Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  “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  “Never made it into service and is obsolete if not silly now, replaced by biologically inspired legged robots that can carry heavy loads over rough or slippery terrain,” she says.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.

  “It’s not about trust. It’s about acknowledging limitations.” It’s an uncharacteristically charitable thing for Lucy to say. Usually, people are simply bad or useless and deserve whatever punishment she decides.

  She eases up on the collective and makes subtle adjustments with the cyclic, increasing our speed and making sure we don’t climb into the clouds. The night around us is impenetrably dark, and there are stretches where I can’t see lights on the ground, suggesting we are flying over trees. I enter the frequency for McGuire so we can monitor its airspace while keeping an eye on the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, the TCAS. It is showing no other aircraft anywhere. We might be the only ones flying tonight.

  “I don’t have the luxury to allow for limitations,” I tell my niece. “Meaning I probably made a mistake hiring Marino. I probably made a bigger one hiring Fielding.”

  “Not probably, and not the first time. Jack walked out on you in Watertown and went to Chicago, and you should have left him there.”

  “In all fairness, we lost our funding in Watertown. He knew the office was probably going to close, and it did.”

  “That’s not why he left.”

  I don’t respond, because she’s right. It isn’t why. Fielding wanted to move to Chicago because his wife had been offered a job there. Two years later, he asked if he could come back. He said he missed working for me. He said he missed his family. Lucy, Marino, Benton, and me. One big, happy family.

  “It isn’t just them. You have a problem with everybody there,” Lucy then says.

  “So nobody should have been hired. Including you, I suppose.”

  “Probably not me, either. I’m not exactly a team player.” She was fired by the FBI, by ATF. I don’t think Lucy can be supervised by anybody, including me.

  “Well, this is a nice thing to come home to,” I reply.

  “That’s the danger with a prototype installation that no matter what anyone says is in fact both civilian and military, has both local and federal jurisdiction and also academic ties,” Lucy says. “You’re neither-nor. Staff members don’t exactly know how to act or aren’t capable of staying within boundaries, assuming anyone even understands the boundaries. I warned you about that a long time ago.”

  “I don’t remember you warning me. I just remember you pointing it out.”

  “Let’s enter the freq for Lakehurst and squawk VFR, because I’m ditching flight following,” she decides. “We get pushed any farther west and we’re going to have a crosswind that will slow us down more than twenty knots and we’ll be grounded for the night in Harrisburg or Allentown.”

  5

  Snowflakes are crazed like moths in landing lights and the wind of our blades as we set down on the wooden dolly. The skids tentatively touch, then spread heavily as the weight settles, and four sets of headlights begin to move toward us from the security gate near the FBO.

  The headlights move slowly across the ramp, illuminating snow that is falling fast, and I recognize the silhouette of Benton’s green Porsche SUV. I recognize the Suburban and the Range Rover, both of them black. I don’t know the fourth car, a sleek, dark sedan with a chrome mesh grille. Lucy and Marino must have driven here separately today and left their SUVs with the line crew, which makes sense. My niece always arrives at the airport well in advance of everyone else so she can get the helicopter ready, so she can check it from the pitot tube on its nose to the stinger on its tail boom. I haven’t seen her like this in a while, and as we wait the two minutes in flight idle before she finishes the shutdown, I try to remember the last time, pinpoint it exactly, in hopes of figuring out what’s happening. Because she isn’t telling me.

  She won’t unless it fits into her overall plan, and there is no getting information out of her when she’s not ready to offer it, which can be never in extreme situations. Lucy thrives on covert behavior, is far more comfortable being who she’s not than who she is, and that’s always been the case, going back to her earliest years. She feeds on the power of secrecy and is energized by the drama of risk, of real danger. The more threatening, the better. All she’s revealed to me so far is that an obsolete robot in the dead man’s apartment is a DARPA-funded packbot called MORT that at one time was intended for mortuary operations in theater, in other words, body removal in war, a mechanical Grim Reaper. MORT was insensitive and inappropriate, and I fought it aggressively years ago, but the peculiarity of the dead man having such a thing in his apartment doesn’t explain Lucy’s behavior.

  When was it that she scared me so badly, not that it’s been only once, but the time I thought she might end up in prison? Seven or eight years ago, I decide, when she came back from Poland, where she was involved in a mission that had to do with Interpol, with special ops that to this day I’m unclear about. I’ll never know just how much she would tell me if I pushed hard enough, but I won’t. I’ve chosen to remain foggy about what she did over there. What I know is enough. It’s more than enough. I would never say that about Lucy’s feelings, health, or general well-being, because I care intensely about every molecule of her, but I can say it about some comp
lex and clandestine aspects of the way she has lived. For her own good and mine, there are details I will not ask about. There are stories I don’t want to be told.

  During the last hour of our flight here to Hanscom Field, she got increasingly preoccupied, impatient, and impossibly vigilant, and it is her vigilance that has a special caliber. That’s what I recognize. Vigilance is the weapon she draws when she feels threatened and goes into a certain mode I used to dread. In Oxford, Connecticut, where we stopped for fuel, she wouldn’t leave the helicopter unattended, not for a second. She supervised the fuel truck and made me stand guard in the cold while she trotted inside the FBO to pay because she didn’t trust Marino with guard duty, as she put it. She told me that when they had refueled in Wilmington, Delaware, earlier today en route to Dover, he was too busy on the phone to care about security or notice what was going on around them.

  She said she watched him through the window as he paced on the tarmac, talking and gesturing, no doubt swept up in telling Briggs about the man who allegedly was still alive when he was locked inside my cooler. Not once did Marino look at the helicopter, Lucy reported to me. He was oblivious when another pilot strolled over to check it out, squatting so he could inspect the FLIR, the Nightsun, and peering through Plexiglas into the cabins. It didn’t enter Marino’s mind that the doors were unlocked, as was the fuel cap, and of course there is no such thing as securing the cowling. One can get to the transmission, the engine, the gear boxes, the vital organs of a helicopter, by the simple release of latches.