"That bloody Book must be terribly important to someone," he mused.
I paused as he smoked again. Then I said, "Why didn't you tell me'? Why did you just run and never say a word?"
"Frankly, I didn't want you dragged into it as well. And it all sounded rather fantastic." He paused, and I could tell by his face he sensed other bad events had occurred since he had left Virginia. "Dr. Scarpetta, I'm not a young man.
I only want to peacefully do my job a little while longer before I retire."
I did not want to criticize him further because I understood what he had done. I frankly could not blame him and was glad he had fled, for he probably had saved his own life. Ironically, there had been nothing important he knew, and had he been murdered, it would have been for no cause, as Danny's murder was for no cause.
Then I told the truth as I pushed back images of a knee brace as bright red as blood spilled, and leaves and trash clinging to gory hair. I remembered Danny's brilliant smile and would never forget the small white bag he had carried out of the cafe on a hill, where a dog had barked half the night. In my mind, I would always see the sadness and fear in his eyes when he helped me with the murdered Ted Eddings, whom I now realized he had known. Together, the two young men had inadvertently led each other a step closer to their eventual violent deaths.
"Dear Lord. The poor boy," was all Mant could say.
He covered his eyes with a handkerchief, and when I left him, he was still crying.
WESLEY AND I FLEW BACK TO NEW YORK THAT NIGHT, and arrived early because tail winds were more than a hundred knots. We went through customs and got our bags, then the same shuttle met us at the curb and returned us to the private airport where the Learjet was waiting.
The weather had suddenly warmed and was threatening rain, and we flew between colossal black thunderheads lighting up with violent thoughts. The storm loudly cracked and flashed as we sped through what seemed the middle of a feud. I had been briefed a little as to the current state of affairs, and it had come as no surprise that the Bureau had established an outpost along with others set up by police and rescue crews.
Lucy, I was relieved to hear, had been brought in from the field, and was working again in the Engineering Re search Facility, or ERF, where she was safe. What Wesley did not tell me until we reached the Academy was that she had been deployed along with the rest of HRT and would not be at Quantico long.
"Out of the question," I said to him as if I were a mother refusing permission.
"I'm afraid you don't have a say in this," he replied.
He was helping me carry my bags through the Jefferson lobby, which was deserted this Saturday night. We waved to the young women at the registration desk as we continued arguing.
"For God's sake," I went on, "she's brand-new. You can't just throw her into the middle of a nuclear crisis."
"We're not throwing her into anything." He pushed open glass doors. "All we need are her technical skills.
She's not going to be doing any sniper-shooting or jumping out of planes."
"Where is she now?" I asked as we got on an elevator.
"Hopefully in bed."
"Oh." I looked at my watch. "I guess it is midnight. I thought it was tomorrow and I should be getting up."
"I know. I'm screwed up, too."
Our eyes met and I looked away. "I guess we're supposed to pretend nothing happened," I said with an edge to my voice, for there had been no discussion of what had gone on between us.
We walked out into the hall and he pressed a code into a digitalized keypad. A lock released and he opened another glass door.
"What good would it do to pretend?" he said, entering another code and opening another door.
"Just tell me what you want to do," I said.
We were inside the security suite where I usually stayed when work or danger kept me here overnight. He carried my bags into the bedroom as I drew draperies across the large window in the living room. The decor was comfortable but plain, and when Wesley did not respond, I remembered it probably was not safe to talk intimately in this place where I knew at the very least phones were monitored. I followed him back out into the hall and repeated my question.
"Be patient," he said, and he looked sad, or maybe he was just weary. "Look, Kay, I've got to go home. First thing in the morning we've got to do a surveillance by air with Marcia Gradecki and Senator Lord."
Gradecki was the United States attorney general, and Frank Lord was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an old friend.
"I'd like you along since overall you seem to know more of what's been going on than anyone else. Maybe you can explain to them the importance of the bible these wackos believe. That they'll kill for it. They'll die for it."
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "And we need to talk about how we're going to-God forbid-handle the contaminated dead should these goddamn assholes decide to blow up the reactors." He looked at me again. "All we can do is try," he said, and I knew he referred to more than the present crisis.
"That's what I'm doing, Benton," I said, and I walked back inside my suite.
I called the switchboard and asked them to ring Lucy's room, and when there was no answer, I knew what that meant. She was at ERF, and I could not call there because I did not know where in that building the size of a football field she might be. So I put on my coat and walked out of Jefferson because I could not steep until I saw my niece.
ERF had its own guard gate not far from the one at the entrance of the Academy, and most of the FBI police, by now, knew me pretty well. The guard on duty looked surprised when I appeared, and he walked outside to see what I wanted.
"I think my niece is working late," I began to explain.
"Yes, ma'am. I did see her go in earlier."
"is there any way you can contact her?"
"Hmmm." He frowned. "Might you have any idea what area she'd likely be in?"
"Maybe the computer room."
He tried that to no avail, then looked at me. "This is important."
"Yes, it is," I said with gratitude.
He raised his radio to his mouth.
"Unit forty-two to base," he said.
"Forty-two, come in."
"You ten-twenty-five me at ERF gate?"
"Ten-four."
We waited for the guard to arrive, and he occupied the booth while his partner let me inside the building. For a while we roamed long empty hallways, trying locked doors that led into machine shops and laboratories where my niece might be. After about fifteen minutes of this, we got lucky. He tried a door and it opened onto an expansive room that was a Santa's workshop of scientific activity.
Central to this was Lucy, who was wearing a data glove and head-mounted display connected to long thick black cables snaking over the floor.
"Will you be okay?" the guard asked me.
"Yes," I said. "Thank you so much."
Co-workers in lab coats and coveralls were busy with computers, interface devices and large video screens, and they all saw me walk in. But Lucy was blind. She really was not in this room but the one in the small CRTs covering her eyes as she conducted a virtual-reality walk through along a catwalk in what I suspected was the Old Point nuclear power plant.
"I'm going to zoom in now," she was saying as she pressed a button on top of the glove.
The area on the video screen suddenly got bigger as the figure that was Lucy stopped at steep grated stairs.
"Shit, I'm zooming out," she said impatiently. "No way this is going to work."
"I promise it can," said a young man monitoring a big black box. "But it's tricky."
She paused and made some other adjustment. "I don't know, Jim, is this really high-res data or is the problem me?"
"I think the problem's you."
"Maybe I'm getting cyber sick," my niece then said as she moved around inside what looked like conveyor belts and huge turbines that I could see on the video screen.