to medications, and uncontrolled substances can be contaminated with impurities and have variable doses.
“Really. You seem like yourself.” Benton touches me again. “How are you feeling? You okay for sure?”
“Worn off, whatever it was. I wouldn’t do the case if it wasn’t, if I felt even remotely impaired,” I tell him. “I guess you’re coming to the autopsy
room.” Since we’re headed there.
“A drink. Right.” He is back to Liam Saltz. “He bumps into you at CNN and asks you to have a drink with him at midnight. That’s not exactly
normal.”
“I’m not sure how to take that. But I don’t feel flattered.”
“His reputation with women is on a par with certain politicians who will remain unnamed. What’s the buzzword these days? A sexual addiction.”
“Well, if you’re going to have one.”
We walk past the x-ray room, and the door is shut, the red light off because the scanner isn’t in use. The lower level is empty and silent, and I
wonder where Marino is. Maybe he’s with Anne.
“He had any contact with you since then? That was what? About two years ago?” Benton asks. “Or maybe with some of your compatriots at
Walter Reed or Dover?”
“Not with me. I wouldn’t know about others, except no one involved with the armed forces is a fan of Dr. Saltz’s. He’s not considered patriotic,
which really isn’t fair if you analyze what he’s actually saying.”
“Problem is nobody seems to understand what anybody is saying anymore. People don’t listen. Saltz isn’t a communist. He’s not a terrorist. He
hasn’t committed treason. He just doesn’t know how to curb his enthusiasm and muzzle his big mouth. But he’s not of interest to the government.
Well, he wasn’t.”
“Suddenly, he is.” I assume that’s what Benton will tell me next. “He wasn’t at Whitehall yesterday. Wasn’t even in London.” Benton waits until
now to inform me of this as we pause before the locked double steel doors of the autopsy room. “I don’t guess you found that part on the Internet
when you were trying to make heads or tails of Jack’s indented writing,” Benton adds in a tone that is shaded with other meanings. A hint of
hostility, not directed at me but at Fielding.
“How do you know where Liam Saltz was or wasn’t?” I ask at the same time I think about what Benton mentioned upstairs. He referred to the
event at Norton’s Woods as a VIP wedding and mentioned a security presence. Undercover agents, Benton told me, although it was during an
interval when I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have been.
“Did his keynote address by satellite on a big video screen. Well attended by the audience at Whitehall,” Benton says as if he was there. “He
had a complication, a family matter, and had to leave the country.”
I think of the man beyond these closed steel doors. A man whose wristwatch when he died may have been set to UK time. A man with an old
robot called MORT inside his apartment, the same robot that Liam Saltz and I testified against, persuading people in power to disallow its use.
“Is that why Jack was looking him up, looking up RUSI or whatever he was looking at early yesterday morning?” I ask as I scan open the lock to
the autopsy room.
“I’m wondering how that happened, if he got a call and then looked him up or maybe knew he was in Cambridge for some reason,” Benton
replies. “I’m wondering a lot of things that hopefully will get answered soon. What I do know is Dr. Saltz was here for the wedding. The daughter of
his current wife, whose biological father was supposed to give her away, then got the swine flu.”
“I text-messaged you,” Anne tells me, and she’s shrouded in blue as she works on a computer that is contained in a waterproof stainless-steel
enclosure, the sealed keyboard mounted at a height suitable for typing while standing. Behind her on the autopsy table of station one, which is now
shiny and clean, is the man from Norton’s Woods.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her abstractedly as I think of Liam Saltz and worry what his connection might be to this dead man, beyond robots,
particularly MORT. “My phone’s in my office, and I’ve not been in there,” I say to Anne, and then I ask Benton, “Does he have other children?”
“He’s at the Charles Hotel,” Benton replies. “Someone’s on the way to talk to him. But to answer your question, yes, he does. He has a number
of children and stepchildren from multiple marriages.”
“I wanted to let you know I didn’t feel comfortable uploading his scans and e-mailing them,” Anne then says to me. “Don’t know what we’re
dealing with and thought it was better to play it extra-safe. If you’re going to hang around, you need to cover up.” She directs this to Benton. “Got no
clue what this one’s been exposed to, but he didn’t set off any alarms. At least he’s not radio active. Whatever he’s got in him isn’t, thank God.”
“I assume all was quiet at the hospital. No incidents,” Benton says to her. “I’m not staying.”
“Security escorted us in and out, and we didn’t see anyone else—no patients or staff, at any rate.”
“You found something in him?” I ask her.
“Trace amounts of metal.” Anne’s gloved hands move on the computer’s keyboard and click the mouse, both freshly overlaid with industrial
silicone. Fielding’s sloppy presence is noticeably gone from the autopsy room, and I see water in the sink of station one—my station—and a big
sponge, the surgical instruments bright and shiny and neatly arranged on the dissecting board. I spot a mop that wasn’t here earlier, and a
whetstone on a counter-top.
“I’m amazed,” I say to her as I look around.
“Ollie,” she says, clicking the mouse. “I called him, and he drove back and spruced up the place.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s not that we haven’t tried while you were gone. Jack’s been using this work space, and we’ve learned to stay away.”
“How can there be metal that didn’t show up on CT?” Benton watches her scroll through files she created at the neuroimaging lab, looking for
the images she wants from the MRI.
“If it’s really small,” I explain to him how it’s possible. “A threshold size of less than point-five millimeters and I wouldn’t expect it to be detected
on CT. That’s why we wanted to rule out the possibility by using MR, and apparently it’s a good thing.”
“Although maybe not if he was alive,” Anne says, clicking on a file. “You don’t want something ferromagnetic in a living person, because it’s
going to torque. It’s going to move. Like metal shavings in the eyes of people involved in professions that expose them to something like that. They
may not even know it until they get an MRI. Then they know it; boy, do they ever. Or if they have body piercings they don’t tell us about, and we’ve
seen that enough times,” she says to Benton. “Or, God forbid, a pacemaker. Metal moves, and it heats up.”
“Theories?” I ask her, because I can’t imagine an event or a weapon that could create what has just filled the video display.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answers as we study high-resolution images of the dead man’s internal damage, a dark distorted area
of signal voids that starts just inside the buttonhole wound and becomes increasingly less pronounced the deeper the penetration inside the organs
and soft tissue structures of the chest.
“Because of the magnetic field, even with what must be particles incredibly minute, you’re going to get artifact. Right here,” I point out to
Benton. “These very dark and distorted areas where there’s no signal penetration. You get this blooming artifact along the wound track, what’s left
of the wound track, because the signal’s been blown out by metal. He’s got some sort of ferromagnetic foreign bodies inside him, all right.”
“What could do that?” Benton asks.
“I’m going to have to recover some of it, analyze it.” I think of what Lucy said about thermite. It would be ferromagnetic just as bullets are, both
metal composites having iron oxide in common.
“Point-five? The size of dust?” Benton’s eyes are distracted by other thoughts.
“A little bigger,” Anne replies.
“About the size of gunshot residue, grains of unburned powder,” I add.
“A projectile like a bullet could be reduced to frag no bigger than grains of gunshot powder,” Benton considers, and I can tell he is connecting
what I’m saying with something else, and I think of my niece and wonder exactly what she said to him while they were together in her lab this
morning. I think of shark bang sticks and nanoexplosives, but there are no thermal injuries, no burns. It wouldn’t make sense.
“No projectile I’ve ever seen,” Anne says, and I agree. “Do we know anything more about who he might be?” She means the body on the table.
“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”
“Hopefully soon,” Benton replies.
“It sounds like you might have an idea,” Anne says to him.
“Our first clue was he showed up at Norton’s Woods at the same time Dr. Saltz was inside the building, and that was something to check
because of certain interests these two individuals would have in common.” He means robots, I suspect.
“I don’t think I know who that is,” Anne says to him.
“A scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is an expatriate,” Benton says, and as I observe him with Anne I’m reminded they are colleagues and
friends, that he treats her with an easy familiarity, with trust that he doesn’t exhibit around most people. “And if he”—Benton indicates the dead man
—”knew Dr. Saltz was coming to Cambridge, the question was how.”
“Do we know if he knew that?” I ask.
“Right now we don’t for a fact.”
“So Dr. Saltz was at the wedding. But this one wasn’t dressed for a wedding.” Anne indicates the nude dead body on the table. “He had his
dog with him. And a gun.”
“What I know so far is the bride is a daughter from a different marriage,” Benton says as if this detail has been carefully checked. “The
daughter’s father, who was supposed to give her away, got sick. So she asked her stepfather, Dr. Saltz, at the last minute, and he couldn’t
physically be in two places at once. He flew into Boston on Saturday and made his appearance at Whitehall via satellite. A sacrifice on his part. The
last thing he felt like doing, I’m sure, was to reenter the US and show up at Cambridge.”
“The undercover agents?” I ask. “For him? If so, why? I know he has enemies, but why would the FBI be offering protection to a civilian scientist
from the UK?”
“That’s the irony,” Benton says. “The security at the event wasn’t about him, was about those attending the wedding, most of them from the UK
because of the groom’s family. The groom is Russell Brown’s son, David. Both Liam Saltz’s stepdaughter Ruth and David attend Harvard Law,
which is one reason the wedding was here.”
Russell Brown. The shadow secretary of state for defense, whose speech I just read on the RUSI website.
“He shows up at an event like that and is armed,” I say as I move closer to the steel table. “A gun with the serial number eradicated?”
“Right. Why?” Benton asks. “To protect himself, or was he a potential assailant? Or to protect himself for a reason that’s unrelated to the
wedding and the people I’ve just mentioned.”
“Possibly top-secret technology he was involved in,” I offer. “Technology worth quite a lot of money,” I add. “Technology people might kill for.”
“And maybe did kill for,” Anne says as she looks at the dead young man.
“Hopefully, we’ll know soon,” Benton says.
I look at the dead man rigidly on his back, his curled fingers and the position of his arms, his legs, his hands, his head, exactly as they were
earlier, no matter how much he has been disturbed during transport and scans. Rigor mortis is complete, but he won’t resist me strenuously as I
examine him, because he’s thin. He doesn’t have much muscle fiber for calcium ions to have gotten trapped in after his neurotransmitters quit. I can
break him easily. I can bend him to my will.
“I’ve got to go,” Benton says to me. “I know you want to get this taken care of. I’ll need your help with something by the time you’re ready to get
away from here, and you’re not to get away on your own. Make sure she calls me,” he says to Anne as she labels test tubes and specimen
containers. “Call me or call Marino,” he adds. “Give us an hour advance notice.”
“Marino will be with you…?” I start to ask.
“We’re working on something. He’s already there.”
I no longer question what Benton is referring to when he says “we,” and he looks one more time at me, his eyes meeting mine with the intimacy
of a lingering touch, and he leaves the autopsy room. I hear the receding sound of his brisk footsteps along the hard tile corridor, then his voice and
another voice as he talks to someone, perhaps Ron. I can’t make out a word they are saying, but they sound serious and intense before silence
returns abruptly. I imagine Benton has left the receiving area, and on a video display I’m startled by him. Picked up by security cameras, he walks
through the bay as he zips up the shearling coat I gave him so long ago I don’t remember the year, only that it was in Aspen, where he used to have
a place.
I watch him on closed-circuit TV opening the side door that is next to the massive bay door, and then another camera picks him up outside my
building as he walks past his green SUV parked in my spot. He gets into a different SUV, dark and big with bright headlights that the snow slashes
through, the wipers sweeping side to side, and I can’t see who is driving. I watch the SUV in my snow-covered lot, backing up, moving forward, and
pausing as the big gate opens, and finally out of sight in the bitter weather at the empty hour of four a.m., with my husband in the passenger’s seat,
driven by someone, maybe his FBI friend Douglas, both of them headed to a destination that for some reason I’ve not been told about.
14
Inside the anteroom I prepare for battle the way I always do, suiting up in armor made of plastic and paper.
I never feel like a doctor, not even a surgeon, as I get ready to conduct a postmortem examination, and I suspect only people who deal with the
dead for a living can understand what I mean by that. During my medical-school residencies I was no different from other doctors, tending to the
sick and injured on wards and in emergency rooms, and I assisted in surgical procedures in the OR. So I know what it is to incise warm bodies that
have a blood pressure and something vital to lose. What I’m about to do couldn’t be more different from that, and the first time I inserted a scalpel
blade into cold, unfeeling flesh, made my first Y-incision on my first dead patient, I gave up something I’ve never gotten back.
I abandoned any notion that I might be godlike or heroic or gifted beyond other mortals. I rejected the fantasy that I could heal any creature,
