left, and look for number 111. It’s only one door down from 101, and to comprehend that 101 is the lowest room number on this floor and 111 is the
highest requires some imagination. My office suite, therefore, would occupy a corner at the end of a long hallway if there were corners and long
hallways, but there aren’t. Up here there is just one big circle with six offices, a large conference room, the reading room for voice-recognition
dictation, the library, the break room, and in the center a windowless bunker where Lucy chose to put the computer and questioned documents lab.
Walking past Marino’s office, I stop outside 111, what he calls CENTCOM for Central Command. I’m sure Marino came up with the pretentious
appellation all on his own, not because he thinks of me as his commander but rather he’s come to think of himself as answering to a higher patriotic
order that is close to a religious calling. His worship of all things military is new. It’s just one more thing that is paradoxical about him, as if Peter
Rocco Marino needs yet another paradox to define his inconsistent and conflicted self.
I need to calm down about him, I say to myself as I unlock my heavy door with its titanium veneer. He isn’t so bad and didn’t do anything so
terrible. He’s predictable, and I shouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, who understands him better than I do? The Rosetta stone to Marino isn’t
Bayonne, New Jersey, where he grew up a street fighter who became a boxer and then a cop. The key to him isn’t even his worthless alcoholic
father. Marino can be explained by his mother first and foremost, and then his childhood sweetheart Doris, now his ex-wife, both women seemingly
docile and subservient and sweet but not harmless. Not hardly.
I push buttons to turn on the flush-mount lighting built into the struts of the geodesic glass dome that is energy-efficient and reminds me of
Buckminster Fuller every time I look up. Were the famed architect-inventor still among the living, he would approve of my building and possibly of
me but not of our morbid raison d’etre, I suspect, although at this stage of things I would have a few quibbles with him, too. For example, I don’t
agree with his belief that technology can save us. Certainly, it isn’t making us more civilized, and I actually think the opposite is true.
I pause on gunmetal-gray carpet just inside my doorway as if waiting for permission to enter, or maybe I’m hesitant because to appropriate this
space is to embrace a life I’ve rather much put off for the better part of two years. If I’m honest about it I should say I’ve put it off for decades, since
my earliest days at Walter Reed, where I was minding my own business in a cramped, windowless room of AFIP headquarters when Briggs walked
in without knocking and dropped an eight-by-eleven gray envelope on my desk with CLASSIFIED stamped on it.
December 4, 1987. I remember it so vividly I can describe what I was wearing and the weather and what I ate. I know I smoked a lot that day
and had several straight Scotches at the end of it because I was excited and horrified. The case of all cases, and the DoD wanted me, picked me
over all others. Or more accurately, Briggs did. By spring of the following year, I was discharged from the air force early, not on good behavior but
because the Reagan administration wanted me gone, and I left under certain conditions that are shameful and cause pain even now. It is karmic
that I find myself in a building of circles. Nothing has ended or begun in my life. What was far away is right next to me. Somehow it’s all the same.
The most blatant sign of my six-month absence from a position I’ve yet to really fill is that Bryce’s adjoining administrative office is comfortably
cluttered while mine is empty and stark. It feels forlorn and lonely in here, my small conference table of brushed steel bare, not even a potted plant
on it, and when I inhabit a space there are always plants. Orchids, gardenias, succulents, and indoor trees, such as areca and sago palms,
because I want life and fragrances. But what I had in here when I moved in is gone and has been gone, overwatered and too much fertilizer. I gave
Bryce detailed instructions and three months to kill everything. It took him less than two.
There is virtually nothing on my desk, a bow-shaped modular work station constructed of twenty-two-gauge steel with a black laminate surface
and a matching hutch of file drawers and open shelves between expansive windows overlooking the Charles and the Boston skyline. A black
granite countertop behind my Aeron chair runs the length of the wall and is home to my Leica Laser Microdissection System and its video displays
and accoutrements, and nearby is my faithful back-up Leica for daily use, a more basic laboratory research microscope that I can operate with one
hand and without software or a training seminar. There isn’t much else, no case files in sight, no death certificates or other paperwork for me to
review and initial, no mail, and very few personal effects. I decide it’s not a good thing to have such a perfectly arranged, immaculate office. I’d
rather have a landfill. It’s peculiar that being faced with an empty work space should make me feel so overwhelmed, and as I seal Erica Donahue’s
letter in a plastic bag I finally realize why I’m not a fan of a world that is fast becoming paperless. I like to see the enemy, stacks of what I must
conquer, and I take comfort in reams of friends.
I’m locking the letter in a cabinet when Lucy silently appears like an apparition in a voluminous white lab coat she wears for its warmth and
what she can conceal beneath it, and she’s also fond of big pockets. The oversized coat makes her seem deceptively nonthreatening and much
younger than her years, in her low thirties is the way she puts it, but she’ll forever be a little girl to me. I wonder if mothers always feel that way about
their daughters, even when the daughters are mothers themselves, or in Lucy’s case, armed and dangerous.
She probably has a pistol tucked into the back waistband of her cargo pants, and I realize how selfishly happy I am that she’s home. She’s
back in my life, not in Florida or with people I have to force myself to like. Manhattan prosecutor Jaime Berger is included in this mix. As I look at my
niece, my surrogate only child, walking into my office, I can’t avoid a truth I won’t tell her. I’m glad if she and Jaime have called it quits. That’s really
why I haven’t asked about it.
“Is Benton still with you?” I inquire.
“He’s on the phone.” She shuts the door behind her.
“Who’s he talking to at this hour?”
Lucy takes a chair, pulling her legs up on the seat, crossing them at the ankles. “Some of his people,” she says, as if to imply he’s talking to
colleagues at McLean, but that’s not it. Anne is handling the hospital, and she and Marino are there and getting started on the scan. Why would
Benton be talking to them or anyone else at McLean?
“It’s just the three of us, then,” I comment pointedly. “Except for Ron, I assume. But if you want the door shut, I suppose that’s fine.” It’s my way of
letting her know that her hypervigilant and secretive behavior isn’t lost on me and I wish she would explain it. I wish she would explain why she feels
it necessary to be evasive if not blatantly untruthful to me, her aunt, her almost-mother, and now her boss.
“I know.” She slides a small evidence pillbox out of her lab coat pocket.
“You know? What do you know?”
“That Anne and Marino went to McLean because you want an MRI. Benton filled me in. Why didn’t you go?”
“I’m not needed and wouldn’t be particularly helpful, since MR scans aren’t my specialty.” There is no MRI scanner at Dover’s port mortuary,
where most bodies are war casualties and are going to have metal in them. “I thought I’d take care of a few things, and when I’m satisfied I know
what I’m looking for, I’ll get started on the autopsy.”
“Kind of a backward way to look at things, when you stop to think about it,” Lucy muses, her eyes green and intensely fixed on me. “It used to
be you did the autopsy so you knew what you were looking for. Now it’s just a confirmation of what you already know and a means of collecting
evidence.”
“Not exactly. I still get surprises. What’s in the box?”
“Speaking of.” She slides the small white box across the unobstructed surface of my ridiculously clean desk. “You can take it out and don’t
need gloves. But be careful with it.”
Inside the box on a bed of cotton is what looks like the wing of an insect, possibly a fly.
“Go ahead, touch it,” Lucy encourages, leaning forward in her chair, her face bright with excitement, as if she’s watching me open a gift.
I feel the stiffness of wire struts and a thin transparent membrane, something like plastic. “Artificial. Interesting. What is this exactly, and where
did you get it?”
“You familiar with the holy grail of flybots?”
“I confess I’m drawing a blank.”
“Years and years of research. Millions and millions of research dollars spent on building the perfect flybot.”
“Not intimately aware of it. Actually, I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Equipped with micro-cameras and transmitters for covert surveillance, literally for bugging people. Or for detecting chemicals or explosives or
possibly even biological hazards. The work’s been going on at Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, a number of places here and overseas, even before
cyborgs, those insects with embedded micro-electromechanical systems, machine-insect interfaces. Which then spread to doing shit like that to
other living creatures, like turtles, dolphins. Not DARPA’s finest moments, you ask me.”
I place the wing back on the square of cotton. “Let’s back up. Start with where you got this.”
“I’m worried.”
“You and me both.”
“When Marino had him in ID this morning”—Lucy means the dead man from Norton’s Woods—”I wanted to tell him about the recording system
I discovered in the headphones, so I go downstairs. He’s fingerprinting the body, and I notice what at a glance looks like a fly wing stuck to the guy’s
coat collar along with some other debris, like dirt and pieces of dead leaves from his being on the ground.”
“It didn’t get dislodged by the EMTs,” I comment. “When they opened his coat.”
“Obviously, it didn’t. Was snagged on the fur, the fake-fur collar,” Lucy says. “Something struck me about it, you know, I got a funny feeling and I
took a closer look.”
I get a hand lens out of my desk drawer and turn on an examination light, and in the bright illumination the magnified wing doesn’t look natural
anymore. What one would assume is the base of the wing, where it attaches to the body, is actually some sort of flexure joint, and the veins running
through the wing tissue are shiny like wires.
“Probably a carbon composite, and there are fifteen joints in each wing drive, which is pretty amazing.” Lucy describes what I’m seeing. “The
wing itself is an electroactive polymer frame, which responds to electrical signals, causing the fanfold wings to flap as fast as the real deal, your
everyday housefly. Historically, a flybot takes off vertically like a helicopter and flies like an angel, which has been one of its major design obstacles.
That and coming up with something micromechanical that’s autonomous but not bulky—in other words, biologically inspired so it has the necessary
power to move around freely in whatever environment you put it in.”
“Biologically inspired, like da Vinci’s conceptualized inventions.” I wonder if she is reminded of the exhibition I took her to in London and if she
noticed the poster in the living room of the dead man’s apartment. Of course she noticed. Lucy notices everything.
“The poster over the couch,” she says.
“Yes, I saw it.”
“In one of the video clips, when he was putting the leash on his dog. How creepy is that?” Lucy says.
“I’m not sure I know why it’s creepy.”
“Well, I had the luxury of looking at the recordings more carefully than you did.” Lucy’s demeanor again, the nuances I’ve come to recognize as
surely as I detect the subtle changes in tissue under the microscope. “It’s for the same exhibition you took me to at the Courtauld, has the date on it
for that same summer,” she says calmly and with a certain goal in mind. “We might have been there when he was, assuming he went.”
That’s the goal. This is what Lucy thinks. A connection between the dead man and us.
“Having the poster doesn’t mean he did,” she goes on. “I realize that. It doesn’t mean it in a way that would hold up in court,” she adds with a
hint of irony, as if she’s making a dig at Jaime Berger, the prosecutor I’m increasingly suspicious she’s no longer with.
“Lucy, do you have some idea of who this man is?” I go ahead and ask.
“I just think it’s bizarre to consider he might have been at that gallery when we were. But I’m certainly not saying he was. Not at all.”
It’s not what she really thinks. I can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice. She suspects he might have been there when we were. How could
she begin to conclude such a thing about a dead man whose name we don’t know?
“You’re not hacking again,” I say bluntly, as if I’m asking about smoking or drinking or some other habit that could be bad for her health.
I’ve thought more than once that Lucy might have found a way to trace the covertly recorded video files to a personal computer or server
somewhere. To her, a firewall and other security measures to protect proprietary data are nothing more than a speed bump on the road to getting
what she wants.
“I’m not a hacker,” she says simply.
That’s not an answer, I think but don’t say.
“I just find it an unusual coincidence that he might have been at the Courtauld when we were,” she goes on. “And I think it’s likely he has that
poster because he has some connection to that exhibit. You can’t buy them now. I checked. Who would have one unless they went or someone
close to them did?”
“Unless he’s much older than he looks, he would have been a child then,” I point out. “That was in the summer of 2001.”
I’m reminded that the time on his watch was five hours ahead of what it should have been for this part of the world. It was set for the United
Kingdom’s time zone, and the exhibition was in London. That proves nothing. A consistency but not evidence, I tell myself.
“That exhibit was exactly the kind of thing a precocious little inventor in the making would love,” Lucy says.
“The same way you did,” I reply. “I think you walked through it four times. And you bought the lecture series on CD, you were so enthralled.”
“It’s quite a thought. A little boy in the gallery at the exact moment we were.”
