be embedded?”
“If I had the gloves, I would have had a much better chance of finding the flybot when I went back to Norton’s Woods,” Lucy says. “But I don’t
have them or know where they are, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I am asking that because it would be tampering with evidence.”
“I didn’t. I promise. I don’t know for a fact that the gloves are data gloves, but if they are, it would make sense in light of other things. Like what
he’s saying on the video clip right before he dies,” she adds thoughtfully, working it out, or maybe she’s already worked it out but is leading me to
believe what she’s saying is a new thought. “The man keeps saying ‘Hey, boy.’”
“I assumed he was talking to his dog.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“And he said other things I couldn’t figure out,” I recall. “‘And for you’ or ‘Do you send one’ or something like that. Could a robotic fly understand
voice commands?”
“Absolutely possible. That part was muffled. I heard it, too, and thought it was confusing,” Lucy says. “But maybe not if he was controlling the
flybot. ‘For you’ could be four-two, maybe, as in the number four? ‘And’ could be ‘N,’ as in north? I’ll listen again and do more enhancement.”
“More?”
“I’ve done some. Nothing helpful. Could be he was telling the flybot GPS coordinates, which would be a common command to give a device
that responds to voice—if you’re telling it where to go, for example.”
“If you could figure out GPS coordinates, maybe you could find the location, find where it is.”
“Sincerely doubt it. If the flybot was controlled by the gloves, at least partially controlled by sensors in them, then when the victim waved his
hand, probably at the moment he was stabbed?”
“Right. Then what.”
“I don’t know, but I don’t have the flybot, and I don’t have the gloves,” Lucy says to me while looking at me intently, her eyes directly on mine. “I
didn’t find them, but I sure wish I had.”
“Did Marino mention that someone may have been following Benton and me after we left Hanscom?” I ask.
“We looked for the big SUV with xenon lights and fog lamps. I’m not saying it means anything, but Jack’s got a dark-blue Navigator. Preowned,
bought it back in October. You weren’t here, so I guess you haven’t seen it.”
“Why would Jack follow us? And no. I don’t know anything about him buying a Navigator. I thought he had a Jeep Cherokee.”
“Traded up, I guess.” She drinks her coffee. “I didn’t say he would follow you or did. Or that he would be stupid enough to ride your bumper.
Except in a blizzard or fog, when visibility’s really bad, a rather inexperienced tail might follow too close if the person doesn’t know where the target
is going. I don’t see why Jack would bother. Wouldn’t he assume you were on your way here?”
“Do you have an idea why anyone would bother?”
“If someone knows the flybot is missing,” she says, “he or she sure as hell’s looking for it, and possibly would spare nothing to find it before it
gets into the wrong hands. Or the right hands. Depending on who or what we’re dealing with. I can say that much based on a wing. If that’s why you
were followed, it would make me less likely to suspect that whoever killed this guy found the flybot. In other words, it could very well still be missing
or lost. I probably don’t need to tell you that a top-secret proprietary technical invention like this could be worth a fortune, especially if someone
could steal the idea and take credit for it. If such a person is looking for it and has reason to fear it may have come in with the body, maybe this
person wanted to see where you were going, what you were up to. He or she might think the flybot is here at the CFC or might think you have it offsite
somewhere. Including at your house.”
“Why would I have it at my house? I haven’t been home.”
“Logic has nothing to do with it when someone is in over-drive,” Lucy answers. “If I were the person looking, I might assume you instructed your
former FBI husband to hide the flybot at your house. I might assume all kinds of things. And if the flybot is still at large, I’m still going to be looking.”
I remember what the man exclaimed, can hear his voice in my head. “What the…? Hey… !” Maybe his startled reaction wasn’t due solely to
the sudden sharp pain in his lower back and tremendous pressure in his chest. Maybe something flew at his face. Maybe he had on data gloves,
and his startled reaction is what caused the flybot to get broken. I imagine a tiny device mid-flight, and then struck by the man’s black gloved hand
and crushed against his coat collar.
“If someone has the data gloves and looked for the flybot before the snow started, is it really possible the person wouldn’t have found it?” I ask
my niece.
“Sure it’s possible. Depends on a number of things. How badly damaged is it, for example. There was a lot of activity around the man after he
went down. If the flybot was there on the ground, it could have been crushed or damaged further and rendered completely unresponsive. Or it could
be under something or in a tree or a bush or anywhere out there.”
“I assume a robotic insect could be used as a weapon,” I suggest. “Since I don’t have a clue what caused this man’s internal injuries, I need to
think about every possibility imaginable.”
“That’s the thing,” Lucy says. “These days, almost anything you can imagine is possible.”
“Did Benton tell you what we saw on CT?”
“I don’t see how a micromechanical insect could cause internal damage like that,” Lucy answers. “Unless the victim was somehow injected with
a micro-explosive device.”
My niece and her phobias. Her obsession with explosives. Her acute distrust of government.
“And I sure as hell hope not,” she says. “Actually, we’d be talking about nanoexplosives if a flybot was involved.”
My niece and her theories about super-thermite, and I remember Jaime Berger’s comment the last time I saw her at Thanksgiving when all of
us were in New York, having dinner in her penthouse apartment. “Love doesn’t conquer all,” Berger said. “It can’t possibly,” she said as she drank
too much wine and spent a lot of time in the kitchen, arguing with Lucy about 9/11, about explosives used in demolitions, nanomaterials painted on
infrastructures that would cause a horrendous destruction if impacted by large planes filled with fuel.
I have given up reasoning with my phobic, cynical niece, who is too smart for her own good and won’t listen. It doesn’t matter to her that there
simply aren’t enough facts to support what has her convinced, only allegations about residues found in the dust right after the towers collapsed.
Then, weeks later, more dust was collected and it showed the same residues of iron oxide and aluminum, a highly energetic nanocomposite that is
used in making pyrotechnics and explosives. I admit there have been credible scientific journal articles written about it, but not enough of them, and
they don’t begin to prove that our own government helped mastermind 9/11 as an excuse to start a war in the Middle East.
“I know how you feel about conspiracy theories,” Lucy says to me. “That’s a big difference between us. I’ve seen what the so-called good guys
can do.”
She doesn’t know about South Africa. If she did, she would realize there isn’t a difference between the two of us. I know all too well what socalled
good guys can do. But not 9/11. I won’t go that far, and I think of Jaime Berger and imagine how difficult it would be for the powerful and
established Manhattan prosecutor to have Lucy as a partner. Love doesn’t conquer all. It really is true. Maybe Lucy’s paranoia about 9/11 and the
country we live in has driven her back into a personal isolation that historically is never broken for long. I really thought Jaime was the one, that it
would last. I now feel certain it hasn’t. I want to tell Lucy I’m sorry for that and I’m always here for her and will talk about anything she wants, even if it
goes against my beliefs. Now is not the time.
“I think we need to consider that we might be dealing with some renegade scientist or maybe more than one of them up to no good,” Lucy then
tells me. “That’s the big point I’m trying to make. And I mean serious no good, extreme no good, Aunt Kay.”
It relieves me to hear her call me Aunt Kay. I feel all is right with us when she calls me Aunt Kay, and she rarely does it anymore. I don’t
remember the last time she has. When I’m her Aunt Kay I can almost ignore what Lucy Farinelli is, which is a genius who is marginally sociopathic,
a diagnosis that Benton scoffs at, nicely but firmly. Being marginally sociopathic is like being marginally pregnant or marginally dead, he says. I love
my niece more than my own life, but I’ve come to accept that when she is well behaved, it is an act of will or simply because it suits her. Morals have
very little to do with it. It’s all about the end justifying the means.
I study her carefully, even though I won’t see what’s there. Her face never gives away information that could really hurt her.
I say to her, “I need to go ahead and ask you one thing.”
“You can ask more than one.” She smiles and doesn’t look capable of hurting anything or anyone unless you recognize the strength and agility
in her calm hands and the rapid changes in her eyes as thoughts flash behind them like lightning.
“You aren’t involved in whatever this is.” I mean the small white box and the flybot wing inside it. I mean the dead man who is getting an MRI at
McLean—someone we may have crossed paths with at a da Vinci exhibition in London months before 9/11, which Lucy incredibly believes was
orchestrated from within our own government.
“Nope.” She says it simply and doesn’t flinch or look the slightest bit uncomfortable.
“Because you’re here now.” I remind her she works for the CFC, meaning she works for me, and I answer to the governor of Massachusetts,
the Department of Defense, the White House. I answer to a lot of people, I tell her. “I can’t have—”
“Of course you can’t. I’m not going to get you into trouble.”
“It isn’t just you anymore—”
“No need to have this conversation,” she interrupts again, and her eyes blaze. They are so green they don’t look real. “Anyway, he doesn’t have
thermal injury, right? No burns?”
“None that I can see so far. That’s correct,” I reply.
“Okay. So if someone poked him with a modified shark bang stick? You know, one of those speargun shafts with something like a shotgun
cartridge attached to the tip? Only in this case, a tiny, tiny charge containing nanoexplosives?”
I push the power button to start my desktop computer. “It wouldn’t look like what I just saw. It would look like a contact gunshot wound minus the
patterned abrasion made by the muzzle of a gun. Even if we’re talking about using nanoexplosives as opposed to some type of firearm ammunition
on the tip of a shaft or something shaftlike, you’re right, you’d see thermal injury. There should be burns at the entrance and also to underlying tissue.
I assume you’re implying something like a flybot could be used to deliver nanoexplosives. Is that what you fear this so-called renegade scientist or
more than one of them might be doing?”
“Deliver. Detonate. Nanoexplosives, drugs, poisons. Like I said, let your imagination be the limit what a device like this might be capable of.”
“I need to take a look at the security footage that shows the body bag leaking.” As I look for files in my computer. “I’m not going to have to go
see Ron for that, am I?”
Lucy comes around to my side of the desk and starts typing on my keyboard, entering her system administrator’s password that grants
complete access to my kingdom.
“Easy as pie.” She taps a key to open a file.
“Nobody could get into my files without your knowing.”
“Not in cyberspace. But I can’t know if someone’s been in your physical space, especially since I’m not up here all the time, in fact, not even
most of the time, because I work remotely when I can,” she says, but I’m not sure I believe she wouldn’t know.
In fact, I don’t believe it.
“But no way anyone has gotten into your password-protected files,” she says, and that I do believe. Lucy wouldn’t permit it. “You can monitor the
security cameras from anywhere, by the way. Even from your iPhone if you want. All you need is access to the Internet. I found this earlier and saved
it as a file. Five-forty-two p.m. That’s what time it was yesterday when this was captured by a closed-caption security camera in the receiving area.”
She clicks on play and turns up the volume, and I watch two attendants in winter coats pushing a stretcher bearing a black body bag along the
lower level’s gray tile hallway.
Wheels click as they park the stretcher in front of the cooler, and now I can see Janelle, stocky with short brunette hair, tough-looking with a
surprising number of tattoos, as best I recall. Someone Fielding found and hired.
Janelle opens the massive stainless-steel door, and I hear the rush of blowing air.
“Put it…” She points, and I notice she is wearing her coat, a dark jacket with FORENSICS in large, bright-yellow letters on the back. She’s in
scene clothes, including a CFC baseball cap, as if she’s going out in the cold or just came in.
“That tray there?” an attendant asks as he and his partner lift the body bag off the stretcher. The bag bends freely as they carry it, the body
inside it as flexible as in life. “Shit, he’s dripping. Dammit. He’d better not have AIDS or something. On my pants, my damn shoes.”
“The lower one.” Janelle directs them to a tray inside the cooler, stepping out of the way and not interested that blood is dripping from the body
bag and spotting the gray floor. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“Janelle the magnificent,” Lucy comments as the video recording ends abruptly.
“Do you have the MLI log?” I want to see what time the medicolegal investigator—in other words, Janelle—came and went yesterday.
“Obviously, she was on call during the evening?”
“She worked a double shift on Sunday, worker bee that she is,” Lucy says. “Filled in for Randy, who was scheduled for evenings over the
weekend but called in sick. Meaning he stayed home to watch the Super Bowl.”
“I hope not.”
“And Dandy Randy’s not here now because of the weather. Supposedly on call at home. Must be nice to have a take-home SUV and get paid
for staying home,” Lucy says, and I hear the contempt in her flinty tone and see it in the hardness of her face. “I guess you can tell you got your work
cut out for you. Assuming you ever quit making excuses for people.”
“I don’t make them for you.”
“That’s because there aren’t any.”
I look at the log Janelle kept yesterday, a template on my video display that has very few fields filled in.
