But I have to remind myself that there are many things in life that make sense to the people who are doing them while the rest of us never figure it out. Even when we’re told why, the explanation often doesn’t fit with any template that has rhyme or reason. I pause before a casement window, not quite ready to leave this room and enter the next one, where I can hear Briggs walking around in his desert boots. He is talking to someone on his phone, and I pull out mine to check my text messages and see that there is one from Bryce.
Can U call Evelyn!?
I try her in the trace evidence lab and another microscopist answers, a young scientist named Matthew.
“You anywhere near a computer?” Matthew’s voice, confident and tense with excitement. “Evelyn’s just down the hall in the ladies’ room, but we want to send you something totally weird, and I keep thinking it’s a mistake or like the weirdest contamination ever. You know a hair is about eighty thousand nanometers, right? So imagine something four nanometers, in other words, a hair would be twenty thousand times the diameter of what we found. And it’s not organic, even though the elemental fingerprint is mostly pure carbon, but we’ve also detected trace residues of what appears to be phencyclidine….”
“You found PCP?” I interrupt his breathless talk.
“PCP, angel dust, a really trace amount, just a miniscule amount. Using FTIR. At a magnification of one hundred, just plain ol’ light microscopy, and you can see the granules and a lot of other microscopic debris, especially cotton fibers, on the backing of the pain-relieving patch, okay? Probably some of these granular structures are PCP, maybe Nuprin, Motrin, too, whatever the patch originally was, possibly other chemicals there.”
“Matthew, slow down.”
“Well, at one hundred and fifty thousand X with SEM you’ll see what I’m talking about as big as a bread box, Dr. Scarpetta, what we want to send you.”
“Go ahead, and if nothing else, I’ll go out to the truck and log in. Send PDFs, though, and I’ll try on my iPhone. What are you talking about, exactly?”
“Sort of like buckyballs, like a dumbbell made out of bucky-balls but with legs. It’s definitely manmade, about the size of a strand of DNA, like I said, four nanometers and pure carbon, except for whatever it was meant to deliver. And also traces of polyethylene glycol that we’re conjecturing was the outer coating for what was meant to be delivered.”
“Explain the meant-to-deliver part. Something built on nanoscale to deliver a trace amount of PCP or what?”
“This isn’t my area, obviously, and we don’t have an AFM, an atomic force microscope, here, hint, hint. Because I’d say we’ve just entered a new day where we have to start looking for things like this, things you might need to magnify millions of times. And in my opinion, something like an AFM would have to have been used to assemble this, do the nanoassembly, to manipulate the nanotubes, the nanoparticles, while you’re trying to get them to stick together, using a nanoprobe or whatever. Well, we could probably handle a lot of this with SEM, but an AFM would be a good idea if this is what’s headed down the pike and about to slam into us head-on, Dr. Scarpetta.”
“You don’t know what you’ve found, but it’s a nanobot of some type, possibly, in your opinion, for the delivery of a drug or drugs? You found one on the film backing that was in the lab-coat pocket?” I don’t say whose lab coat.
“Just one admixed with the particulate and fibers and other debris because we didn’t analyze the entire piece of film, just the specimen we mounted on a stub. The rest of the plastic film’s at fingerprints right now, and then it’s going to DNA, then to GC-Mass-Spec,” Matthew says. “And it’s broken or degraded.”
“What is?”
“The nanobot. Or it looks broken, or maybe it’s deteriorating, like it was supposed to have eight legs but I’m seeing four on one side and two on the other. I’m e-mailing this to you now, a couple photographs we took so you can see it for yourself.”
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.