The God Machine (23 page)

Sajan smiled. She looked down at the Garmin. By pressing in the coordinates, the system had pulled up a small map on the screen. “The City of Brotherly Love,” she said. “Where it started. Philadelphia, Joseph. In something called Carpenters' Hall.”

S
ISTER
M
ARIA HAD BEEN WATCHING THEM ALL MORNING
. She had flown in the night before, only a few hours after they'd landed. And while she had stayed at a different hotel, she had picked up their trail at the Four Seasons that morning, and kept with it—off and on—for most of the day. Except for that time they'd spotted her by Mount Vernon Square.

So she had called in a new car on her Nokia cell phone. She had picked up the gray Ford at the Jefferson Memorial, just before they had slipped north onto Constitution, and then turned toward the Washington Monument.

Sister Maria had followed on foot after that. She had watched as the pair entered the obelisk, as they gawked at the tourist curiosities, taking notes. Minutes later, they vanished into the chrome-colored elevator. That's when she had purchased a copy of that morning's
Washington Post
.

She had followed them up the white tower. And then she had waited, biding her time on the Observation Level,
cajoling the tourists away. No one questioned a nun. Her long habit and veil nurtured a natural authority. She waited at the lip of the corner, the newspaper tucked under her arm, until all of the tourists—the flittering children, the old men with their military hats—had made their way back to the elevator. Then, she looked at her watch.

Almost time.

The Cuban with the National Park Service uniform would be approaching the obelisk now. She saw it all in her mind's eye. He was entering the lobby. She stared at her watch. Just a few seconds more. Six. Five. Four. He was standing outside of the elevator.

Sister Maria glanced up at the lights in the panel. The elevator was ascending again. It was on its way back to the Observation Level. A few seconds later, it arrived. And, it was empty. Exactly as planned.

The nun quickly stuffed the newspaper into the opening between the shaft and the elevator, blocking the door. She watched as it started to shut, hit the paper and bounced open again. She stepped back. She waited and listened.

Footsteps. Someone was approaching. She slipped off her rosary beads.

Slowly and methodically, the nun wrapped the beads round her fists. She pulled the cord tight. She froze when she sensed a sudden vibration in the folds of her habit.

Her cell phone.

Sister Maria hesitated. She stepped back and unraveled her beads. Then, she pulled out her phone. It was a text message. From Archbishop Lacey.

STAND DOWN
, the note said.,
LET'S SEE WHAT THEY FIND
. That was all.

The nun slipped the phone back into the folds of her habit. The elevator opened and closed with a bang. She
cocked her head. The footsteps grew louder. Sajan was only a few feet away.

The nun spun about. She considered getting back into the elevator, then she noticed another corridor on the far side of the doors. It ran round the south side of the obelisk. Without pausing to think, she dashed past the elevator, slipped round the corner and pressed her back to the wall.

“What is it?” Koster shouted.

“Something's jammed in the elevator. It looks like a newspaper.”

Sister Maria could hear the footsteps of Savita Sajan as she rounded the corner and stepped up to the door of the elevator, only feet away.

The nun wrapped her rosary beads round her fists.

“Savita,” cried Koster. “Savita, where are you?” His words seemed to bounce down the corridor.

“The newspaper's caught in the elevator doors. Just a minute. I'm getting it out.”

“Savita.”

“Wait a minute,” she answered. “I think that there's somebody else…”

Sister Maria took a step closer to the edge of the corner. She lifted her hands, trying to gauge the right height, trying to imagine the neck and the hair, the flash of the rosary beads, the shocked look on the Indian girl's face.

“Savita, come back here. Right now!”

The world stopped for an instant. Sister Maria could practically
feel
Sajan around the corner, smell the scent of her perfume. Then, without warning, the elevator closed with a slam. The nun listened attentively as Sajan started moving away. “Savita,” she heard Koster shout once again.

Sister Maria unwrapped the rosary beads from her fists. She had tied the cord so tightly that it had left
marks in her skin. She rubbed her fingers absently as the crackle of fear and excitement slowly faded. But she was not disappointed.

Eventually, she knew, despite this reprieve, it would all come to pass. In the end, they would both fall to her rosary. There was no amount of blood they could smear on their lintel that could ever keep her at bay.

F
RANKLIN LOOKED UP AT THE SKY, AT THE PREGNANT BLACK
clouds gathered above him, and realized with a start that, without even knowing it, he was praying for rain. Normally, he didn't pray for anything. What was the point, after all? God had more pressing things to attend to than to listen to the whining of men.

He wrapped his cloak more firmly about him and tugged his hat down. A few feet away, his bastard son William stood playing with a crimson silk kite in his hand. The young man had just turned twenty-one, but he fidgeted and fussed like a boy. Franklin had tried to connect with him over the years, but—much to his utmost regret—they seemed to be similarly charged. Per haps William reminded him too much of what he liked least in himself. William was just like his mother. He was easily distracted. He was too fond of the comforts of life, obsessed with material things, constantly worrying about how others considered him. Franklin couldn't understand it. The boy had none of his intellectual curiosity, none of his seething will to succeed.

One time, years earlier, when William had come upon his father working late at the press, the boy had asked him blithely, “Is it profit that drives you? Everyone says that it's so.”

Franklin had stood there, hands stained with ink, looking down at the boy, then a teenager. He felt overwhelmed by a sudden disgust, though he tried to suppress it. “While there is nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth,” he had answered, staring over his spectacles, “it's what it provides you that matters, William. The freedom to study and learn. The time and the means to devote to the needs of your family, your community. In a world too often driven by unearned rank and prestige, wealth is what evens the playing field, William. That's all. In the end, it's what you do with your talents that matters. The world is crying out for improvement. Find a need, a practical problem that requires addressing, and solve it. And if you work hard enough, and diligently, wealth will come to you. ‘Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy—’”

“Oh, for God's sake, Father, I wish you'd stop quoting
Poor Richard's
to me.” The boy rolled his eyes. “Your aphorisms make my skin crawl, I've heard them so often.”

Franklin looked at his son.
Yes
, he thought.
That's exactly what your mother would say
.

A bolt of lightning creased the sky. A moment later, a thunderclap barked back. Franklin looked out across the open field, beyond the stone fence, beyond the trees to the distant smudge of the city. The storm was sweeping in from the south. Already, great sheets of water lanced down upon the roofs of Philadelphia. He could see the steeple of Christ Church, half built, encased in a beam of bright light, like a heavenly portent. Then the clouds closed.

Franklin turned toward his son. “Get ready,” he told
William. “It's coming.” He looked up at the sky, and thought back to that afternoon, almost a decade before, when he had first seen Dr. Archibald Spencer, the traveling showman from Scotland, as he expounded on Newton's theories of light and performed electricity tricks, creating static charges by rubbing a tube made of glass. Franklin had watched the doctor's presentation with increasing excitement as Spencer drew showers of sparks from the glass, over and over again. He knew, at that moment, that he'd finally found what he'd been anxiously searching for—the pulse at the heart of the God machine.

A few years later, in 1747, Franklin's Library Company had received its own tube for generating static electricity from his agent in London, Peter Collinson. Franklin had worked many a long hour, devising numerous experiments, and had eventually discovered that electricity was not
created
by the friction generated by rubbing the glass with a cloth, but actually
collected
. Stranger still, a charge could be drawn into one person, A, and out another, B, and the electrical fluid would flow back again if the people simply touched one another. Until then, most people had speculated that electricity involved two types of fluids, vitreous and resinous, and that each type operated independently. But Franklin believed that the generation of a positive charge was always accompanied by an equivalent negative charge, in some mysterious conservation. This had led him to uncover the remarkable value of points. He electrified a small iron ball. Next, he dangled a cork right beside it, and was startled to find that the string and the cork were repelled by the iron ball's charge. Then, when he brought the tip of a poker to the ball, the charge was ushered away. It seemed as though electrical fluid was attracted to points.

One evening, on the banks of the Delaware, he had invited a few friends over for an electrical dinner. It had
been a sumptuous affair, and much fun. They had dispatched a turkey by linking it to a series of Leyden jar batteries. After, they roasted it by electrical jack, before a fire kindled with an electrified bottle, whilst toasting the health of the most famous electrical scientists of the Continent using electrified glasses. The evening had been a fabulous success, though the bird had taken longer to cook than anticipated, and by sunset a storm had rolled in. In his carriage on the way back to Market Street, Franklin had watched the rain wash the countryside. It was then, as a lightning bolt—like the roots of some brilliant white tree—emblazoned the heavens, that he had first struck on the idea of the lightning rod.
Electrical fluid was attracted to points
.

For millennia, the devastating effects of lightning had mystified people. It was considered a supernatural phenomenon, an expression of God, or the Gods, depending upon where you were born in the world. But while church bells were rung to ward off the forces of lightning throughout Christendom, they had little effect. Lightning still struck church towers, burning many to the ground, and hundreds of bell ringers and rectors were killed in the colonies every year.

It was true that Newton and other scientists had speculated about the apparent connection between lightning and electricity, but none, until Franklin, had ever conceived of a practical manner to prove it. Franklin believed that if you placed a man in a sentry box topped with a long metal rod in a thunderstorm, and if you linked that rod to a wire, insulated with wax, which the man held in his hand, he could stimulate sparks from the clouds, steal fire from heaven, like Prometheus, just as Franklin had done from his tube. He had outlined his theories to Collinson in 1750, who in turn presented Franklin's letters to the Royal Society of London. They were published in London's
Gentleman's Magazine
, and
translated into French. Indeed, they had caused such a sensation that King Louis had commanded a field test be mounted to plumb out the theory.

Meanwhile, Franklin had moved ahead with his own plans for an experiment. He had been waiting for the completion of the Christ Church steeple so he could make use of its vantage point, but decided to try something different instead.