"Dr. Weiss, whatever you do, stay on this line. You've done the right thing. Don't have any doubt about that."

CHAPTER 33.

WHITE SANDS.

Ravi Nara was lying on a cement floor with a needle pressed to his jugular vein when he was paged to the hospital over the White Sands PA system. Geli Bauer was going to kill him with the syringe of potassium chloride he had planned to use on Godin.

"Dr. Nara, please report to the Bubble immediately."

"Peter could be coding again!" he cried.

Geli jerked him to his feet and pushed him toward the door.

As they hurried toward the hospital, he thought about the past half hour. After finding the syringe, Geli had marched him from the Bubble to the bare storage room. When they arrived, Ravi asked what the hell she was doing in White Sands. Geli smiled and leaned against the wall, studying him as she might an insect that she was about to pin to a board.

"I wanted to know if Skow was telling the truth," she said. "If Godin was really dying. If Trinity was really going to fail."

"And?"

"Godin is dying, but Trinity isn't going to fail. It's going to save Godin's life."

"Not his life," Ravi said. "His mind."

"That's the very essence of life." Geli stepped close to Ravi and drew a gleaming knife from her belt. "I could sever your spinal cord anywhere between C-one and C-seven. You'd be an instant quadriplegic. If I gave you the choice between that and death, would you choose death?"

Ravi stepped back. "I see your point."

Geli smiled with fascination, her tongue showing between her teeth. He had always sensed that she felt some connection between sex and violence, and her behavior now confirmed it. She was toying with him, and watching his fear aroused her.

"I also wanted to see my father," she said. "I haven't had that unique pleasure in a long time."

Ravi said nothing.

"There's one other reason I'm here. If you guess it, maybe we'll just stop at paraplegic."

"Stop this stupid game!" Ravi snapped. "Skow will be here any minute."

"Can't you guess?" Geli said.

"No."

"I wanted to be scanned by the machine."

He hadn't expected this. "Why? You know the scans cause neurological side effects."

Geli laughed. "People risk side effects for cosmetic surgery. I'll take some risk for immortality."

Ravi wanted her to keep talking.

"This technology will be held very closely for a long time," she said. "Only a few people will be scanned. Presidents and geniuses like Godin. Maybe a few half-ass scientists like you. But not security chiefs. So, I spent three hours this afternoon having a picture taken of my brain. Quite an experience."

Geli took the syringe of potassium chloride from a pouch on her belt.

"I wonder what my side effect will be?" she mused. "Narcolepsy and epilepsy, I don't need. Tourette's . . . no. Short-term memory loss I could stand. I'm getting it anyway. But yours is definitely the winner. It already fits my personality."

Ravi shook his head. Uncontrollable sexual compulsions sounded funny until you had to deal with them. Like any true compulsion, they could drive you to the edge of suicide.

"I used to watch you on the security cameras," Geli said, laughing. "Running to the bathroom five times a day, wanking your little weenie ... I heard you moaning my name a few times. Pathetic."

Ravi ground his teeth and silently hoped that Skow planned to remove Geli Bauer from the planet. He was trying to think of a way to stall some more when Geli kicked him in the chest.

He went down hard, and before he could recover his breath, she was kneeling on his chest with the syringe at his throat. What saved him was not Skow, but the PA system calling him to the hospital.

Godin had developed serious problems with his tongue. He could barely swallow, and shooting pains had returned to the surface of his face. These were textbook effects of a glioma, and nothing could be done about anything but the pain. After an hour, he regained control of his tongue, but his face had started drooping on the left side.

As Ravi pretended to treat the old man, Godin's cell phone rang, and Geli answered. It was the White House. She held the phone to Godin's face while he listened. Ravi couldn't make out what was being said, but he sensed that something had gone wrong.

"No, Ewan, I'm fine," Godin lied. "My health is as good as it's always been, and I can't imagine what Skow was thinking when he told you that."

Godin listened for a while, then said, "If Fielding's death was anything but a stroke, I think Skow is the man we need to talk to. He never got along with Fielding, and he's been running the hunt for Tennant as well. . . . Don't worry about Dr. Tennant. I'll send Ravi Nara over on my company jet immediately. He's the only doctor in the world who knows anything about that type of coma."

Send Ravi Nara over where? Ravi wondered. Anywhere was better than in the storage room with Geli Bauer.

"Yes, I'll give you an update as soon as possible. . . . Good-bye, Ewan."

Godin waved the phone away, then looked up at Ravi. "You're going to Jerusalem."

Ravi blinked in astonishment. "Israel?"

"Tennant is in a coma at Hadassah Hospital. Dr. Weiss is with him. She just called the White House for help. I assured Ewan McCaskell that you're the only man in the world who can help Tennant."

"But why do you want to help Tennant?" Ravi asked. "Why do they? The newspapers are saying Tennant wants to kill the president."

Godin swallowed painfully. "Presidents know better than to believe newspapers. And you're forgetting it was Matthews who foisted Tennant on me in the first place. He wants Tennant's side of the story."

"I see." Ravi didn't see at all. "What do you want me to do in Jerusalem?"

"Kill Tennant."

Ravi closed his eyes.

"He's practically brain-dead now," Godin said. "One tiny push from you and he's gone, and nobody the wiser."

"Peter, I can't walk into an Israeli hospital and . . ."

"Why not? You were prepared to murder me. Why not Tennant?"

"I never intended to hurt you."

The right side of Godin's face clenched in spasm.

"Has the pain returned?"

"Shut up, Ravi. This is your chance to redeem yourself. Your one chance to live."

Ravi cut his eyes at Geli. Anything was better than being alone with her again. "All right. But what if I can't do it? I mean, what if it's impossible?"

"You won't be the only one trying."

"I see. Well. . . when am I leaving?"

"I want you airborne in ten minutes. My Gulfstream is fueled on the strip. Go to Administration first. You'll have a telephone call waiting."

A telephone call? "All right, Peter."

Ravi started to leave, but some remnant of professional responsibility held him back. "What about you?"

"Dr. Case can keep me alive until Trinity state is reached." Godin waved him away. "Don't worry. Tennant will probably die before you get there."

JERUSALEM.

Rachel sat by the telephone and prayed that the return call from Washington would come soon. If a bed opened up in neurology, someone would come to move David out of the ER. She was thinking of going to check his EEG tracing when the telephone rang. "Hello?"

A distinctly American voice said, "Is this Dr. Rachel Weiss?"

"Yes."

"This is Ewan McCaskell, the president's chief of staff."

Rachel closed her eyes and tried to keep her voice steady. "I recognize your voice."

"Dr. Weiss, I'm calling to assure you that the president has the utmost concern for Dr. Tennant's health. We're not quite sure about the reasons behind the events of the past few days, but we intend to find the truth. The president is back in the United States now, and I assure you that Dr. Tennant is going to get a fair hearing."

Something inside her let go then, a tangled knot of fear and tension that had been building ever since she'd seen David shoot the gunman in his kitchen. A stuttering rush of sobs came from her throat.

"Dr. Weiss?" said McCaskell. "Are you all right?

"Yes . . . thank you so much for calling. There's something terrible going on, and Dr. Tennant has been trying to warn the president about it."

"Try to calm down, Doctor. I know you have a medical situation there, so I'm going to bring Dr. Ravi Nara in on our call. I'm told he's the only man who has the knowledge to deal with Dr. Tennant's problem."

Rachel tensed at the mention of Nara. There was a crackle as though the connection had been lost.

"Dr. Nara?" said McCaskell. "Are you there?"

A precise voice in a higher register came on the line. "Yes, hello? Dr. Weiss? This is Ravi Nara. Can you hear me?"

CHAPTER 34.

My eyes opened like those of a newborn, startled by the world's bare brightness. As I blinked against the overhead bulb, my body announced itself with aching hunger and an overwhelming urge to empty my bladder. I sat up and looked around. I was sitting in a medical treatment room. I'd worked in dozens just like it.

'Water, I thought. I need water.

A woman somewhere said, "I can't begin to thank you for this." Her voice was familiar. I listened for more words, but none followed.

A door opened across the room. Rachel walked in and froze. Then her hand flew to her mouth, and she started toward me.

"David? Can you hear me?"

I held up my hand, and she stopped.

"You've been in a coma. You've been out for . . ." she looked at her watch-"fifteen hours. Alpha coma nearly all that time. I thought you were brain dead." She pointed at my face. "Why are you crying?"

I wiped my face. My fingers came away wet. "I don't know."

"Do you remember anything? The seizure at the church?"

I remembered kneeling, then thrusting my fingers through a hole in a silver plate. A current of energy had shot into my arm, straight up to my brain, a current too intense to endure. I felt as though my mind were a tiny glove, and the hand of a giant was trying to force its way inside it. My body began to shake, then . . .

"I remember falling."

"Do you remember anything after that?"

I fell toward the floor, but before I reached it, the boundary of my body melted away, and I felt an oceanic unity with everything around me: the earth and rock beneath the church, the birds nesting among the stones above, the flowers in the courtyard and the pollen they loosed on the wind. I was not falling but floating, and I saw that a deeper reality underlay the world of things, a pulsing matrix in which all boundaries were illusory, where the pollen grain was not distinct from the wind, where matter and energy moved in an eternal dance, and life and death were but changing states of both. Yet even as I hovered there, floating in the world like a sentient jellyfish, I sensed that beneath that pulsing matrix of matter and energy lay something still deeper, a thrumming substrate as ephemeral and eternal as the laws of mathematics, invisible but immutable, governing all without force.

The thrumming was deep and distant, like turbines churning in the heart of a dam. As I listened, I discerned a pattern, more numerical than melodic, as of an undiscovered music whose notes and scales lay just beyond my understanding. I tuned my mind to the sound, searching for repetitions, the elusive keys to any code. Yet though I listened with all my being, I could not read meaning in the sound. It was like listening to a rainstorm and trying to hear the pattern of the individual drops as they hit the ground. Something in me craved knowledge of the underlying order, the vast sheet music that scored the falling of the rain.

And then I understood. The pattern I was searching for was no pattern at all. It was randomness. A profound randomness that pervaded the seeming order of the world. And in that moment I began to see as I had never seen before, to hear what few men had ever heard, the voice of- "David? Can you hear me?"

I blinked and forced myself to focus on my surroundings. Medical cabinets. An EEG machine on a cart. Rachel's exhausted eyes.

"I hear you."

She took a step forward, wringing her hands. "I called Washington. I told them we were here. I didn't know what else to do."