“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.