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DARK MATTER

By

GREG ILES

Version 1.0

CHAPTER 1

"My name is David Tennant, M.D. I'm professor of ethics at the University of

Virginia Medical School, and if you're watching this tape, I'm dead."

I took a breath and gathered myself. I didn't want to rant. I'd mounted my

Sony camcorder on a tripod and rotated the LCD screen in order to see myself

as I spoke. I'd lost weight over the past weeks. My eyes were red with

fatigue, the orbits shiny and dark. I looked more like a hunted criminal than

a grieving friend.

"I don't really know where to begin. I keep seeing Andrew lying on the floor.

And I know they killed him. But. . . I'm getting ahead of myself. You need

facts. I was born in 1961 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. My father was James

Howard Tennant, the nuclear physicist. My mother was Ann Tennant, a

paediatrician. I'm making this tape in a sober state of mind, and I'm going to

deposit it with my attorney as soon as I finish, on the understanding that it

should be opened if I die for any reason.

"Six hours ago, my colleague Dr. Andrew Fielding was found dead beside his

desk, the victim of an apparent stroke. I can't prove it, but I know Fielding

was murdered. For the past two years, he and I have been part of a scientific

team funded by the National Security Agency and DARPA—the government agency

that created the Internet in the 1970s. Under the highest security

classification, that team and its work are known as Project Trinity."

I glanced down at the short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 in my lap. I'd made

sure the pistol wasn't visible on camera, but it calmed me to have it within

reach. Reassured, I again stared at the glowing red light.

"Two years ago, Peter Godin, founder of the Godin Supercomputing Corporation,

had an epiphany much like that mythical moment when an apple dropped onto

Isaac Newton's head. It happened in a dream. Seemingly from nowhere, a

seventy-year-old man visualized the most revolutionary possibility in the

history of science. When he woke up, Godin telephoned John Skow, a deputy

director of the NSA, in Fort Meade, Maryland. By six A.M., the two men had

drafted and delivered a letter to the president of the United States. That

letter shook the White House to its foundations. I know this because the

president was my brother's close friend in college. My brother died three

years ago, but because of him, the president knew of my work, which is what

put me in the middle of all that followed."

I rubbed the cool metal of the .38, wondering what to tell and what to leave

out. Leave out nothing, said a voice in my head. My father's voice. Fifty

years ago, he'd played his own part in America's secret history, and that

burden had greatly shortened his days. My father died in 1988, a haunted man,

certain that the Cold War he'd spent his youthful energy to perpetuate would

end with the destruction of civilization, as it so easily could have. Leave

out nothing....

"The Godin Memo," I continued, "had the same effect as the letter Albert

Einstein sent President Roosevelt at the beginning of World War Two, outlining

the potential for an atomic bomb and the possibility that Nazi Germany might

develop one. Einstein's letter spurred the Manhattan Project, the secret quest

to ensure that America would be the first to possess nuclear weapons. Peter

Godin's letter resulted in a project of similar scope but infinitely greater

ambition. Project Trinity began behind the walls of an NSA front corporation

in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. Only six people on the planet

ever had full knowledge of Trinity. Now that Andrew Fielding is dead, only

five remain. I'm one. The other four are Peter Godin, John Skow, Ravi Nara—"

I bolted to my feet with the .38 in my hand. Someone was rapping on my front

door. Through thin curtains, I saw a Federal Express truck parked at the foot

of my sidewalk. What I couldn't see was the space immediately in front of my

door.

"Who is it?" I called.

"FedEx," barked a muffled male voice. "I need a signature."

I wasn't expecting a delivery. "Is it a letter or a package?"

"Letter."

"Who from?"

"Uhh . . . Lewis Carroll."

I shivered. A package from a dead man? Only one person would send me a package

under the name of the author of Alice in Wonderland. Andrew Fielding. Had he

sent me something the day before he died? Fielding had been obsessively

searching the Trinity labs for weeks now, the computers as well as the

physical space. Perhaps he'd found something. And perhaps whatever it was had

got him killed. I'd sensed something strange about Fielding's behavior

yesterday— not so easy with a man famed for his eccentricities—but by this

morning he'd seemed to be his old self.

"Do you want this thing or not?" asked the deliveryman.

I cocked the pistol and edged over to the door. I'd fastened the chain latch

when I'd got home. With my left hand, I unlocked the door and pulled it open

to the length of the chain. Through the crack, I saw the face of a uniformed

man in his twenties, his hair bound into a short ponytail.

"Pass your pad through with the package. I'll sign and give it back to you."

"It's a digital pad. I can't give you that."

"Keep your hand on it, then."

"Paranoid," he muttered, but he stuck a thick orange pad through the crack in

the door.

I grabbed the stylus hanging from the string and scrawled my name on the

touch-sensitive screen. "Okay."

The pad disappeared, and a FedEx envelope was thrust through. I took it and

tossed it onto the sofa, then shut the door and waited until I heard the truck

rumble away from the curb.

I picked up the envelope and glanced at the label. "Lewis Carroll" had been

signed in Fielding's spidery hand. As I pulled the sheet of paper from the

envelope, a greasy white granular substance spilled over my fingers. The

instant my eyes registered the color, some part of my brain whispered anthrax.

The odds of that were low, but my best friend had just died under suspicious

circumstances. A certain amount of paranoia was justified.

I hurried to the kitchen and scrubbed my hands with dish soap and water. Then

I pulled a black medical bag from my closet. Inside was the usual

pharmacopoeia of the M.D.’s home: analgesics, antibiotics, emetics, steroid

cream. I found what I wanted in a snap compartment: a blister pack of Cipro, a

powerful broad-spectrum antibiotic. I swallowed one pill with water from the

tap, then took a pair of surgical gloves from the bag. As a last precaution, I

tied a dirty T-shirt from the hamper around my nose and mouth. Then I folded

the FedEx envelope and letter into separate Ziploc bags, sealed them, and laid

them on the counter.

As badly as I wanted to read the letter, part of me resisted. Fielding might

have been murdered for what was written on that page. Even if that weren't the

case, nothing good would come from my reading it.

I carefully vacuumed the white granules from the carpet in the front room,

wondering if I could be wrong about Fielding's death being murder. He and I

had worked ourselves into quite a state of suspicion over the past weeks, but

then we had reason to. And the timing was too damn convenient. Instead of

putting the vacuum cleaner back into the closet, I walked to the back door and

tossed the machine far into the yard. I could always buy another one.

I was still eerily aware of the letter sitting on the kitchen counter. I felt

like a soldier's wife refusing to open a telegram. But I already knew my

friend was dead. So what did I fear?

The why, answered a voice in my head. Fielding talking. You want to keep your

head in the sand. It's the American national pastime. ...

More than a little irritated to find that the dead could be as bothersome as

the living, I picked up the Ziploc containing the letter and carried it to the

front room. The note was brief and handwritten.

David,

We must meet again. I finally confronted Godin with my suspicions. His

reaction astounded me. I don't want to commit anything to paper, but I know

I'm right. Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night. Please

join us. It's close quarters, but discreet. It may be time for you to contact

your late brother's friend again, though I wonder if even he can do anything

at this point. Things like this have a momentum greater than individuals.

Greater even than humanity, I fear. If anything should happen to me, don't

forget that little gold item I asked you to hold for me one day. Desperate

times mate. I'll see you Saturday.

There was no signature, but below the note was a hand-drawn cartoon of a

rabbit's head and the face of a clock. The White Rabbit, an affectionate

nickname given Fielding by his Cambridge physics students. Fielding always

carried a gold pocket watch, and that was the "little gold item" that he had

asked me to hold for him one day.

We were passing each other in the hallway when he pressed the watch and chain

into my hand. "Mind keeping that for an hour, old man?" he'd murmured.

"Lovely." Then he was gone. An hour later he stopped by my office to pick it

up, saying he hadn't wanted to take the watch into the MRI lab with him, where

it could have been smashed against the MRI unit by the machine's enormous

magnetic fields. But Fielding visited the MRI lab all the time, and he'd never

given me his pocket watch before. And he never did again. It must have been in

his pocket when he died. So what the hell was he up to that day?

I read the note again. Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday

night. Lu Li was Fielding's new Chinese wife. The "blue place" had to be code

for a beach cabin at Nags Head, on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Three months

ago, when Fielding asked for a recommendation for his honeymoon, I'd suggested

the Nags Head cabin, which was only a few hours away. Fielding and his wife

had loved the place, and the Englishman had apparently thought of it when he

wanted a secure location to discuss his fears.

My hands were shaking. The man who had written this note was now as cold as

the morgue table he was lying on, if indeed he was lying in a morgue. No one

had been able—or willing—to tell me where my friend's body would be taken. And

now the white powder. Would Fielding have put powder in the envelope and

neglected to mention it in his letter? If he didn't, who did? Who but the

person who had murdered him?

I laid the letter on the sofa, stripped off the surgical gloves, and rewound

the videotape to the point at which I'd walked out of the frame. I had decided

to make this tape because I feared I might be killed before I could tell the

president what I knew. Fielding's letter had changed nothing. Yet as I stared

into the lens, my mind wandered. I was way ahead of Fielding on calling my

"late brother's friend." The moment I'd seen Fielding's corpse on the floor of

his office, I knew I had to call the president. But the president was in

China. Still, as soon as I got clear of the Trinity lab, I'd called the White

House from a pay phone in a Shoney's restaurant, a "safe" phone Fielding had

told me about. It couldn't be seen by surveillance teams in cars, and the

restaurant's interior geometry made it difficult for a parabolic microphone to

eavesdrop from a distance.

When I said "Project Trinity," the White House operator put me through to a

man who gruffly asked me to state my business. I asked to speak to Ewan

McCaskell, the president's chief of staff, whom I'd met during my visit to the

Oval Office. McCaskell was in China with the president. I asked that the

president be informed that David Tennant needed to speak to him urgently about

Project Trinity, and that no one else involved with Trinity should be

informed. The man said my message would be passed on and hung up.

Thirteen hours separated North Carolina and Beijing. That made it tomorrow in

China. Daylight. Yet four hours had passed since my call, and I'd heard

nothing. Would my message be relayed to China, given the critical nature of

the summit? There was no way to know. I did know that if someone at Trinity

heard about my call first, I might wind up as dead as Fielding before I talked

to the president.

I hit START on the remote control and spoke again to the camera.

"In the past six months I've gone from feeling like part of a noble scientific

effort to questioning whether I'm even living in the United States. I've

watched Nobel laureates give up all principle in a search for—"

I went still. Something had passed by one of my front windows. A face. Very

close, peering inside. I'd seen it through the sheer curtains, but I was sure.

A face, framed by shoulder-length hair. I had a sense of a woman's features,

but...

I started to get up, then sat back down. My teeth were vibrating with an

electric pain like aluminum foil crushed between dental fillings. My eyelids

felt too heavy to hold open. Not now, I thought, shoving my hand into my

pocket for my prescription bottle. Jesus, not now. For six months, every

member of Trinity's inner circle had suffered frightening neurological

symptoms. No one's symptoms were the same. My affliction was narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy and dreams. At home, I usually gave in to the trancelike sleep. But

when I needed to fight off a spell—at Trinity, or driving my car—only

amphetamines could stop the overwhelming waves.

I pulled out my prescription bottle and shook it. Empty. I'd swallowed my last

pill yesterday. I got my speed from Ravi Nara, Trinity's neurologist, but Nara

and I were no longer speaking. I tried to rise, thinking I'd call a pharmacy

and prescribe my own, but that was ridiculous. I couldn't even stand. A leaden

heaviness had settled into my limbs. My face felt hot, and my eyelids began to

fall.

The prowler was at the window again. In my mind, I raised my gun and aimed it,

but then I saw the weapon lying in my lap. Not even survival instinct could

clear the fog filling my brain. I looked back at the window. The face was

gone. A woman's face. I was sure of it. Would they use a woman to kill me? Of

course. They were pragmatists. They used what worked.

Something scratched at my doorknob. Through the thickening haze I fought to

aim my gun at the door. Something slammed against the wood. I got my finger on

the trigger, but as my swimming brain transmitted the instruction to depress

it, sleep annihilated consciousness like fingers snuffing a candle flame.

Andrew Fielding sat alone at his desk, furiously smoking a cigarette. His

hands were shaking from a confrontation with Godin. It had happened the

previous day, but Fielding had the habit of replaying such scenes in his mind,

agonizing over how ineffectually he had stated his case, murmuring retorts he

should have made at the time but had not.

The argument had been the result of weeks of frustration. Fielding didn't like

arguments, not ones outside the realm of physics, anyway. He'd put off the

meeting until the last possible moment. He pottered around his office,

pondering one of the central riddles of quantum physics: how two particles

fired simultaneously from the same source could arrive at the same destination

at the same instant, even though one had to travel ten times as far as the

other. It was like two 747s flying from New York to Los Angeles—one flying

direct and the other having to fly south to Miami before turning west to Los

Angeles—yet both touching down at LAX at the same moment. The 747 on the

direct route flew at the speed of light, yet the plane that had to detour over

Miami still reached L.A. at the same instant. Which meant that the second

plane had flown faster than the speed of light. Which meant that Einstein's

general theory of relativity was flawed. Possibly. Fielding spent a great deal

of time thinking about this problem.

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, anyway. 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 reception 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 function, 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 problem— 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 telephone 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

destructive 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 experiment: If Andrew fielding could move as fast as

that particle, could he reach Ravi Nara 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, consciousness 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 banging 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.

CHAPTER 2

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 projected a focused severity that

made her physical appearance 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 the 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 skeptical. "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

appointment 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 paranoia 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.

What Rachel didn't know was that I had only been allowed to see her after

winning a brutal argument with John Skow, the director of Project Trinity. My

narcolepsy had developed as a result of my work at Trinity, and I wanted

professional help to try to understand the accompanying dreams.

First the NSA flew in a shrink from Fort Meade, a pharmacological psychiatrist

whose main patient base was technicians trying to cope with chronic stress or

depression. He wanted to fill me up with happy pills and find out how to

become an internationally published physician like me. Next they brought in a

woman, an expert in dealing with the neuroses that develop when people are

forced to work for long periods in secrecy. Her knowledge of dream symbolism

was limited to "a little historical reading" during her residency. Like her

colleague, she wanted to start me on a regimen of antidepressants and

antipsychotics. What I needed was a psychoanalyst experienced in dream

analysis, and the NSA didn't have one.

I called some friends at the UVA Medical School and discovered that Rachel

Weiss, the country's preeminent Jungian analyst, was based at the Duke

University Medical School, less than fifteen miles from the Trinity building.

Skow tried to stop me from seeing her, but in the end I told him he'd have to

arrest me to do it, and before he tried that, he'd better call the president,

who had appointed me to the project.

"Something's happened," Rachel said. "What is it? Have the hallucinations

changed again?"

Hallucinations, I thought bitterly. Never dreams.

"Have they intensified? Become more personal? Are you afraid?"

"Andrew Fielding is dead," I said in a flat voice.

Rachel blinked. "Who's Andrew Fielding?"

"He was a physicist."

Her eyes widened. "Andrew Fielding the physicist is dead?"

It was a measure of Fielding's reputation that a medical doctor who knew

little about quantum physics would know his name. But it didn't surprise me.

There were six-year-olds who'd heard of "the White Rabbit." The man who had

largely unraveled the enigma of the dark matter in the universe stood second

only to his friend Stephen Hawking in the astrophysical firmament.

"He died of a stroke," I said. "Or so they say."

"So who says?"

"People at work."

"You work with Andrew Fielding?"

"I did. For the past two years."

Rachel shook her head in amazement. "You don't think he died of a stroke?"

"No."

"Did you examine him?"

"A cursory exam. He collapsed in his office. Another doctor got to him before

he died. That doctor said Fielding exhibited left-side paralysis and had a

blown left pupil, but..."

"What?"

"I don't believe him. Fielding died too quickly for a stroke. Within four or

five minutes."

Rachel pursed her lips. "That happens sometimes. Especially with a severe

hemorrhage."

"Yes, but it's comparatively rare, and you don't usually see a blown pupil."

That was true enough, but it wasn't what I was thinking. I was thinking that

Rachel was a psychiatrist, and as good as she was, she hadn't spent sixteen

years practicing internal medicine, as I had. You got a feeling about certain

cases, certain people. A sixth sense. Fielding had not been my patient, but

he'd told me a lot about his health in two years, and a massive hemorrhage

didn't feel right to me. "Look, I don't know where his body is, and I don't

think there's going to be an autopsy, so—"

"Why no autopsy?" Rachel broke in.

"Because I think he was murdered."

"I thought you said he died in his office."

"He did."

"You think he was murdered at work? Workplace violence?"

She still didn't get it. "I mean premeditated murder. Carefully thought out,

expertly executed murder."

"But . . . why would someone murder Andrew Fielding? He was an old man, wasn't

he?"

"He was sixty-three." Recalling Fielding's body on his office floor, mouth

agape, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, I felt a sudden compulsion to

tell Rachel everything. But one glance at the window killed the urge. A

parabolic microphone could be trained on the glass.

"I can't say anything beyond that. I'm sorry. You should go, Rachel."

She took two steps toward me, her face set with purpose. "I'm not going

anywhere yet. Look, if anyone died while not under a doctor's supervision in

this state, there has to be an autopsy. And especially in cases of possible

foul play. It's required by law."

I laughed at her naivete. "There won't be an autopsy. Not a public one,

anyway."

"David—"

"I really can't say more. I shouldn't have said that much. I just wanted you

to know . . . that it's real."

"Why can't you say more?" She held up a small, graceful hand. "No, let me

answer that. Because to tell me more would put me in danger. Right?"

"Yes."

She rolled her eyes. "David, from the beginning you've made extraordinary

demands about secrecy. And I've complied. I've told colleagues that the hours

you spend in my office are research for your second book, rather than what

they really are."

"And you know I appreciate that. But if I'm right about Fielding, anything I

tell you now could put your life at risk. Can't you understand that?"

"No. I've never understood. What sort of work could possibly be so dangerous?"

I shook my head.

"This is like a bad joke." She laughed strangely. "'I could tell you, but then

I'd have to kill you.' It's classic paranoid thinking."

"Do you really believe I'm making all this up?"

Rachel answered with caution. "I believe that you believe everything you've

told me." .

"So, I'm still delusional."

"You've got to admit, you've been having disturbing hallucinations for some

time now. Some of the recent ones are classic religious delusions."

"But most not," I reminded her. "And I'm an atheist. Is that classic?"

"No, I concede that. But you've also refused to get a workup for your

narcolepsy. Or epilepsy. Or even to get your blood sugar checked, for that

matter."

I've been worked up by the foremost neurologist in the world. "That's being

investigated at work."

"By Andrew Fielding? He wasn't an M.D., was he?"

I decided to go one step further. "I'm being treated by Ravi Nara."

Her mouth fell open. "Ravi Nara? As in the Nobel Prize for medicine?"

"That's him," I said with distaste.

"You work with Ravi Nara?"

"Yes. He's a prick. It was Nara who said Fielding died of a stroke."

Greg Iles - Dark Matter

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