and dragging the UK along for the ride.
Unsurprisingly, the speech is political, as is almost everything right now in Britain, which holds its general election in three months. Six hundred
and fifty seats are being contested, and a major campaign issue is the more than ten thousand British troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Fielding isn’t military, has never paid much attention to foreign affairs or elections, and I don’t know why he would have the slightest interest in what
is happening in the UK. I don’t recall that he’s ever even been to the UK. He’s not the sort to be interested in a general election over there or RUSI
or any think tank, and knowing him as well as I do, I suspect he intended for me to find this file. He wanted me to see it after he pulled another one of
his vanishing stunts. What is it he wants me to know?
Why is he interested in RUSI? And did he come across the speech himself on the Internet, or did someone send it to him? If it was sent to him,
by whom? I consider asking Lucy to go into Fielding’s e-mail, but I’m not ready to be that heavy-handed, and I don’t want to be caught. I can lock the
door, but my superuser deputy chief could still walk in, because I don’t have confidence that Ron or anyone else will keep Fielding in the security
area if he shows up. I have no faith that Ron, who was unfriendly to me and seems to have little regard for me, will detain Fielding or try to get hold of
me to ask for clearance. I don’t trust that my staff is loyal to me or feels safe with me or follows my orders, and Fielding could reappear at any
moment.
That would be like him. To vanish without warning, then show up just as unexpectedly and catch me red-handed, sitting at his desk, going
through his electronic files. It’s just one more thing he’ll use against me, and he’s used plenty against me over the years. What has he been doing
behind my back? Let’s see what else I find, and then I’ll know what to do. I look at the time stamp again and imagine Fielding sitting in this very
chair at eight-oh-three this morning, printing the speech while Lucy, Marino, Anne, and Ollie, while everybody, was in an uproar because of what
was in the cooler downstairs.
How odd that Fielding would be up here in his office while that was going on, and I wonder if he even cared that a man might have been locked
inside our refrigerator while still alive. Of course, Fielding would have to care. How could he not? If the worst had turned out to be true, he would be
blamed. Ultimately, I would be the one all over the news and likely out of a job, but he would go down with me. Yet he was up here on the seventh
floor, in his office and out of the fray, as if he already had his mind made up, and it occurs to me that his disappearance may be related to
something else. I lean back in his chair and look around, my attention landing on the pad of call sheets and a ballpoint pen near his phone. I notice
faint indentations on the top sheet of paper.
Turning on a lamp, I pick up the pad and hold it at various angles, trying to make out indented writing left like a footprint when someone wrote a
note on a top sheet of paper that is no longer there. One thing about Fielding, he doesn’t have a light touch, not when he’s wielding a scalpel or
typing on a keyboard or writing something by hand. For a devotee of martial arts, he is surprisingly rough, is easily frustrated and quick to flare up.
He has a childish way of holding a pencil or pen with two fingers on top instead of one, as if he’s using chopsticks, and it’s not uncommon for him to
break lead or nibs, and he’s hell on Magic Markers.
I don’t need ESDA or a Docustat or vacuum box or some other indented writing-recovery unit to detect what I can see the old-fashioned way in
oblique lighting with my own eyes. Fielding’s barely legible scribble. What appears to be two separate notes. One is a phone number with a 508
area code and “MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.” Then a second one: “U of Sheffield today @ Whitehall. Over and out.” I look again, making sure I
read the last three words correctly. Over and out. The end of a radio transmission, like Roger Wilco over and out but also a song performed by a
heavy-metal band that Fielding used to play in his car all the time when he first came to Richmond. “Over and out / every dog has its day.” What
he’d sing to me when he’d threaten to quit, when he’d had enough or when he was teasing, flirting, pretending to be fed up. Did he write over and
out on a call sheet with me in mind or for some other reason?
I find a legal pad in a drawer and write what I’ve discovered indented on the pad of call sheets and begin doing the best I can to figure out what
Fielding was up to and thinking about what it is he wants me to know. If I came in here to snoop, I was going to find the printout and the indented
writing. He knows me. He would think that way, because he knows damn well how my mind works. The University of Sheffield is one of the top
research institutions in the world, and Whitehall is where RUSI is headquartered, literally in the former Whitehall Palace, the original location of
Scotland Yard.
Logging on to Intelliquest, a search engine Lucy created for the CFC, I type in RUSI and the date February 8 and Whitehall. What comes up is
the title of a keynote address, Civilian-Military Collaboration, the lecture Fielding must be referring to that was delivered at RUSI at ten a.m. UK
time, what is now yesterday morning for me. The speaker was Dr. Liam Saltz, the controversial Nobel laureate whose doomsday opinions about
military technology make him a natural enemy of DARPA. I wasn’t aware he was on the faculty at the University of Sheffield. I thought he was at
Berkeley. He used to be at Berkeley, and now he’s at Sheffield, I read on the Internet as I think, rather dazed, of the exhibit at the Courtauld in the
summer before 9/11, where Lucy and I heard Dr. Saltz lecture. Not long after that, Dr. Saltz, like me, was a vocal critic of MORT.
I ponder the title of the lecture Dr. Saltz delivered not even twenty-four hours ago. Civilian-Military Collaboration. That certainly sounds tame
for the rabble-rousing Dr. Saltz, who is as jolting as an air-raid siren in his warnings that America’s two-hundred-plus-billion-dollar allocation to
future combat systems— specifically, unmanned vehicles—has put us on the road to ultimate annihilation. Robots might seem to make sense when
you consider sending them into the battlefield, he rails, but what happens when they come home like used Jeeps and other military surplus?
Eventually they will find their way into the civilian world, and what we’ll have is more policing and surveillance, more insensate machines doing the
jobs of humans, only these machines will be armed and equipped with cameras and recording devices.
I’ve heard Dr. Saltz on the news, painting terrifying scenarios of “copbots” responding to crime scenes and unmanned “robo-cruisers” pursuing
vehicles to write up occupants for traffic violations or hauling people in for outstanding warrants or, God forbid, getting a message from sensors to
use force. Robots Tasering us. Robots shooting us to death. Robots that look like huge insects dragging our wounded and dead off a battlefield.
Dr. Saltz testifying before the same Senate subcommittee I did but not at the same time. Both of us wreaking havoc for a technology company
named Otwahl that I’d completely forgotten about until just hours ago.
I’ve met him only once, when both of us happened to be on CNN and he pointed at me and quipped, “Autbotsies.”
“I beg your pardon,” I answered, unclipping my mike as he walked onto the set.
“Robotic autopsies. Someday they’ll take your place, my good doctor, maybe sooner than you think. We should have a drink after the show.”
He was a bright-eyed man who looked like a lost hippie with his long, graying ponytail and wasted face, and he had the electricity of an
exposed live wire. That was two years ago, and I should have taken him up on his invitation and waited around CNN. I should have had a drink with
him. I should have gotten better versed in what he believes, because it isn’t all crazy. I haven’t seen him since then, although I can’t escape his
presence in the media, and I try to recall if I’ve ever mentioned him to Fielding for any reason at all. I don’t think so. I can’t figure out why I would.
Connections. What are they? I search some more.
The University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire has an excellent medical school, that much I already know. Rerum Cognoscere Causas, its
motto, to discover the causes of things, how apropos, how ironic. I need causes. Research, and I click on that. Global warming, global soil
degradation, rethinking engineering with pioneering computer software, new findings in human embryonic stem cells’ DNA changes. I go back to
the indented notes on the call sheet.
MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.
MVF is our abbreviation for motor-vehicle fatality, and I instigate another search, this time mining the CFC database. I enter MVF and the date
8/18, August 18 last summer, and a record is returned, the case of a twenty-year-old British man named Damien Patten who was killed in a taxicab
accident in Boston. Fielding didn’t do the autopsy, one of my other MEs did, and in the narrative I notice that Damien Patten was a lance corporal in
the 14 Signal Regiment and was on leave and had come to Boston to get married when he was killed in the taxicab accident. I get a funny feeling.
Something registers.
I execute another search using the keywords February 8 and UK Ministry of Defense Diary. I end up on its official news blog, and an entry in the
diary lists British soldiers killed in Afghanistan yesterday. I run down the list of casualties, looking for anything that might mean something to me. A
lance corporal from 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. A lance sergeant from 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. A kingsman from 2nd Battalion Duke
of Lancaster’s Regiment. Then there is a sapper, or combat engineer, with the Counter-Improvised Explosive Device Task Force who was killed in
the mountainous terrain of northwestern Afghanistan. In the Badghis Province. Where my patient PFC Gabriel was killed on Sunday, February 7.
I execute another search, although one detail I already know without having to look it up is how many NATO troops died in Afghanistan on
February 7. At Dover, we always know. It’s as routine as preparing for ugly storms, a depressingly morbid report that controls our lives. Nine
casualties, and four of them were Americans killed by the same roadside improvised explosive device that turned PFC Gabriel’s Humvee into a
blast furnace. But again, that was on the seventh, not the eighth. It occurs to me that the British soldier who died on the eighth might have been
injured the day before.
I check and I’m right. The IED sapper, Geoffrey Miller, was twenty-three, recently married, and was wounded in a roadside bombing in the
Badghis Province early Sunday but died the next day in a military medical center in Germany. Possibly the same roadside bombing that killed the
Americans we took care of at Dover yesterday morning—in fact, it’s likely. I wonder if Sapper Miller and PFC Gabriel knew each other, and how the
British man killed in a taxicab, Damien Patten, might be connected. Was Patten acquainted with Miller and Gabriel in Afghanistan, and what does
Fielding have to do with any of this? How is Dr. Saltz or MORT or the dead man from Norton’s Woods connected, or are they?
Miller’s body will be repatriated this Thursday, returned to his family in Oxford, England, I read on, but I can’t find anything else about him,
although I certainly am capable of getting more information about a slain British soldier if I need it. I can call the press secretary Rockman. I can call
Briggs, and I should, anyway, I remember. Briggs asked me—in fact, ordered me to—demanding that I keep him informed about the Norton’s
Woods case, to wake him up if need be the minute I have information. But I won’t. No way. Not now. I’m not sure whom I can trust, and as that
thought lingers, I realize the trouble I’m in.
What does it say when you can’t ask for help from the very people you work with? It says everything, and it’s as if the ground is opening up
beneath my feet and I’m falling into the unknown, a cold, lightless, empty space where I’ve been before. Briggs wanted to do an end run, to usurp my
authority and transfer the Norton’s Woods case to Dover. Fielding has been sneaking around in my absence, meddling in affairs that are none of
his business and even using my office, and now he’s ducking me, or at least I hope that’s all it is. My staff is committing mutiny, and any number of
people, strangers to me, seem to know the details of my return home.
It is almost two a.m., and I’m tempted to try the indented telephone number Fielding scribbled on a call sheet and surprise whoever answers,
wake the person up and perhaps get a clue as to what is going on. Instead, I do a police computer search to see who or what the number with the
508 area code might belong to. The report summary shocks me, and for a moment I sit very still and try to calm myself. I try to push back the walls of
dismay and confusion crowding in.
Julia Gabriel, mother of PFC Gabriel.
On the screen in front of me are her home and business addresses, her marital status, the salary she earns as a pharmacist in Worcester,
Massachusetts, and the name of her only child and his age, which was nineteen when he died in Afghanistan on Sunday. I was on the phone with
Mrs. Gabriel for the better part of an hour before I autopsied her son, trying to explain as gently as I could the impossibility of collecting his sperm
while she raised her voice at me and cried and accused me of personal choices that aren’t mine to make and ones I didn’t make and would never
make.
Saving sperm from the dead and using it to impregnate the living isn’t something that causes me a moral dilemma. I really have no personal
opinion about what truly is a medical and legal question, not a religious or ethical one, and the choice should be up to those involved, certainly not
up to the practitioner. What matters to me is that the procedure, which has become increasingly popular because of the war, is done properly and
legally, and my supposed views on posthumous reproduction rights were moot in PFC Gabriel’s case, anyway. His body was burned and
decomposing, his pelvis so charred that his scrotum was gone and the vas deferens containing semen along with it, and I wasn’t about to tell Mrs.
Gabriel that. I was as compassionate and gentle as I could be and didn’t take it personally as she vented her grief and rage on the last doctor her
