The Footprints of God

CHAPTER 14

I was about to drive out of my subdivision when I real¬ized I was making a mistake. The open highway looked like escape but wasn't. I knew Geli Bauer better than that. Yanking the wheel left, I did a 180 in the middle of Hickory Street, then turned onto Elm.

"Why are you turning around?" Rachel asked from the floor on the passenger side.

"Have you ever hunted rabbit?"

She blinked in confusion. "Rabbit? I'm from New York."

A woman on a mountain bike rode by us and waved, a toddler in a baby seat perched on the back fender. In our present circumstances, the image looked surreal.

"When a rabbit runs for its life, it takes a zigzag course at lightning speed. But it always circles back to where it started. It's a good escape strategy. Of course, rabbit hunters know that. That's why they use dogs. The dogs chase the rabbit while the hunter stands there wait¬ing to shoot him when he comes back around."

Rachel's face showed disgust. "That's barbaric."

"It puts food on the table. The point is, the people hunting expect us to run like humans. But we're going to take a lesson from the rabbit."

"What do we gain by doing that?"

"A car, for one thing. We wouldn't get five miles in this one. Yours, either."

"Whose car can we get?"

"Just sit tight."

Elm Street circumnavigated my subdivision. When I came to the east entrance of Oak Street -which paral¬leled Willow -I turned left. As I drove, I watched between the houses to catch a glimpse of the roofs on my street. When I saw my own, I began scanning the lawns ahead. A hundred yards up Oak Street, I saw what I wanted. A blue-and-white FOR SALE sign. The house it advertised had a long, curving driveway with no cars parked in it. Turning into the drive, I pulled quickly off the cement and rolled behind a thick stand of box¬wood shrubs.

"Follow me," I said, getting out.

Rachel climbed off the floor and opened her door. Her face was pale, her hands shivering. The shooting at my house had put her into shock. It had rattled me, too. I had killed before. I'd injected my own brother with narcotics and potassium, then watched the last spark of consciousness wink out of his eyes. But blowing a man's brains out was something else. And when Geli Bauer learned that I'd killed one of her people, she would move heaven and earth to take her revenge.

I walked over to Rachel and pulled her against me, hugging her as I once had my wife and daughter. "We're going to be all right," I said, not really believing it. Her hair smelled familiar. My wife had used the same shampoo. I put the memories out of my mind. "But we have to run. Do you understand?"

She nodded into my chest. I stroked her hair, still not quite believing what had happened myself. Thirty min¬utes ago, I'd believed the nightmare was over. Ewan McCaskell would call back, and the president would take control of Trinity. Now that hope was blown to hell.

"We're going to walk a little ways," I said, "and then we're going to borrow a car. Nobody will bother us. With me carrying Fielding's box, it'll look like we're sell¬ing something. Can you do it?"

She nodded.

I got Fielding's box from my car and started down Oak Street, Rachel beside me. "There's a hedge in these backyards that runs behind the lots on my street. You'll see it in a minute. We're going to cut through it to my street. I'll tell you when."

Using the sidewalk, we quickly covered the hundred yards back to where I'd seen my roof. I walked her past two more lawns, then said, "Right here. Cut between the houses."

A wooden privacy fence blocked the space between the two houses I'd chosen.

"If the gate's locked, we'll climb over," I said.

"What if someone's in the backyard?"

"I'll deal with it."

The gate opened easily. The backyard contained some plastic playground equipment and a parked lawn mower, but no people. With my hand in the small of Rachel's back, I guided her across the yard. There was no gate in the back fence, so I bent and interlocked my fingers, boosted her over, then slung myself up and dropped to the ground beside her.

The space between the fence and the hedge was only a couple of feet wide. I crawled through an opening at the bottom of the bushes, then got to my feet behind the utility shed where I'd hidden Fielding's box earlier. Rachel followed, grabbed my hand, and pulled herself up. I didn't know what the shed's owner did for a living, but I assumed he had some sort of sales job, because he was hardly ever home.

The interior was dim, and it stank of dead mice and motor oil. A row of tools hung from hooks on a peg-board. I was looking for a crowbar like the one in my attic, but I saw nothing like that. Kneeling, I scanned the area beneath the shelves. The owner stowed fishing gear there. Nothing heavy enough for my purpose.

"I feel sick," Rachel said.

"It's the smell. Go outside."

As she left, I saw a twelve-pound sledgehammer lean¬ing in the corner. I picked it up and walked outside. Rachel was bent over with her hands on her knees.

"What's that for?" she asked.

"Stay close."

I trotted up to the back door of the house, drew back the sledge, and swung it in a roundhouse arc at the lock. The door caved in. Dropping the hammer, I ran into the dark house. Rachel followed. I didn't hear an alarm, but it could be silent. Wired straight to a security service.

"We want the kitchen," I told her.

"This way. I smell garlic and dish soap."

"Look for wall hooks. We need car keys."

"It would help if you turned on the lights."

I hit a wall switch and flooded the kitchen with light. It was a showplace, filled with professional Viking appli¬ances in stainless steel. While Rachel searched the walls for hooks, I pulled open drawers. One held dishrags. Another practically spewed coupons, which seemed odd.

Someone who could afford Viking appliances didn't need to cut out coupons.

"Key!" Rachel cried, grabbing something off the countertop.

I took the key and examined it. "That's for a riding lawn mower. Keep looking."

The next drawer contained jars of nails, screws, glue sticks, and paper clips. No keys.

"Why did you pick this house?" she asked.

"The guy's single and never home, but I know he has two cars."

"Got it!' She pulled a square black key from a hook under a cabinet. "It's for an Audi."

"That's it."

Just as in my house, you had to go through the laun¬dry room to reach the garage. The same contractor had probably built both homes.

"How did you know the key was for an Audi?"

"My ex-husband drove one."

I opened the door to the garage and saw a silver A8 sitting there like an answered prayer. The guy's other car was a Honda Accord. He probably took the Accord to the airport to sit in the Park amp; Fly and saved the flag¬ship Audi for his road trips.

"Anybody with an eighty-thousand-dollar car has a security system in his house," Rachel said over my shoulder.

"The cops are definitely on their way. Key?"

She slapped it into my palm like a nurse passing a scalpel to a surgeon, and twenty seconds later we were pulling onto Willow Street, the garage door sliding down behind us. I looked up and down Willow, being careful not to turn too far right when I looked toward my house. I didn't see anybody. Not even a yardman.

"What good is stealing this car if the police come check out that guy's alarm?" Rachel asked.

"The police won't know what was taken. They don't know this car was there. They'll have to track down the owner, and he's probably on a business trip to God knows where."

I made two quick turns and swung onto Kinsdale, headed east toward Interstate 40. Traffic was fairly heavy, and I was glad of it.

"Where are we going now?"

I reached into the backseat and grabbed Fielding's Ziploc-sealed letter from the box, then laid it on her lap. I pointed to the line, Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night.

"The blue place?"

Steering with my knee, I searched the Audi's console and found a ballpoint pen. Then I pulled the letter out of the Ziploc and wrote Nags Head/The Outer Banks beneath Fielding's cartoon White Rabbit.

"Why can't you tell me out loud?"

I scribbled, They could be listening.

She took the pen and wrote, HOW? WE JUST STOLE THIS CAR!

"Trust me," I whispered. "It's possible."

She shook her head, then wrote, Is there something at Nags Head? Evidence?

An image of Fielding's pocket watch came into my mind. I took the pen back and wrote, I hope so.

She wrote, Cell phone in my pocket. Try to call Presi¬dent?

I took the pen and wrote, It's not that simple now.

"Why not?"

There was no way to write all I needed to say. I pulled her close and whispered into her ear. "Once they heard Ewan McCaskell's message, they knew they could elimi¬nate me and tell the president whatever they wanted to explain my death. Yours, too."

"What kind of lie would explain that?"

"An easy one. By now the president has been told that my hallucinations have progressed to psychosis. Ravi Nara will write a formal diagnosis. He'll say I've become dangerously paranoid, that I believe Andrew Fielding was murdered when he clearly died of natural causes. Your own office records say I've been having hallucinations and may be schizophrenic. They'll be used to support Nara 's position." I took my eyes off the road and looked at her. "Do you think that would be a hard sell?"

She turned away.

"Not a very optimistic picture is it?"

"No. But you have to put it out of your mind for a few minutes. You're all over the road. If you insist on driving, you need to calm down."

"That's not what's getting to me right now."

"Then what is?"

By answering this honestly, I would be asking for trouble, but I didn't want to keep it to myself any longer. "I saw it."

"Saw what?"

"The guy who was going to kill you."

"Of course you did. You had to see him to shoot him."

I swung onto the I-40 ramp and merged with the traf¬fic headed toward the RTP and Raleigh. "That's not what I mean. I saw him walking up the street. Willow Street. Before he ever got to the house. He walked right up to the door."

"What do you mean?"

"I dreamed it, Rachel."

She stared at me. She had never been with me when I'd experienced one of my hallucinations. "How did you see him? Like your Jesus hallucinations? Like a movie? What?"

"I saw it the way you see what the criminal or the monster sees in B movies. I saw it through his eyes."

She sat back in her seat. "Tell me exactly what you saw."

"The houses on my street. My feet walking. A dog trotting by. I thought I was dreaming about myself. But when I got to my house and reached into my pocket for my key… I brought out a lockpick."

"Go on."

"I picked the lock and went inside. I heard you in the kitchen, and then I took out a gun."

Rachel stared through the windshield, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. "That doesn't mean anything," she said finally. "Dreams of someone invading the house or bedroom are almost universal in narcoleptic patients. Even if you weren't narcoleptic, that would be a typical dream, a distortion of reality caused by anxiety."

"No. The timing was too perfect. I saw a threat in my dream, and when I woke up, the threat was there in the real world. Just as I saw it."

She squeezed my shoulder. "Listen to me. You're accustomed to the sounds of your own house. You were already in an anxious state. You heard something unfa¬miliar, something that triggered your fear of a break-in. The front door opening. A window going up. A creaking board. In response to that stimulus, your mind generated a dream of a break-in. It frightened you enough to wake you. Your dream was a reaction to external stimuli, not the other way around."

I did remember a creaking board. But I was already awake when I'd heard that. "I saw his gun in the dream," I said doggedly. "An automatic. It had a silencer." I tapped the gun in my waistband. "Just like this one."

"Coincidence."

"I've never seen a gun with a silencer before."

"Of course you have. You've seen hundreds of them in films."

I thought about it. "You're right, but there's some¬thing else."

"What?"

"That's not the first dream I've had like that. Where I was someone else, someone from the present day. I had one the day Fielding died."

"Describe it for me."

A Durham police cruiser passed us in the westbound lanes. My heart clenched, but the cruiser didn't slow or blink its lights.

"Yesterday, when I was making my videotape-just before you came in-I dreamed I was Fielding just prior to and during his death. It was so real that I felt I'd actu¬ally died. I couldn't see… couldn't breathe. When I answered the door for you, I didn't know which way was up."

"But Fielding had already died that morning."

"So?"

She held up her hands as if to emphasize an obvious point. "Don't you see? Your Fielding dream didn't pre¬dict anything. It could easily have been a grief reaction. Have you had any more dreams like that?"

I looked back at the road. We had reached the Research Triangle Park. I-40 ran right through it. Less than a mile away, Geli Bauer was directing the hunt for me.

"David, have you had other dreams like that?"

"This isn't the time to discuss it."

"Will there be a better time? Why did you skip your last three appointments with me?"

I shook my head. "You already think I'm crazy."

"That's not a medical term."

"Descriptive, though."

She sighed and looked out the window at the perfect green turf on her side of the road.

"That's Trinity," I said. "Coming up over there."

The lab was set so far back from the road that little was visible.

"The sign says Argus Optical," she said.

"That's cover."

"Ah. Look… what's the point of keeping a halluci¬nation from me? What part of yourself do you think you're protecting?"

"We'll talk about it later." I could see that she didn't intend to drop it. "I need drugs, Rachel. I can't afford to be passing out five times a day while we're on the run."

"What have you been taking? Modafinil?"

Modafinil was a standard narcolepsy treatment. "Sometimes. Usually I take methamphetamine."

"David! We talked about the side effects of ampheta¬mines. They could be exaggerating your hallucinations."

"They're the only thing that can keep me awake. Ravi Nara used to get me Dexedrine."

She sighed. "I'll write you a prescription for some Adderall."

"A scrip isn't the problem. I could write that myself. The problem is that they know I need it. They'll be watching all the pharmacies."

"They can't possibly cover every pharmacy in the Triangle."

"They're the NSA, Rachel, and they know I need drugs. These are the people who recorded the cockpit chatter of the Russian pilots who shot down that Korean airliner over Sakhalin Island in 1983. That was twenty years ago, and it was a random incident. They are actively searching for us. You read 1984?"

"Twenty years ago."

"When I say NSA, think Big Brother. The NSA is the closest thing we have to it in America."

"But you still need your drugs."

"You must know somebody."

"I could get it at the hospital pharmacy."

"They'll be watching for us there."

"Well, shit."

I'd almost never heard her use profanity. Maybe it came with the blue jeans. Maybe she shed her demure exterior with her silk skirts and blouses.

"I know a doc in North Durham who'll give us some samples," she said.

We'd already left Durham behind and were well on our way to Raleigh. My knowledge of Geli Bauer made me reluctant to linger in the area longer than necessary. Also, paradoxically enough, something in me did not want the dreams to stop. My last one had saved our lives, and though I'd never confess it to Rachel, I felt somehow that my dreams-however frightening they might be-were giving me information about our plight, information I could gain in no other way.

"We're not going back," I said.

"What if you pass out at the wheel?"

"You saw how it works at the house. It doesn't hap¬pen instantly."

"You weren't driving then."

"I usually have a couple of minutes' warning. I'll pull over the second I feel something wrong."

Rachel was clearly unhappy. As though to drain off some anger, she put one foot up on the dash, untied her shoe, then retied it. Then she did the same to the other. This compulsive ritual seemed to calm her.

I took the 440 loop around Raleigh, then merged onto U.S. 64, which would take us all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The highway was generic Southern: two broad strips of cement running through pine and hardwood for¬est. It would be another two hours before the land started to drop toward the Outer Banks. Fielding would have been traveling this road today if he hadn't died, a road he had traveled before, to a destination my wife and I had visited twelve years earlier. Thoughts like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time. The Nags Head cabin Fielding and his wife had honeymooned in appeared to be the same one my wife and I had used- but in reality it was not. In the fabric of space-time, it was altogether different. The school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran-none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action. Life from death.

"I don't want to make things worse," Rachel said, "but since you can't call the president anymore, what exactly can you do? Where can we go?"

"I'm hoping something at the cabin will give me a clue. Right now I'm just trying to keep us alive."

"Why don't we just go public? Drive to Atlanta and tell it all to CNN?"

"Because the NSA could just say I was lying. What can I really prove at this point?"

She folded her arms. "You tell me. Would a Nobel laureate like Ravi Nara perjure himself to cover all this up?"

"He wouldn't hesitate. National security is the ulti¬mate rationalization for lying. And as for the Trinity building, it could be totally empty by now."

"Lu Li Fielding would support you."

"Lu Li has disappeared."

Rachel's face lost some color.

"Don't assume the worst yet. She had a plan to escape, but I have no idea whether she made it or not."

"David, you must know more than you're telling me."

"About Lu Li?

"About Trinity!"

She was right. "Okay. A couple of weeks ago, Fielding decided that the suspension of the project was just a ruse to distract the two of us. He thought the real work on Trinity was continuing elsewhere, and maybe had been for a long time."

"Where else could they be working on it?"

"Fielding's bet was the R and D labs at Godin Supercomputing in California. Godin's been flying out there quite a bit on his private jet. Nara 's gone with him several times."

"That doesn't prove anything. For all you know, they're playing golf at Pebble Beach."

"These guys don't play golf. They work. They'd sell their souls for what they want. When you think of Peter Godin, think Faust."

"What do they want?"

"Different things. John Skow was about to be canned by the NSA when Godin asked that he administer Project Trinity. That resurrected his career."

"Why would Peter Godin want a man like that?"

"I think Godin has something on Skow. He probably compromised him a long time ago and knows Skow will keep quiet about anything he's told to. Working at the NSA doesn't make you rich. But being the man who deliv¬ered a Trinity computer to the agency would put Skow in the director's chair. And after that, he'd be invaluable to private corporations. Skow will do anything necessary to make Trinity a reality."

"And Ravi Nara?"

" Nara demanded a million dollars a year to come on board. What the government wouldn't pay, Godin made up in cash. Beyond that, Nara 's contribution to Trinity would give him a lock on another Nobel. Shared with Godin and Jutta Klein, of course. Fielding would deserve it the most, but the Nobel committee doesn't give posthumous awards. Tack on unlimited research funds for life, Nara 's name in the history books…"

"And this Jutta Klein?"

"Klein is straight. She's an older German woman, and she already shared a Nobel with two other Germans back in 1994. She's on loan to Trinity from Siemens. That's the way it's set up with several companies. Godin wanted the best people in the world, so he borrowed them from the R and D divisions of the best computer companies. Sun Micro. Silicon Graphics. In exchange, those companies will get to license certain parts of the Trinity technology once it's declassified. If it's declassified."

"If Jutta Klein is straight," Rachel said, "maybe she's the person who can help us."

"She couldn't if she wanted to. They'll have her sewed up tight."

Rachel gave a frustrated sigh. "And Godin? What does he want?"

"Godin wants to be God."

"What?"

I eased into the left lane to pass a motor home. "Godin doesn't care about Trinity making a profit. He's a billionaire. He's seventy-two years old, and he's been a star since he was forty. So forget being the father of arti¬ficial intelligence or anything like that. He wants to be the first-maybe the only-human being whose mind is ported into a Trinity computer."

Rachel pushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. "What's he like? An egomaniac?"

"He's not that simple. Godin is a brilliant man who believes he knows what's wrong with the world. He's like the people you knew in college who thought Atlas Shrugged was the answer to the world's problems, only he's a genius. And he's made major contributions to science. So far, America is truly a better place because Peter Godin lived here. His supercomputers played a signifi¬cant role in winning the Cold War."

"It sounds like you admire him."

"He's easy to admire. But he scares me, too. He's practically killing himself to build the most powerful computer in the world, and he doesn't care that he won't understand how it works when it finally does. Godin's building Trinity to use it himself. And I don't know if there's anything more dangerous than a powerful man obsessed with remaking the world in his own image."

As I reached out to set the Audi's cruise control, my vision started to blur. A wave of fatigue washed through me, and Rachel's last words slipped out of my head. My eyesight cleared, but the familiar high-pitched humming had begun in my head. I braked and swerved onto the shoulder.

"What is it?" asked Rachel.

"You need to drive. I may go under."

She sat up. "Okay."

I got out and walked around to her side of the car. Rachel climbed over the console and slid behind the wheel. Before getting back in, I looked up and down the highway. Traffic was moderate but steady, and no driv¬ers showed any interest in me.

She studied me closely. "Are you all right, David?"

"A little shaky."

She reached over and fastened my safety belt. "Is it an episode?"

The humming had descended to my back teeth. "Yes."

"Close your eyes. I've got the wheel."

"Just keep going east. Our destination is about"-I held up three fingers-"hours away." In the glove com¬partment was a map of the Carolinas. I located Highway 64 and pointed to Plymouth, near where the Roanoke River ran into Albemarle Sound. "If I don't wake up by the time we reach here, wake me up."

Rachel put the Audi in gear and began accelerating along the shoulder. When she reached fifty, she pulled onto the highway and goosed the pedal.

"Is it getting worse?" she asked.

In my mind I said, I'm fine, but some part of my brain realized that my lips had not moved. I was about to go under. My palms were tingling, and my face felt hot. Rachel laid a hand on my forehead.

"You're burning up. Does that always happen?"

I tried to answer, but I felt as I had as a boy in the Oak Ridge swimming pool, trying to talk to my friends underwater. We yelled as loud as we could, but we couldn't make our words understood. Rachel's hand seemed to be melting into my forehead. That pleased me somehow. I wanted to check the visor mirror and see if her hand really was melting, but I couldn't move. A woman was calling my name from far away. Before I could answer, the deep blue swell of a wave broke over me and I went under, rolling and tumbling into darkness.

I'm sitting outdoors in a circle of sleeping men, leaning against a wall. Banked embers glow at the center of the circle. The sky is on fire with stars. A robed man named Peter sits beside me. He seems upset.

"Why do you want to do this?" he whispered. "If you go, you'll suffer all manner of indignities. Even if the peo¬ple listen, you'll be rejected by the priests and elders. And what of the Romans? I fear you will be killed."

Though he does not name the place, I know he's speaking of Jerusalem. "Go away," I tell him. "You value what the dog values. Your body, your next meal, your life."

He takes hold of my arm and shakes it. "You don't drive me off so easily! I've seen it in a dream. If you go, you will be executed."

"Whoever will save his life shall lose it," I reply.

Peter shakes his head, his eyes filled with confusion.

The scene changes suddenly. I'm on a high mountain, looking out over a plain. Three men sit with me.

"When you go into the towns," I ask, "who do you say that I am?"

"We say you are the anointed one."

I shake my head. "Do not say this of me. Speak from your hearts of what you have seen. No more."

"Yes, Master," answers a man named John, whose eyes are large and brown like a woman's. He looks at Peter, then speaks cautiously to me. "I'm told you mean to go to Jerusalem."

"Yes."

John shakes his head. "If you do this, the priests will not know what to do with you. They will fear you, and they'll condemn you to death."

"This cup has been passed to me. I must drink."

The men fall silent. As I contemplate the plain below, fear simmers in the pit of my belly. To know the gift of this life, this body, and then to give it up…

I snapped awake and grabbed the dashboard, my eyes on the rear of a tractor-trailer ahead. Rachel grabbed my knee.

"It's all right, David! I'm here."

My hands were shaking, the fear of the dream still palpable. "How long have we been on the road?"

"An hour and twenty minutes. We just passed Plymouth."

"I told you to wake me up!"

"You were sleeping so hard, I hated to do it."

"Have you seen anything suspicious?"

"We passed a state trooper a half hour ago, and a couple of Plymouth cops, but none of them looked twice at us. I think we're okay."

Rachel looked anything but okay. And once our immediate goal of escape was accomplished, her compo¬sure would crack. I was no different. My reaction to killing Geli Bauer's assassin had been blunted by a flood of neurochemicals evolved for my survival. Images from my dream returned in flashes of color and light, but the fear was fading, and in its wake I felt a strange sort of relief. After months of vagueness and mystery, the dreams were finally localizing to a specific place. Jerusalem. Logically this made no sense. I had never been to Israel, and I knew little about it beyond the bloody conflict I'd seen for decades on the evening news. But where had logic led me so far?

"David?" Rachel said. "Maybe we can hole up for a while at the-"

I clapped my hand over her mouth. "Don't. I'm sorry, but I warned you already."

She nodded, and I took my hand away. "If the NSA is so all powerful," she whispered, "what were you doing making that videotape in your own living room? Wouldn't they hear that?"

I reached into the backseat, lifted Fielding's box of homemade electronic toys, and set it on my lap. From it I withdrew a metallic wand about ten inches long. "Fielding showed me where their bugs were. In tiny holes in the Sheetrock."

"What was he doing with equipment like that? Don't you think that's a little suspicious?"

"I can see how it would look that way. You had to know him."

Even as I said that, I wondered if I really had known the eccentric Englishman. I poked through his box, look¬ing for signs of a secret agenda. Most of the home-built devices looked like the projects of a teenager who spent his weekends at RadioShack. One resembled the old View-Master toy of my youth, a plastic frame with tubu¬lar eyepieces and a switch on the right side. I held the makeshift goggles up to my face, aimed them at Rachel, and flipped the switch. An amber haze fell across my field of vision, but beyond that, nothing happened.

"What are those?" Rachel asked.

"I'm not sure." I turned the goggles toward the wind¬shield and looked out over the road.

My heart turned to ice. A thin, green beam of coher¬ent light-a laser-was hitting the Audi's front wind¬shield at an angle almost perpendicular to the ground. I'd seen many such beams in physics labs at MIT. The only other places I had seen them was in films, on laser-gun sights. Someone was aiming a laser at us from the air! I wanted to scream a warning to Rachel, but my throat was glued shut. Shoving my foot across the floor, I hit the brake, throwing the Audi into a skid.

Rachel screamed and tried to control the spinning car. I turned the goggles and searched for the laser. It was about forty yards away, tracking back toward the car like the hand of God. The Audi shuddered to a stop on the grassy shoulder.

"Why the hell did you do that?" Rachel yelled.

Our nearest cover was a line of trees fifty yards from the shoulder. Someone with an automatic weapon could easily cut us down before we reached the tree line. I held the goggles up to Rachel's eyes.

"Someone's going to shoot at us! Get under the dash. As far as you can."

As she tried to fold herself under the steering column, I reacquired the laser beam. I expected it to move onto me, but instead it froze on the windshield glass. The beam didn't penetrate the glass; it terminated at the windshield's surface. By extending the beam in my mind, I realized it would not intersect with either me or Rachel, but the dashboard.

"If they wanted to shoot us," I thought aloud, "they could have done it before I ever turned on the goggles."

"What?"

"It's not a gun sight."

"What are you talking about?"

The laser could be a bomb designator, but not even panic would drive the NSA to drop a smart bomb on the shoulder of an American highway. They had too many other options. Suddenly I understood. The laser was a surveillance device. By bouncing the beam off the wind¬shield and measuring the vibration of the glass, eaves¬droppers in a plane or helicopter could hear every word we said inside.

"Get up! Get up and drive!"

Rachel struggled back into her seat, shifted the car into drive, and pulled onto the highway. The green beam stayed locked on our windshield like a satellite weapon aimed from space. Taking the map off the floor, I folded it down to a small rectangle and tapped a spot three times to indicate our location.

She nodded.

I then followed 64 eastward for a couple of miles, to a small rural road that broke to the left. There I wrote, Take this turn.

When Rachel nodded again, I leaned down to her ear and said, "Take the turn no matter what happens. Understand?"

"I will. Is whatever you saw still there?"

I checked through the goggles, then squeezed her shoulder. "It's there. Speed up."

She pressed the accelerator to the floor.