, damn it. It's probably okay, but this is the way we're going to do it. I'll whistle when it's all right for you to come up."

I walked up to the front door of my dead friend's house, my hands in plain sight, my mind on the .38 in my pocket.

Geli Bauer listened intently as Corelli reported from the Fielding house.

"They're going inside now. Tennant went up first. The shrink is hanging back.

Now she's going up. Wait ... I think the doc is carrying."

"Which doc?"

"Oh. Tennant. He's got a gun in his pocket. Right front."

"You see the butt?"

"No, but it looks like a revolver."

What the hell does Tennant think he's up to? The cell connection crackled.

"What do you want me to do?" asked Corelli.

"Sit tight and make sure the mikes are working."

"The widow just answered the door. She's pulling them inside."

"Keep me posted."

Geli killed the connection to Corelli. If Tennant was carrying a gun, he was afraid for his life. He must believe Fielding had been murdered. But why? The drug that had killed Fielding caused a fatal bleed in the brain—a true stroke.

Without an autopsy, murder couldn't be proved. And there would be no autopsy.

Tennant must know more than Godin thought he did. If the FedEx letter he'd received had been sent by Fielding, it might have contained some sort of evidence.

She touched her headset mike and said, "Skow. Home." Her computer dialed John Skow's house in Raleigh.

"What is it now?" Skow said after two rings.

"Tennant and Weiss hardly spoke on the way to Fielding's house."

"So?"

"It wasn't natural. They're avoiding conversation."

"Tennant knows he's under surveillance. You've always wanted them all to know that."

"Yes, but Tennant's never been evasive like this. He's up to something."

"He's a little freaked-out. It's natural."

"He's carrying a gun."

A pause. "Okay, he's a lot freaked-out. We knew he had one in his house."

"That's different than carrying the damn thing."

Skow chuckled. "That's the kind of reaction you inspire in people, Geli.

Seriously, you need to calm down. Everything is context. We know Tennant was suspicious already. His best friend died today. He's naturally paranoid. What we don't want to do is make him more suspicious."

She wished she could talk to Godin. She'd tried his private cell number, but he hadn't answered or called back. It was the first time that had ever happened. "Look, I think—"

"I know what you think," Skow said. "Take no steps without my approval."

"Asshole," Geli said, but Skow was already off the line.

She pressed a button that connected her to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Her liaison there was a young man named Conklin.

"Hello, Ms. Bauer," he said. "You calling about the FedEx query again?"

"What do you think?"

"I've got what you want. The package was dropped into a collection box at a post office in Durham, North Carolina. The sender was listed as Lewis Carroll."

So, Fielding had sent something to Tennant. She knew he hadn't dropped it off himself, but his wife almost certainly had. Geli clicked off and leaned back in her chair, reassessing the situation.

Seven hours ago, she had killed a man on Godin's order, without knowing precisely why. She had no problem with that. Fielding posed a threat to the project, and under the conditions of her contract, that was enough. If she needed a moral justification, Project Trinity was critical to American national security. Executing Fielding was like killing a spy caught in the act of treason. Still, she was curious as to motive. Godin had told her that Fielding was sabotaging the project and stealing Trinity data. Geli wasn't sure. Rigorous precautions had been taken to prevent sabotage. No one could physically move data in or out of the building. And as for electronic theft, Skow's NSA techs made sure that not a single electron left the building without first being cleared by him.

So, why did Fielding have to die? Six weeks ago, he and Tennant had gotten the project suspended by raising medical and ethical concerns. If that were the motive, then why wait to kill Fielding? And why kill only him? Peter Godin had appeared almost desperate when he visited Geli last night. And she had never seen Godin desperate before. Was he that anxious to get the project back on-line? She knew little about the technical side of the Trinity research, but she did know that success was still quite a ways off. She could read that in the faces of the scientists and engineers who reported to work every day.

Project Trinity was building—or attempting to build—a supercomputer. Not a conventional supercomputer like a Cray or a Godin, but a computer dedicated to artificial intelligence—a true thinking machine. She didn't know what made this theoretical computer so difficult to build, but Godin had told her a little about the genesis of the project.

In 1994, a Bell Labs scientist had theorized that an almost infinitely powerful code-breaking computer might be built using the principles of quantum physics. Geli knew little about quantum physics, but she understood why a quantum computer would be revolutionary. Modern digital encryption—the code system used by banks, corporations, and national governments—was based on the factoring of large prime numbers. Conventional supercomputers like those used by the NSA cracked those codes by trying one key after another in sequence, like testing keys in a lock. Breaking a code this way could take hundreds of hours. But a quantum computer—in theory—could try all possible keys simultaneously. The wrong keys would cancel each other out, leaving only the proper one to break the code. And this process wouldn't take hours or even minutes. A quantum computer could break digital encryption codes instantaneously. Such a machine would render present-day encryption obsolete and give whatever country possessed it a staggering strategic advantage over every other nation in the world.

Given the potential value of such a machine, the NSA had launched a massive secret effort to design and build a quantum computer. Designated Project Spooky, after the description Albert Einstein had given to the action of certain quantum particles—"spooky action at a distance"—it was placed under the direction of John Skow, director of the NSA's Supercomputer Research Center. After spending seven years and $600 million of the NSA's black budget, Skow's team had not produced a prototype that could rival the performance of a Palm Pilot.

Skow was probably days from being terminated when he received a call from Peter Godin, who had been building conventional supercomputers for the NSA for years. Godin proposed a machine as revolutionary as a quantum computer, but with one attribute the government could not resist: it could be built using refinements of existing technology. Moreover, after a conversation with Andrew Fielding, the quantum physicist he'd already enlisted to work on his machine, Godin believed there was a strong chance that his computer would have quantum capabilities.