He lit another cigarette and thought about the letter he'd FedExed to David Tennant. It didn't say enough. Not nearly. But it would have to do until they met at Nags Head. Tennant would be working a few steps up the hall from him all afternoon, but he might as well be in Fiji. No square foot of the Trinity complex was free of surveillance and recording devices. Tennant would get the letter this afternoon, if no one intercepted it. To prevent this, Fielding had instructed his wife to drop it at a FedEx box inside the Durham post office, beyond the sight line of anyone following her from a distance. That was all the spouses usually got-random surveillance from cars-but you never knew.

Tennant was Fielding's only hope. Tennant knew the President. He'd had cocktails in the White House, any¬way. Fielding had won the Nobel in 1998, but he'd never been invited to 10 Downing Street. Never would be, in all likelihood. He'd shaken hands with the PM at a recep¬tion once, but that wasn't the same thing. Not at all.

He took a drag on the cigarette and looked down at his desk. An equation lay there, a collapsing wave func¬tion, unsolvable using present-day mathematics. Not even the world's most powerful supercomputers could solve a collapsing wave function. There was one machine on the planet that might make headway with the prob¬lem-at least he believed there was-and if he was right, the term supercomputer might soon become as quaint and archaic as abacus. But the machine that could solve a collapsing wave function would be capable of a lot more than computing. It would be everything Peter Godin had promised the mandarins in Washington, and more. That “more” was what scared Fielding. Scared the bloody hell out of him. For no one could predict the unintended consequences of bringing such a thing into existence. “Trinity” indeed.

He was thinking of going home early when something flashed in his left eye. There was no pain. Then the visual field in that eye swirled into a blur, and an explosion seemed to detonate in the left frontal lobe of his brain. A stroke, he thought with clinical detachment. I'm having a stroke. Strangely calm, he reached for the tele¬phone to call 911, then remembered that the world's preeminent neurologist was working in the office four doors down from his own.

The telephone would be faster than walking. He reached for the receiver, but the event taking place within his cranium suddenly bloomed to its full destruc¬tive power. The clot lodged, or the blood vessel burst, and his left eye went black. Then a knifelike pain pierced the base of his brain, the center of life support functions. Falling toward the floor, Fielding thought again of that elusive particle that had traveled faster than the speed of light, that had proved Einstein wrong by traversing space as though it did not exist. He posed a thought experi¬ment: If Andrew Fielding could move as fast as that par¬ticle, could he reach Ravi Kara in time to be saved?

Answer: No. Nothing could save him now.

His last coherent thought was a prayer, a silent hope that in the unmapped world of the quantum, conscious¬ness existed beyond what humans called death. For Fielding, religion was an illusion, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Project Trinity had uncovered hope of a new immortality. And it wasn't the Rube Goldberg monstrosity they were pretending to build a hundred meters from his office door.

The impact of the floor was like water.

I jerked awake and grabbed my gun. Someone was bang¬ing the front door taut against the security chain. I tried to get to my feet, but the dream had disoriented me. Its lucidity far surpassed anything I'd experienced to date. I actually felt that I had died, that I was Andrew Fielding at the moment of his death-

"Dr. Tennant?" shouted a woman's voice. "David! Are you in there?"

My psychiatrist? I put my hand to my forehead and tried to fight my way back to reality. "Dr. Weiss? Rachel? Is that you?"

"Yes! Unlatch the chain!"

"I'm coming," I muttered. "Are you alone?"

"Yes! Open the door."

I stuffed my gun between the couch cushions and stumbled toward the door. As I reached for the chain latch, it struck me that I had never told my psychiatrist where I lived.

Rachel Weiss had jet-black hair, olive skin, and onyx eyes. Eleven weeks ago, when I'd arrived at her office for my first session, I'd thought of Rebecca from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Only in the novel Rebecca had a wild, unrestrained sort of beauty. Rachel Weiss pro¬jected a focused severity that made her physical appear¬ance and clothing irrelevant, as though she went out of her way to hide attributes that would cause people to see her as anything other than the remarkable clinician she was.

"What was that?" she asked, pointing to the sofa cushion where I'd stashed the gun. "Are you self-prescribing again?"

"No. How did you find my house?"

"I know a woman in Personnel at UVA. You missed two consecutive sessions, but at least you called ahead to cancel. Today you leave me sitting there and you don't even call? Considering your state of mind lately, what do you expect me to do?" Rachel's eyes went to the video camera. "Oh, David… you're not back to this again? I thought you stopped years ago."

"It's not what you think."

She didn't look convinced. Five years ago, a drunk driver flipped my wife's car into a roadside pond. The water wasn't deep, but both Karen and my daughter Zooey drowned before help arrived. I was working at the Hospital they were brought to after the accident. Watching the ER staff try in vain to resuscitate my four-year-old daughter shattered me. I spent hours at home in front of the television, endlessly replaying videotapes of Zooey learning to walk, laughing in Karen's arms, hugging me at her third birthday party. My medical practice withered, then died, and I sank into clinical depression. This was the only fact of my personal life I had discussed in detail with my psychiatrist, and this only because after three sessions she had told me that she'd lost her only child to leukemia one year before.

She confided this because she believed my disturbing dreams were caused by the tragic loss of my family, and she wanted me to know she had felt the same kind of pain. Rachel, too, had lost more than her child. Unable to handle the devastating effects of his son's illness, her lawyer husband had left her and returned to New York. Like me, Rachel had descended into a pit of depression from which she was lucky to emerge. Therapy and medication had been her salvation. But like my father, I've always been fiercely private, and I fought my way back to the land of the living alone. Not a day went by that I didn't miss my wife and daughter, but my days of weeping as I replayed old videotapes were over.

"This isn't about Karen and Zooey," I told Rachel. "Please close the door."

She remained in the open doorway, car keys in hand, clearly wanting to believe me but just as clearly skepti¬cal. "What is it, then?"

"Work. Please close the door."

Rachel hesitated, then shut the door and stared into my eyes. "Maybe it's time you told me about your work."

This had long been a point of contention between us. Rachel considered doctor/patient confidentiality as sacred as the confessional, and my lack of trust offended her. She believed my demands for secrecy and warnings of danger hinted at a delusional reality I had constructed to protect my psyche from scrutiny. I didn't blame her. At the request of the NSA, I'd made my first appoint¬ment with her under a false name. But ten seconds after we shook hands, she recognized my face from the jacket photo of my book. She assumed my ruse was the para¬noia of a medical celebrity, and I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But after a few weeks, my refusal to divulge anything about my work-and my obsession with "protecting" her-had pushed her to suspect that I might be schizophrenic.