recognized the type.
She'd known girls like that at boarding school in Switzerland. Strivers. Most of them Jews. She would have known Weiss was Jewish without hearing her name or seeing her file. Even with fashionably windblown hair, Rachel Weiss looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had the dark martyr's eyes, the premature lines around the mouth. She was one of the top Jungian analysts in the world, and you didn't reach that level without being obsessive about your work.
Geli had been against involving Weiss. It was Skow who had allowed it. Skow's theory was that if you held the leash too tight, you were asking for trouble.
But it was Geli's head that would roll if there was a security breach. To prevent that eventuality, she received transcripts of Weiss's sessions with Tennant and recordings of every telephone call the psychiatrist-made. Once a week, one of her operatives slipped into Weiss's office and photocopied Tennant's file, to be sure that nothing escaped Geli's scrutiny.
That was the kind of hassle that came from dealing with civilians. It had been the same at Los Alamos, with the Manhattan Project. In both cases the government had tried to control a group of gifted civilian scientists who through ignorance, obstinacy, or ideology posed the greatest threat to their own work. When you recruited the smartest people in the world, you got crackpots.
Tennant was a crackpot. Like Fielding. Like Ravi Nara, the project's Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. All six Trinity principals had signed the tightest possible security and nondisclosure agreements, but they still believed they could do anything they wanted. To them the world was Disneyland.
And doctors were the worst. Even in the army, the rules had never quite seemed to apply to M.D.s. But tonight Tennant was going to step far enough over the line to get his head chopped off.
Her headset beeped. She opened the line to her man at Tennant's house. "What is it?"
"I'm inside. You're not going to believe this. Someone put painter's putty in the holes over the mikes."
Geli felt a strange numbness in her chest. "How could Tennant know where they were?"
"No way without a scanner."
"Magnifying glass?"
"If he knew to look for them. But that would take hours, and you'd never be sure you got them all."
A scanner. Where the hell would an internist get that? Then she knew.
Fielding. "Tennant took that FedEx delivery. Do you see an envelope anywhere?"
"No."
"He must have taken it with him. What else do you see? Anything strange?"
"There's a video camera set up on a tripod."
Shit. "Tape in it?"
"Let me check. No tape."
"What else?"
"A vacuum cleaner in the backyard."
What the hell? "A vacuum cleaner? Take the bag out and bring it here. We'll chopper it to Fort Meade for analysis. What else?"
"Nothing."
"Take one last look, then get out."
Geli clicked off, then said, "Skow—home." The computer dialed the Raleigh residence of Project Trinity's administrative director.
"Geli?" Skow said. "What's going on?"
Bauer always thought Kennedy when she heard John Skow's voice. Skow was a Boston Brahmin with twice the usual brains of his breed. Instead of the customary liberal arts and law background of his class, Skow had advanced degrees in astronomy and mathematics and had served for eight years as deputy director of special projects for the NSA. His primary area of responsibility was the agency's top secret Supercomputer Research Center. Skow was technically Geli's superior, but their relationship had always been uncomfortable. Short of taking a human life, Geli had independent responsibility for Project Trinity's security. She held this power because Peter Godin— citing security leaks at government labs—had demanded that he pick his own team to protect Trinity.
The old man had found her just as she was leaving the army. Geli believed heart and soul in the warrior culture, but she could no longer endure the bloated and
Lexy Timms, B+r Publishing, Book Cover By Design