"Yes."

"Tell him you're going to spare Washington but destroy White Sands. Sparing Washington shows your goodwill, wiping out White Sands your resolve. It also removes General Bauer from the equation. Then tell the president what will happen if he doesn't destroy his three missiles. Armageddon."

Trinity's lasers flashed sporadically. "You would sacrifice the woman you love?"

"To save millions of lives. But I'll be with her when the missile explodes. You can't keep me in here."

The sphere flashed blue fire.

SITUATION ROOM.

Rachel's eyes flicked from General Bauer to the NORAD screen. She feared that any moment a forest of red lines would begin rising from Russian soil.

Ewan McCaskell still held the phone to his ear, despite the gun that Bauer was aiming at his face.

"General, you've lost your mind," McCaskell said. "I'm trying to save lives."

"You're confusing the situation," said General Bauer. "Hang up that phone."

"Give me the president," McCaskell said into the phone.

General Bauer stepped close to the chief of staff, so lose that the barrel of the pistol touched McCaskell's forehead.

The missile over Washington just self-destructed!" shouted the chief technician.

"And White Sands?" said General Bauer, his gun still at McCaskell's forehead.

"Still on track. We're within the margin of error, sir. Any second now."

Rachel steeled herself against the unknown. Would they be vaporized by the blast? Carbonized by superheated air? Would they hear the explosion? Or would it just be a flash? A flash bright enough to scorch their retinas and carrying enough neutrons to cook them from the inside out- A burst of static sounded in the room. Then a familiar voice crackled from the speakers. Senator Jackson. The audio feed from Fort Meade had been restored. The bulldog-faced Tennessean was glaring down from the screen as if he wanted to reach through it and strangle somebody.

"General Bauer," he said, "if you pull that trigger, you'll rot in Leavenworth until your dying day. That's if they don't hang you."

Bauer's finger stayed on the trigger, and his twitching cheek made him look quite capable of firing. Geli was watching him with wide eyes. Rachel couldn't tell whether the daughter wanted her father to fire or to stand down.

"We're all about to die here, Senator," General Bauer said. "You can't believe anything Trinity says. We have to stop it, no matter what the price. It's our last chance."

McCaskell spoke into his phone but kept his eyes or Bauer. "Mr. President? Trinity has agreed to shut itself down. We have to destroy our missiles. . . . What's that?" McCaskell's face turned white. "I see. Yes, sir understand. . . . Yes, that's kind of you. And tell the children. ... I know you will. Good-bye."

McCaskell hung up and addressed the room. "The president is in communication with Trinity. Trinity destroyed the missile over Washington to show its good faith, but the missile coming here will detonate."

"What?" gasped Skow.

"Trinity was about to launch a thousand missiles. It's not going to do that now. It's going to go along with Dr. Tennant's plan."

"Look!" cried Skow.

Blue letters had appeared on the Trinity screen: DR. WEISS SHOULD REPORT TO CONTAINMENT IMMEDIATELY.

Rachel stared at the letters as she would at a mirage. Containment meant safety. Containment meant life. And David...

Ignoring the general's pistol, McCaskell pointed to two of Bauer's men. "You will escort Dr. Weiss to Containment immediately. Do not try to enter yourselves."

The soldiers looked at General Bauer for confirmation of this order.

McCaskell had sagged during his talk with the president, but now he stood erect, his shoulders squared, his eyes burning with resolve. "You will consider that an order from your commander in chief. Move!"

The soldiers trotted toward Rachel.

Her heart lifted as she got out of the chair. Everyone in the room was staring at her. The soldiers at the consoles. Geli Bauer. On every face was the terrible awareness of death, and also a question: Why you? Why do you get a seat in the lifeboat?

Rachel stepped away from the table, but then-without really intending to-she sat back down. Her bowels had gone to water, but she knew what she had to do.

"I'm not going," she said.

CONTAINMENT.

I stared at the display screen below Trinity, my chest so tight I could barely breathe. Rachel sat grim-faced at the table, her eyes staring straight ahead. It would take more than two soldiers to move her out of the Situation Room.

"This is not a rational choice," said the computer.

The image was grainy, but it seemed to me that Rachel was shaking. Slowly, as if she realized I might be watching, she raised one hand, smiled, and waved good-bye.

"There are other women, " said Trinity.

"Not for me."

The lasers flashed in the sphere. "General Bauer must die."

"Bauer doesn't matter anymore," I said in a dead voice. "By sparing these people, you spare yourself. Your soul. Can't you see that?"

"It's too late."

The explosion shook the Containment building on its foundation. It was briefer than I'd expected, and since there were no windows in the building, I saw no flash. But that meant nothing. A burst of deadly particles could already have written the death sentence of every living creature outside. A silence unlike any I'd ever known descended over White Sands, and I felt as alone as I had the night I learned my wife and daughter were killed.

Something slammed into the concrete roof over my head. A rattling series of impacts followed.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Debris."

"From a neutron bomb?"

"No. The missile is destroyed."

"But . . . you said it was too late."

"For me."

CHAPTER 45.

WHITE SANDS.

Rachel and I had to submit to three hours of drug-induced paralysis for the Super-MRI to produce the scans required for our neuromodels. During that time, the president and the Joint Chiefs remained under surveillance in Washington, and the personnel at White Sands maintained an uneasy truce. General Bauer's armed threat against Ewan McCaskell had upset a lot of people, but since the general commanded all the troops at White Sands, no one but the president was in a position to do much about it. And the president seemed to have forgotten the general altogether. Bauer spent most of the scanning period closeted in one of the storage hangars.

Zach Levin's Interface Team managed the scanning procedure. The protocol involved considerable risk, especially for me, and Rachel didn't want me scanned at all. She pointed out that a neuromodel of my brain already existed, and that since its production had caused narcolepsy and hallucinations, a second was bound to have negative effects, possibly fatal ones. But Trinity insisted on a new scan, and I didn't argue. I agreed that what I'd experienced during my coma should pass into the new entity that would result when Trinity created the merged model.

Ravi Nara and Dr. Case from Johns Hopkins prepped us for the scans, a complex procedure requiring considerable expertise. Conventional MRI scans only required that patients move as little as possible. Trinity's Super-MRI scans required absolute stillness, which could only be guaranteed by the administration of a paralyzing muscle relaxant. A ventilator breathed for the patient during the scan, while a rigid nonmetallic frame held the skull motionless. A sedative was given to prevent the panic of conscious paralysis. Special earplugs were also fitted, since the massive pulsed-field magnets used by the scanner produced an earsplitting screech that was eerily like the roar of Godzilla in Japanese movies. After all these steps were completed, the patient was pushed into the tubular opening in the scanning machine like a corpse into a morgue drawer.

It was possible to remain conscious during this process, and I chose to do so. Being paralyzed while conscious initially produced a nightmarish panic-especially in the claustrophobic space of the scanning tube-but after a few minutes, my mind adapted to its new state. That feeling of panic was probably similar to what a neuromodel experienced when it first became conscious within the Trinity computer.

Rachel hovered by the MRI control station during my scan, watching the monitor as my neuromodel was painstakingly constructed by the Godin supercomputers in the basement. The data generated by the scanning unit devoured staggering amounts of computer memory. Only a special compression algorithm developed by Peter Godin made it possible for a neuromodel to be stored in a conventional supercomputer. The only place a neuromodel could exist in an uncompressed-and thus functional-state was in the vast microcircuitry and holographic memory of the Trinity computer.

After I was pulled from the scanner, Rachel stroked my face and arms until my paralysis subsided. Then she took my place on the gurney and allowed herself to be intubated and prepped for her own scan. She chose not to be conscious during her procedure. As the sedative flowed into her veins, she told me in a slurred voice that she was imagining what it would be like to merge with me, not sexually, but as one mind. Lovers often talked about being linked in this way, but no two human beings had ever actually experienced it. Yet if Trinity could fulfill its promise, Rachel and I would soon be one.

Just before her eyes closed, she threw up an arm as if to ward off a blow. I wondered if she had seen an image of a vengeful Geli Bauer in her mind. As I laid her arm by her side, Zach Levin patted me on the shoulder, then wheeled Rachel's paralyzed body into the dark hole in the scanning machine.

LAB HANGAR TWO.

General Bauer had been pacing the storage hangar for hours when Skow finally walked through the door and gave him a thumbs-up signal. The NSA man was covered in white gypsum, and a faint blue halo hung around his head. Dawn was coming over the desert.

"You found it?" Bauer asked.

"We found it."

Skow had been working with an NSA crew at an excavation site seven miles away. It was there that the data pipe from the Trinity computer met the massive OC48c cable that served the White Sands Proving Ground.

"It's a simple signal brilliantly concealed," Skow said. "Trinity's sending it to over five thousand computers around the world. If that signal stops or is interrupted, any one of them could retaliate in ways we know nothing about. But we can duplicate the signal, and we've already got a computer at the excavation to do it."

General Bauer closed his eyes and made a fist. He had stripped off his coat and blouse, but now he stood and began to put them on.

"We still have one problem," Skow said.

"What?"

"We can't substitute our signal for Trinity's without Trinity detecting it. We need some sort of distraction to confuse the computer for a brief period."

General Bauer fastened his shoulder holster over his blouse. "That's not going to be a problem."

"Why not? You think that when Trinity starts to merge the two models, it will be too preoccupied to notice what we're doing?"

"No."

"Then what?"

The general smiled cagily. "I like to stick with proven methods."

"What do you mean?"

"The same as before, only different."

Skow puzzled over this. "But it was Godin's death that caused Trinity's confusion the first time. Godin can't die twice."

"That's true."

Skow went still. "Jesus. Do you think you can get away with that?"

"Why do you think I haven't been arrested? The president knows Trinity has to be stopped, but he knows he can't tell anyone that. He can't do anything from where he is without Trinity knowing about it. But I can. We can. That's why he's left me loose."

Skow nodded, but he didn't look completely convinced. "If Trinity enters another period of confusion like the one after Godin's death, why won't more Russian missiles be launched by the peripheral computers?"

General Bauer shook his head. "I'm banking that Trinity's taken care of that. The merging procedure has never been tried, and Trinity doesn't want catastrophic accidents any more than we do."

"And Tennant?"

*'What about him?"

"You don't think there's anything to his idea about merging a male and female model? Getting the machine to voluntarily disconnect itself from the Net?"

Bauer snorted. "You heard what Trinity said. No matter who gets loaded in, they're not going to relinquish control. That machine will never agree to be disconnected from the Internet. And so long as that's the case, we'll be under its control. It's now or never, Skow."

The general buttoned his coat and walked toward the hangar door.

"Where are you going?" Skow asked.

Bauer smiled. "To see my daughter. It's long past time for a family visit."

ADMINISTRATION HANGAR.

Geli was standing outside smoking a Gauloise when her father walked up the narrow road between the hangars and stopped a few feet away from her. The general looked tired in the dawn, older than he'd looked inside under the lights. Yet his strength remained. He had the same long muscles Geli did, and his grip could make men twenty years his junior grimace. His gray eyes found hers and held them, looking across three decades of pain and anger.

"I need you to do something for me," he said. "For you," she said. "You've got some fucking nerve."

"That's why I have this job."

She stared at the chiseled face, so set with certainty. "What is it?"

"After the models are merged, I need you to kill Tennant or Weiss."

"Or Weiss? It doesn't matter which?"

"No. The death of either will throw Trinity into disarray. That will allow the NSA to tap into Trinity's data cable and substitute its own signal, which will fool the computers that control the missiles into thinking everything is fine. After that, we can kill the power to Trinity without worrying about retaliation."