The Footprints of God

CHAPTER 9

Geli Bauer was on her feet, pacing the control center and shouting into her headset at John Skow. She'd never lost her temper with him before, but without Godin backing her up, Skow was proving maddeningly obstinate.

"Haven't you heard a word I said? Can't you see what's happening?"

Skow answered in a condescending voice, "This is what you've told me. Dr. Tennant and Dr. Weiss visited the grieving widow and walked her dog. Dr. Weiss kissed Tennant, then she went home in a cab."

Geli closed her eyes and tried to suppress her anger. "Tennant pulled into the garage and closed the door before he left the Fielding house. He obviously took something that he didn't want us to see."

"That's possible," Skow said. "But as far as you can tell, he's headed home now. What's the problem?"

"We couldn't hear a damn thing! They plugged the bugs, same as they did at Tennant's house. And Weiss left her Saab at Tennant's house, instead of taking the cab there to pick it up. Why would she do that? Tennant might be planning to run or even to go public. Maybe both."

"I think you're projecting your own paranoia onto him."

"Ritter heard them talking about MRI side effects."

"That's small potatoes. You couldn't know that, of course. The Super-MRI unit is Tennant's pet ethical con¬cern, and it's got nothing to do with the central issue."

"But they talked for ten minutes before that. And Ritter thinks he saw a tape recorder."

Skow sighed. "What would you have me do about that?"

"Take them out."

The NSA man caught his breath. "Did I hear you cor¬rectly?"

"You know you did. We have to assume Weiss knows the full details of Trinity and about Tennant's suspicions regarding Dr. Fielding's death."

"Dr. Weiss is a private citizen who's broken no law."

"If you won't take them out, then bring them in for interrogation with prejudice."

The resulting silence seemed interminable. Then Skow said, "Do you have someone following Dr. Weiss's cab?"

Ritter was covering Weiss. "My best man. He could easily stage an accident."

Skow's voice, when it came, was like shaved ice. "Listen to me, Geli. Your man will follow the cab to Dr. Weiss's residence, then break contact. He will not let her see him. He will not even breathe hard in her direction."

"What?"

"Call off your dog. And your team on Dr. Tennant will follow him to his residence and set up a static sur¬veillance post as per normal procedure."

Why the hell would somebody keep a cobra's fang? She wanted to go to the storage room and check the actual objects against the list, but she was too pissed off to deal with that.

She had always worked with incomplete information at Trinity. It hadn't bothered her much. The army was good training for that. You could guard a building for twenty-four hours without knowing whether it contained nuclear bombs or cases of underwear. But now there was too much she didn't know. The mystery at the heart of Trinity was taking control of everyone and everything around it. Yet there was nothing she could do. She had to talk to Godin, and he was incommunicado.

Faced with this impasse, she called Ritter Bock and told him to break contact with Weiss. The taciturn young German was needed back at the control center. Skow had ordered her to calm down, and Geli knew only one way to do that. She needed to take some orders rather than give them.