CHAPTER 5

Geli Bauer listened intently as Corelli reported from the Fielding house.

"They're going inside now. Tennant went up first. The shrink is hanging back. Now she's going up. Wait… I think the doc is carrying."

"Which doc?"

"Oh. Tennant. He's got a gun in his pocket. Right front."

"You see the butt?"

"No, but it looks like a revolver."

What the hell does Tennant think he's up to? The cell connection crackled.

"What do you want me to do?" asked Corelli.

"Sit tight and make sure the mikes are working."

"The widow just answered the door. She's pulling them inside."

"Keep me posted."

Geli killed the connection to Corelli. If Tennant was carrying a gun, he was afraid for his life. He must believe Fielding had been murdered. But why? The drug that had killed Fielding caused a fatal bleed in the brain-a true stroke. Without an autopsy, murder couldn't be proved. And there would be no autopsy. Tennant must know more than Godin thought he did. If the FedEx letter he'd received had been sent by Fielding, it might have con¬tained some sort of evidence.

She touched her headset mike and said, "Skow. Home." Her computer dialed John Skow's house in Raleigh.

"What is it now?" Skow said after two rings.

"Tennant and Weiss hardly spoke on the way to Field¬ing's house."

"So?"

"It wasn't natural. They're avoiding conversation."

"Tennant knows he's under surveillance. You've always wanted them all to know that."

"Yes, but Tennant's never been evasive like this. He's up to something."

"He's a little freaked-out. It's natural."

"He's carrying a gun."

A pause. "Okay, he's a lot freaked-out. We knew he had one in his house."

"That's different than carrying the damn thing."

Skow chuckled. "That's the kind of reaction you inspire in people, Geli. Seriously, you need to calm down. Everything is context. We know Tennant was sus¬picious already. His best friend died today. He's natu¬rally paranoid. What we don't want to do is make him more suspicious."

She wished she could talk to Godin. She'd tried his pri¬vate cell number, but he hadn't answered or called back. It was the first time that had ever happened. "Look, I think-"

"I know what you think," Skow said. "Take no steps without my approval."

"Asshole," Geli said, but Skow was already off the line.

She pressed a button that connected her to NSA head¬quarters at Fort Meade. Her liaison there was a young man named Conklin.

"Hello, Ms. Bauer," he said. "You calling about the FedEx query again?"

"What do you think?"

"I've got what you want. The package was dropped into a collection box at a post office in Durham, North Carolina. The sender was listed as Lewis Carroll."

So, Fielding had sent something to Tennant. She knew he hadn't dropped it off himself, but his wife almost cer¬tainly had. Geli clicked off and leaned back in her chair, reassessing the situation.

Seven hours ago, she had killed a man on Godin's order, without knowing precisely why. She had no prob¬lem with that. Fielding posed a threat to the project, and under the conditions of her contract, that was enough. If she needed a moral justification, Project Trinity was criti¬cal to American national security. Executing Fielding was like killing a spy caught in the act of treason. Still, she was curious as to motive. Godin had told her that Fielding was sabotaging the project and stealing Trinity data. Geli wasn't sure. Rigorous precautions had been taken to prevent sabotage. No one could physically move data in or out of the building. And as for electronic theft, Skow's NSA techs made sure that not a single electron left the building without first being cleared by him.

So, why did Fielding have to die? Six weeks ago, he and Tennant had gotten the project suspended by raising med¬ical and ethical concerns. If that were the motive, then why wait to kill Fielding? And why kill only him? Peter Godin had appeared almost desperate when he visited Geli last night. And she had never seen Godin desperate before. Was he that anxious to get the project back on-line? She knew little about the technical side of the Trinity research, but she did know that success was still quite a ways off. She could read that in the faces of the scientists and engineers who reported to work every day.

Project Trinity was building-or attempting to build-a supercomputer. Not a conventional supercom¬puter like a Cray or a Godin, but a computer dedicated to artificial intelligence-a true thinking machine. She didn't know what made this theoretical computer so dif¬ficult to build, but Godin had told her a little about the genesis of the project.

In 1994, a Bell Labs scientist had theorized that an almost infinitely powerful code-breaking computer might be built using the principles of quantum physics. Geli knew little about quantum physics, but she under¬stood why a quantum computer would be revolution¬ary. Modern digital encryption-the code system used by banks, corporations, and national governments-was based on the factoring of large prime numbers. Conventional supercomputers like those used by the NSA cracked those codes by trying one key after another in sequence, like testing keys in a lock. Breaking a code this way could take hundreds of hours. But a quantum computer-in theory-could try all possible keys simul¬taneously. The wrong keys would cancel each other out, leaving only the proper one to break the code. And this process wouldn't take hours or even minutes. A quan¬tum computer could break digital encryption codes instantaneously. Such a machine would render present-day encryption obsolete and give whatever country possessed it a staggering strategic advantage over every other nation in the world.

Given the potential value of such a machine, the NSA had launched a massive secret effort to design and build a quantum computer. Designated Project Spooky, after the description Albert Einstein had given to the action of cer¬tain quantum particles-"spooky action at a distance"- it was placed under the direction of John Skow, director of the NSA's Supercomputer Research Center. After spending seven years and $600 million of the NSA's black budget, Skow's team had not produced a prototype that could rival the performance of a Palm Pilot.

Skow was probably days from being terminated when he received a call from Peter Godin, who had been build¬ing conventional supercomputers for the NSA for years. Godin proposed a machine as revolutionary as a quan¬tum computer, but with one attribute the government could not resist: it could be built using refinements of existing technology..Moreover, after a conversation with Andrew Fielding, the quantum physicist he'd already enlisted to work on his machine, Godin believed there was a strong chance that his computer would have quan¬tum capabilities.

By dangling these plums before the president. Godin had been able to secure almost every concession he demanded. A dedicated facility to work on his new machine. Virtually unlimited government funds to pay for a crash effort modeled on the Manhattan Project. The right to hire and fire his own scientists. For government oversight he got John Skow, whom he had compromised \ears before by bribing Skow to choose Godin computers over Grays for the Supercomputer Research Center. The president's single demand had been on-site ethical over¬sight, which materialized in the form of David Tennant.

And Tennant had seemed only a minor annoyance in the beginning. Everything had seemed perfect.

But now two years had passed. Nearly a billion dol¬lars had been spent, and there was still no working Trinity prototype. In the secret corridors of the NSA's Crypto City, people were starting to draw parallels to the failed Project Spooky. The difference, of course, was Peter Godin. Even Godin's enemies conceded that he had never failed to deliver on a promise. But this time, they whispered, he might have taken on more than he could handle. Artificial intelligence might not be as theoretical as quantum computing, but more than a few companies had gone bankrupt by promising to deliver it.