Port Mortuary (2010)

by Patricia Cornwell

  I’m able to pull up the images on my iPhone, and it is an inexplicable feeling to note the eerie symmetry, to have it enter my mind that the nanobot looks like a molecular version of a micro-mechanical fly. I can’t know if Lucy’s holy grail of flybots looks like this nanobot magnified thousands of times, but the artificial structure in the photographs is insectlike with its grayish bucky-ball elongated body. The delicate nanowire arms or legs that are still intact are bent at right angles with gripperlike appendages on the tips, possibly for grabbing onto the walls of cells or burrowing into blood vessels or organs, to find the target, in other words, and adhere to it while delivering medicine or perhaps illegal drugs destined for certain brain receptors.

  No wonder Johnny Donahue’s drug screen was negative, it occurs to me. If nanobots were added to his sublingual allergy exacts or, better yet, to his corticosteroid nasal spray, the drugs might have been below the level of detection. More astonishingly, the drugs may not have penetrated the blood-brain barrier at all, but would have been programmed to bind to receptors in the frontal cortex. If the drugs never entered the bloodstream, they wouldn’t have been excreted in urine. They wouldn’t have ended up in hair, and that’s the point of nanotechnology’s use in medicine, to treat diseases and disorders with drugs that aren’t systemic and therefore are less harmful. As is true with everything else, whatever can be used for good most assuredly will be used for evil.

  Fielding’s living room is bare floors and walls, and stacked almost to the ceiling are dusty brown boxes, all the same size, with the moving company Gentle Giant’s logo on the sides, scores of cartons in cubed piles as if they’ve never been touched since they were carried in here.

  In the midst of this cardboard bunker Briggs sits, reminding me of a Matthew Brady photograph of a Civil War general, in his muted sandy-green fatigues and boots, a Mac notebook in his lap, his broad-shouldered back straight against the straight-back chair. I decide it would be like him to sit and make me stand, to choreograph our conversation so I feel small and subservient to him, but he gets up, and I tell him no, thank you. I’ll stand. So both of us do, moving to a window, where he places his laptop on a sill.

  “I find it interesting he has a wireless network in here,” Briggs says right off, looking out at the view of the ocean and the rocks across the icy street that is covered with tan sand. “With all you’ve seen in here, would you expect him to have wireless?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t the only person in here.”

  “Maybe.”

  “At least you’ll entertain the possibility. That’s more than anybody else seems to be doing.” I place my iPhone on the window-sill so he can see what is in the small display, and he looks at it, and then he looks away.

  “Imagine two types of nanobots,” he says, as if he’s talking to someone on the other side of the wavy old window, as if his attention is out there in the sunlight and sparkling water and not with the woman standing next to him, a woman who always feels young and insecure with him, no matter her age or who she grew up to become.

  “A nanobot that is biodegradable,” he says, “that vanishes at some point after delivering a minute dose of a psychoactive drug, and then a second type of nanobot that self-replicates.”

  I always feel like someone else with Briggs, someone other than myself, and as I stand next to him, our sleeves touching and feeling his heat, I think of the wonderful and the terrible ways he has shaped me.

  “The self-replicating one is what worries us most. Imagine if you got something like that inside you,” he says, and what’s inside me is the irresistible force that is General John Briggs, and I understand what Fielding felt and how much he must have revered and resented me.

  I understand how awful and wonderful it is to be overwhelmed by someone. Like a drug, it occurs to me. An addiction you desperately want to get over and desperately want to keep. Briggs will always have the same effect on me, I think. I won’t get over it in this life.

  “And the self-replicating nanobot enables the sustained release of something like testosterone,” Briggs says, and I feel his energy, the intensity of him, and I’m aware of how close we are standing to each other, drawn to each other, just as we’ve always been and should never have been. “A drug like PCP couldn’t replicate, of course, so that would be a dead-end hit, would be repeated only as the subject repeats his or her nasal spray or injections or applies a new transdermal patch impregnated with biodegradable nanobots. But something your body naturally produces could be programmed to replicate, so the nanobot is replicating, flowing freely through the body, through your arteries, latching onto target areas, like the frontal cortex of your brain, without the need of a battery. Self-propelled and replicating.”

  Briggs looks at me, and his eyes are hard but there is something in them that he’s always held for me, an attachment that is as constant as it is conflicted. I’m vividly reminded of who we were at Walter Reed, when our futures held mystery and limitless possibility, when he was older and profoundly formidable to me and I was a prodigy. He called me Major Prodigy, and then I returned from South Africa and went to Richmond and he didn’t call me at all, not for years. What we had with each other was complex and unfathomable, and I’m reminded all over again when I’m with him.

  “We wouldn’t need wars anymore,” he says. “Not the sort of wars you and I know, Kay. We’re on the threshold of a new world where our old wars will seem easy and humane.”

  “Jack Fielding wasn’t that kind of scientist,” I reply. “He didn’t manufacture those patches and probably would have been extremely resistant and unnerved, had someone attempted to entice him into using drugs delivered by nanobots. I would be stunned if he even knew what a nanobot is or would have a clue this was what he was letting loose in his system. He probably thought he was taking some new form of steroid, a designer steroid, something that would help him in his bodybuilding, help alleviate his chronic pain from decades of overuse, help him fight aging. He hated getting older. Getting old wasn’t an option to him.”

  “Well, he won’t have to worry about it.”

  No, he won’t, that’s for sure. What I say is, “I don’t accept that he killed himself because he didn’t want to get old. I haven’t accepted he killed himself, and have extreme doubts about it.”

  “I understand you got an exposure to one of his patches,” Briggs then says, “and I’m sorry about that, but if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t know the rest of it. Kay Scarpetta high. Now, that’s quite a thought. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see that.”

  Benton must have told him.

  “This is what we’re up against, Kay,” Briggs says. “Our brave new world, what I call neuroterrorism, what the Pentagon is calling it, the big fear. Make us crazy and you win. Make us crazy enough and we’ll kill ourselves, saving the bad guys the trouble. In Afghanistan, give our troops opium, give them benzodiaze-pines, give them hallucinogenics, something to take the edge off their boredom, and then see what happens when they climb into their choppers and fighter jets and tanks and Humvees. See what happens when they come home addicts, come home deranged.”

  “Otwahl,” I comment. “We’re developing weapons like this?”

  “We aren’t. That’s not what DARPA’s paying all these millions for, dammit. But someone at Otwahl is, and we don’t think it’s just one. A cell of superbrains engaging in experiments not authorized or approved, and in fact as dangerous as it gets.”

  “I assume you know who.”

  “Damn kids,” he says, gazing out at the bright afternoon. “Seventeen, eighteen, with IQs off the charts and full of passion but nothing home up here.” He taps his forehead. “I don’t need to tell you about boys especially, their frontal lobes not done, half-baked like a cookie until they’re in their early to mid-twenties, and yet there they are, fucking around in nanotech labs or with superconductors and robotics and synthetic biology, you name it. Difficult enough we give them guns and throw them into stealth bombers, but we have rules,” he
says in a hard tone. “We have structures, regimens, leadership, the strictest of supervision, but what the hell do you think goes on at a place like Otwahl where the objective isn’t national security and discipline but money and ambition? Those damn whiz kids like Johnny Donahue and his gang over there don’t know shit about Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq, for Christ’s sake. They’ve never set foot on a military base.”

  “I don’t see Jack’s connection to it beyond his teaching martial arts to a few of them.” The sky is a spotless deep turquoise, and below it, the blue ocean heaves.

  “He got tangled up with them, and my guess is unwittingly became a science project. You know all too well what goes on with research projects and clinical trials, only the type we’re familiar with are supervised and strictly monitored by human-study review boards. So where do you get volunteers if you’re an eighteen-year-old Harvard or MIT technical engineer at Otwahl? We can only guess that Jack made his contacts, likely through the gym, through tae kwon do. All of us are painfully aware of his lifelong problems with substance abuse, mainly steroids, so now someone is going to deliver the elixir of life, the fountain of youth, through pain-relieving patches. But he sure as hell didn’t get what he bargained for. Neither did Wally Jamison, Mark Bishop, or Eli Goldman.”

  “Wally Jamison didn’t work at Otwahl.”

  “For a while he dated someone who does. Dawn Kincaid, another one of the neuroterrorists over there.”

  “Johnny Donahue’s best friend,” I say. “And where is she right now?” I ask. “It seems everyone you’ve mentioned is dead. Except her.” I feel an alarm going off inside me.

  “Missing in action,” Briggs says. “Didn’t show up at Otwahl yesterday or today, supposedly is on vacation.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Exactly. We’ll find her and get the rest of the story, because no question she’s going to be the one to tell it, since her expertise is nanoengineering, nanoscale chemical synthesis. Based on what we’ve learned, she’s likely the one developing these nasty little nanobots that found their way to Jack Fielding and turned him into a Mr. Hyde, to put it mildly.”

  “Mr. Hyde,” I repeat. “The same thing Erica Donahue says happened to her son,” I point out. “Only I doubt Johnny killed anyone.”

  “He didn’t kill that boy.”

  “You’re convinced Jack did.”

  “Out of control, sloppy,” Briggs says.

  “And then he killed Eli.” My comment hangs in the air, and I wonder if it sounds as hollow to Briggs as it does to me. I wonder if he can hear how strongly I don’t believe it.

  “You realize this is because of the damn swine flu.” He continues staring out at the day blazing beyond dusty old glass. “If the stepdaughter’s biological father hadn’t gotten sick, Liam Saltz wouldn’t have had the pleasure of giving her away at her wedding, and he wouldn’t have come to the US, to Cambridge, to Norton’s Woods, at the last minute. And Jack wouldn’t have had to stab Eli in the back with a damn injection knife.”

  “To stop him from telling Dr. Saltz what you’re telling me.”

  “We can’t ask Jack, unfortunately.”

  “Maybe I could understand it if Eli was going to tell Dr. Saltz or someone that Jack was selling semen he was stealing from dead bodies. Maybe that would be a motive.”

  “We don’t know what Eli knew. But he likely was aware of Jack and his drugs, obviously was well enough acquainted with him to have one of his guns. That must have been a bad feeling when Jack found out from the Cambridge police that the dead man had a Glock on him with an eradicated serial number.”

  “Sounds like Marino’s filled you in. Told you all this as if it’s an irrefutable case history. And it’s not. It’s a theory. We don’t have tangible evidence that Jack killed anyone.”

  “He knew he was in trouble. That much I think is safe to say,” Briggs replies.

  “As much as anything is safe to say. I agree he wouldn’t have removed the Glock from the lab, had he not feared he had a problem. My question is whether he was covering for himself or for someone else.”

  “He knew damn well we’d restore the serial number, that we’d trace the pistol to him.”

  “‘We,’” I reply. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot of late.”

  “I know how you feel about it.” Briggs plants his hands on the windowsill and leans forward, as if his lower back aches. “You think I’m trying to take something away from you. You believe it.” He smiles grimly. “Captain Avallone came here last fall.”

  “Someone that junior? So it wouldn’t raise suspicions?”

  “Exactly, to appear casual, an informal drop-in while she was on her way somewhere else. When the fact is we were hearing things we didn’t like about how your second in command was running the CFC. And I don’t need to tell you we have a vested interest. The AFME does, DoD does, a lot of people do. It isn’t yours to ruin.”

  “It isn’t mine at all,” I answer. “Obviously, I did a terrible job before I even started—”

  “You haven’t done a terrible job,” he cuts me off. “I’m just as much to blame. You picked Jack or, better put, gave in to his wish to come back, and I didn’t get in your way, and I sure as hell should have. I didn’t want to step on you, and I should have stepped all over you about that decision you made. I figured in four months you’d be home, and I honestly didn’t imagine the havoc that man could cause in such a short period of time, but he was mixed up with the Otwahl Laboratory Rat Pack, doing drugs and losing it.”

  “Is that why you delayed my leaving Dover? So you could find time to replace the leadership at the CFC? Find time to replace me?” I say it as bravely as I can.

  “The opposite. To keep you out of it. I didn’t want you tarred by it. I delayed you as many times as I could without an out-and-out abduction, and then the father of the bride in London gets the damn swine flu, and a dead body starts bleeding. And your niece shows up in her chopper at Dover, and I tried to get you to stay by offering to transport the body to Dover, but you wouldn’t, and that was the end of it. And here we are again.”

  “Yes, again.”

  “We’ve been in our messes before. And we probably will again.”

  “You didn’t send Lucy to pick me up.”

  “I did not. And I don’t think she’s likely to take orders from me. Thank God she never thought about enlisting. Would end up in Leavenworth.”

  “You didn’t ask her to bug my office.”

  “A suggestion made in passing so we could know exactly what Jack was doing.”

  “Your making a suggestion in passing is like a cannibal offhandedly inviting someone to dinner,” I reply.

  “Quite an analogy.”

  “People pay attention to your suggestions, and you know it.”

  “Lucy pays attention if it suits her.”

  “What about Captain Avallone? Did she conspire with Jack, conspire against me?”

  “Never. I told you why she showed up last November for her tour. She’s quite loyal to you.”

  “So loyal that she told Jack about Cape Town.” I surprise myself by saying it out loud.

  “That never happened. Sophia knows nothing about Cape Town.”

  “Then how did Julia Gabriel know?”

  “When she was yelling at you? I see,” he says, as if I’ve just answered a question I didn’t know he’d asked. “I stopped outside your door to have a word with you and could hear you talking on the phone, could hear you were somewhat intensely involved. She talked to me, too. Talked to a number of people after getting word on the grapevine that we routinely extract semen at Dover, that every medical examiner office does this routinely, which is utter bullshit. We would never do such a thing unless it was absolutely proper and approved. She got this impression because Jack was covertly doing that at the CFC and had done so in the case of the man who got killed in a Boston taxicab on his wedding day. Someone connected to Mrs. Gabriel’s son. And I think you can understand how she got the
idea that her son Peter should get the same special treatment.”

  “She knows nothing about me personally. She didn’t mean it personally. You’re sure.”

  “Why would you believe these negative things about you personally?” he says.

  “I think you know why, John.”

  “No damn way she was referring to anything specific. She’s an angry, militant woman and was just venting when she called you the same names she called me, called several other people at Dover. Bigots. Racists. Nazis. Fascists. A lot of staff got christened a lot of ugly names that morning.”

  Briggs steps back away from the window and collects his laptop off the sill, his way of saying he has to go. He can’t have a conversation that lasts more than twenty minutes, and in fact the one we just had is lengthy for him and has tried his patience and gotten too close to too many things.

  “One favor you could do for me that would be greatly appreciated,” he says. “Please stop telling people I thought MORT was the best thing since sliced bread.”

  Benton, I think. I guess the two of them have gotten quite cozy.

  “Not so, but I understand your remembering it that way, and I’m sorry we butted heads about it,” Briggs goes on. “However, given a choice of a robot dragging a dead body off the battlefield and a living person risking his life and limb to do it? That’s what I call a Sophie’s choice. No good choice, only two bad ones. You weren’t right, and I wasn’t, either.”

  “Then we’ll leave it at that,” I answer. “Both of us made bad decisions.”

  “It’s not like we hadn’t made them before,” he mutters.

  He walks with me out of the sea captain’s house, passing through rooms I’ve already been in. Every space seems empty and depressing, as if there never was anybody home. It doesn’t feel that Fielding ever lived here, just parked himself as he worked demonically on his renovations and labored secretly in his cellar, and I just don’t know what drove him. Maybe it was money. He’d always wanted money and was never going to get it in our trade, and that bothered him about me, too. I do better than most. I plan well, and Benton has his inheritance, and then there is Lucy, who is obscenely rich from computer technologies she’s been selling since she was no older than the neuroterrorists Briggs just talked about. Thank God Lucy’s inventions are legal, as best I know.