“The question is what else they’re focused on. What are they focused on now that could have significance in all this?”
“I honestly can’t say, not for a fact. But you know the obvious just by looking at the place.” Were we to drive back toward Hanscom, we would pass within a mile of Otwahl Technologies and its adjoining superconducting test facility, a massive self-contained complex with its own private police force. “Neutron science, most likely, because of materials science and how it applies to new technologies.”
“Robotics,” Benton says.
“Robots, nanotechnology, software engineering, synthetic biology. Lucy knows something about it.”
“Probably more than something.”
“Knowing her, yes. A lot more than something.”
“They’re probably making damn humanoids so we never run out of soldiers.”
“They might be.” I’m not joking.
“And Briggs would know about the robot in this guy’s apartment.” Benton means the dead man’s apartment. “Because of video clips? What else about that? I wonder if he said something to Jack about it, called and alerted him by asking questions.”
I explain it further, giving a more detailed account of the man and the recordings Lucy discovered—recordings that Marino inappropriately e-mailed to Briggs before I had a chance to review them first, and when I did get a chance to see them, it was only superficially, en route to the Civil Air Terminal in Dover. I tell Benton all about the ill-fated six-legged robot, the Mortuary Operational Removal Transport, known as MORT, that is parked inside the apartment near the door, and I remind him of the controversies, of the disagreements I had with certain politicians and especially with Briggs over using a machine to recover casualties in theater or anywhere.
I describe the heartlessness, the horror, of a gas-powered metal construction that sounded like a chain saw lurching across the earth to recover wounded or dead human beings by grasping them in grippers that looked like the mandibles of a bull ant. “Think of the message it sends if you’re dying on the battlefield and this is what your comrades send for you,” I say to Benton. “What kind of message does it send to the victim’s loved ones if they see it on the news?”
“You used inflammatory language like that when you testified before a defense appropriations Senate subcommittee,” Benton assumes.
“I don’t remember what I said verbatim.”
“I’m sure you didn’t make any friends at Otwahl. You probably made enemies you have no idea about.”
“It wasn’t about Otwahl or any other technology company. All Otwahl did was create an unmanned robotic vehicle. It was people at the Pentagon that came up with its so-called useful purpose. I think originally MORT was supposed to be a packbot, nothing more. I didn’t even remember Otwahl was the company until tonight. They were never a preoccupation of mine. My disagreement was with the Pentagon, and I was going to stand my ground.” I almost say this time. But I catch myself. Benton doesn’t know about the time I didn’t stand my ground.
“Enemies who haven’t forgotten. Those kinds of enemies never forget. I’m sorry I wasn’t privy to all this when it was going on,” Benton says, because he wasn’t around when I was making enemies on Capitol Hill. He was in a protective witness program and not exactly in a position to give me advice or counsel or even assure me that he wasn’t dead. “You must have files on it, records from back then.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to take a look, get up to speed. It might explain a few things.”
“What things?”
“I’d like to look at what you have from back then,” Benton says. Transcripts from my testimony, video recordings of the segments aired on C-SPAN: What I have would be in my safe in our Cambridge basement—along with certain items I don’t want him to see. A thick gray accordion file and photographs I took with my own camera. Bloodstained squares of white cardboard improvised before the day of FTA DNA collection kits, because if blood is air-dried it can last forever, and I knew where technology was headed. Plain white envelopes with fingernail cuttings and pubic combings and head hair. Oral, anal, and vaginal swabs, and cut and torn bloody underpants. An empty Chablis bottle, a beer can. Materials I smuggled from a dark continent half a world away more than two decades ago, evidence I shouldn’t have had, items I shouldn’t have had privately tested, but I did. I seriously consider that if Benton was aware of the Cape Town cases, he might not feel the same about me.
“You know the old saying, revenge is best served cold,” he goes on. “You fucked a huge multimillion-dollar project, a joint venture between DoD and Otwahl Technologies, and stepped on toes, and although a number of years have passed, I suspect there are people out there who haven’t forgotten, even if you have. And now here you are, working with DoD in Otwahl’s backyard. A perfect opportunity to calculate revenge, to pay you back.”
“Pay me back? A man dropping dead in Norton’s Woods is payback?”
“I just think we should know the cast of characters.”
Then we stop talking about it, because we have reached the girder bridge that connects Cambridge to Boston, the Mass Ave Bridge, or what the locals refer to as the Harvard Bridge or MIT Bridge, depending on their loyalties. Just ahead, my headquarters rises like a lighthouse, silo-shaped with a glass dome on top, seven stories sided in titanium and reinforced with steel. The first time Marino saw the CFC he decided it looked like a dum-dum bullet, and in the snowy dark, I suppose it does.
Turning off Memorial Drive, away from the river, we take the first left into the parking area, illuminated by solar security lights and surrounded by a black PVC-coated fence that can’t be climbed or cut. I dig a remote control out of my bag and push a button to open the tall gate, and we drive over tire tracks that are almost completely covered in fresh white powder. Anne and Ollie’s cars are here, parked near the CFC’s all-wheel-drive cargo vans and SUVs, and I notice one is missing, one of the SUVs. There should be four, but one of them is gone and has been since before it began to snow, probably the on-call medicolegal investigator.
I wonder who is on duty tonight and why that person is out in one of our vehicles. At a scene, or is the person at home, and I look around as if I’ve never been here before. Above the fence on two sides are lab buildings that belong to MIT, glass and brick, with antennas and radar dishes on the roofs, the windows dark except for a random few glowing dimly, as if someone left a desk light or a lamp on. Snow streaks the night and is loud like a brittle rain as Benton pulls close to my building, into the space designated for the director, next to Fielding’s spot, which is empty and smooth with snow.
“We could put it in the bay,” Benton says hopefully.
“That would be a little spoiled, since no one else can,” I reply. “And it’s unauthorized, anyway. For pickups and deliveries only.”
“Dover’s worn off on you. Am I going to have to salute?”
“Only at home.”
We climb out, and the snow is up to the ankles of my boots and doesn’t pack under them because it is too cold, the flakes tiny and icy. I enter a code in a keypad next to a shut bay door that begins to retract loudly as Marino and Lucy drive into the lot. The receiving bay looks like a small hangar sealed with white epoxy paint, and mounted in the ceiling is a monorail crane, a motorized lifter for moving bodies too large for manual handling. There is a ramp inside leading to a metal door, and parked off to the side is our white van-body truck, what at Dover we refer to as a bread truck, designed to transport up to six bodies on stretchers or in transfer cases and to serve as a mobile crime scene lab when needed.