People want the confession to be genuine, because they don’t want to think someone like that might still be loose. I wonder how the evaluation went
today, as I envision Benton’s black Porsche backing out of our driveway on the video clips I just watched. He was on his way to McLean to pick up
Johnny Donahue’s case file when a young man and a greyhound walked past our house. Several degrees of separation. The human web
connecting all of us, connecting everyone on earth.
“Let’s keep one-two-seven-point-three-five on Comm Two so we can monitor Philly,” Lucy is saying, “but I’m going to try to stay out of their
Class B. I think we can, unless this stuff pushes in any tighter from the coast.”
She indicates the green and yellow shapes on the satellite weather radar display that show precipitation moving closer, as if trying to bully us
northwest into the bright skyline of downtown Philadelphia, fly us into the high-rises.
“I’m fine,” she then says. “Sorry about him, because I can tell you’re pissed.” She points her thumb toward the back, meaning Marino. “What’d
he do besides be his usual self?”
“Were you listening when he talked to Briggs?”
“That was in Wilmington. I was busy paying for fuel.”
“He shouldn’t have called him.”
“Like telling Jet Ranger not to drool when I get out the bag of treats. It’s Pavlovian for Marino to shoot off his mouth to Briggs, to show off. Why
are you more surprised than usual?” Lucy asks as if she already knows the answer, as if she’s probing, looking for something.
“Maybe because it’s caused a worse problem than usual.” I tell her about Briggs wanting the body transported to Dover.
I tell her that the chief of the armed forces medical examiners has information he’s not sharing, or at least I suspect that he is withholding
something important from me. Probably because of Marino, I say. Because of what he’s managed to stir up by going over my head.
“I don’t think that’s all of it by a long shot,” Lucy says as her tail number is called out over the air.
She presses the radio switch on her cyclic and answers, and as she talks to flight following, I enter the next frequency. We hop-scotch from air
space to air space, the shapes on the weather radar mostly yellow now and bird-dogging us from the southeast, indicating heavy rains that at this
altitude will create hazardous conditions as supercooled water particles hit the leading edges of the rotor blades and freeze. I watch for moisture on
the Plexiglas windscreen and don’t see anything, not one drop, while I wonder what Lucy is referring to. What’s not it by a long shot?
“Did you notice what was in his apartment?” Lucy’s voice in my headset, and I assume she means the dead man and what I watched on the
video clips recorded by his headphones.
“You said that’s not all of it.” I go back to that first. “Tell me what you’re referring to.”
“I’m about to and didn’t want to bring it up in front of Marino. He didn’t notice, wouldn’t know what it was, anyway, and I didn’t point it out
because I wanted to talk to you and I’m not sure he should know about it, period.”
“Didn’t point out what?”
“My guess is Briggs didn’t need it pointed out,” Lucy goes on. “He had a lot more time to look at the video clips than you did, and he or
whoever else he’s showed them to would have recognized the metal contraption near the door, sort of looks like a six-legged creepy crawler
welded together with wires and composite pieces and parts, about the size of a stackable washer and dryer. Picked up by the camera for a second
when the man and Sock were on their way out to Norton’s Woods. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on you, of all people.”
“I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a crude metal sculpture.” Obviously, I missed a connection she’s made. A big one.
“A robot, and not just any robot,” Lucy informs me. “A prototype developed for the military, what was supposed to be a tactical packbot for the
troops in Iraq, and then another creative purpose was suggested that went over like the proverbial lead balloon.”
A glint of recognition, and an ominous feeling begins working its way up from my gut, tightening my chest, creating awareness, then a memory.
“This particular model didn’t last long,” she continues, and I think I know what she’s talking about.
MORT. Mortuary Operational Removal Transport. Good God.
“Never made it into service and is obsolete if not silly now, replaced by biologically inspired legged robots that can carry heavy loads over
rough or slippery terrain,” she says. “Like the quadruped called Big Dog that’s all over YouTube. Damn thing can carry hundreds of pounds all day
long in the worst conditions imaginable, jumps like a deer and regains its balance if it trips or slips or you kick it.”
“MORT,” I go ahead and say it. “Why would he have a packbot like MORT in his apartment? I think I’m misunderstanding something.”
“You ever see it in person back then, when you got into a debate about it on Capitol Hill? And you’re not misunderstanding anything. I’m talking
about MORT.”
“I never saw MORT in person.” I saw it on videotaped demonstrations only, and I got into more than one debate, especially with Briggs. “Why
would he have something like that?” I ask again about what Lucy claims is in the dead man’s apartment.
“Creepy as hell. Like a giant mechanical ant, gas-powered,” she says. “Sounds like a chain saw when it’s ambulating slowly on its short, clunky
legs with two sets of grippers in front like Edward Scissorhands. If you saw it coming at you, you’d run like hell or maybe lob a grenade at it.”
“But in his apartment? Why?” I remember demonstrations that I found horrifying, and heated discussions that became nasty skirmishes with
colleagues including Briggs at the AFME, at Walter Reed, and in the Russell Senate Office Building.
MORT. The epitome of wrongheaded automation that became the source of a controversy in military and medical intelligence. It wasn’t the
technology that was such a terrible idea, it was the suggestion of how it should be used. I remember a hot summer morning in Washington, the heat
rising off a sidewalk crowded with Boy Scouts touring the capital as Briggs and I argued. We were hot in our uniforms, frustrated and stressed, and
I remember walking past the White House, people everywhere, and wondering what would be next. What other inhumanities would be offered by
technology? And that was almost a decade ago, almost the Stone Age compared to now.
“I’m pretty sure—in fact, more than pretty sure—that’s what’s parked inside the guy’s apartment,” Lucy is saying. “And you don’t buy something
like that on eBay.”
“Maybe it’s a model,” I suggest. “A facsimile.”
“No way. When I zoomed in on it, I could see the composite parts in detail, some wear and tear on it from usage, probably from R-and-D on
hard terrain and it got scraped up a little. I could even see the fiber-optic connectors. MORT wasn’t wireless, which was just one of a number of
things wrong with it. Not like what they’re doing today with autonomous robots that have onboard computers and receive information through
sensors controlled by man-wearable units instead of lugging around a cumbersome Pelican case-based one. Like the military guys are doing so
their field-embedded operators are hands-free when they’re out with their robotic squads. This whole new thing with lightweight ruggedized
processors that you can wear in your vest, saying you’re operating an unmanned ground vehicle or the armed robots, the SWORDS unit, the
Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System. A robotic infantry armed with M-two-forty-nine light machine guns. Not something I’m
comfortable with, and I know how you feel about that.”
“I’m not sure that there are words for how I feel about it,” I reply.
“Three SWORDS units so far in Iraq, but they haven’t fired their weapons yet. Nobody’s sure how to get a robot to have that kind of judgment.
Artificial EQ. A rather daunting prospect but I’m sure not impossible.”
“Robots should be used for peacekeeping, surveillance, as pack mules.”
“That’s you but not everyone.”
“They should not make decisions about life and death,” I go on. “It would be like autopilot deciding whether we should fly through these clouds
rolling toward us.”
“Autopilot could if my helicopter had moisture and temperature sensors. Throw in force transducers and it will land all by itself as light as a
feather. Enough sensors and you don’t need me anymore. Climb in and push a button like the Jetsons. Sounds crazy, but the crazier, the better.
Just ask DARPA. You got any idea how much money DARPA invests in the Cambridge area?”
Lucy lowers the collective, losing altitude and bleeding off speed as another ghostly patch of clouds rolls toward us in the dark.
“Besides what it’s invested in the CFC?” she then says.
Her demeanor is different, even her face is different, and she’s no longer trying to hide what has come over her. I know this mood. I know it all
too well. It is an old mood I haven’t seen in a while, but I know it like I know the symptoms of a disease that has been in remission.
“Computers, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, the more off the wall, the better,” she continues. “Because there’s no such thing as
mad scientists anymore. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as science fiction. Come up with the most extreme invention you can imagine, and it’s
probably being implemented somewhere. It’s probably old news.”
“You’re suggesting this man who died in Norton’s Woods is connected to DARPA.”
“Somehow he is, in some capacity. Don’t know how directly or indirectly,” Lucy answers. “MORT isn’t being used anymore, not by the military,
not for any purpose, but was Star Wars stuff about eight or nine years ago when DARPA stepped up funding for military and intelligence-gathering
applications of robotics, bio and computer engineering. And forensics and other applications germane to our war dead, to what happens in
combat, in theater.”
It was DARPA that funded the research and development of the RadPath technology we use in virtual autopsies at Dover and now at the CFC.
DARPA funded my four-month fellowship that turned into six.
“A substantial percentage of research grants are going to Cambridge area labs, to Harvard and MIT,” Lucy says. “Remember when everything
became about the war?”
It’s getting harder to remember a time when that wasn’t true. War has become our national industry, like automotives and steel and the
railroads once were. That’s the dangerous world we live in. I don’t believe it can change.
“The brilliant idea that robots like MORT could be utilized in theater to recover casualties so troops didn’t risk their lives for a fallen comrade?”
Lucy reminds me.
Not a brilliant idea but an unfortunate one. A supremely stupid one, I thought at the time and still do. Briggs and I weren’t on the same side
about it. He’ll never give me credit for saving him from a PR misstep that could have injured him badly.
“The idea was aggressively researched for a while and then got tabled,” Lucy adds.
It got tabled because using robots for such a purpose supposes they can decide a fallen soldier, a human being, is fatally injured or dead.
“DoD got a lot of shit for it, at least internally, because it seemed cold-blooded and inhumane,” she says.
Deservedly. No one should die in the grippers of something mechanical dragging them off the battlefield or out of a crashed vehicle or from the
rubble of a building that has collapsed.
“What I’m getting at is the early generations of this technology have been buried by DoD, relegated to a classified scrap yard or salvaged for
pieces and parts,” Lucy says. “Yet your guy in the cooler has one in his apartment. Where’d he get it? He’s got a connection. He has drafting paper
on the coffee table. He’s an inventor, an engineer, something like that, and somehow involved in classified projects that require a high level of
security clearance, but he’s a civilian.”
“How can you be so sure he’s a civilian?”
“Believe me, I’m sure. He’s not experienced or trained, and he sure as hell isn’t military intel or a government agent or he wouldn’t walk around
listening to music turned up loud and armed with an expensive pistol that has the serial number ground off—in other words, he probably bought it on
the street. He’d have something that would never be traced to him or anyone, something you use once and toss….”
“We don’t know who the gun is traced to?” I want to make sure.
“Not that I know of, not yet, which is ridiculous. This guy isn’t undercover. Hell, no. I think what he is is scared,” Lucy says as if she knows it for a
fact. “Was,” she adds. “He was. And someone had him under surveillance—my belief, anyway—and now he’s dead. In my opinion, it’s not a
coincidence. I suggest you exercise extreme caution when talking to Marino.”
“Sometimes he has terrible judgment, but he’s not trying to do me in.”
“He’s also not medical intel like you are, and his understanding only goes so far as not discussing cases with his buddies at the bowling alley
and not talking to reporters. He thinks it’s perfectly fine to confide in people like Briggs, because he’s got no sense when it comes to military brass.”
Lucy’s demeanor is as uneasy and somber as I’ve seen her since I can’t remember when. “In a case like this one, you talk to me, you talk to
Benton.”
“Have you told Benton what you just told me?”
“I’ll let you explain about MORT, because he’s not likely to understand what it is. He wasn’t around when you went through all that with the
Pentagon. You tell him, and then all of us can talk. You, him, me, and that’s it, at least for now, because you don’t know who is what, and you damn
well better have your facts straight and know who’s us and who’s them.”
“If I can’t trust Marino with a case like this, or any case, for that matter, why do I have him?” Defensiveness sharpens my tone, because Marino
was her idea, too.
She encouraged me to hire him as CFC’s chief of operational investigations, and she talked him into it, too, although it wasn’t exactly a hard
sell. He’d never admit it, but he doesn’t want to be anywhere I’m not, and when he realized I was going to be in Cambridge, he suddenly got
disenchanted with the NYPD. He lost interest in Assistant DA Jaime Berger, whose office he was assigned to. He got into a feud with his landlord
in the Bronx. He started complaining about New York taxes, even though he’d been paying them for several years. He said it was intolerable having
no place to ride a motorcycle and no place to park a truck, even though he owned neither at the time. He said he had to move.
