Unsurprisingly, the speech is political, as is almost everything right now in Britain, which holds its general election in three months. Six hundred and fifty seats are being contested, and a major campaign issue is the more than ten thousand British troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Fielding isn’t military, has never paid much attention to foreign affairs or elections, and I don’t know why he would have the slightest interest in what is happening in the UK. I don’t recall that he’s ever even been to the UK. He’s not the sort to be interested in a general election over there or RUSI or any think tank, and knowing him as well as I do, I suspect he intended for me to find this file. He wanted me to see it after he pulled another one of his vanishing stunts. What is it he wants me to know?
Why is he interested in RUSI? And did he come across the speech himself on the Internet, or did someone send it to him? If it was sent to him, by whom? I consider asking Lucy to go into Fielding’s e-mail, but I’m not ready to be that heavy-handed, and I don’t want to be caught. I can lock the door, but my superuser deputy chief could still walk in, because I don’t have confidence that Ron or anyone else will keep Fielding in the security area if he shows up. I have no faith that Ron, who was unfriendly to me and seems to have little regard for me, will detain Fielding or try to get hold of me to ask for clearance. I don’t trust that my staff is loyal to me or feels safe with me or follows my orders, and Fielding could reappear at any moment.
That would be like him. To vanish without warning, then show up just as unexpectedly and catch me red-handed, sitting at his desk, going through his electronic files. It’s just one more thing he’ll use against me, and he’s used plenty against me over the years. What has he been doing behind my back? Let’s see what else I find, and then I’ll know what to do. I look at the time stamp again and imagine Fielding sitting in this very chair at eight-oh-three this morning, printing the speech while Lucy, Marino, Anne, and Ollie, while everybody, was in an uproar because of what was in the cooler downstairs.
How odd that Fielding would be up here in his office while that was going on, and I wonder if he even cared that a man might have been locked inside our refrigerator while still alive. Of course, Fielding would have to care. How could he not? If the worst had turned out to be true, he would be blamed. Ultimately, I would be the one all over the news and likely out of a job, but he would go down with me. Yet he was up here on the seventh floor, in his office and out of the fray, as if he already had his mind made up, and it occurs to me that his disappearance may be related to something else. I lean back in his chair and look around, my attention landing on the pad of call sheets and a ballpoint pen near his phone. I notice faint indentations on the top sheet of paper.
Turning on a lamp, I pick up the pad and hold it at various angles, trying to make out indented writing left like a footprint when someone wrote a note on a top sheet of paper that is no longer there. One thing about Fielding, he doesn’t have a light touch, not when he’s wielding a scalpel or typing on a keyboard or writing something by hand. For a devotee of martial arts, he is surprisingly rough, is easily frustrated and quick to flare up. He has a childish way of holding a pencil or pen with two fingers on top instead of one, as if he’s using chopsticks, and it’s not uncommon for him to break lead or nibs, and he’s hell on Magic Markers.
I don’t need ESDA or a Docustat or vacuum box or some other indented writing-recovery unit to detect what I can see the old-fashioned way in oblique lighting with my own eyes. Fielding’s barely legible scribble. What appears to be two separate notes. One is a phone number with a 508 area code and “MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.” Then a second one: “U of Sheffield today @ Whitehall. Over and out.” I look again, making sure I read the last three words correctly. Over and out. The end of a radio transmission, like Roger Wilco over and out but also a song performed by a heavy-metal band that Fielding used to play in his car all the time when he first came to Richmond. “Over and out / every dog has its day.” What he’d sing to me when he’d threaten to quit, when he’d had enough or when he was teasing, flirting, pretending to be fed up. Did he write over and out on a call sheet with me in mind or for some other reason?
I find a legal pad in a drawer and write what I’ve discovered indented on the pad of call sheets and begin doing the best I can to figure out what Fielding was up to and thinking about what it is he wants me to know. If I came in here to snoop, I was going to find the printout and the indented writing. He knows me. He would think that way, because he knows damn well how my mind works. The University of Sheffield is one of the top research institutions in the world, and Whitehall is where RUSI is headquartered, literally in the former Whitehall Palace, the original location of Scotland Yard.
Logging on to Intelliquest, a search engine Lucy created for the CFC, I type in RUSI and the date February 8 and Whitehall. What comes up is the title of a keynote address, Civilian-Military Collaboration, the lecture Fielding must be referring to that was delivered at RUSI at ten a.m. UK time, what is now yesterday morning for me. The speaker was Dr. Liam Saltz, the controversial Nobel laureate whose doomsday opinions about military technology make him a natural enemy of DARPA. I wasn’t aware he was on the faculty at the University of Sheffield. I thought he was at Berkeley. He used to be at Berkeley, and now he’s at Sheffield, I read on the Internet as I think, rather dazed, of the exhibit at the Courtauld in the summer before 9/11, where Lucy and I heard Dr. Saltz lecture. Not long after that, Dr. Saltz, like me, was a vocal critic of MORT.
I ponder the title of the lecture Dr. Saltz delivered not even twenty-four hours ago. Civilian-Military Collaboration. That certainly sounds tame for the rabble-rousing Dr. Saltz, who is as jolting as an air-raid siren in his warnings that America’s two-hundred-plus-billion-dollar allocation to future combat systems— specifically, unmanned vehicles—has put us on the road to ultimate annihilation. Robots might seem to make sense when you consider sending them into the battlefield, he rails, but what happens when they come home like used Jeeps and other military surplus? Eventually they will find their way into the civilian world, and what we’ll have is more policing and surveillance, more insensate machines doing the jobs of humans, only these machines will be armed and equipped with cameras and recording devices.
I’ve heard Dr. Saltz on the news, painting terrifying scenarios of “copbots” responding to crime scenes and unmanned “robo-cruisers” pursuing vehicles to write up occupants for traffic violations or hauling people in for outstanding warrants or, God forbid, getting a message from sensors to use force. Robots Tasering us. Robots shooting us to death. Robots that look like huge insects dragging our wounded and dead off a battlefield. Dr. Saltz testifying before the same Senate subcommittee I did but not at the same time. Both of us wreaking havoc for a technology company named Otwahl that I’d completely forgotten about until just hours ago.