Blasphemy

Greer pulled down his glasses and stared hard at Hazelius. “I will expect everyone in the same place at seven o’clock. Understood?” He spoke precisely, enunciating every word.

Hazelius returned the gaze, his face mild, unthreatening. “Mr. Greer, I’m in charge of a forty-billion-dollar machine inside this mountain, and we are in the middle of a critical scientific experiment. I’m sure you wouldn’t want anything to go wrong, especially if I had to tell DOE investigators that the machine had been left unattended—at your insistence. I have to keep three team members in the mountain tonight. They’ll be available for questioning tomorrow morning.”

A long pause, then Greer nodded curtly. “Fine.”

“We’ll be at the trading post by seven,” said Hazelius. “It’s the old log building—you can’t miss it.”

Ford headed back to the Jeep and climbed in, Kate following. He turned the key, and they pulled back onto the road.

“I can’t believe it,” said Kate, her voice shaking, her face pale. She fumbled in her pocket, tugged out a handkerchief, and wiped her eyes. “This is terrible,” she said. “I just . . . can’t believe it.”

As the Jeep hummed down the road, Ford had a final glimpse of the two coyotes, who had finished their meal and were hanging back, skulking out of range, hoping for a second helping.

For all its beauty, he thought, Red Mesa was a hard place.

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK SHARP, LIEUTENANT JOSEPH Bia followed Greer and Alvarez into the former Nakai Rock Trading Post. He remembered the place from his childhood, when old man Weindorfer was the trader. He felt a twinge of nostalgia. In his mind he could still see the old store—the flour bin, the piles of stovepipe for sale, the halters and lassos, the candy jars. In the back had been the stacks of rugs Weindorfer was taking in trade. The drought of 1954–55 killed half the sheep on the mesa, but not before they had peeled the land. That was when Peabody Coal was hauling out twenty thousand short tons a day. The Tribal Council, with money from the coal company, had paid off everyone who lived on the mesa and resettled them in HUD housing in Blue Gap, Piñon, and Rough Rock. His parents had been among those moved down below. It was the first time Bia had been back in fifty years. The place looked completely different, but he could still smell the old scent of woodsmoke, dust, and sheep’s wool.

The scientists had gathered, nine of them, tense and waiting. They looked like hell, and Bia had the feeling something else was wrong besides Volkonsky’s death. Something that had been wrong for a while. He wished Greer hadn’t drawn the case. Greer had been a good agent once, until what happened to all good agents happened to him: he’d been promoted to special agent in charge and then ruined by spending most of his time shifting paper from point A to point B.

“Good evening, folks,” said Greer, slipping off his dark glasses, with a warning look to Bia to do the same.

Bia left his on. He didn’t like people telling him what to do. He had always been like that—it ran in the family. Even his name, Bia, came about because his grandfather refused to give his last name when he was hauled off to boarding school. So they wrote down “BIA”—for Bureau of Indian Affairs. A lot of other Navajos had done the same, making Bia a common surname on the Rez. He was proud of that name. The Bias, even though they weren’t related, all had something in common—they didn’t like to be pushed around.

“We’ll get through this as quickly as possible,” Greer was saying. “One at a time in alphabetical order.”

“Have you made any progress?” Hazelius asked.

“Some,” said Greer.

“Was Dr. Volkonsky murdered?”

Bia waited for Greer’s answer. None came. They’d been dealing with the question from the get-go, but the forensics would have to be analyzed. There’d be a wait for the ME’s report. All being handled in Flagstaff. He doubted he’d see more than a summary. He’d been included only because some FBI bureaucrat needed a name to fill a blank space on some form—proof that the Tribal Police had been “liaised with,” to use the favored FBI term.

Bia told himself he had no interest in the case anyway. These were not his people.

“Melissa Corcoran?” said Greer.

An athletic blonde rose to her feet, looking more like a tennis pro than a scientist.

Bia followed them into the library, where Alvarez rearranged a table and some chairs and set up a digital recorder. Greer and Alvarez handled the questioning; Bia listened and took notes. The questioning went fast, one after the other. It didn’t take long for a consistent line to develop: They’d all been under pressure, things weren’t going well, Volkonsky was an excitable type and he’d been taking it especially badly, he’d begun drinking, and there was a suspicion of harder drugs. Corcoran said he’d banged on her door drunk one night, wanting to sleep with her. Innes, the team psychologist, talked about the isolation and said Volkonsky was depressed and in denial. Wardlaw, the SIO, said the Russian had been acting erratic and was careless with security.

All this had already been confirmed by a search of Volkonsky’s place: empty vodka bottles, traces of methylated amphetamine powder in a mortar and pestle, ashtrays overflowing with butts, stacks of porn DVDs, all in one trashed little house.

The stories were consistent and believable, with just enough contradictions to be unrehearsed. Working the Rez, Bia had seen a lot of suicides, and this looked pretty straightforward, aside from a few elements. It wasn’t easy to shoot yourself and roll your car into a ravine at the same time. On the other hand, if this had been a murder, the killer would have torched the car. Unless he was smart. Most killers weren’t.

Bia shook his head. He was thinking instead of listening. It was his worst habit.

By eight thirty, Greer was done. Hazelius saw them to the door, where Bia, who until now had said nothing, stopped. He removed his shades, tapped them on his thumbnail. “A question, Dr. Hazelius?”

“Yes?”

“You said Volkonsky and the rest of you are under a lot of stress. Why exactly is that?”

Hazelius answered calmly. “Because we’ve built a machine that cost forty billion dollars and we can’t get the goddamned thing to work.” He smiled. “Does that answer your question, Lieutenant?”

“Thank you. Oh—and another thing, if you don’t mind?”

“Lieutenant,” said Greer, “don’t you think we’ve covered enough ground here?”

Bia continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Will you hire a new person to take over Mr. Volkonsky’s responsibilities?”

A beat, and then, “No. Rae Chen and I will handle them.”

Bia slipped the shades back on and turned to go. There was something about this case he didn’t like, but he was damned if he could put his finger on it.

17

THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. FORD eased open the back door of his casita and slipped into the shadows, a rucksack on his back. Stars jammed the sky. A chorus of coyote yips rose in the distance, then died. The moon was nearly full, and the high desert air was so clear that light silvered every detail of the landscape. It was a beautiful evening, thought Ford. Too bad he didn’t have time to appreciate it.

He scanned the little settlement. The other casitas were dark, except for the last one at the far end of the loop: Hazelius’s, where a yellow glow in the back bedroom diffused through the curtains.

Volkonsky’s casita lay a quarter mile the other way down the loop.

Ford darted across the moonlit yard and gained the shadows of the cottonwoods. He moved slowly, avoiding the puddles of moonlight, until he reached Volkonsky’s house. He scanned the grounds, but neither saw nor heard anything.

Moving behind the house, he flattened himself in the shadow next to the back door. It was sealed with crime-scene tape. Delving into the rucksack, he removed kid gloves and a knife. He tried the doorknob—locked, of course. Briefly he weighed the consequences of breaking the seal, decided it was worth it.

He slit the tape, pulled a hand towel from his pack, wrapped it around a rock, and pressed it steadily against the window until the glass gave with a shiver. After plucking out the loose slivers, he reached inside, unlocked the door, and slipped in.

The smell of Volkonsky’s despair hit him: stale smoke from cigarettes and marijuana, bad liquor, boiled onions, rancid cooking oil. He slipped an LED flashlight out of the pack and shined it around low. The kitchen was a mess. Green-and-gray mold grew on a paper plate of cooked cabbage and miniature peppers that must have been sitting out for days. Beer bottles and vodka minis had spilled out of the overflowing recycling bin. Some had shattered on the Saltillo tile floor, the pieces swept into a corner.

He moved into the living/dining area, the rug gritty with dirt, the sofa stained. No decoration of any sort hung on the walls, except for a couple of kid’s drawings taped to a door. One showed a spaceship, the other the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. Beyond that, there were no photographs of wife or children, no sentimental details.

Why hadn’t Volkonsky taken the drawings? Probably he wasn’t much of a father. Ford had a hard time imagining him as a father at all.

The door to the bedroom stood open in the hallway, but still the room smelled stale. The bed had the ratty look of one that was never made, the sheets never changed. Dirty laundry dangled out of the hamper. In the closet, half-full of clothes, Ford found a suit. He felt the material—fine wool—and paged through the rack. Volkonsky had brought a lot of clothes to the wilderness, some of them chic in a kind of Eurotrash way. He must not have realized what he was getting into here, at least socially. But why hadn’t he taken them when he left?

Ford moved down the hall to the second bedroom, which had been turned into an office. The computer was gone, but the unhooked USB and FireWire cables remained, along with a printer, a specialized high-speed modem, and a wi-fi base station. Computer CDs lay scattered about. It looked as though they had been sorted through in a hurry, the unwanted ones discarded.

He opened the top drawer of the computer desk to more mess: leaking pens, chewed pencils, and stacks of printed-out assembly language program code, the kind of stuff that would take years to analyze. In the next drawer he found an untidy stack of file folders. He sorted through them—more printed fragments of code, notes in Russian, software flowcharts. He pulled the pile up, and there, underneath, was an envelope, sealed and stamped, unaddressed, and torn in half.

Ford lifted the two pieces out, unfolded them, and found not a letter, but a page of hexadecimal computer code. Handwritten. The date at the top was Monday, the day Volkonsky left. Nothing more.

Questions flooded Ford. Why had Volkonksy written this, then torn it in half? Why had he stamped it, but not addressed it? Why had he left it behind? What did the code mean? Above all, why had he handwritten it? Nobody handwrote computer code. It took forever and was ridiculously error prone.

Ford had a thought: in a high-security computing environment like the Isabella project, you couldn’t copy, print, transmit, or e-mail any data without the action being logged. But the computer wouldn’t know if you copied it by hand. He stuffed the pieces into his pocket. Whatever they were, they mattered.

From the back porch came the crackle of grit under a footfall.

He switched off the LED and froze. Silence. Then the faintest crick of something between the sole of a shoe and the kitchen floor.

He could not exit either door—the kitchen or the front—without being seen.

Another whispery crunch of a footfall, closer. The intruder knew he was there and was coming for him, moving very slowly, no doubt hoping to ambush him.

Silently Ford crossed the carpet to the back window and reached up. He turned the circular latch and grasped the upper divider, giving it a little upward pressure. It stuck.

He was just about out of time.

A hard shove and the window sash gave. A split second later the intruder made his rush. Ford dived headlong through the window, ripping through the plastic screen just as two rapid shots from a silenced small-caliber handgun shattered the window above him. He rolled on the ground, glass showering around him.

In a flash he was up and running, zigzagging through the shadows under the cottonwoods. At the far end of the trees he sprinted across open ground, heading up the valley. The moon was so bright that he could see his shadow running beside him.

The dull whine of low-muzzle-velocity rounds passed his ears. It had to be Wardlaw—nobody else would have a silencer or shoot like that.

Ford sprinted toward the dark shape of Nakai Rock, swung left behind the rock, and ran up the trail toward the top of the low bluffs. The waspy hum of another round passed to his left. He made a quick jog off the trail and scrambled up through tumbled boulders toward the rim, keeping to cover. A few moments later he came out on top, his legs burning from the effort, and paused to look back. Two hundred yards below he glimpsed a dark figure darting up through the rocks after him.

Ford sprinted along a low spine of slickrock. It was devoid of vegetation and offered no cover—but at least it wouldn’t record his footprints. Ahead he could make out several small gullies that zigzagged toward the far edge of the mesa. In a moment he had reached the first. He leapt and ran down the dry wash at the bottom until it angled sharply as it approached the mesa edge. He flattened himself behind a fin of rock and looked behind. His pursuer had halted at the rim and was examining the sandy ground with his flashlight.

It was unmistakably Wardlaw.

The SIO rose and played the beam about the arroyo, clambered down, and began moving in his direction, gun at the ready.

Ford scrambled up the hidden side, keeping out of sight. As he topped the ravine, briefly showing himself, two more shots followed in quick succession, one kicking off a spray of chips from a nearby rock.

Ford ran across an open expanse of sand, hoping to reach the far side before the SIO reached the top of the canyon. He sprinted over the sandy flat so hard, it felt as if someone were knifing his lungs. Toward the far end he angled toward a scabland of naked, hollowed-out bedrock. It was absurdly open, but beyond lay a crazy mass of hoodoo rocks that would provide cover and a possible means of escape. He jumped off the last dune and ran into the scabland, momentarily obscured from Wardlaw’s view.

He suddenly saw his chance, and changed his idea. Halfway across the scabland was a hollow in the bedrock with a pool of moonshadow just deep enough to hide him. With a quick turn he dropped into it and huddled down. It wasn’t much of a hiding place—all Wardlaw had to do was point his flashlight in the right direction. But he wouldn’t—because he would assume Ford had headed into the excellent cover of the hoodoo rocks beyond.

A few minutes passed—and then he heard the fall of Wardlaw’s running feet on stone, his rasping breath pass by.

He counted to sixty, then cautiously peeked above the shadow. Beyond, in the hoodoo rocks, he could see the play of Wardlaw’s Maglite as he searched deeper and deeper into the rock maze.

Ford leapt up and sprinted back toward Nakai Valley.

AFTER TAKING A CONVOLUTED ROUTE HOME, Ford crept up behind his casita. He circled around, satisfying himself that Wardlaw wasn’t keeping a lookout, then slipped in the back door. The moon had set and dawn was just lightening the eastern sky. The distant scream of a mountain lion drifted across the mesa.

He went into the bedroom, hoping to grab at least a few moments of sleep before breakfast. He paused, staring at the bed.

A envelope lay on the pillow. He plucked it up and pulled out the note. Sorry I missed you, read the generous, looping script. It was signed, Melissa.

Ford dropped it back on the pillow and thought wryly that the hazards of the assignment were only now beginning to reveal their true dimensions.

18

AN HOUR LATER, FORD ARRIVED AT breakfast to the reviving smell of coffee, bacon, and flapjacks. He paused in the doorway. It was a reduced group—several team members were down in the Bunker and others were being interviewed by the FBI in the rec room. Hazelius occupied his usual place at the head of the table.

With a deep breath, Ford entered the room. If the scientists seemed haggard before, they looked like zombies now, eating in silence, their red-rimmed eyes staring off into space. Hazelius in particular looked like hell.

Ford poured himself a mug of coffee. When Wardlaw arrived a few minutes later, Ford observed him out of the corner of his eye. In contrast to the others, the man seemed rested, unperturbed, and unusually friendly, nodding as he made his way to his seat.

Kate went back and forth from the kitchen, laying down platters of food. Ford tried to keep his eyes off her. A desultory conversation arose around him, trivialities. Nobody wanted to talk about Volkonsky. Anything but Volkonsky.

Corcoran took a seat beside him. He could feel her eyes on him, and he turned, to see a knowing smile on her face. She leaned over and spoke sotto voce. “Where were you last night?”

“Out for a walk.”

“Yeah, right.” She smirked and her eyes slid over to Kate.

She thinks I’m sleeping with Kate.

Corcoran turned to the group and said, “We’re all over the news this morning. You hear about it?”

Everyone paused in their eating.

“No one?” Corcoran looked around with an air of triumph. “It’s not what you think. There was nothing in the news about Peter Volkonsky—at least, not yet.”

Again she surveyed the group, enjoying the attention. “This is something different. Weird. You know that televangelist, Spates, who runs a megachurch over in Virginia? There was a story about him and us in the Times online this morning.”

“Spates?” Innes leaned in from across the table. “The preacher who was busted with those prostitutes? What could he possibly have to do with us?”

Her smile broadened. “His sermon last Sunday was all about us.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Innes.

“Said we were a bunch of godless scientists putting the lie to the book of Genesis. The whole sermon is available as a podcast on his Web site. ‘Ah greet yeew in the nayum of our Lorud and Saveeyore Cheesus Chraiyst,’ ” she intoned in a near-perfect imitation of his southern drawl, once again demonstrating her ability to mimic.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Innes.

She nudged Ford under the table with her leg. “You hadn’t heard this?”

“No.”

“Who has time to surf the news?” Thibodeaux said, her voice high and irritated. “I can’t get my work done as it is.”

“I don’t get it,” said Dolby. “How are we putting the lie to the book of Genesis?”

“We’re researching the Big Bang—that secular humanist theory which claims the universe was created without the guiding hand of God. We’re part of the war on faith. We’re Christ haters.”

Dolby shook his head in disgust.

“According to the Times, the sermon’s caused an uproar. Several southern congressmen are calling for an investigation, threatening to kill our funding.”

Innes turned to Hazelius. “Did you know about this, Gregory?”

Hazelius nodded wearily.

“What are we going to do about it?”

Hazelius laid down his coffee mug, wiped his eyes. “The Stanford-Binet curve demonstrates that seventy percent of human beings fall in the average or below-average range in intelligence. In other words, more than two-thirds of all human beings are average, which is stupid enough, or they’re clinical morons.”

“I’m not sure I follow your point,” said Innes.

“What I’m saying is, this is the way of the world, George. Live with it.”

“But surely we need to issue a statement refuting the accusation,” said Innes. “As far as I’m concerned, the Big Bang theory is perfectly consistent with a belief in God. One doesn’t exclude the other.”

Edelstein’s eyes rose from his book, suddenly glittering with amusement. “If that’s what you really think, George, then you understand neither God nor the Big Bang.”

“Just a second, Alan,” said Ken Dolby, interrupting. “You can have an entirely physical theory, like the Big Bang, and still believe God was behind it.”

Edelstein’s dark eyes turned to him. “If the theory is fully explanative—which a good theory must be—then God would be unnecessary. A mere spectator. What kind of a useless God is that?”

“Alan, why don’t you tell us what you really think?” said Dolby sarcastically.

Innes spoke loudly, shifting into his professional voice. “Surely the world is big enough for God and science.”

Corcoran rolled her eyes.

“I would object to any statement made in the name of the Isabella project that mentions God,” said Edelstein.

“Enough discussion,” said Hazelius. “There will be no statements. Let the politicians handle it.”

The door to the rec room opened and three scientists came out, followed by Special Agents Greer and Alvarez, and Lieutenant Bia. The room fell silent.

“I wanted to thank you for your cooperation,” said Greer stiffly, clipboard in hand, addressing the group. “You have my card. If there’s anything you need or if you think of anything useful, please call me.”

“When will you know something?” Hazelius asked.

“Two, three days.”

There was a silence. Then Hazelius said, “May I ask a question or two?”

Greer waited.

“Was the gun found in the car?”

Greer hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

“Where?”

“On the floor on the driver’s side.”

“As I understand it, Dr. Volkonsky was shot in the right temple at point-blank range, while he was sitting behind the wheel. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Were any of the car’s windows open?”

“They were all closed.”

“And the AC was on?”

“Yes.”

“Doors locked?”

“That is correct.”

“Keys in the ignition?”

“Yes.”

“Did Dr. Volkonsky’s right hand test positive for powder residue?”

A silence. “The results aren’t in yet,” Greer said.

“Thank you.”

Ford recognized the significance of the questions, and it was clear Greer did, too. As the agents filed out of the room, the meal resumed in tense silence. The unvoiced word “suicide” seemed to hang in the air.

As the meal concluded, Hazelius rose. “A few words.” His tired eyes traveled around the room. “I know all of you are deeply shaken, as am I.”

People shifted positions uncomfortably. Ford glanced at Kate. She looked more than shaken—she was devastated.

“The problems with Isabella fell hardest on Peter—for reasons we all know. He made a superhuman effort to fix the software problems with Isabella. I guess he must have given up. I’d like to share a few lines to his memory, from a poem by Keats about that transcendent moment of discovery.”

He recited from memory: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien .

Hazelius paused, then looked up. “I’ve said it before: no discovery worth a damn in this world comes easy. Any great exploration into the unknown is dangerous—physically and psychologically. Look at Magellan’s voyage around the world, or Captain Cook’s discovery of Antarctica. Look at the Apollo program or the space shuttle. We lost a man yesterday to the rigors of exploration. Regardless of how the investigation turns out—and I think most of us can guess which way it will go—I’ll always consider Peter a hero.”

He paused, choking up with emotion. After a moment he cleared his throat. “The next run of Isabella begins at noon tomorrow. You all know what you have to do. Those of us not already in the mountain will gather here, in the rec room, at eleven thirty and head over as a group. The Bunker doors will close and lock at eleven forty-five. This time, ladies and gentlemen, I swear, we will gaze like stout Cortez on the Pacific.”

There was a fervor in his voice that struck Ford—the fervor of the true believer.

19

THAT SAME MORNING, THE REVEREND D. T. SPATES eased himself into his office chair, pressing a lever to adjust his lumbar support and fiddling with other levers to get it to his liking. He was feeling good. The Isabella project had proved to be a red-hot subject. He owned it. It was his. The money was pouring in and the phone banks were jammed. The question was how to advance the subject on his Friday night Christian talk show, Roundtable America. In a sermon, you could play on emotion, you could roll out the blood and thunder. But Roundtable America worked on a more cerebral level. It was a respected show. And for that he needed firm facts—which he had precious few of, beyond what he could glean from the Isabella project Web site. He had already canceled the guests he had booked weeks ago and had found a new one, a physicist who could talk about the Isabella project. But he needed more: he needed a surprise.

His assistant, Charles, entered with the morning folders. “The e-mails you requested, Reverend. Messages. Schedule.” He laid them down, side by side, with quiet efficiency.

“Where’s my coffee?”

His secretary entered. “Good morning, Reverend!” she said brightly. Her frosted bouffant hair bobbed and glittered in the morning sun. She set a tray in front of him: silver coffeepot, cup, sugar, creamer, a Mrs. Fields macadamia-nut cookie, and a freshly ironed copy of the Virginia Beach Daily Press.

“Shut the door when you leave.”

In the restful quiet that followed, Spates poured a cup of coffee, leaned back in his chair, raised the cup to his lips, and took that first bitter, delectable sip. He rolled the brew around in his mouth, swallowed, exhaled, and placed the cup down. Then he picked up the e-mail folder. Every day Charles and three helpers culled through the thousands of e-mails that arrived, selecting those from people who had given or seemed prepared to give at the “1,000 Blessings” level, and those from politicians and business leaders who needed cultivation. This was the result, and they required a personal response, usually a thank-you for money or a request for money.

Spates plucked the first e-mail off the pile, scanned it, scribbled a response, laid it aside, picked up the second one, and in this way worked through the pile.

Fifteen minutes into the pile, he hit one Charles had flagged with a Post-it: Looks intriguing.

He took a nibble of the cookie and read. Dear Rev. Spates,Greetings in Christ. This is Pastor Russ Eddy, writing you from the Gathered in Thy Name Mission, Blue Gap, Arizona. I’ve been bringing the Good News to Navajoland since 1999, when I founded the mission. We’re a small operation—in fact, it’s just me.Your sermon on the Isabella project really hit home, Reverend. I’ll tell you why. Isabella is our next-door neighbor—it’s right up there on Red Mesa above me, I can see it out my window as I type this. I’ve been getting quite an earful about it from my flock. There are a lot of ugly rumors. And I mean ugly. People are scared; they’re frightened about what’s going on up there. I won’t take up any more of your time, Reverend—just a word of thanks for fighting the Good Fight and alerting Christians everywhere aboust this godless machine out here in the desert. You keep it up.Yours in Christ,Pastor Russ EddyGathered in Thy Name MissionBlue Gap, Arizona

Spates read the e-mail, then read it again. He drained his coffee cup, laid it on the tray, mashed his thumb on the last moist cookie crumb and licked it off. He leaned back, thinking. Seven fifteen in Arizona. Country pastors got up early, right?

He picked up the receiver and tapped in a phone number from the end of the e-mail. It rang several times before a high-pitched voice answered.

“This is Pastor Russ.”

“Ah, Pastor Russ! This is Reverend Don T. Spates from God’s Prime Time Ministry, Virginia Beach. How are you today, Pastor?”

“I’m just fine, thank you.” The voice seemed doubtful, even suspicious.

“Now who did you say you were?‘

“Reverend Don T. Spates! God’s Prime Time!”

“Oh! Reverend Spates! This is quite a surprise. You must’ve gotten my e-mail.”

“I certainly did. It was very interesting.”

“Thank you, Reverend.”

“Please call me Don. I can see that your proximity to this machine, your access to this scientific experiment, could be a Gift from God.”

“How’s that?”

“I need an inside source of information on what’s going on out there, someone on the scene. Maybe God means you to be that source. He didn’t move you to write that e-mail for nothing, Russ. Am I right?”

“Yes sir. I mean, no, He didn’t. I listen to your sermon every Sunday. We don’t get any television reception out here, but I do have a high-speed satellite Internet connection and I listen to the Webcast, without fail.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Russ. It’s good to know our new Webcast’s reaching out. Now, Russ, you mentioned rumors in your e-mail. What kind of rumors you been hearing?”

“All kinds. Radiation experiments, explosions, child abuse. They say they’re creating freaks up there, monsters. That the government is testing a new weapon to destroy the world.”

A slug of disappointment congealed in Spates’s gut. This so-called pastor sounded like a nutcase. No wonder, living out there in the desert with a bunch of Indians.

“Anything a little, ah, more . . . solid?”

“There was a killing up there, yesterday. One of the scientists found with a bullet in his head.”

“Is that right?” This was better. Praise the Lord. “How do you know?”

“Well, in a rural area like this, rumors spread fast. The mesa was crawling with FBI agents.”

“You saw them?”

“Sure did. The FBI only comes on the Rez when there’s been a homicide. The Tribal Police handle almost all other crimes.”

Spates’s spine tingled.

“One of my flock has a brother in the Tribal Police. The latest rumor is that it was actually a suicide. All hush-hush.”

“The dead scientist’s name?”

“Don’t know.”

“You’re sure it was one of the scientists, Russ, and not somebody else?”

“Believe me, if it had been a Navajo, I’d know. This is a very tight-knit community.”

“Have you run into any of the scientists on the team?”

“No. They pretty much keep to themselves.”

“Is there a way you can make contact?”

“Well, sure. I suppose I could drop by, introduce myself as the local pastor. Real friendly-like.”

“Russ, that is an excellent idea! I’m interested in finding out more about the fellow who runs Isabella, guy named Hazelius. You heard about him?”

“The name’s familiar.”

“He declared himself the smartest man on earth. Said everyone was beneath him, called us all a race of morons. Remember that?”

“I think I do.”

“That’s quite a thing to say, isn’t it? Especially coming from a man who doesn’t believe in God.”

“It doesn’t surprise me, Reverend. We live in a world that worships evil.”

“That we do, son. Now: Can I count on you?”

“Yes, sir, Reverend, you bet you can.”

“Here’s something important: I need this information in two days, so I can use it on Friday’s Roundtable America. You ever listen to my show?”

“Since you’ve Webcast it, I never miss it.”

“This Friday, I’ve got a physicist on the show, someone with a Christian perspective, to talk more about the Isabella project. I’ve just got to have more information—not the usual PR stuff. I’m talking dirt. Like this death—what happened? Talk to that Navajo cop you mentioned. You understand, Russ?”

“Absolutely, yes, you got it, Reverend.”

Spates replaced the phone in its cradle and gazed pensively out the window. Everything was falling into place. The power of God knew no bounds.

20

ON HIS RETURN FROM BREAKFAST, FORD was about to enter his casita when Wardlaw stepped from the side of the house and blocked his entry.

Ford had been expecting something like this.

“Mind if we chat?” Wardlaw said, his voice sham-friendly. He worked a piece of gum with his jaw, the muscles above his ears bulging rhythmically.

Ford waited. This wasn’t the moment for a showdown, but if Wardlaw wanted it, he would get it.

“I don’t know what your game is, Ford, or who you really are. I’m assuming you’re operating in some kind of semiofficial capacity. I sensed it from the day you arrived.”

Ford waited.

Wardlaw stepped so close, Ford could smell his aftershave. “My job is to protect Isabella—even from you. I’m guessing you’re here undercover because some bureaucrat back in Washington needs to cover his ass. That doesn’t offer you much in the way of protection, does it?”

Ford remained silent. Let the man vent.

“I’m not going to mention your little escapade last night to anyone. Course, you’ll report it to your handlers. If it gets brought up, you know what my defense will be. You were an intruder and my rules of engagement are shoot to kill. Oh, and if you think the broken windowpane and screen are going to get Greer in a lather, they’ve been fixed. None of this goes beyond the two of us.”

Ford was impressed. Wardlaw had actually thought things through. He was glad that the SIO was no fool. He had always found it easier to go up against an intelligent adversary. Stupid people were unpredictable. He said, “Are you finished with your little speech?”

The carotid artery pounded in Wardlaw’s thick neck. “Watch your back, cop.” He stepped aside, just barely, to allow Ford to pass.

Ford took a step forward and then paused. He was so close to Wardlaw, he could have kneed the SIO in the groin. He looked at the man, inches from his face, and said pleasantly, “You know what’s funny? I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

The shadow of a doubt flickered across Wardlaw’s face as Ford moved on.

He went in the house and slammed the door. So Wardlaw wasn’t absolutely certain that Ford had been the man he’d chased. That uncertainty would slow him down, make him cautious. Ford’s cover had been compromised, but it wasn’t blown.

When he was sure Wardlaw had left, he threw himself on the sofa, annoyed and frustrated. He’d been on the mesa almost four days, but he knew scarcely more than he had back in Lockwood’s office.

He wondered why he had ever thought this would be an easy assignment.

The time had come for him to take the next step, the step he had hoped to avoid ever since Lockwood showed him Kate’s dossier.

AN HOUR LATER, FORD FOUND KATE in the stables feeding and watering the horses. He stood in the doorway, following her with his eyes as she filled buckets with oats, broke open a bale of alfalfa, and tossed a flake or two into each stall. He watched the way she moved, her body slender and supple, performing the banal tasks with sureness and grace, despite her obvious exhaustion. It felt like twelve years ago, watching her sleep under that table.

Rock music, turned down low, filtered from inside the barn.

She tossed the last flake and then turned, seeing him for the first time.

“Going for another ride?” she asked, her voice subdued.

He stepped into the cool shade. “How are you, Kate?”

She put her gloved hands on her hips. “Not so good.”

“I’m very sorry about Peter.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I give you a hand?”

“All done.”

The music played on softly in the background. He recognized it now.

“Blondie?”

“I often play music while working with the horses. They like it.”

“Do you remember—?” he began.

She cut him off. “Yes.”

They faced each other silently. At MIT, she used to start the day at the LEES lab, the electronics lab, by blasting “Atomic” out across Killian Court. When he got there, she was usually dancing around the room, earphones on and coffee mug in hand, making a spectacle of herself. She had enjoyed spectacles—like the time she’d poured a pint of gasoline into Murphy Memorial Fountain and lit it on fire. He felt a sudden pang at the memories, the time gone. How full of naïve hopefulness she had been, how sure that life was always going to be a laff-riot. Life eventually clobbered everyone—her especially.

He shook off the memories and focused on the mission. With Kate, the most direct way was always the best. She hated people who beat around the bush. Ford swallowed. Would he ever forgive himself for what he was about to do?

Point-blank he asked the question: “Okay, what are you all hiding?”

She looked at him steadily. No feigned surprise, no protest, no pretense of ignorance.

“None of your business.”

“It is my business. I’m part of the team.”

“Then ask Gregory.”

“I know you’ll be straight with me. Hazelius—I don’t know what to make of him.”

Her face softened. “Trust me, Wyman, you don’t want to know.”

“I do want to know. I need to know. It’s my job. This isn’t like you, Kate, keeping secrets.”

“What makes you think we’re keeping secrets?”

“Ever since I arrived, I’ve had the feeling you’re hiding something. Volkonsky alluded to it. So did you. Something’s seriously wrong with Isabella, isn’t it?”

Kate shook her head. “God, Wyman, you never change—always that damnable curiosity.” She looked down at her shirt, plucked a piece of straw from her shoulder, frowned.

Another long silence. Then she focused her intelligent brown eyes on him and he saw she had reached a decision. “Yes. Something’s wrong with Isabella. But it’s not what you might think. It’s uninteresting. Stupid. It has nothing to do with you or your work here. I don’t want you to know because . . . well, it could get you into trouble.”

Ford said nothing. He waited.

Kate issued a short, bitter laugh. “All right. You asked for it. But don’t expect some big revelation.”

He felt a hideous flush of guilt. He shoved the emotion down—he would deal with it later.

“You’ll understand, when you hear this, why we’ve been keeping it secret.” She looked at him steadily. “Isabella’s been sabotaged. A hacker is making fools of us.”

“How so?”

“Someone planted malware in the supercomputer. It seems to be a kind of logic bomb that goes off just as Isabella is about to reach one hundred percent power. First it produces a bizarre image on the Visualizer; then it shuts down the supercomputer and posts a stupid message. It’s incredibly frustrating—and extremely dangerous. At that high energy level, if the beams kink or get thrown off track, we could all be blown up. Even worse, a sudden energy fluctuation could create dangerous particles or miniature black holes. It’s the Mona Lisa of hacks, a real masterpiece, the work of an incredibly sophisticated programmer. We can’t find it.”

“What’s the message?”

“You know, GREETINGS or HELLO or ANYBODY THERE?”

“Like the old AI programming saw, HELLO, WORLD.”

“Exactly. An inside joke.”

“And then what?”

“That’s it.”

“It doesn’t say more?”

“There’s no time for it to say more. With the computer crashed, we’re forced to initiate an emergency shutdown of the system.”

“You haven’t engaged it in conversation? Gotten it talking?”

“Are you kidding? With a forty-billion-dollar machine about to blow up? Anyway, it wouldn’t help—it would only spew out more crap. And with the supercomputer crashed, running Isabella is like driving at night on a wet road at a hundred miles an hour with the headlights off. We’d be crazy to sit around chatting with it.”

“And the image?”

“Very strange. It’s hard to describe—really spectacular, all deep and shimmery like a ghost. Whoever did this was an artist in his own way.”

“You can’t find the malware?”

“No. It’s devilishly clever. It appears to be moving itself around the system, erasing its tracks as it goes, evading detection.”

“Why not tell Washington and get a specialized team out here to fix it?”

She was silent for a moment. “It’s too late for that. If it came out that we were flummoxed by a hacker, there’d be a furious scandal. The Isabella project just barely scraped by the Congress . . . . It would be the end.”

“Why didn’t you report it right away? Why are you hiding it?”

“We were going to!” She brushed back her hair. “But then we decided it would be better to delete the malware before we reported it, so we could say we’d already taken care of the problem. A day went by, then another and another, and we couldn’t find the malware. A week passed, ten days—and then it dawned on us we’d waited too long. If we reported it, we’d be accused of a cover-up.”

“That was a blunder.”

“I’ll say. I don’t quite know how it happened . . . . We were just crazy with stress, and it takes a minimum of forty-eight hours to complete a single run cycle . . . .” She shook her head.

“Any idea who’s behind it?”

“Gregory thinks it may be a sophisticated group of hackers who planned a deliberate act of criminal sabotage. But there’s always the unspoken fear . . . that the hacker might be one of us.” She paused, breathing hard. “You see the position we’re in, Wyman.”

A horse nickered softly in the shadows.

“This must be why Hazelius seems to think Volkonsky’s death was a suicide,” Ford said.

“Of course it was a suicide. As the software engineer, the humiliation of being the victim of a hacker fell on him like a ton of bricks. Poor Peter. He was so fragile, an emotional twelve-year-old, just a hyperactive, insecure kid in T-shirts that were too big for him.” She shook her head. “He couldn’t take the pressure. The guy never slept. He was in there with the computer day and night. But he couldn’t find the slag code. It tore him to pieces. He started drinking and I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into harder stuff.”

“What about Innes? Isn’t he supposed to be the team psychologist?”

“Innes.” Her brow furrowed. “He means well, but he’s hopelessly out-gunned intellectually. I mean, these once-a-week ‘rap’ sessions, this let’s-talk-it-all-out crap, it might wash with normal people, but not with us. It’s so easy to see through his tricks, his leading questions, his little strategies. Peter detested him.” She brushed away a tear with the back of her gloved hand. “We were all very fond of Peter.”

“All except Wardlaw,” said Ford. “And Corcoran.”

“Wardlaw . . . Well, he doesn’t really like any of us, except Hazelius. But you have to realize, he’s under even more pressure. He’s the team’s intelligence officer, the guy who’s supposed to be in charge of security. If this came out, he’d go to prison.”

No wonder he’s a little high-strung.

“As for Melissa, she’s had dustups with quite a few of the team members. It wasn’t just Volkonsky. I’d . . . be careful of her.”

Ford thought of the note, but said nothing.

She pulled off her gloves and tossed them in a basket hung on the wall. “Satisfied?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

As Ford walked back to his casita, he repeated the question to himself. Satisfied?

21

PASTOR RUSS EDDY HAD GOTTEN INTO his old Ford pickup and was staring at the gas gauge, caculating if he had the gas to get up the mesa and back, when he saw the telltale corkscrew of dust on the horizon that indicated an approaching vehicle. He got out of the truck and leaned against it, waiting.

A few moments later a Navajo Tribal Police car eased to a stop in front of the trailer, the plume of dust spiraling away in the wind. The door opened and a dusty cowboy boot appeared. A tall man unfolded himself from the inside and straightened up.

“Morning, Pastor,” he said, touching his hat.

“Morning, Lieutenant Bia,” said Eddy, trying to keep his voice easy and loose.

“Going somewhere?”

“Oh, no, just checking the gas level in the truck,” said Eddy. “Actually, I was thinking of driving up to the mesa, introducing myself to the scientists up there. I’m concerned about what’s going on up there.”

Bia gazed around, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting the endless horizon in every direction he looked. “Haven’t seen Lorenzo around lately, have you?”

“No,” said Eddy. “Haven’t seen him since Monday morning.”

Bia hitched up his pants, his dangling accoutrements clinking like a giant charm bracelet. “Funny thing is, he hitched a ride to Blue Gap around four o’clock Monday, told the folks there he was heading out this way to finish up his work. They saw him walking down the mission road—and then he seems to have disappeared.”

Eddy let a beat pass. “Well, I never saw him. I mean, I saw him in the morning, but he left around noon or maybe before and I haven’t seen him here since. He was supposed to be working for me, but . . .”

“Hot out here today, eh?” Bia turned and grinned at Eddy, and glanced toward the trailer.

“Can I talk you into a cup of coffee?” Bia asked.

“Of course.”

Bia followed Eddy into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Eddy filled the percolator pot with fresh water and turned on the burner. Navajos habitually reused their grounds, and Eddy figured Bia wouldn’t mind.

Bia laid his hat on the table. His hair was plastered down in a wet ring. “Well, I’m actually not here about Lorenzo. I personally think he took off again. The folks at Blue Gap said he was pretty drunk when he came through on Monday.”

Eddy nodded. “I noticed he’d started hitting the juice.”

Bia shook his head. “Too bad. That kid had just about everything going for him. If he don’t show up soon, they’ll revoke his parole and he’ll go back to Alameda.”

Eddy nodded again. “A shame.”

The coffee began to perk. Eddy took the opportunity to busy himself getting out the mugs, sugar, and Cremora, placing them on the table. He poured out two cups and sat down again.

“Actually,” said Bia, “I’m here about something else. I was talking to the trader in Blue Gap yesterday, and he told me about the . . . problem you’d had with the collection money.”

“Right.” Eddy took a swallow of coffee, burned his mouth.

“He told me how you marked up some money and asked him to keep an eye out for it.”

Eddy waited.

“Well, yesterday a bunch of those bills showed up.”

“I see.” Eddy swallowed. Yesterday?

“It’s kind of an awkward situation,” said Bia, “which is why the trader talked to me about it, instead of calling you. I hope you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you. I don’t want to make a big deal about it.”

“Sure thing.”

“You know old lady Benally? Elizabeth Benally?”

“Of course, she attends my church.”

“She used to graze her sheep up on the mesa every summer, had an old hogan up there near Piute Spring. It wasn’t her land, she didn’t have any right to it, but she’d been using it most of her life. When the tribal government took over the mesa for that Isabella project, she lost that grazing land and had to sell her sheep.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It wasn’t so bad for her. She’s in her seventies, and they got her into a nice HUD house down in Blue Gap. Problem is, with a house like that, you suddenly have electric bills, water bills—you know what I mean? She’s never had to pay a bill in her life. And now her income’s down to just her government stipend because she doesn’t have any more sheep.”

Eddy said he understood.

“Well, this week her granddaughter’s having her tenth birthday and yesterday old lady Benally bought her a Gameboy at the Trading Post as a present, had it gift-wrapped and everything.” He paused, looking steadily at Eddy. “She paid for it with your marked bills.”

Eddy sat there, staring at Bia.

“I know. Pretty surprising.” Bia removed a wallet from his back pocket. His big dusty hand slipped out a fifty and pushed it across the table. “No point in making a big deal over it.”

Eddy could not move.

Bia rose, put the wallet away. “If it happens again, just let me know and I’ll cover the loss. Like I said, there’s no point in the law getting involved. I’m not sure she’s all that compos mentis anyway.” He picked up his hat and fitted it back down over the sweat mark on his salt-and-pepper hair.

“Thanks for your understanding, Pastor.”

He turned to go, then paused. “And if you see Lorenzo, give me a holler, okay?”

“Sure will, Lieutenant.”

Pastor Russ Eddy watched as Lieutenant Bia walked out the front door and disappeared, then reappeared through the window, striding across his front yard, right over where the body was buried, his cowboy boots kicking up streamers of dust.

His eye fell on the soiled fifty-dollar bill, and he felt sick. And then angry. Very angry.

22

FORD ENTERED HIS LIVING ROOM AND stood at the window, gazing at the crooked form of Nakai Rock rising above the cottonwoods. He had completed his assignment, and now he faced a decision: Should he report it?

He flung himself into a chair and dropped his head into his hands. Kate was right: if the news got out, it would fatally damage the project. It would destroy their careers—Kate’s included. In the field of science, the whiff of a cover-up or a lie was a career killer.

Satisfied? he asked himself again.

He got up and angrily paced the room. Lockwood had known all along that he would find the answer by asking Kate. He’d been hired not because he was some brilliant ex–CIA agent turned PI, but because he just happened to have dated a certain woman twelve years ago. He should’ve walked out on Lockwood when he had the chance. But he’d been intrigued by the assignment. Flattered. And, if the truth be told, way too attracted to the idea of seeing Kate again.

For a moment he longed for his life at the monastery, those thirty months when life seemed so simple, so clean. Living there, he’d almost forgotten the awful grayness of the world and the impossible moral choices it forced on you. But he never would have made a monk. He had gone into the monastery hoping it would give him back his certainty, his faith. But it had done just the opposite.

He bent his head and tried to pray, but it was just words. Words spoken into silence.

Maybe there wasn’t any such thing as right or wrong anymore—people did what they did. He made his decision. There was no way he was going to take a step that would damage Kate’s career. She had had enough hard knocks in her life. He would give them two days to track down the malware. And he would help them. He strongly suspected that the saboteur was a member of the team. No one else would have the access or the knowledge.

Walking out the front door, Ford took a turn around the house as if taking the air, making sure Wardlaw wasn’t hanging around. Then he went into his bedroom, unlocked a filing cabinet, and removed his briefcase. He punched in the code to unlock it and tapped in the number.

Lockwood answered so fast, Ford thought the science adviser must have been waiting by the phone.

“News?” Lockwood asked breathlessly.

“Not much.”

A sharp sigh of exasperation from Lockwood. “You’ve had four days, Wyman.”

“They simply can’t get Isabella to work. I’m beginning to think you’re wrong, Stan. They’re not hiding anything. It’s just like they say—they just can’t get the machine to work properly.”

“Damn it, Ford, I don’t buy it!”

He could hear Lockwood breathing hard on the other end. This was a career-breaker for him, too. But the fact was, he didn’t give a shit about the man. Let him go down. Kate was what mattered. If he could buy them a few more days to find the malware, there was no reason for Lockwood to ever know.

Lockwood went on. “You heard about this preacher, Spates, and his sermon?”

“Yes.”

“This shortens the time frame. You have two, maybe three days, max, before we pull the plug. Wyman, you find out what they’re hiding—you hear me? Find it!”

“I understand.”

“You searched Volkonsky’s place?”

“Yes.”

“Find anything?”

“Nothing special.”

Silence from Lockwood, then, “I just got the preliminary forensic report on Volkonsky. Looking more and more like suicide.”

“I see.”

Ford heard a rustling of papers over the line.

“I also looked into some of the research you asked me to. As for Cecchini . . . The cult was called Heaven’s Gate. You probably remember, back in ‘97, that cult whose members committed mass suicide, thinking their souls were going to board an alien spaceship that was approaching Earth behind Comet Hale-Bopp? Cecchini joined the cult back in ’95, stayed in it less than a year, and left before the mass suicide.”

“Any evidence he still believes it? The guy seems a bit like an automaton.”

“The cult doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s no evidence he believes it. He’s had a normal life since—if a bit of a loner. Doesn’t drink or smoke, no girlfriends to speak of, few if any friends. Focused everything on his career. The man’s a brilliant physicist—totally dedicated to his work.”

“And Chen?”

“Her dossier says her father was an illiterate laborer who died before she and her mother emigrated from China. Not so. He was a physicist with the Chinese nuclear-weapons-testing facility out at Lop Nor. And he’s still alive, back in China.”

“How’d the false information get in the dossier?”

“Immigration files—and from the interview with Chen herself.”

“So she’s lying.”

“Maybe not. Her mother took her out of China when she was two. Could be her mother’s the liar. But there could be an innocent explanation for the falsehood: the mother wouldn’t have gotten a visa to come to America if she’d told the truth. Chen may not even know her father’s alive. No evidence she’s passing information.”

“Hmm.”

“We’re running out of time, Wyman. You keep pushing. I know they’re hiding something big—I just know it.”

Lockwood rang off.

Ford went back to the window and stared again toward Nakai Rock. Now he was one of them—hiding the secret. But unlike them, he had more than one secret.

23

AT ELEVEN TWENTY, PASTOR RUSS EDDY sped along the brand-new asphalt road that cut across the top of Red Mesa in his battered 1989 F-150 pickup. The wind blowing through his open windows fanned the pages of the King James Bible on the seat beside him, and his blood pounded with a sense of confusion, anger, and anxiety. So it wasn’t Lorenzo after all. Still, he’d been drunk, he’d been insolent—and he’d blasphemed the Lord in the most heinous way. Eddy had had nothing to do with his death—he’d killed himself. But in the end, it was all God’s plan. And God knew what He was doing.

God moves in mysterious ways.

He said it to himself again and again. All his life he had awaited the call—the revelation of God’s purpose for him. It had been a long, difficult journey. God had tested him as sorely as Job, taken from him his wife and child in divorce, taken his career, his money, his self-respect.

And now this thing with Lorenzo. Lorenzo had blasphemed God and Jesus using the most horrific words of vileness, and before his very eyes God had smote him dead. Before his very eyes. But Lorenzo hadn’t been the thief: Eddy had accused him unjustly. What did it mean? Where was God’s will in all this? What was God’s plan for him?

God moves in mysterious ways.

The pickup coughed and rattled along the shining black asphalt, took a broad curve, passed between sandstone bluffs—and there below him lay a collection of adobe houses half-hidden among cottonwoods. To the right, about a mile off, lay the two new runways of the airstrip and a set of hangars. Beyond that, at the edge of the mesa, was the Isabella complex itself, surrounded by a double set of chain-link fences.

Most of Isabella, he knew, was deep below ground. The entrance must be inside the fenced-off area.

Dear Heavenly Father, please guide me, he prayed.

Eddy drove down into the little green valley. There was a log building at the far end, which must be the old Nakai Rock Trading Post. Two men and a woman were walking toward it. Others moved about near the door. God had gathered them together for him.

He took a deep breath, slowed the pickup, and parked in front of the building. A hand-painted sign above the door read, NAKAI ROCK TRADING POST, 1888.

Through the screen door, he counted eight people inside. He knocked on the wooden frame. No answer. He knocked louder. The man at the front of the room turned, and Russ was struck by his eyes. They were so blue, they seemed to jolt you with electricity.

Hazelius. It had to be.

Russ whispered a quick prayer and stepped inside.

“What can I do for you?” the man asked.

“My name’s Russ Eddy. I’m the pastor of the Gathered in Thy Name Mission down in Blue Gap.” It came out in a rush. He felt foolish and self-conscious.

With a warm smile the man detached himself from the chair he’d been leaning on and strode over. “Gregory North Hazelius,” he said with a hearty handshake. “Good to meet you, Russ.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What can I do for you?”

Russ felt panic welling up. Where were the words he had rehearsed as the truck climbed the Dugway? Then his tongue found them. “I heard about the Isabella project, and I decided to come and tell you about my mission and offer you all the benefits of my spiritual assistance. We meet every Sunday at ten o’clock, over in Blue Gap, about two miles west of the water tower.”

“Thank you very much, Russ,” said Hazelius, his voice warm and sincere.

“We’ll visit you sometime soon—and perhaps you’d also enjoy a tour of Isabella one of these days. Unfortunately, right now we’re in a very important meeting. Perhaps you’d care to come back next week?”

Heat crept up Russ’s face. “Well, sir, no, I don’t think so.” He swallowed. “You see, my flock and I, we’ve been concerned about what’s going on up here. I came to get some answers.”

“I understand your concern, Russ, I really do.” Mr. Hazelius glanced at a man standing close to him—tall, angular, and ugly. “Pastor, let me introduce you to Wyman Ford, our community liaison person.”

The man stepped forward, his hand extended. “Glad to meet you, Pastor.”

Hazelius was already retreating.

“I came to talk to him, not you,” said Eddy, the high-pitched voice he hated cracking with effort.

Hazelius turned. “Excuse me, Pastor. We didn’t mean any disrespect. We’re a little tied up right now . . . . Could we meet tomorrow, same time?”

“No, sir.”

“May I respectfully ask why is it so important to deal with this now?”

“Because I understand there’s been a . . . a sudden bereavement, and I think that needs to be addressed.”

Hazelius gazed at him. “You’re referring to the death of Peter Volkonsky?” His voice had become quiet.

“If that’s the man who took his own life, yes, I am, sir.”

The man named Ford stepped forward again. “Pastor, I’d be happy to work with you on these issues. The problem is, right now Dr. Hazelius is about to direct another test of Isabella, and he doesn’t have the time he’d like to devote to you. But I could.”

Eddy wasn’t going to let himself be bundled off to some PR lackey. “Like I said, I want to talk to him—not you. Isn’t he the one who claimed he was the smartest man on earth? The one who said the rest of us were morons? The one who built this machine to challenge the Word of God?”

There was a short silence.

“The Isabella project has nothing to do with religion,” said the PR man. “It’s strictly a scientific experiment.”

Eddy felt his anger swelling—righteous, furious anger at Lorenzo, at his ex-wife, at the divorce court, at all the injustice in the world. This was how Jesus must have felt in the Temple, when he cast out the money changers.

He pointed a trembling finger at Hazelius. “God will punish you anew.” “That’s quite enough—,” said the PR man, his voice sharp now, but Hazelius interrupted.

“What do you mean by ‘anew’?”

“I’ve been reading up on you. I know about your wife, who pornographically bared her body in Playboy magazine, who glorified herself, and lived deliciously, like the whore of Babylon. God punished you by taking her. Still, you did not repent.”

The room went deathly silent. The PR man said, after a moment, “Mr. Wardlaw, please escort Mr. Eddy from the premises.”

“No,” said Hazelius. “Not yet.” He turned to Eddy with a terrible smile that chilled the preacher’s soul. “Tell me, Russ. You’re the pastor of a mission near here?”

“That’s right.”

“To what denomination do you belong?”

“We’re unaffiliated. Evangelical.”

“But you are—what? Protestant? Catholic? Mormon?”

“None of the above. We’re born-again, fundamentalist Christians.”

“What does that mean?”

“That we’ve accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts as our Lord and Savior, and we’ve been born again through water and the spirit, the only true way to salvation. We believe every word of the Scriptures is the divine, unerring word of God.”

“So you think Protestants and Catholics aren’t real Christians and God will send them to hell—am I correct?”

Eddy felt uneasy at this detour into fundamentalist dogma. But if that’s what the smartest man in the world wanted to talk about—it was fine with Eddy.

“If they haven’t been born again—then, yes.”

“Jews? Muslims? Buddhists? Hindus? The uncertain, the seekers, the lost? All damned?”

“Yes.”

“So most people on this little mud-ball out here in the outer arm of a minor galaxy are going to hell—except for you and a select few like-minded individuals?”

“You have to understand—”

“That’s why I’m asking you these questions, Russ—to understand. I repeat: Do you believe that God will send most people on earth to hell?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you know this for a fact?”

“Yes. The Scriptures repeatedly confirm it. ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved. He that believed not shall be damned.’ ”

Hazelius turned to the group. “Ladies and gentlemen: I give you an insect—no, a bacterium—who presumes to know the mind of God.”

Eddy’s face flushed. His brain boiled with the effort to come up with a reply.

The ugly man named Ford spoke to Hazelius. “Gregory, please, don’t ask for trouble.”

“I’m merely asking questions, Wyman.”

“What you’re doing is creating a problem.” The man turned again to the security officer. “Mr. Wardlaw? Once again I will ask you to escort Mr. Eddy from the premises.”

The security officer said evenly, “Dr. Hazelius is in charge and I take my orders from him.” He turned. “Sir?”

Hazelius did not speak.

Eddy wasn’t finished with the speech he had prepared in his head on the drive up. He had mastered his anger, and he spoke with cold, cold certainty, facing those blue eyes squarely. “You think you’re the smartest man in the world. But how smart are you, really? You’re so smart, you think the world started in some accidental explosion, a Big Bang, and all the atoms just happened to come together to create life, with no help from God. How smart is that? I’ll tell you how smart it is: it’s so smart, it’ll send you to straight to hell. You’re part of the War on Faith, you and your godless theories. You people want to abandon the Christian nation built up by our Founding Fathers and turn the country into a temple to feel-good secular humanism, where anything goes—homosexuality, abortion, drugs, premarital sex, pornography. But now you’re reaping what you’ve sown. Already there’s been a suicide. That’s where blasphemy and hatred of God lead you. Suicide. And God will visit his divine wrath on you again, Hazelius. ‘ Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth the Lord.’ ”

Eddy halted, breathing hard. The scientist gazed at him strangely, his eyes glittering like a pair of frozen steel bearings.

In a curiously strangled voice, Hazelius said, “It’s now time for you to leave.”

Eddy didn’t answer. The beefy security guard stepped forward. “Come this way, pal.”

“That’s not necessary, Tony. Russ here has recited his little speech. He knows it’s time to go.”

The security guard took another step toward him anyway.

“Don’t worry about me,” Eddy said hastily. “I can’t wait to get out of this godless place.”

As the screen door shut behind him, Eddy heard the calm voice say, “The germ extends its flagellum to depart.”

He turned, pressed his face against the wire mesh, and called, “‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ John 8:32.”

He spun around and walked stiffly to his truck, the left side of his face twitching from humiliation and boundless, fulminating anger.

24

FORD WATCHED THE SKINNY FIGURE OF the pastor striding across the parking area toward an old beater of a pickup truck. A man like that, if he had a following, could do a lot of damage to the Isabella project. He was very sorry Hazelius had provoked him, and he felt that they hadn’t heard the end of this—not by a long shot.

When he turned back, Hazelius was checking his watch as if nothing had happened.

“We’re late,” the scientist said briskly, plucking his white lab coat from the hook. He glanced around. “Let’s go.” His eye fell on Ford. “I’m afraid you’ll be on your own for the next twelve hours.”

“Actually,” said Ford, “I’d like to see a run.”

Hazelius pulled on his coat and picked up his briefcase. “I’m so sorry, Wyman, that just won’t be possible. When we’re down in the Bunker on a run, everyone has his or her assigned role and it’s very tight. We just can’t have any extra people around. I hope you understand.”

“I’m sorry, too, Gregory, because I feel that in order to do my job, I have to be present at a run.”

“All right, then, but I’m afraid it can’t be this particular run. We’re having a lot of problems, we’re all under stress, and until we solve these technical issues, we can’t have extraneous people on the Bridge.”

Ford said quietly, “I’m afraid I have to insist.”

Hazelius paused. An awkward silence fell. “Why do you need to see a run in order to do your job?”

“I’ve been hired to assure the local people that Isabella is safe. I’m not going to assure anyone of anything until I’m sure of it myself.”

“Do you actually doubt the safety of Isabella?”

“I’m not going to take someone else’s word for it.”

Hazelius shook his head slowly.

“I have to be able to tell the Navajos that I’m part of every aspect of the project, that nothing’s being kept from me.”

“As the senior intelligence officer,” said Wardlaw suddenly, “I would like to inform Mr. Ford that, for security purposes, he is denied access to the Bunker. End of discussion.”

Ford turned to Wardlaw. “I don’t think you want to take us down that particular road, Mr. Wardlaw.”

Hazelius shook his head. “Wyman, I understand what you’re saying. I really do. The problem is—”

Kate Mercer interrupted. “If you’re worried about him finding out about the malware in the system, don’t bother. He already knows about it.”

Everyone stared at her. A shocked silence settled over the group.

“I told him everything,” said Mercer. “I felt he should know.”

“Oh, now that’s just great,” said Corcoran, looking up at the ceiling.

Kate turned on her. “He’s a member of the team. He’s got a right to know. I can vouch for him one hundred percent. He won’t reveal our secret.”

Corcoran’s face flushed. “I think we can all read between the lines of that little speech.”

“It’s not what you think,” said Mercer coldly.

Corcoran smirked. “And what is it that I think?”

Hazelius cleared his throat. “Well, well.” He turned to Ford and laid a not-unkindly hand on his shoulder. “So Kate explained everything.”

“She did.”

He nodded. “All right . . .” He seemed to be thinking. Then he turned and smiled to Kate. “I respect your judgment. I’m going to trust you on this one.” He turned to Ford. “I know you’re an honorable man. Welcome to the group—for real, this time. You’re now privy to our little secret.” His blue eyes were disconcertingly penetrating.

Ford tried to stop the flush from mounting into his face. He glanced at Kate and was startled by her expression—of what, hope? Anticipation? She didn’t seem angry that he’d pushed the issue.

“We will speak of this later, Wyman.” Hazelius let the hand slide off Ford’s shoulder and he turned to Wardlaw. “Tony, it looks like Mr. Ford will be part of the next run after all.”

The SIO didn’t answer. His face remained utterly stolid and expressionless, his eyes straight ahead.

“Tony?”

“Yes, sir,” came the strained answer. “I understand, sir.”

Ford made a point of looking at Wardlaw as he passed by. The man returned the look with cold, empty eyes.

25

KEN DOLBY WATCHED THE GREAT TITANIUM door to the Bunker drop down and seal itself with a hollow boom. A damp movement of air played over his face, smelling of caverns, wet stones, warm electronics, machine oil, and coal dust. He inhaled. It was a heady smell, a rich smell—the smell of Isabella.

The scientists filed past on their way to the Bridge. Dolby caught Hazelius as he passed.

“There’s a red light on Magnet 140,” he said. “I got a squelch warning on it. Nothing serious. I’m going to check it out.”

“How long do you think it’ll take?” Hazelius asked.

“Less than an hour.”

Hazelius gave him an affectionate pat on the back. “You do that, Ken, and report back. I won’t turn on Isabella until we hear from you.”

Dolby nodded. He stood in the vast cavern while the others disappeared into the Bridge. The door closed with a clang that reverberated through the hangarlike space.

Silence gradually returned. Dolby breathed once again the fragrant air. He had led the design team for Isabella—directing a dozen Ph.D. engineers and almost a hundred contractor-designers who were blueprinting specific subsystems and the supercomputer. Despite the many people involved, he had been firmly in charge, his hand in everything. He knew every square inch of Isabella, every quirk and foible, every curve and hollow. Isabella was his creation—his machine.

The oval opening to Isabella’s tunnel—like a slice taken off the side of doughnut—glowed in soft blue light. Condensation snaked out of the portal in sinuous tracks that crawled this way and that before evaporating. Inside the tunnel, just beyond the opening, Dolby could see the massive blue-gray wall of depleted uranium shielding—behind which was CZero, the beating heart of Isabella.

CZero. Coordinate Zero. This was the tiny place, no bigger than a pin-head, where the beams of matter and antimatter were brought together at the speed of light to annihilate themselves in a burst of pure energy. When Isabella was running at 100 percent full power, it was the hottest, brightest place in the entire universe—one trillion degrees. Unless, thought Dolby with a smile, there was an intelligent race of beings out there with a particle accelerator bigger than his.

He was inclined to think not.

Most of the energy of the matter–antimatter explosion at CZero was instantly converted back to mass, according to Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, and became an awesome spray of exotic subatomic particles, some not seen since the very creation of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

He closed his eyes and imagined himself as one of the protons circulating in the ring, going round and round, being accelerated by the supermagnets to 99.999 percent the speed of light. He made the forty-seven-mile circuit four thousand times per second, round and round. He saw himself plunging down the curving tunnel at unimaginable speed, getting a kick in speed from each magnet, more than three million kicks per second, faster and faster . . . it thrilled him to imagine it. And ripping along just half an inch from him in the pipe was the beam of antiprotons, circulating in the opposite direction, whipping by him at the same incredible speed.

He imagined the moment of contact. His beam was forced into the oncoming beam. Into a head-on collision at CZero. Matter striking antimatter at the speed of light. Riding the particle into CZero, he felt the collision—the pure, absolute, thrilling annihilation of it. He felt his rebirth into strange new particles spraying outward in all directions, ripping into the many layers of detectors that logged, counted, and examined each particle.

Ten trillion particles per second.

DOLBY OPENED HIS EYES, RETURNING FROM his reverie, feeling slightly foolish. Checking his pockets for loose change or other ferromagnetic items, he walked across the staging area toward the row of electric golf carts. Isabella’s superconducting magnets were thousands of times more powerful than the ones used in medical MRI machines. They could pull a nickel right through your body or gut you with your own belt buckle.

Isabella was dangerous and demanded respect.

He climbed in behind the wheel. Pressing a button, he engaged the clutch and eased the cart into first gear.

He had designed it himself, and it was one sweet little cart. Although it could do only twenty-five miles an hour, it had cost almost as much as a Ferrari Testarossa, mostly because it had to be built entirely out of nonmagnetic materials—plastics, ceramics, and low-diamagnetic metals. It came with a communications system, a built-in computer, radar warning sensors and controllers front, side, and back, radiation sensors, ferromagnetic alarms, and a special vibration-damped bay for transporting delicate scientific instruments.

He sped across the concrete floor and entered the oval opening to the Isabella tunnel. The turn was tight and he came to a full stop.

“Hello, Isabella.”

He eased onto the concrete track that ran along the bottom of the tunnel, next to the curving bundle of pipes. Once on the track, he accelerated, the wheels staying in their grooves. Everything was bathed in greenish-blue light from a double row of fluorescent tubes overhead. As he whipped along, he glanced at the biggest pipe, gleaming 7000 aluminum-alloy construction, flanged and bolted every six feet. Inside was a vacuum harder than that found on the surface of the moon. It had to be tight: one loose atom wandering into CZero would be like a horse straying onto the racetrack at Daytona. Crash and burn.

He accelerated to top speed. The rubber wheels whispered in their grooves. Every hundred feet he passed a magnet wrapped around the pipe like a big doughnut. Each magnet, supercooled to four and a half degrees above absolute zero, wept a fog of condensation. Dolby blew through each cloud, leaving behind a whirl of eddies, the pipes racing past.

Periodically he passed a steel door on the left side of the tunnel, an opening into the old coal tunnels. Emergency exits, in case something happened. But nothing would happen. This was Isabella.

Magnet 140 was eight miles down the tunnel . . . . A twenty-minute drive. It wasn’t anything serious. Dolby was almost glad about it—he liked having time alone with his machine.

“Pretty good,” he said out loud, “for the son of a grease monkey from Watts, eh, Isabella?”

He thought of his dad, who could rebuild any car engine on earth. Never made more than the barest of livings—it was almost a crime that a fine mechanic like him never had a chance. Dolby was determined to make up for it—and he did. When Dolby was seven, his father gave him a radio kit. It seemed like a miracle, to screw and solder together a bunch of plastic and metal crap and have a voice come out. By the time he was ten, Dolby had built his first computer. Then he built a telescope, threw in a couple of CCD chips, hooked it to the computer, and began tracking asteroids. He built a tabletop accelerator using an old electron gun from a TV set. With that he achieved the alchemist’s dream, something that had eluded even Isaac Newton himself: he’d smashed a piece of lead foil with electrons, turning maybe a few hundred atoms to gold. His poor father, God rest his kindly soul, had spent every free dollar from his meager paychecks buying him kits, equipment, and parts. Ken Dolby’s dream was to build the biggest, shiniest, most expensive machine ever.

And now he had done it.

His machine was perfect, even if some bastard had hacked into the computer software.

Magnet 140 came into view and he braked hard and came to a halt. He pulled a special laptop out of the instrument bay and jacked it into a panel on the side of the magnet. Sitting on his heels, he worked on the laptop, talking to himself. He unscrewed a metal plate on the side of the magnet’s case, clipped a device with two wires—one red, one black—to terminals in the magnet.

He consulted the computer, his face darkening. “Well, damn you, bitch.” The cryogenic pump that was part of the insulating system was failing. “I’m glad I caught you early.”

Silently he repacked the tools, shoved the laptop back into its neoprene carrying case, and got behind the wheel of the cart. He unhooked a radio from the dashboard, pressed a button.

“Dolby calling the Bridge.”

“Wardlaw here,” came a tinny voice from the speaker.

“Lemme talk to Gregory.”

After a moment Hazelius came on.

“You can start Isabella.”

“The high-temperature alarm is still red on the board.”

A silence. “You know I’d never risk my machine, Gregory.”

“Fine. I’ll start her up.”

“We’re going to have to install another cryogenic pump, but we’ve got plenty of time. It’ll last at least another two runs.”

Dolby signed off, put his hands behind his head, and kicked back, propping his feet up on the dashboard. In what at first felt like utter silence, Dolby began to make out faint sounds—the whisper of the forced-air system, the humming of the cryogenic pumps, the hiss of liquid nitrogen moving through the outer jackets, the faint creakings of the golf cart engine as it continued to cool, the cricks and ticks of the mountain itself.

Dolby closed his eyes and waited, and then he heard a new sound. It was like a low, low singing, a humming, rich and dark.

Isabella had been turned on.

He felt that ineffable shiver of wonder, of awe that he had designed a machine that could peer into the moment of creation—a machine that actually re-created the moment of creation.

A God machine.

Isabella.

26

FORD DRAINED THE BITTER DREGS FROM his coffee mug and checked his watch: close to midnight. The run had been one long bore, endless adjustments and tinkerings stretched out over hours and hours of time. As he watched everyone work, he wondered: Was one of them the saboteur?

Hazelius strolled over. “We’re bringing the two beams in contact. Keep your eye on the Visualizer—that screen in front.”

The physicist murmured a command and, after a moment, a bright point of light appeared in the center of the screen, followed by a flickering of colors that radiated outward.

Ford nodded at the screen. “What do all those colors represent?”

“The computer translates the particle collisions at CZero into pictures. Each color represents a type of particle, the bands represent energy levels, and the radiating shapes are the particles’ trajectories as they exit CZero. It’s a way for us to see at a glance what’s going on, without having to crunch a bunch of numbers.”

“Clever.”

“It was Volkonsky’s idea.” Hazelius shook his head sadly.

Ken Dolby’s voice tolled out, “Ninety percent power.”

Hazelius held up his empty coffee mug. “Get you another?”

Ford winced. “Why don’t you get a decent espresso machine in here?”

Hazelius went off with a low chuckle. Everyone else in the room was quiet, focused on various tasks, except for Innes, who paced the room with nothing to do, and Edelstein, who sat in a corner reading Finnegans Wake. The boxes from the frozen pizzas they’d eaten for dinner spilled out of the trash bin by the door. Coffee rings marked various white surfaces. The bottle of Veuve Clicquot still lay by the wall.

It had been a long twelve hours—long stretches of crushing boredom, punctuated by brief bursts of manic activity, and then more boredom.

“Beam steady, collimated, luminosity fourteen point nine TeV,” said Rae Chen, hunched over a keyboard, her glossy black hair spilling in an unruly curtain over the keys.

Ford strolled along the raised part of the Bridge. As he passed Wardlaw, who was at his own monitoring station, he caught a faintly hostile glance, and smiled coldly back at it. The man was waiting and watching.

He heard Hazelius’s quiet voice. “Bring it to ninety-five, Rae.”

The faint clicking of a keyboard sounded in the hushed room.

“Beam holding steady,” said Chen.

“Harlan? How’s the power?”

St. Vincent’s leprechaun-like face popped up. “Coming in like a tidal bore: smooth and strong.”

“Michael?”

“So far so good. No anomalies.”

The murmured catechism went on, Hazelius asking for a report from everyone in turn, then repeating the process. It had been going on like this for hours, but now Ford could feel the anticipation finally beginning to build.

“Ninety-five percent power,” said Dolby.

“Beam steady. Collimated.”

“Luminosity seventeen TeV.”

“Okay, folks, we’re verging into unknown territory,” said Chen, her hands on a set of controllers.

“Here there be monsters,” intoned Hazelius.

The screen was awash in color, like a flower forever blooming. Ford found it mesmerizing. He glanced over at Kate. She had been working quietly on a networked Power Mac to one side, running a program he recognized as Wolfram’s Mathematica. The screen displayed a complicated infolded object. He went over and looked over her shoulder.

“Am I interrupting?”

She sighed, turned. “Not really. I was going to shut this down and watch the final run-up anyway.”

“What is it?” He nodded at the screen.

“A Kaluza-Klein eleven-dimensional space. I’ve been running some calculations on mini black holes.”

“I hear that Isabella will investigate possibility of power generation using mini black holes.”

“Yes. That’s one of our projects—if we can ever get Isabella online.”

“How would that work?”

He saw a nervous glance back at Hazelius. Their eyes met for just a moment.

“Well, it turns out Isabella might be powerful enough to create miniature black holes. Stephen Hawking showed that mini black holes evaporate after a few trillionths of a second, releasing energy.”

“You mean, they blow up.”

“Right. The idea is that maybe we can harness the energy.”

“So there’s a possibility of Isabella creating a black hole that will blow up?”

Kate waved her hand. “Not really. The black holes Isabella might create—if any get created at all—would be so small that they would evaporate in a trillionth of a second, releasing a lot less energy than, say, the bursting of a soap bubble.”

“But the explosion might be bigger?”

“Highly unlikely. I suppose it’s possible that if the mini black hole lasted, say, a few seconds, it might knock around long enough to acquire more mass and . . . then blow up.”

“How big an explosion?”

“Hard to say. The size of a small nuke, perhaps.”

Corcoran glided over, sidling up to Ford. “But that’s not even the scariest scenario,” she said.

“Melissa.”

She arched her eyebrows at Kate, putting on an innocent look. “I thought we weren’t going to hide anything from Wyman.” She turned to Ford. “The really scary possibility is that Isabella will create a mini black hole that might be completely stable. In which case, it would drift down to the center of the earth and hang out there, swallowing up more and more matter until . . . krrrrch! Good-bye Earth.”

“There’s a chance that might happen?” Ford asked.

“No,” said Kate irritably. “Melissa’s just teasing you.”

“Ninety-seven percent,” intoned Dolby.

“Luminosity at seventeen point nine two TeV.”

Ford lowered his voice. “Kate . . . Don’t you think even the smallest possibility is too high? We’re talking about the destruction of the earth.”

“You can’t shut down science on outlandish possibilities.”

“Don’t you care?”

Kate flared up. “Damn it, Wyman, of course I care. I live on this planet, too. You think I’d risk that?”

“If the probability isn’t exactly zero, you are risking it.”

“The probability is zero.” She swiveled her chair, roughly turning her back on him.

Ford straightened up and noticed Hazelius still looking at him. The physicist rose from his chair and strolled over with an easy smile.

“Wyman? Let me reassure you with this little fact: if miniature black holes were stable, we’d see them everywhere, left over from the Big Bang. In fact, there’d be so many that they would have swallowed up everything by now. So the fact that we exist is proof that mini black holes are unstable.”

Corcoran smirked at the sidelines, pleased at the effect of her words.

“Somehow I’m not completely reassured.”

Hazelius placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It’s impossible that Isabella will create a black hole that will destroy the earth. It simply can’t happen. ”

“Power steady,” said St. Vincent.

“Beam collimated. Luminosity eighteen point two TeV.”

The murmuring in the room had increased. Ford heard a new sound—a faint, distant singing.

“You hear that?” Hazelius said. “That’s a sound generated by trillions of particles racing around Isabella. We’re not sure why there’s a sound at all—the beams are in a vacuum. Somehow they set up a sympathetic vibration transmitted by the intense magnetic fields.”

The atmosphere on the Bridge was thickening with tension.

“Ken, take it up to ninety-nine and hold,” said Hazelius.

“Will do.”

“Rae?”

“Luminosity just over nineteen TeV and rising.”

“Harlan?”

“Steady and cool.”

“Michael?”

“No anomalies.”

Wardlaw spoke from his security station across the room. His voice was very loud in the hushed atmosphere. “I’ve got an intruder.”

“What?” Hazelius straightened up, astonished. “Where?”

“At the perimeter fence up top, around the elevator. I’m focusing in.”

Hazelius strode over, and Ford quickly joined him. A greenish image of the fence materialized on one of Wardlaw’s screens, seen from the perspective of a camera mounted high up on a mast above the elevator. It was of a man, pacing restlessly along the fence.

“Can you zero in?”

Wardlaw hit a switch, and a different view sprang into focus from the level of the fence.

“It’s that preacher!” said Hazelius.

The form of Russ Eddy, as gaunt as a scarecrow, paused in his pacing and hooked his fingers into the chain links, peering in with a suspicious scowl on his face. Behind him, the moon cast a greenish glow across the barren mesa.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Wardlaw, rising.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Hazelius.

“He’s trespassing.”

“Leave him be. He’s harmless. If he tries to climb the fence, then you can speak to him over the loudspeakers and tell him to scram.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hazelius turned. “Ken?”

“Holding at ninety-nine.”

“How’s the supercomputer, Rae?”

“So far, so good. Keeping up with the flow of particles.”

“Ken, take it up a tenth.”

The flower on the screen flared, flickering and spreading, running through all the colors of the rainbow. Ford stared at the screen, mesmerized by the image.

“I’m starting to see the very lowest end of that resonance,” said Michael Cecchini. “It’s a powerful one.”

“Take it up another tenth,” said Hazelius.

The writhing flower on the screen grew more intense, and two faint, shimmering lobes appeared on either side of the central point, darting outward again and again, like a grabbing hand.

“All power systems go,” said St. Vincent.

“Up a tenth,” said Hazelius.

Chen hit the keyboard. “I’m starting to see it—extreme space-time curvature at CZero.”

“Up a tenth.” Hazelius’s voice was calm, steady.

“There it is!” said Chen, her voice resonating across the Bridge.

“You see?” said Kate to Ford. “That black dot right at CZero. It’s as if the spray of particles was just briefly passing out and then back into our universe.”

“Twenty-two point five TeV.” Even the laid-back Chen sounded tense.

“Steady at ninety-nine point four.”

“Up a tenth.”

The flower writhed, twisted, throwing off veils and sprays of color. The dark hole in the center increased, its edges flickering raggedly. The resonance suddenly lunged outward, right off the sides of the screen.

Ford saw a drop of sweat crawl down Hazelius’s cheek.

“That’s the source of the charged jet at twenty-two point seven TeV,” said Kate Mercer. “We seem to be tearing the ‘brane at that point.”

“Up a tenth.”

The hole grew, pulsating strangely, like a beating heart. In the middle it was black as night. Ford stared, drawn in.

“Infinite curvature at CZero,” said Chen.

The hole had grown so large, it swallowed most of the center of the screen. Ford suddenly saw flashes in its depths, like a school of fish darting about in deep water.

“How’s the computer?” Hazelius asked sharply.

“Flaky,” said Chen.

“Up a tenth,” said Hazelius, his voice low.

The flecks increased. The singing noise, which had been steadily rising, added a hissing, snakelike overtone.

“Computer’s getting funkier,” said Chen, her voice tight.

“How so?”

“Take a look.”

Everyone was now standing before the big screen—everyone but Edelstein, who continued reading. Something was materializing in the central hole, with little bits and flashes of color, swarming faster, coming up from infinite depths, shimmering, taking shape. It was so strange, Ford wasn’t sure if his brain was interpreting it right.

Hazelius pulled the keyboard over and rapped in a command. “Isabella’s having trouble managing the bitstream. Rae, kill the checksum routines—that should free up CPU.”

“Hold it,” said Dolby. “That’s our early warning system.”

“It’s a backup to a backup. Rae? Please do it.”

Chen hammered in the command.

“Computer’s still funky, Gregory.”

“I’m with Ken—I think you should turn the checksum routines back on,” said Kate.

“Not yet. Take it up a tenth, Ken.”

A hesitation.

“Up a tenth.”

“All right,” said Dolby, his voice uncertain.

“Harlan?”

“Power’s deep, strong, and clean.”

“Rae?”

Chen’s voice was high-pitched. “It’s happening again. The computer’s getting all glacky on me, just like it did with Volkonsky.”

The shimmering intensified.

Cecchini said, “Beams still collimated. Luminosity twenty-four point nine. Tight and focused here.”

“Ninety-nine point eight,” said Chen.

“Up a tenth.”

Dolby spoke, his usually laconic voice uncharacteristically tight. “Gregory, are you sure—?”

“Up a tenth.”

“I’m losing the computer,” said Chen. “I’m losing it. It’s happening again.”

“It can’t be happening. Put it up a tenth!”

“Approaching ninety-nine point nine,” said Chen, a slight tremble in her voice.

The singing had become louder, and it reminded Ford of the sound made by the monolith in the movie 2001, a chorus of voices.

“Take it up to ninety-nine point nine five.”

“It’s gone! It won’t accept any input!” Chen tossed her head, her hair sweeping back in an angry cloud of black.

Ford stood with the others, just behind Hazelius, Cecchini, Chen, and St. Vincent, all of whom were riveted to their own keyboards. The image, the thing in the center of the Visualizer had taken solidity, and it was shimmering faster, with purple and deep red darts whipping in and out, a whirling hive of color, deep and three-dimensional.

It looked almost alive.

“My God,” gasped Ford involuntarily. “What is that?”

“Slag code,” said Edelstein dryly, not even looking up from his book. Instantly the Visualizer went blank.

“Oh no. God no,” Hazelius groaned.

A word popped up in the middle of the screen:

Greetings

Hazelius smacked the keyboard with his hand. “Son of a bitch!”

“Computer’s frozen,” said Chen.

Dolby turned to Chen, “Power down, Rae. Now.”

“No!” Hazelius turned on him. “Up to one hundred percent!”

“Are you crazy?” Dolby screamed.

Suddenly, instantly, Hazelius became calm. “Ken, we’ve got to find the malware. It seems to be a bot program—it’s moving around. It’s not in the main computer. So where is it? The detectors have built-in microprocessors— it’s moving around in the detectors. And that means we can find it. We can isolate the output from each detector and corner it. Am I right, Rae?”

“Absolutely. That’s a brilliant idea.”

“For God’s sake,” said Dolby, his face covered with sweat, “we’re flying blind. If the beams decollimated, they could slice through here, blow the shit out of all of us—not to mention frying two hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of detectors.”

“Kate?” said Hazelius.

“I’m with you all the way, Gregory.”

“Take it to a hundred, Rae,” Hazelius said coolly.

“Okay.”

Dolby lunged for the keyboard, but Hazelius stepped into his way, blocking him.

“Ken,” Hazelius said rapidly, “listen to me. If the computer’s going to crash, it would have already happened. The controller software’s still running in the background. We just can’t see it. Give me ten minutes to trace this.”

“No way.”

“Five minutes, then. Please. This is not an arbitrary decision. My assistant director agrees with me. We’re in charge.”

“Nobody’s in charge of my machine but me.” Breathing hard, Dolby stared at Hazelius, stared at Mercer, then turned back, his arms at his side, fists clenched.

Without turning, Hazelius said, “Kate? We’re going to try what you and I discussed earlier: type in a question—anything. Let’s see if we can get it talking.”

“What the hell’s the point of asking it questions?” Dolby turned. “It’s a chatterbot program.”

“Maybe we can trace the output back to the source. Back to the logic bomb.”

Dolby stared at him.

“Rae,” said Hazelius, “if it outputs, you troll through the detectors looking for the signal.”

“Gotcha.” Chen jumped up from the console and went to another workstation, where she began typing.

The others stood almost paralyzed, as if in shock. Ford saw that Edelstein had finally put down his book to watch, a distant look of interest on his face.

Hazelius and Dolby continued their face-off, Hazelius blocking access to the power control board.

Greetings to you, too, Kate typed in.

The LED screen above the console flickered, went dark. Then an answer appeared:

I am glad to be speaking to you.

“It’s responding!” Kate cried.

“Did you get that, Rae?” Hazelius shouted.

“I did,” said Chen excitedly. “I’ve got a bead on the output stream. You were right, it is coming from a detector! This is it! We got it! Keep going!”

Glad to be speaking to you, too, Kate typed. “Jeez, what should I say?”

“Ask who it is,” said Hazelius.

Who are you? Kate typed.

For lack of a better word, I am God.

A derisive snort from Hazelius. “Stupid-ass hackers!”

If you’re really God, typed Kate, then prove it.

We don’t have much time for proofs.

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. What is it?

You are thinking of the transcendental number e.

Kate took her fingers off the keyboard and sat back.

“How’s it going, Rae?” Hazelius called to Chen.

“I’m tracing it! Just keep typing!”

Kate straightened her shoulders and leaned forward to type again.

Now I’m thinking of a number between zero and one.

Chaitin’s number: Omega.

At this, Kate stood up abruptly and stepped back from the keyboard, her hand over her mouth.

“What is it?” Ford asked.

“Keep typing!” Chen screamed from her hunched-over position.

Kate shook her head, her face pale, hand over her mouth, backing away from the machine.

“Why the hell isn’t someone inputting!” Chen screamed.

Hazelius turned to Ford. “Wyman—you take over from Kate.”

Ford stepped forward to the keyboard. If you’re God, then . . . What could he ask? He quickly typed, what’s the purpose of existence?

I don’t know the ultimate purpose.

“I’m getting it!” Chen shouted. “That’s it! Keep it going!”

That’s a fine thing, Ford typed, a god who doesn’t know the purpose of existence.

If I knew, existence would be pointless.

How so?

If the end of the universe were present in its beginning—if we are merely in the middle of the deterministic unfolding of a set of initial conditions—then the universe would be a pointless exercise.

“All right,” said Dolby, in a low and menacing tone. “Your time’s up. I want Isabella back.”

“Ken, we need more time,” said Hazelius.

Dolby tried to step past Hazelius, but the physicist blocked him. “Not yet.”

“I’ve almost got it!” yelled Chen. “Give me just a minute more, for chris-sakes!”

“No!” said Dolby. “I’m powering down now!”

“The hell you are,” said Hazelius. “Damn it, Wyman, keep inputting!”

Explain, Ford hastily typed.

If you’re at your destination, why make the journey? If you know the answer, why ask the question? That is why the future is—and must be—profoundly hidden, even from God. Otherwise, existence would have no meaning.

That’s a metaphysical argument, not a physical argument, Ford typed.

The physical argument is that no part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself. The universe is “predicting the future” as fast as it can.

Dolby tried to step around Hazelius, but the physicist darted to the side, still blocking him.

“Keep it outputting, I’m almost there!” Chen screamed, hunched over the keyboard, typing maniacally.

What is the universe? Ford typed, plucking questions at random. Who are we? What are we doing here?

Dolby lunged forward, shoving Hazelius out of the way. Hazelius stumbled back, but he recovered quickly and flung himself on the engineer’s back, pulling him away from the console with astonishing force.

“Are you crazy?” Dolby yelled, trying to shuck him off. “You’re going to wreck my machine—!”

The two men wrestled, the diminutive physicist clinging like a monkey to the engineer’s broad back—and they fell heavily to the floor, the chair overturning with a crash.

The others were frozen with shock at the brawl. Nobody knew what to do.

“You crazy bastard—!” Dolby yelled, rolling on the floor, struggling to break free of the fiercely clinging physicist.

The logic bomb continued outputting to the Visualizer screen.

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation, which is working toward a state that I do not and cannot know. The purpose of existence is to reach that final state. But that final state is a mystery to me, as it must be, for if I knew the answer, what would be the point of it all?

“Let me go!” Dolby cried.

“Somebody help me,” Hazelius cried. “Don’t let him touch that keyboard!”

What do you mean by computation? Ford typed. We’re all inside a computer?

By computation I mean thinking. All of existence, everything that happens—a falling leaf, a wave upon the beach, the collapse of a star—it is all just me, thinking.

“I got it!” Chen cried triumphantly. “I’ve—wait! What the hell—?”

What are you thinking? Ford typed.

With a final wrench, Dolby broke away from Hazelius and threw himself on the console.

“No!” Hazelius screamed. “Don’t shut her down! Wait!”

Dolby sat back, breathing hard. “Power-down sequence initiated.”

The singing noise that filled the room attenuated, and the screen in front of Ford flickered, the words dissolving. He had just the briefest glimpse of some eldritch shape flurrying up and disappearing into a point in the center of the screen, and then it went dark.

Hazelius shrugged his shoulders, straightened his clothes, brushed the dust off his shoulders, and turned to Chen, his voice calm. “Rae? Did you get it?”

Chen stared back at him, her face blank.

“Rae?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I got it.”

“Well? What processor is it coming from?”

“None.”

A silence settled in the room.

“What do you mean,none?”

“It was coming from CZero itself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. The output was coming directly out of the space-time hole at CZero.”

In the shocked silence, Ford looked around for Kate. He found her standing all alone and very still at the back of the Bridge. He quickly walked over to her and spoke to her in a low voice. “Kate? Are you all right?”

“It knew,” she whispered, her face white. “It knew.” Her hand sought his and closed around it, trembling.

27

EDDY EXITED HIS TRAILER, TOWEL OVER his shoulder, shaving kit in hand, and stared at the boxes of unsorted clothing that had arrived during the week. After his midnight trip up the mesa, he hadn’t been able to sleep and he’d spent most of the night online, haunting the late-night Christian chat rooms.

He gave the pump a few pulls and caught the cold water with his hand, dashing it into his face, trying to shock himself into awareness. There was a humming noise in his head from lack of sleep.

He lathered up and shaved, swished the razor blade clean in the basin, and dumped out the water into the sand. He watched as it soaked in, leaving clots of foam on the surface. It suddenly reminded him of Lorenzo’s blood. With a feeling of panic, he stamped down hard on the image. God had smote Lorenzo down—not him. It was not his fault—it was God’s will. And God never did anything without a purpose. And that purpose involved the Isabella project—and Hazelius.

Hazelius. He found himself replaying in his mind the encounter of the day before. He flushed at the memory and his hands trembled. He kept rephrasing, again and again, what else he could have said; with each revision his speech grew longer, more eloquent, more full of righteous anger. In front of everyone, Hazelius had called him an insect, a germ—because he was a Christian. The man was an example of all that was wrong with America, a high priest in the temple of secular humanism.

Eddy’s eye wandered over to the boxes that had arrived the day before. With Lorenzo gone, he had a lot more work to do. Thursday was “clothes day,” when he distributed free clothes to the Indians. Through the Internet, Russ had worked out a deal with a half dozen churches in Arkansas and Texas to collect used clothing and ship it to him for distribution to needy families.

With his penknife, Eddy slit open the top of the first box and began sorting through the sorry pickings, pulling out a jacket here, a pair of jeans there, hanging them on racks or laying them out on plastic tables under the hay barn. He worked in the cool of the morning, sorting, racking, folding. The great form of Red Mesa rose up in the background, purple in the early light. His mind continued to orbit around Hazelius, replaying their scene. God had shown him what He would do to a blasphemer like Lorenzo. What more would He do against Hazelius?

He glanced up at the outline of the mesa rising above him, vaguely menacing, and remembered the darkness of the night before, the desolation, the emptiness. The humming and crackling of the power lines, the smell of ozone. He could feel the presence of Satan up there.

A telltale cloud of dust on the horizon indicated an approaching vehicle. He squinted into the rising sun, and soon a pickup materialized out of the dust, lurching and groaning along the potholed road. It came to a shuddering halt. A large Indian woman climbed out, followed by two boys. One carried a Star Wars gun, the other a plastic Uzi. They rushed off through the saltbush, pretending to shoot at each other. Russ followed them with his eyes, thinking of his own son growing up without him, and his internal rage increased.

“Hey, Pastor, how you doing?” asked the woman cheerfully.

“Greetings in Christ, Muriel,” said Eddy.

“What you got today?”

“Help yourself.” His eyes strayed back to the boys, who were shooting at each other from behind clumps of sagebrush.

The bell he had mounted on the outside of the trailer sounded to tell him the phone was ringing inside. He dashed in, searched for the receiver among piles of books.

“Hello?” he asked breathlessly. He almost never got calls.

“Pastor Russ Eddy?” It was Reverend Don Spates.

“Good morning, Reverend Spates. Christ be with—”

“I was wondering if you’d done any more looking around, like I asked.”

“I did, Reverend. I went back up the mesa last night. The houses and village were completely deserted. The high-tension lines, all three of them, were humming with power. My hair was just about standing on end.”

“Is that right?”

“Then around midnight, I heard like a vibration or a singing noise, coming from underground. It lasted about ten minutes.”

“Did you get past the security fence?”

“I . . . I didn’t dare.”

Another grunt and a long silence. Eddy could hear more pickup trucks arriving and someone calling his name. He ignored it.

“Lemme tell you my problem,” Spates said. “I’m doing my television talk show tomorrow evening at six— Roundtable America—and as my guest I’ve got a physicist from Liberty University. I’ve got to have something new on the Isabella project.”

“I understand, Reverend.”

“So like I told you the other day, you need to dig up something good. You’re my man on the scene. This suicide’s a start, but it’s not enough. We need something to scare people. What are they really doing out there? Is radiation leaking out, like those rumors you told me about? Are they going to blow up the earth?”

“I wouldn’t know . . . .”

“That’s the point, Russ! Get in there and find out. Trespass a little, bend the laws of man to serve the Law of God. I’m counting on you!”

“Thank you, Reverend. Thank you. I’ll do it.”

After the call, Pastor Russ stepped back out into the bright sunlight and crossed over to where half a dozen people were sorting through clothes—mostly single mothers with children. He held up his hands. “Folks? I’m sorry, but we have to shut this down. Something’s come up.”

There was a murmur of disappointment, and Eddy felt bad—he knew some of the mothers had driven a long ways to get there, despite the price of gas.

After they’d gone, Russ hung up a notice that clothes day had been canceled and climbed into his pickup. He looked at the gauge: eighth of a tank, not enough gas to get up the mesa and back. Fishing out his wallet, he found three dollars. He already owed a couple hundred dollars at the filling station in Blue Gap and almost as much at Rough Rock. He’d have to pray he could make it to Piñon and fill up there, hoping they’d extend him credit. He was pretty sure they would—Navajos always let you borrow money.

It made no sense to go over to Isabella during the day—they’d see him. He would drive over after sunset, hide his pickup behind Nakai Rock, and poke around in the dark. In the meantime, he might be able to pick up some more information in Piñon about the suicide up on the mesa.

He took a deep, satisfying breath. God had finally called him. Gregory North Hazelius, that bile-spewing Christ hater, had to be stopped.

28

FORD, ENSCONCED IN AN OLD LEATHER chair in the corner of the rec room, watched as the rest of the team arrived from the Bunker, exhausted and demoralized. The first rays of the sun angled down from the horizon and blasted in through the building’s eastern windows, filling the room with a golden light. People sank silently down into chairs, their eyes unfocused. Hazelius was the last to enter. He went to the fireplace and lit the kindling beneath a prelaid fire. Then he, too, sank into a chair.

For a while they sat in silence, the only sound the crackling of the fire. Finally Hazelius rose slowly to his feet. All eyes turned to him. He looked from person to person, his blue eyes rimmed with the pink of fatigue, his lips white with tension. “I have a plan.”

This announcement was greeted with silence. A sap pocket burst in a log, causing everyone to jump.

“Tomorrow, at noon, we ramp up for another run,” Hazelius continued, “at one hundred percent power. Here’s the important thing: we stick with the run until we’ve traced the slag code to its source.”

Ken Dolby took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “Look, Gregory, you almost wrecked my machine. I can’t let that happen again.”

Hazelius bowed his head. “Ken, I owe you an apology. I know I push too hard sometimes. I was angry and frustrated. I acted like a madman. Forgive me.” He offered his hand.

After a moment Dolby took it.

“Friends?”

“Okay, sure,” said Dolby. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to allow any more runs at one hundred percent power until we fix the hacker problem.”

“And how do you propose we fix the problem without runs at one hundred percent?”

“Maybe the time has come to admit failure and report this back to Washington. Let them handle it.”

A long silence followed, until Hazelius said, “Anyone else have an opinion?”

Melissa Corcoran turned to Dolby. “Ken, if we admit failure now, we’ll be flushing our careers down the toilet. I don’t know about the rest of you, but this was the chance of a lifetime for me. No way in hell am I going to let it go.”

“Any other thoughts?” asked Hazelius.

Rae Chen stood up, her diminutive form hardly taller than those who were sitting. But the formal gesture of rising added weight. “I’ve got an opinion.”

Her black eyes circled the table.

“I grew up in the back of a Chinese restaurant in Culver City, California. My mother worked herself half to death to send me to college and graduate school. She’s proud of me because I made it in this country. And now I’m here. The whole world’s watching us.” Her voice began to break. “I’d rather die than give up. That’s what I have to say. I’d rather die. ”

She sat down abruptly.

Into the uncomfortable silence, Wardlaw spoke. “I know how things work at the DOE. If we report this now, we’ll be charged with a cover-up. There could be criminal charges.”

“Criminal charges?” said Innes from the back of the room. “For God’s sake, Tony, let’s not be absurd.”

“I’m quite serious.”

“That’s sheer alarmism.” Innes’s pale face belied his dismissive tone. His eyes darted around the table. “And even if it were true, I’m only the team psychologist. I had nothing to do with the decision to withhold information.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t report it either,” said Wardlaw, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t kid yourself, you’ll be in the dock with the rest of us.”

The twittering of birds came in through the silence.

“Anyone in agreement with Ken?” Hazelius asked finally. “That we throw in the towel and report the problem to Washington?”

No one was in agreement.

Dolby looked around. “Think of the risk!” he cried. “We could wreck Isabella! We can’t just power up Isabella and run it blind!”

“That’s right, Ken,” said Hazelius. “My plan takes that into account. Would you like to hear it?”

“Hearing isn’t agreeing,” said Dolby.

“Understood. As you know, the Isabella project facilities are run by three state-of-the-art IBM p5 595 servers. You specked them out yourself, Ken. They control telecommunications, e-mail, the LAN, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s computational overkill—those servers are powerful enough to run the Pentagon. My idea is, let’s reconfigure them as a backup system to Isabella.” He turned to Rae Chen. “Possible?”

“I think so.” She glanced at Edelstein. “Alan, what do you think?”

He nodded slowly.

“Just how do you propose doing this?” Dolby asked.

“The biggest problem is the firewall,” Chen said. “We’ll have to disable all links to the outside. Including telecommunications. Our landlines and cell phones would go down. Then we gang the servers, link them directly to Isabella. It’s doable.”

“No outside communications at all?”

“None, as long as Isabella is engaged. The firewall’s unbreakable. If the software running Isabella senses any link to the outside, it shuts down for security purposes. That’s why we have to cut all communications.”

“Ken?”

Dolby drummed his fingers on the table and frowned.

Hazelius looked around the room. “Anyone else?” His eye fell on Kate Mercer, who was sitting in the back, disengaged from the discussion. “Kate? Any thoughts?”

Silence.

“Kate? Are you all right?”

Her voice was barely audible. “It knew.”

More silence. Then Corcoran said briskly, “Well, that may not be as amazing as it seems. Obviously we’re dealing with an Eliza-like program—anyone remember Eliza?”

“That old FORTRAN program back in the eighties, talked to you like a psychoanalyst?” said Cecchini.

“That’s the one,” said Corcoran. “The program was simple—it turned everything you said into another question. You’d type, My mother hates me, and Eliza would answer, Why do you say your mother hates you? A little programming went a long way.”

“This was no Eliza,” said Kate. “It knew what I was thinking.”

“It’s actually quite elementary,” said Melissa, giving her a breezy, superior look. “The hacker who created this logic bomb knows we’re a bunch of egghead scientists, right? He knows we don’t think like ordinary people. So when you said, ‘I’m thinking of a number between one and ten,’ the hacker had already anticipated someone asking a question like that. He figured you wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of a whole number or even a rational number—no, he assumed you’d be thinking of all the numbers between one and ten. And what’s the most interesting number between one and ten? Either pi or e. But of the two, e is the more mysterious.” She looked around brightly.

“How about the next one it got?”

“Same rule applies. What’s by far the weirdest frigging number between zero and one? Easy: Chaitin’s halting-probability number—Omega. Right, Alan?”

Alan Edelstein dipped his head.

Melissa turned a radiant smile on Kate. “See?”

“Bullshit.”

“Oh, so you think we’re talking to God?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Kate said irritably. “All I’m saying is, it knew.”

Rae Chen spoke up. “Look, I don’t want to get all woo-woo here, but I traced that output right into the center of CZero. It was not coming from a detector or from any hardware. It was coming out of that weird data cloud inside the tear in space-time at CZero.”

“Rae,” said Hazelius, “you know that can’t be true.”

“I’m telling you what I saw. That data cloud was spewing out binary code directly into the detectors. On top of that there was an energy surplus—more energy was coming out of CZero than was being pumped in. The calculation’s right here.” She pushed a folder of papers in Hazelius’s direction.

“Impossible. Can’t happen.”

“Yeah, well then you run the calculations.” Chen spread her hands.

“That’s why we need to do this again,” said Hazelius, “not under pressure, not under some deadline. We need to do another run that’ll give Rae all the time she needs to really track down that logic bomb.”

Edelstein spoke. “I was tied up at Console Three during the exchange. Does anyone have a transcript? I’d like to read what the malware actually out-putted.”

“What does it matter?” Hazelius said.

Edelstein shrugged. “Just curious.”

Hazelius looked around. “Anyone keep a record?”

“I’ve got it somewhere,” said Chen. “It printed out with the data dump.” She shuffled through some papers, pulled one out. Hazelius took it.

“Read it out loud,” said St. Vincent. “I didn’t catch most of it either.”

“Me neither,” said Thibodeaux. The others concurred.

Hazelius cleared his throat and read in a matter-of-fact tone:

Greetings

Greetings to you, too.

I am glad to be speaking to you.

Glad to be speaking to you, too. Who are you?

For lack of a better word, I am God.

Here Hazelius paused. “When I get my hands on the son of a bitch who dropped this logic bomb into the system, I’m going to rip his nuts off.”

Thibodeaux laughed nervously.

“How do you know it wasn’t a woman?” asked Corcoran.

After a moment, Hazelius continued.

If you’re really God, then prove it.

We don’t have much time for proofs.

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. What is it?

You are thinking of the transcendental numbere.

Now I’m thinking of a number between zero and one.

Chaitin’s number: Omega.

If you’re God, then what’s the purpose of existence?

I don’t know the ultimate purpose.

That’s a fine thing, a god who doesn’t know the purpose of existence.

If I knew, existence would be pointless.

How so?

If the end of the universe was present in its beginning—if we are merely in the middle of the deterministic unfolding of a set of initial conditions—then the universe would be a pointless exercise.

Explain.

If you’re at your destination, why make the journey? If you know the answer, why ask the question? That is why the future is—and must be—profoundly hidden, even from God. Otherwise, life would have no meaning.

That’s a metaphysical argument, not a physical argument.

The physical argument is that no part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself. The universe is “predicting the future” as fast as it can.

What is the universe? Who are we? What are we doing here?

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation, which is working toward a state that I do not and cannot know. The purpose of existence is to reach that final state. But that final state is a mystery to me, as it must be, for if I knew the answer, what would be the point of it all?

What do you mean by computation? We’re all inside a computer?

By computation I mean thinking. All of existence, everything that happens—a falling leaf, a wave upon the beach, the collapse of a star—it is all just me, thinking.

What are you thinking?

Hazelius lowered the paper. “And that’s all she wrote.”

Edelstein murmured, “That is truly extraordinary.”

“It strikes me as being a lot of New Age claptrap,” said Innes. “It is all just me, thinking. I find the sentiments to be puerile. They are just what you might expect from a socially underdeveloped computer hacker.”

“You think so?” Edelstein said.

“I certainly do.”

“Then may I point out that this malware has—at least so far—passed the Turing test?”

“The Turing test?”

Edelstein squinted at him. “Surely you’re aware of it.”

“I apologize for being a mere psychologist.”

“The seminal paper on the Turing test was published in the psychological journal Mind.”

Innes’s face shifted into professional blandness. “Perhaps you should consider, Alan, why it is that you feel such a strong need for self-validation.”

“Turing,” said Edelstein, “was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century. He invented the idea of the computer back in the thirties. During World War Two he cracked Germany’s Enigma code. After the war, he was horribly mistreated for being a homosexual and committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple.”

Innes frowned. “A seriously unstable individual.”

“You’re saying homosexuals are unstable?”

“No, not at all, of course not,” Innes said hastily. “I was referring to his method of suicide.”

“Turing saved England from the Nazis—the British would have lost the war otherwise—and England thanked him with ruthless persecution. Under the circumstances, I should think suicide would not be . . . illogical . As for his method, it was clean, efficient, and eloquent in its symbolism.”

Innes’s face flushed. “I’m sure we would all appreciate it, Alan, if you would get to the point.”

Edelstein continued smoothly. “The Turing test was an attempt to answer the question, ‘Can a machine think?’ Turing’s proposal was this: a human judge engages in a written conversation with two entities he can’t see—one human and the other machine. If, after a long exchange, the judge can’t tell the human from the machine, then the machine is said to be ‘intelligent.’ The Turing test became the standard definition of artificial intelligence.”

“All very interesting,” said Innes, “but what does that have to do with our problem?”

“Since we haven’t achieved anything close to artificial intelligence, even with the most powerful supercomputers, I find it astonishing that a mere piece of malware—a few thousand lines of slag code, presumably—could pass the Turing test. And on such an abstract subject as God and the meaning of life.” He pointed at the transcript. “That is why this is not puerile—not at all.” He folded his arms and looked around.

“Which is why we have to do another run,” said Hazelius. “We have to keep it talking so Rae can trace it back to its source.”

People sagged in their chairs. No one spoke.

“Well?” said Hazelius. “I’ve made a proposal. We’ve talked about it. Let’s take a vote: Tomorrow, do we run this logic bomb to ground or not?”

Halfhearted nods and sounds of vague assent went around the room.

Ford said, “Tomorrow is the day of the protest ride.”

“There’s no way we can delay this any longer,” said Hazelius. He looked fiercely from face to face. “Well? Raise your hands!”

One by one, the hands rose. After a hesitation, Ford raised his with the others. Only Dolby’s remained down.

“We can’t do it without you, Ken,” Hazelius said quietly. “Isabella’s your baby.”

A pause, then Dolby swore. “All right, damn it, I’m in.”

“Unanimous,” said Hazelius. “We’ll begin the run at noon tomorrow. If all goes well, by nightfall we’ll be at one hundred percent power. Then we’ll have all night to track down and kill this malware. And now—let’s get some sleep.”

As Ford headed back across the field, Kate’s phrase kept ringing through his head: It knew. It knew.

29

AS FORD WALKED TOWARD HIS CASITA, he heard someone speak his name and turned. The short, slim figure of Hazelius came striding across the field toward him.

“The events of last night must have been quite a shock to you,” the director said, falling into step next to him.

“They were.”

“What do you think?” Hazelius tilted his head slightly and looked at Ford sideways. His gaze was like a microscope.

“I think by not reporting it right away, you painted yourselves into a corner.”

“What’s done is done. I’m relieved that Kate told you about it. I didn’t like deceiving you. I hope you understand why we didn’t level with you before.”

Ford nodded.

“I know you assured Kate you would keep this to yourself.” He paused significantly.

Ford didn’t dare speak. He no longer trusted himself to be a good liar.

“Do you have a moment?” Hazelius asked. “I’d like to show you the Indian ruin up the valley that’s causing the controversy. It would give us a chance to chat.”

They crossed the road and followed a path through the cottonwoods, moving rapidly up the dry bed of an arroyo that branched off from Nakai Wash. Ford could feel his body and his senses revving up after the exhausting night. The sandstone walls on either side of the wash narrowed, until the ripples and twists carved in the soft stone by ancient floods were close enough to touch. A golden eagle came gliding over the rim, its wingspan as wide as Ford was tall, and they paused to watch it. After it spiraled out of sight, Hazelius touched his shoulder and pointed upcanyon. About fifty feet up the canyon’s sloping sandstone wall stood a small Anasazi ruin, wedged into an alcove. An ancient trail, pecked into the rock, led to it.

“When I was younger,” Hazelius said, speaking softly, “I was an arrogant little prick. I thought I was smarter than everyone else. I believed that made me a better person, more worthy than those born with normal intelligence. I didn’t know what I believed in and I didn’t care. I churned along with my life, collecting proofs of my worth—a Nobel, the Fields, honorary degrees, accolades, buckets of money. I saw other people as props in the movie starring me. And then I met Astrid.”

He paused as they reached the bottom of the ancient trail up the rock.

“Astrid was the only person on earth I ever truly loved, who took me out of myself. Then she died. Young and vital, struck down in my arms. After she was gone, I thought the world had ended.”

He stopped. “It’s hard to describe to someone who’s never been through it.”

“I have been through it,” Ford said, almost before meaning to. The awful coldness of loss wrapped itself again around his heart and squeezed.

Hazelius leaned an arm on the sandstone. “You lost your wife?”

Ford nodded. He wondered why he was talking about this with Hazelius when he wouldn’t even open up with his own shrink.

“How did you deal with it?”

“I didn’t. I ran away to a monastery.”

Hazelius drew closer. “Are you religious?”

“I . . . don’t know. Her death shook my faith. I needed to find out—where I stood. What I believed in.”

“And?”

“The more I tried, the less I was certain. It was good to discover that I never would be sure. That I wasn’t born a true believer.”

“Perhaps no rational, intelligent person can ever be absolutely sure of his faith,” said Hazelius. “Or in my case, sure of my lack of faith. Who knows, maybe Eddy’s God really is up there—vengeful, sadistic, genocidal, ready to burn everyone who doesn’t believe in him.”

“When your wife died . . . ,” Ford asked, “how did you deal with it?”

“I decided to give something back to the world. And so, being a physicist, I came up with the idea for Isabella. My wife used to say, ‘If the smartest person on earth can’t figure out how we got here, then who can?’ Isabella is my attempt to answer that question—and many others. It’s my statement of faith.”

In a small patch of sunlight, Ford noticed a baby lizard gripping the wall of stone. Somewhere overhead, the golden eagle still circled, its high-pitched cry echoing off the cliffs.

“Wyman,” Hazelius went on, “if this hacker business got out, it would destroy the Isabella project, ruin our careers, and set back American science by a generation. You know that, don’t you?”

Ford said nothing.

“I’m asking you with all my heart to please not divulge this problem until we have a chance to fix it. It would destroy all of us—Kate included.”

Ford looked at him sharply.

“Yes, I can see there’s something between you two,” Hazelius continued. “Something good. Something sacred, if I may use that word.”

If only it were true, Ford thought.

“Give us forty-eight more hours to solve this problem and save the Isabella project. I beg you.”

Ford wondered if this intense little man knew, or had guessed, his real mission. It almost seemed as if he had.

“Forty-eight hours,” Hazelius repeated softly.

“All right,” Ford said.

“Thank you,” said Hazelius, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Now, let’s climb up.”

Ford put his hands in the steps above him and followed Hazelius slowly up the treacherous trail. Weather had worn and softened the steps, and it was hard for his fingers and feet to keep their grip.

When they reached the small ruin, they paused on the ledge in front of the doorway to catch their breath.

“Look.” Hazelius gestured to where an ancient inhabitant of the house had smoothed an outer layer of mud plaster across the stone wall. Most of this plaster had eroded away, but near the wooden lintel, handprints and streaks remained in the dried mud.

“If you look closely, you can see the whorls in the fingerprints,” said Hazelius. “They’re a thousand years old, but this is all of that person that remains.”

He turned his face toward the blue horizon. “That’s how it is with death. One day, bang. Everything’s gone. Memories, hopes, dreams, houses, loves, property, money. Our family and friends shed a tear, hold a ceremony, and go on with their lives. We become a few fading photographs in an album. And then those who loved us die, and those who loved them die, and soon even the memory of us is gone. You’ve seen those old photo albums in antique shops, filled with people in nineteenth-century dress—men, women, children. Nobody knows who they are anymore. Like the person who left this handprint. Gone and forgotten. To what purpose?”

“I wish I knew,” said Ford.

Despite the growing warmth of the day, Ford felt a shiver as they descended, touched to the core by a sense of his own mortality.

30

WHEN FORD REACHED THE CASITA, HE locked the door, drew the curtains, pulled his briefcase from the file cabinet, and dialed in the combination.

Sleep, you fool, sleep, his body screamed. Instead he extracted the laptop and Volkonsky’s note from the briefcase. It was the first free moment he’d had to try to decrypt the note. He settled cross-legged on the bed with his back against the wooden headboard and pulled the computer into his lap. He called up a hex editor and began to type in the numbers and letters into a data file. The hexadecimal code of the mysterious note had to be in the machine before he could work with it.

The code could be anything at all: a short computer program, a data file, a text file, a small picture, the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. It might even be an RSA private key—and useless, since the FBI had carried off Volkonsky’s personal computer.

Ford nodded off and slumped forward, knocking the laptop off his legs. He roused himself and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He hadn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours.

He was measuring the final scoop into the filter when he felt a stab in his belly and thought of all the coffee he’d been pumping into his system for days. He shoved the coffee machine aside and rummaged in the cupboard, finding a box of organic green tea way in the back. Two bags, steeped ten minutes—and he returned to the bedroom with a mug of the green liquid. As he typed in more code, he gulped the hot, bitter tea.

He wanted to finish quickly so he could nap before riding down to Blackhorse to talk to Begay one final time before the protest ride, but his eyes blurred as they moved back and forth from the screen to the paper, and he kept catching mistakes.

He forced himself to slow down.

By ten thirty he was finished. He sat back and checked the data file against the note. It looked clean. He saved the file and hit the hex-binary convert module.

Instantly the hex code showed up as a binary file—a large block of zeros and ones.

On a hunch, he activated the binary-ASCII convert module, and to his surprise, a plain-text message appeared on the screen. Congratulations, whoever you are. Ha ha! You have IQ slightly better than normal human idiot. So. I take my skinny ass the hell out of this nuthouse and go home. I park myself in front of TV with bottle of ice-cold vodka and doobie and watch apes in monkey house beat on bars. Ha ha! And maybe I write long letter to Aunt Natasha. I know the truth, you fool. I saw through the madness. To prove it, I give you a name only: Joe Blitz. Ha ha!P. Volkonsky

Ford read the note twice and sat back. It had the rambling, manic tone of someone growing deranged. What madness had he meant? The malware? Isabella? The scientists themselves? Why did he conceal the message in code, instead of simply leaving a note?

And Joe Blitz?

Ford Googled the name and got back a million hits. He paged through the top ones, seeing no obvious connections.

He pulled the satellite phone out of the briefcase and stared at it. He’d misled Lockwood. No, he’d lied to him. And now he’d promised Hazelius he wouldn’t mention the malware.

Damn it to hell. Why had he imagined that after two years in the monastery, he could just slide back into the same old lying and deception of his CIA years? At least he could tell Lockwood about the note. Perhaps Lockwood might even have an idea about this mysterious Joe Blitz. He entered his number.

“It’s been more than twenty-four hours,” Lockwood answered the phone testily, not bothering with the usual salutations. “What have you been doing?”

“I found a note at Volkonsky’s the other night I thought you’d want to know about.”

“Why didn’t you mention it yesterday?”

“It was just a piece of torn paper with some computer code on it. I didn’t know it was significant. But then I was able to decode it.”

“Well? What did it say?”

He read the note into the phone.

“Who the hell’s Joe Blitz?” Lockwood asked.

“I was hoping you might know.”

“I’ll get my staff on it. And also this Aunt Natasha.”

Ford slowly hung up the phone. There was one other thing he’d noticed: the note did not at all strike him as being written by a man on the verge of suicide.

31

AFTER A QUICK NAP AND A late lunch, Ford walked over to the stables. He had some important business to take care of with Kate: she had leveled with him, and now it was his turn to tell her the truth.

He found her filling up the horse troughs from a hose. She glanced at him. Her face was still pale, almost translucent, with worry.

“Thanks for vouching for me back there,” Ford said. “I’m sorry I put you in an awkward position.”

She shook her head. “Never mind. I’m just relieved I don’t have to hide anything from you anymore.”

He stood in the doorway, trying to screw up the courage to tell her. She was not going to take it well—not at all. His courage failed. He would tell her later, on the ride.

“Thanks to Melissa, everyone thinks we’re sleeping together.” Kate looked at him. “She’s impossible. First she was chasing Innes, and then Dolby, and now you. What she really needs is a good shagging.” She managed a wan smile. “Maybe you guys should get together and draw straws.”

“No thanks.” Ford eased himself down on a bale. It was cool in the barn and motes drifted in the air. Blondie was playing again on the boom box.

“Wyman, I’m sorry I wasn’t very welcoming when you arrived. I want to tell you that I’m glad you’re here. I never liked how we broke things off.”

“It was pretty nasty.”

“We were young and stupid. I did a lot of growing up since then—I mean, a lot.”

Ford wished he hadn’t read her dossier, knowing the pain she must have gone through in the intervening years.

“Me, too.”

She lifted her arms and let them drop. “And so here we are. Again.”

She looked so hopeful, standing there in dusty barn, hay in her hair. And so breathtakingly pretty. “Want to go for a ride?” he asked. “I’m going to pay another visit to Begay.”

“I’ve got a lot to do . . . .”

“We made a pretty good team last time.”

She brushed back her hair and looked at him—searchingly, for a long time. Finally she spoke. “All right.”

They saddled up and set off southwestward toward the sandstone bluffs along the edge of the valley. Kate rode ahead, her slim body fitted confidently to her horse, swaying with it, in a rhythmic, almost erotic motion. A battered Australian cowboy hat was crammed on her head, and her black hair stirred in the wind.

God, how am I going to tell her?

As they approached the edge of the mesa where the Midnight Trail plunged down through a cut in the rock, Ford moved his horse up alongside her. They stopped twenty feet from the edge of the cliffs. She was staring across toward the horizon, a troubled look on her face. The wind blew up in uneven gusts from below, bringing with it an invisible cloud of grit. Ford spat and shifted in the saddle. “Are you still thinking about what happened last night?” he asked.

“I can’t stop thinking about it. Wyman, how could it guess those numbers?”

“I don’t know.”

She gazed out over the vast red desert unrolling to blue mountains and cloud-castled infinities. “Looking at this,” she murmured, “it’s not hard to believe in God. I mean, who knows? Maybe we are talking to God.”

She brushed back her hair and smiled ruefully at him.

Ford was astonished. This was a very different Kate from the strident atheist he had known in graduate school. He wondered once again what had happened in those missing two years.

32

BOOKER CRAWLEY STUCK THE CHURCHILL IN his mouth while he lined up the snooker shot. Satisfied, he hit the cue ball with a decisive rap and watched the little balls do their thing.

“Nice,” said his billiards companion, watching the three ball drop into the braided leather pocket.

Through a row of narrow windows, the sun glinted off the river. It was a pleasant Thursday morning at the Potomac Club, and most members were at work. Crawley was also at work, or so he considered it—entertaining a potential client who owned a barrier island near Cape Hatteras and wanted the government to pay twenty million dollars to build a bridge to it. A bridge like that would double, even triple his land investment. For Crawley, this was a no-brainer. The junior senator from North Carolina owed him a favor after that golfing trip to St. Andrews, and he was a man who could be counted on for his loyalty and the preservation of his perks. One phone call, an earmark slipped into an unrelated bill, and Crawley would make the developer millions while pocketing a seven-figure fee for himself. If Alaska could have its bridge to nowhere, North Carolina should have one, too.

He watched the developer lining up his shot. He came from that special tribe of southerners who sported three last names and a roman numeral. Safford was his name, Safford Montague McGrath III. McGrath came from fine old Scotch-Irish stock, a big, blond, trim specimen of southern gentility. In other words, he was as dumb as a cow in the rain. McGrath made a show of being savvy in the ways of Washington, but anyone could see he was walking around with a hayseed jammed in one of his big country ears. Crawley had a feeling the man was going to tussle over the fee like a pigskin at the two-yard line. He was the type who had to come away from a negotiation feeling like he’d beat the crap out of the other side, or he wouldn’t be able to get it up at home.

“So how’s Senator Stratham these days?” McGrath asked, as if he had once known the old bastard.

“Fine, just fine.” No doubt these days the old boy was enjoying a lunch of Gerber’s whirled peas and sipping Ensure through a straw. The reality was, Crawley had never worked with old Senator Stratham; he’d bought the firm, Stratham & Co., when Stratham had retired. He had thereby acquired an aura of respectability, a link to the fine old days, which handily distinguished him from the other K Street lobbyists who had sprung up after the last election like mushrooms in a steaming pile after a rain.

McGrath’s next shot grazed the corner, made a little jog in front of the pocket, and drifted off down the felt. The man straightened up, saying nothing, his lips tight.

Crawley could polish off the fellow with his eyes closed, but that wouldn’t do. No—the best way was to stay just ahead until the very end, then lose. Close the deal on the man’s flush of triumph.

He flubbed the next shot by a close enough margin to give it verisimilitude.

“Nice try,” said McGrath. He took a long puff on his cigar, laid it in the marble ashtray, crouched, and sighted. Then he shot. He obviously considered himself a hotshot pool player, but he didn’t have the finesse for snooker. Still, this was an easy one and the ball was well potted.

“Whew,” said Crawley. “You’re going to make me work, Safford.”

An attendant entered carrying a silver tray that held a note. “Mr. Crawley?”

Crawley took the note with a flourish. The club management, he thought with a smile, still used a system whereby an army of old-time darkies went flitting around with notes on silver platters—very antebellum. Getting a note on a silver platter beat hell out of fumbling for a squealing cell phone.

“Excuse me, Safford.” Crawley unfolded the note. It read, Delbert Yazzie, Chairman, Navajo Nation, 11:35 A.M. Please call a.s. a. p . Then a number.

When courting a prospective client, Crawley liked to make it clear he had at least one client who was more important. People despised you if they thought they were your number one client.

“I’m terribly sorry, Safford, but I’ve got to take this call. In the meantime—order us a round of martinis.”

He hustled off to one of the old oak phone booths that could be found on every floor, shut himself in, and dialed. In a moment he had Delbert Yazzie on the other end.

“Mr. Booker Crawley?” The Navajo’s voice sounded faint, old, quavering, like it was coming all the way from Timbuktu.

“How are you, Mr. Yazzie?” Crawley kept his voice friendly but distinctly cool.

A silence. “Something unexpected seems to have come up. Have you heard of this preacher, Don T. Spates?”

“I certainly have.”

“Well, that sermon of his caused quite a ruckus out here already, just among our own people. As you know, we have a lot of missionary activity on the Navajo Nation. Now I’m hearing it may be causing a problem in Washington, too.”

“Yes,” said Crawley. “It is.”

“It seems to me this could be a serious challenge to the Isabella project.”

“Absolutely.” Crawley felt a swell of triumph. He had called Spates less than a week ago. This would go down as one of the masterstrokes of his career.

“Well, then, Mr. Crawley, what can we do about it?”

Crawley let a silence build. “Well, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about it. I was under the impression you no longer required our services.”

“Our contract with you isn’t up for six weeks. We’re paid up until November first.”

“Mr. Yazzie, we’re not a house rental. That isn’t how things work in Washington. I’m sorry. Our work on the Isabella project has, most regretfully, come to a close.”

Crackle, hiss. “Losing the government leasing payments for the Isabella project would be a great blow to the Navajo Nation.”

Crawley held the receiver silently.

“I’m told Spates has a television program tomorrow night that’s going to attack the Isabella project again. And there are rumors Isabella is having problems. One of the scientists committed suicide. Mr. Crawley, I’m going to consult with the Tribal Council and see about getting your contract renewed. We’re going to need your help after all.”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Yazzie, but we’ve filled your slot with another client. Really, I’m terribly sorry—but, if you don’t mind me saying so, I did mention this possibility. I can’t tell you how much I regret this, personally and professionally. Perhaps you could find some other firm to take up your case? I can recommend several.”

The phone line spat noises into the silence. Crawley could hear a faint, ghostly conversation going on in the static. Christ, what kind of phone system did they have out there? Probably still using telegraph lines strung up by Kit Carson.

“Another firm would take too much time getting up to speed. We need Crawley and Stratham. We need you.”

We need you. Oh God, was this music to his ears or what?

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Yazzie. This kind of work involves a lot of one-on-one staff time. Very intensive. And we’re booked to the gills. To take this back on . . . It would mean hiring more staff, maybe even leasing more space.”

“We would be glad—”

Crawley interrupted. “Mr. Yazzie, I’m truly extremely sorry, but you caught me just before an important luncheon engagement. Would you be kind enough to call me Monday afternoon, say at four, eastern time? I really want to help, and I promise I’ll give it serious thought. Tomorrow night I’ll watch Spates’s show, and you and the Tribal Council should do the same, so we can get a better idea of what we’re up against. We’ll talk Monday.”

He exited the little booth and paused to relight his cigar, inhaling deeply. It was like a sweet, heady perfume. The whole Tribal Council watching the show—what a trip. Spates had better put on a good one.

He swept back into the billiard room, trailing a stream of smoke and feeling seven feet tall, but when he saw Safford crouching at the table, examining all the angles, he felt a twinge of irritation. Time to cut bait.

It was Crawley’s shot, and Safford had foolishly parked the cue ball where it could be snookered.

In five minutes, the game was over. Safford had lost—badly.

“Well,” said Safford, taking up his martini and smiling gamely. “I’ll think twice before playing billiards with you again, Booker.” He mustered an artificial chuckle. “Now about your fee,” he went on, his voice switching into High Noon mode. “There’s no way we can even consider the level you mentioned in your letter. It’s just not in our budget. Nor does it seem in line with the amount of work required, if I may speak frankly.”

Crawley racked his cue and tossed the cigar into the sand bucket. He passed by his martini, not bothering to pick it up, and said, without looking back, “I’m afraid something’s come up, Safford, that requires me to cancel our lunch.”

He turned, then, to enjoy the expression on the developer’s face. The man stood there—cue, cigar, martini, and all—looking like he’d been slapped upside the head.

“If you change your mind about our fee, give me a call,” Crawley added as he strode out.

Safford Montague McGrath III wasn’t going to get it up tonight, that was for sure.

33

FORD REACHED THE BOTTOM OF THE mesa and rode down the wash in the direction of Blackhorse, Kate coming up and riding alongside him. Halfway down the wash he heard a horse nicker and turned. “Someone’s behind us,” he said, pulling Ballew to a stop.

Through a thicket of tamarisk came the sound of hooves, and a moment later a tall man pushed through on a big quarterhorse. It was Bia. The Tribal Police lieutenant halted and touched his hat brim. “Out for a pleasure ride?” he asked.

“We’re on our way to Blackhorse,” said Ford.

Bia smiled. “Nice day for it, not too hot, bit of a breeze.” He rested his hands on the saddlehorn. “Paying a visit to Nelson Begay, I imagine.”

“That’s right,” said Ford.

“He’s a good man,” Bia said. “If I thought there’d be trouble on this protest ride, I’d offer you a Tribal Police presence. But I think that might be counterproductive.”

“I agree,” said Ford, grateful for the man’s insight.

“Better to let them do their thing. I’ll keep an eye on them—discreetly.”

“Thank you.”

Bia nodded and leaned forward. “Long as you’re here, mind if I ask a question or two?”

“Shoot away,” said Ford.

“This Peter Volkonsky—did he get along with everyone?”

Kate answered. “Mostly.”

“No personality clashes? Disagreements?”

“He was a little high-strung, but we were cool with that.”

“Was he an important member of the team?”

“One of the most important.”

Bia tugged on his hat. “The man throws some clothes in a suitcase and leaves. It’s nine o’clock, give or take an hour, moon’s already up. Drives about ten minutes, then leaves the road and drives about a quarter mile across the desert. Comes to a deep ravine. Stops the car on an incline near the brink, pulls the emergency brake, turns off the engine, and puts the car in neutral. Then he puts a gun to his head with his right hand, releases the brake with his left hand, fires a bullet into his right temple, and the car rolls over the edge.”

He paused. The bar of shade under his hat hid his eyes.

“Is that what you think happened?” asked Kate.

“That’s the FBI reconstruction.”

“But you don’t buy it,” said Ford.

From the stripe of heavy shadow beneath his hat, Bia seemed to be looking at him intently. “Do you?”

“I find it a little strange that he rolled his car off a cliff after shooting himself,” Ford countered. He thought of the letter. Should he tell Bia? Better to let Lockwood handle it at his end.

“Actually,” said Bia, “that to me is a believable element.”

“Are you puzzled that he packed a suitcase?”

“Some suicides do that sort of thing. Suicide is often spontaneous.”

“So where do you see a problem?”

“Mr. Ford, how’d you know there was a car out there?”

“I saw the fresh tire tracks and the crushed sagebrush—and then there were the buzzards.”

“But you didn’t see the ravine.”

“No.”

“Because it isn’t visible from anywhere along the road—I checked. How’d Volkonsky know it was there?”

“He was distraught, drove off into the desert to shoot himself, came across the ravine, and decided to make it even more certain.” Ford didn’t quite believe it himself; he wondered if Bia would.

“That’s exactly what the FBI thinks.”

“But not what you think.”

Bia straightened up and touched his hat. “Be seeing you.”

“Wait,” said Kate.

Bia paused.

“You don’t think one of us might have killed him?” Kate asked.

Bia brushed a broken tamarisk twig off his thigh. “Let me put it this way: if it’s not suicide, it was a very, very intelligent murder.”

With this, he touched his hat brim again, nudged the flanks of his horse with his heels, and passed them by.

Ford thought: Wardlaw.

34

BLACKHORSE LOOKED EVEN BLEAKER THAN IT had when Ford had first seen it on Monday — a lonely collection of dust-covered trailers huddled between the flanks of Red Mesa and some low yellow hills. There was the smell of snakeweed in the air. In the patch of dirt where the children had been playing last time, a swing rocked emptily in the wind. Ford wondered where the school was—probably Blue Gap, thirty miles away.

What a place to grow up. And yet, there was a kind of monastic-like emptiness to a Navajo settlement that Ford found appealing. Navajos did not accumulate property the way other people did. Even their houses were spare.

As they rode toward the corrals, Ford spotted Nelson Begay shoeing a sorrel horse snubbed to a cedar post. He was cold-shaping a horseshoe on an anvil with a series of well-aimed blows of a hammer. The blows echoed off the mesa.

Begay laid the hammer and shoe down with a clatter and straightened up, watching them approach.

Ford and Kate halted, dismounted, and tied their horses to a corral fence. Ford raised his hand in greeting, and Begay motioned them over.

“This is Dr. Kate Mercer, assistant director of the Isabella project.”

Begay lifted his hat brim to Kate. She stepped over and shook his hand.

“You a physicist?” Begay asked, eyeing her skeptically.

“Yes.”

Begay’s eyebrows rose slightly. With great deliberation he turned his back, put his shoulder into the horse’s flank, pulled up the hind leg, and began matching the shoe to the hoof. Then he placed it on the anvil and gave it a few more whacks.

As Ford stood there pondering Navajo cultural sensitivities, Kate said to Begay’s blue plaid back, “We were hoping to talk to you.”

“Then talk.”

“I’d prefer not to talk to a man’s back.”

Begay dropped the hoof and straightened up. “Well, now, ma’am, I didn’t ask you to come, and right now I happen to be busy.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me. I’ve got a Ph.D.”

Begay coughed, laid down his tools, and faced her without expression.

“Well?” she said. “Are we going to stand here in the hot sun or are you going to invite us in for coffee?”

Exasperation mingled with amusement spread across Begay’s face. “All right, all right, come on in.”

Once more Ford found himself in the spare living room with the military photographs on the walls. As Begay poured coffee, Ford and Kate sat down on the brown sofa. When their mugs were full, Begay settled into the broken Barcalounger. “Are all lady scientists like you?”

“Like what?”

“Like my grandmother. You don’t take no for an answer, do you? You could be Diné yourself. In fact”—he leaned forward, scrutinizing her face—“you aren’t—?”

“I’m half Japanese.”

“Right.” He leaned back. “All right. Here we are.”

Ford waited for Kate. She always had a knack with people, as she was already proving with Begay. He was curious to see how she’d handle him.

“I’ve been wondering,” Kate said, “what, exactly, is a medicine man?”

“I’m a kind of doctor.”

“How so?”

“I perform ceremonies. I cure people.”

“What kind of ceremonies?”

Begay didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry if I seem nosy,” Kate said, giving him a dazzling smile. “It’s sort of my profession.”

“Well, I don’t mind the question, as long as it isn’t idle curiosity. I perform several ceremonies—the Blessing Way, the Enemy Way, and the Falling Star Way.”

“What do the ceremonies do?”

Begay grunted, sipped his coffee, eased back. “The Blessing Way restores balance and beauty in a person’s life—after troubles with drugs or alcohol, time in jail. The Enemy Way is for soldiers returning from war. It’s a ceremony that removes the taint of killing. Because when you kill, a little bit of that evil clings to you, even though it’s war and you did it lawfully. If you don’t do an Enemy Way, that evil will eat you up.”

“Our doctors call it posttraumatic stress disorder,” said Kate.

“Yes,” said Begay. “Like my nephew, Lorenzo, who went to Iraq . . . He’ll never be the same.”

“Does the Enemy Way cure PTSD?”

“In most cases.”

“That’s extremely interesting . . . . And the Falling Star Way?”

“That’s a ceremony we don’t speak about,” said Begay curtly.

“Would you ever consider doing a ceremony for a non-Navajo?”

“Why, you need one?”

Kate laughed. “I could use a good Blessing Way.”

Begay looked offended. “This is not something you do lightly. There’s a lot of preparation involved and you have to believe in it for it to work. A lot of Bilagaana have trouble believing things they can’t see with their own eyes. Or they’re New Agers who don’t like the hard preparation—the sweat lodge, fasting, sexual abstinence. But I wouldn’t deny the ceremony to a Bilagaana just because they’re white.”

“I didn’t mean to sound flippant,” she said. “It’s just . . . For a long time, I’ve been wondering what the point of it all is. What we’re doing here.”

He nodded. “Join the club.”

After a long silence Kate said, “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

At this Begay leaned back and rested his hands on his jeans. “In Diné culture, we believe in exchanging information. I’ve told you something about my work. Now I’d like to hear something of yours. Mr. Ford here tells me that over there at the Isabella project, you’re investigating something called the Big Bang.”

“That’s right.”

“I been thinking about that. If the universe was created in a Big Bang, what came before?”

“Nobody knows. Many physicists believe there was nothing. In fact, there wasn’t even a ‘before.’ Existence itself began with the Big Bang.”

Begay whistled. “So what caused the Bang?”

“That’s a difficult question to explain to a nonphysicist.”

“Try me.”

“The theory of quantum mechanics says things can just happen, without a cause.”

“You mean you don’t know the cause.”

“No, I mean there is no cause. The sudden creation of the universe from nothing may not violate any laws or be unnatural or unscientific in any way. Before, there was absolutely nothing. No space, no time, no existence. And then, it just happened—and existence came into being.”

Begay stared at her, then shook his head. “You’re talking like my nephew, Lorenzo. Smart boy, full scholarship to Columbia University, studied mathematics. It screwed him up—the whole Bilagaana world messed up his head. Dropped out, went to Iraq, came back believing in nothing. And I mean nothing. Now he sweeps out a damn church for a living. Or at least he used to, till he ran off.”

“You blame science for that?” Kate said.

Begay shook his head. “No, no, I’m not blaming science. It’s just that hearing you talk about how the world came into being out of nothing, it sounded like the kind of nonsense he spouts . . . . How could the Creation just happen?”

“I’ll try to explain. Stephen Hawking proposed the idea that before the Big Bang, time didn’t exist. Without time, there can’t be any kind of definable existence. Hawking was able to show mathematically that nonexistence still has some kind of spatial potential, and that under certain weird conditions space can turn into time and vice versa. He showed that if a tiny, tiny bit of space morphed into time, the appearance of time would trigger the Big Bang—because suddenly there could be movement, there could be cause and effect, there could be real space and real energy. Time makes it all possible. To us, the Big Bang looks like an explosion of space, time, and matter from a single point. But here’s the really weird part. If you peer into that first tiny fraction of a second, you’ll see there wasn’t a beginning at all—time seems to have always existed. So here we have a theory of the Big Bang that seems to say two contradictory things: first, that time did not always exist; and second, that time has no beginning. Which means that time is eternal. Both are true. And if you really think about it, when time didn’t exist, there could be no difference between eternity and a second. So once time came into existence, it had always existed. There was never a time when it didn’t exist.”

Begay shook his head. “That’s just plain crazy.”

An awkward silence settled in the shabby living room.

“Do the Navajo have a creation story?” Kate asked.

“Yes. We call it the Diné Bahané. It’s not written down. You have to memorize it. It takes nine nights to chant it. That’s the Blessing Way I told you about—it’s a chant that tells the story of the creation of the world. You chant it in the presence of a sick person and the story heals them.”

“You memorized it?”

“Sure did, my uncle taught it to me. Took five years.”

“About the same as my Ph.D.,” said Kate.

Begay looked pleased by the comparison.

“Will you chant a few lines?”

Begay said, “The Blessing Way shouldn’t be chanted casually.”

“I’m not sure we’re having a casual conversation.”

He looked at her intently. “Yes, maybe so.”

Begay closed his eyes. When he opened his mouth, his voice quavered and was pitched high, as he chanted in a strange five-tone scale. The non-Western harmonics and the sounds of the Navajo words—a few still familiar, but most not—filled Ford with a longing for something he had no name for.

After about five minutes, Begay stopped. His eyes were damp. “That’s how it begins,” he said quietly. “It’s the most beautiful poetry ever written, at least in my opinion.”

“Can you translate it for us?” asked Kate.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that. Well, here goes.” He took a deep breath.

Of it he is thinking, he is thinking. Long ago of it, he is thinking. Of how darkness will come into being, he is thinking. Of how Earth will come into being, he is thinking. Of how blue sky will come into being, he is thinking. Of how yellow dawn will come into being, he is thinking. Of how evening twilight will come into being, he is thinking. Of dark moss dew he is thinking, of horses he is thinking. Of order he is thinking, of beauty he is thinking. Of how everything will increase without decreasing, he is thinking .

He stopped. “It doesn’t sound good in English, but that’s sort of how it goes.”

“Who is this ‘he’?” Kate asked.

“The Creator.”

Kate smiled. “Tell me, Mr. Begay: Who created the Creator?”

Begay shrugged. “The stories don’t tell us that.”

“What came before Him?”

“Who knows?”

Kate said, “It seems that both of our creation stories have origin problems.”

From the kitchen sink, a drip of water splatted into the silence, then another, and another. Finally Begay rose and limped over to turn it off. “This was an interesting conversation,” he said, returning. “But there’s a real world out there, and in it is a horse who needs new shoes.”

They stepped out into the brilliant sun. As they walked back to the corrals, Ford said, “One of the things we wanted to tell you, Mr. Begay, is that tomorrow we’re doing a run of Isabella. Everyone will be underground. When you and your riders arrive, I’ll be the only one there to meet you.”

“We aren’t doing a ‘meet and greet.’”

“I didn’t want you to think we were being disrespectful.”

Begay patted his horse and stroked his flank. “Look, Mr. Ford, we got our own plans. We’re going to set up a sweat lodge, do some ceremonies, talk to the ground. We’ll be peaceful. When the police come to arrest us, we’ll go quietly.”

“The police aren’t going to come,” said Ford.

Begay looked disappointed. “No police?”

“Should we call them?” Ford asked dryly.

Begay smiled. “I suppose I had a fantasy of being arrested for the cause.” He turned his back and plucked up the horse’s leg with one hand, the paring knife with the other. “Easy, boy,” he murmured, as he began to pare and trim.

Ford glanced at Kate. On the ride back, he would come clean.

35

BY THE TIME FORD AND KATE reached the top of the mesa, the sun was so low, it seemed to wobble at the horizon. As they rode quietly through the blooming snakeweed, Ford tried for the hundredth time to frame what he wanted to say. If he didn’t start talking, they’d be back at Isabella—and he’d have missed his chance.

“Kate?” he began, riding up alongside her.

She turned.

“I asked you on this ride for another reason besides visiting Begay.”

She gazed at him, her hair like black gold in the sunlight, her eyes already narrowing in suspicion. “Why do I have a feeling this is something I’m not going to like?”

“I’m here partly as an anthropologist, and partly for another reason.”

“I should’ve guessed. So what’s the mission, Secret Agent Man?”

“I . . . was sent here to investigate the Isabella project.”

“In other words, you’re a spy.”

He took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Does Hazelius know?”

“Nobody knows.”

“I see . . . And you befriended me because I was a quick route to the information you needed.”

“Kate—”

“No, wait—it’s worse: they hired you knowing of our past relationship, in the hopes that you could blow on those old coals and coax the information out of me.”

As usual, Kate had figured it all out even before he could finish.