Godin carefully massaged his right hand with the fingers of his left. "We've all sustained a severe shock. I want everyone to take three full days of rest, beginning at lunch today. We'll meet in this room on Tuesday morning. All the usual off-site security precautions will be observed during this period."

The resulting silence was total. The man who drove himself twice as hard as anyone else was suggesting time off? Such a "vacation" went so against Godin's nature that no one knew what to say.

Skow finally cleared his throat. "Well, I, for one, could use some time at home. My wife is about ready to divorce me over the hours I put in here."

Godin frowned and closed his eyes again.

"Meeting adjourned?" Skow said, glancing at Godin.

The old man got unsteadily to his feet and walked out without another word.

"Well, then," Skow said needlessly.

I stood and walked back to my office, my eyes on Peter Godin's retreating back. The meeting had gone nothing like I'd expected. Ahead of me, Godin started to turn the corner, but instead he stopped and turned to face me. I walked toward him.

"You and Fielding were very close," he said. "Weren't you?"

"I liked him. Admired him, too."

Godin nodded. "I read your book two nights ago. You're more of a realist than I would have guessed. Your opinions on abortion, fetal tissue research, cloning, the expenditures on last-year-of-life care, euthanasia. I agreed with all of it, right down the line."

I couldn't believe Peter Godin had worked with me for two years without reading the book that had brought me to Trinity. He looked over my shoulder for a moment, then back at my face.

"Something occurred to me during the meeting," he said. "You know the old hypothetical about history? If you could go back in time, and you had the opportunity to kill Hitler, would you do it?"

I smiled. "It's not a very realistic formulation."

"I'm not so sure. The Hitler question is easy, of course. But imagine it another way. If you could go back to 1948, and you knew that Nathuram Godse was going to assassinate Gandhi-would you kill him to prevent that assassination?"

I thought about it. "You're really asking how far down the chain of events I would go. Would you murder Hitler's mother?"

It was Godin's turn to smile. "You're right, of course. And my answer is yes."

"Actually, I think your question is more about causal¬ity. Would murdering Hitler's mother have prevented the Second World War? Or would some other nobody have risen from the discontented masses to tap German resentment over the Versailles Treaty?"

Godin considered this. "Quite possibly. All right, then. It's 1952, and you know that a clumsy lab technician is going to ruin the cell cultures of Jonas Salk. The cure for poliomyelitis will be greatly delayed, perhaps by years. Would you kill that innocent technician?"

A strange buzzing started in my head. I had a sense that Godin was toying with me, yet Peter Godin never wasted time with games.

"Thankfully, real life doesn't present us with those dilemmas," I said. "Only hindsight allows us to formu¬late them."

He smiled distantly. "I'm not so sure, Doctor. Hitler could have been stopped at Munich." Godin reached out and patted me on the arm. "Food for thought, anyway."

He turned and carefully negotiated his way around the corner.

I stood in the corridor, trying to read between the lines of what I'd heard. Godin never wasted words. He hadn't been idly reflecting on history or morality. He had been talking quite frankly about murder. Justifiable murder, in his mind. I shook my head in disbelief. Godin had been talking about Fielding.

Fielding's murder was necessary, he was saying. Fielding was innocent, but he was interfering with a great good, and he had to be eliminated.

As I walked back toward my office, I realized I was shivering. No one had asked about my call to Washing¬ton. No one had mentioned my visit to Fielding's house. Not one word about Rachel Weiss. And three days off would give me plenty of time to speak to the president. I might even be able to fly to Washington. What the hell was going on?

I froze in my office doorway. A tall, sinewy blonde woman with electric blue eyes and a stippled scar on her left cheek sat in my chair, gazing at my computer screen. Geli Bauer. If anyone in this building had murdered Andrew Fielding, it was she.

"Hello, Doctor," she said, a trace of a smile on her lips. "You look surprised. I thought you'd be expecting me."

I stood speechless in my office doorway. Relief had turned to paralyzing anxiety in less than a second, and the fact that Geli Bauer was a woman did nothing to slow my racing pulse. Like her handpicked subordinates. She was lean and hard, with a predatory gleam in her eyes. She radiated the icy confidence of a world-class alpinist. I could imagine her hanging for hours from a precipice, her body supported only by her fingertips. Her intelligence was difficult to judge in an incubator filled with geniuses, but I knew from previous conversation that she was quick as mercury. She treated all but the top Trinity scientists like prisoners working under duress, and I attributed this to her being the daughter of a powerful army general. Ravi Nara had crudely called her "a terminator with tits," but I thought of her as a terminator with brains.

"What can I do for you?" I said finally.

"I need to ask you a couple of questions," she said. "Routine stuff."

Routine? Geli Bauer had visited my office a half dozen times in two years. I mostly saw her through a sheet of glass, observing the polygraph tests to which I was randomly subjected.

"Godin just gave us three days off," I told her. "Why don't we do this when I get back?"

"I'm afraid it can't wait." She had the stateless accent of elite overseas schools.

"You said it was routine."

A plastic smile. "Why don't you have a seat, Doctor?

"You're in my chair."

Geli didn't get up. She thrived on conflict.

"You don't usually handle this kind of thing personally," I said. "To what do I owe the honor?"

"Dr. Fielding's death has created an unusual situation. We need to be sure we know as much as possible about the circumstances surrounding it."

"Dr. Fielding died of a stroke."

She studied me for a while without speaking. Her scar on her left cheek reminded me of some I'd seen in some Vietnam vets during physicals. The vets described how shrapnel from a phosphorous grenade burned itself deep into the skin and then self-cauterized, only to reignite in the air and wound the operating surgeons when they attempted to remove the fragments. Soldiers lived in terror of them, and Geli Bauer looked as though she'd suffered intimate contact with one. I had been predisposed to like her because of that scar. A beautiful woman marked by such a thing might have earned some insight about life that few of her sisters possessed. But my interactions with Geli had convinced me that whatever hell she had survived, she'd learned only bitterness.

"I'm concerned about your relationship with Dr. Fielding," she said.

Always I with Geli, never the bureaucratic we, as though she felt personal responsibility for the security of the entire project.

"Really?" I said, as though shocked.

"How would you characterize your relationship?"

"He was my friend."

"You saw him and spoke to him outside this facility."

To concede this was to admit a violation of Trinity security regulations. But Geli probably had videotape.

"Yes."

"That's a direct violation of security protocol." I rolled my eyes.

"Sue me."

"We could jail you."

Shit. "That'll really help keep this place secret."

She ran her long fingers through her blonde hair. I thought of a hawk preening itself. "You could lose your position here, Doctor."