I understand how awful and wonderful it is to be overwhelmed by someone. Like a drug, it occurs to me. An addiction you desperately want to get over and desperately want to keep. Briggs will always have the same effect on me, I think. I won’t get over it in this life.
“And the self-replicating nanobot enables the sustained release of something like testosterone,” Briggs says, and I feel his energy, the intensity of him, and I’m aware of how close we are standing to each other, drawn to each other, just as we’ve always been and should never have been. “A drug like PCP couldn’t replicate, of course, so that would be a dead-end hit, would be repeated only as the subject repeats his or her nasal spray or injections or applies a new transdermal patch impregnated with biodegradable nanobots. But something your body naturally produces could be programmed to replicate, so the nanobot is replicating, flowing freely through the body, through your arteries, latching onto target areas, like the frontal cortex of your brain, without the need of a battery. Self-propelled and replicating.”
Briggs looks at me, and his eyes are hard but there is something in them that he’s always held for me, an attachment that is as constant as it is conflicted. I’m vividly reminded of who we were at Walter Reed, when our futures held mystery and limitless possibility, when he was older and profoundly formidable to me and I was a prodigy. He called me Major Prodigy, and then I returned from South Africa and went to Richmond and he didn’t call me at all, not for years. What we had with each other was complex and unfathomable, and I’m reminded all over again when I’m with him.
“We wouldn’t need wars anymore,” he says. “Not the sort of wars you and I know, Kay. We’re on the threshold of a new world where our old wars will seem easy and humane.”
“Jack Fielding wasn’t that kind of scientist,” I reply. “He didn’t manufacture those patches and probably would have been extremely resistant and unnerved, had someone attempted to entice him into using drugs delivered by nanobots. I would be stunned if he even knew what a nanobot is or would have a clue this was what he was letting loose in his system. He probably thought he was taking some new form of steroid, a designer steroid, something that would help him in his bodybuilding, help alleviate his chronic pain from decades of overuse, help him fight aging. He hated getting older. Getting old wasn’t an option to him.”
“Well, he won’t have to worry about it.”
No, he won’t, that’s for sure. What I say is, “I don’t accept that he killed himself because he didn’t want to get old. I haven’t accepted he killed himself, and have extreme doubts about it.”
“I understand you got an exposure to one of his patches,” Briggs then says, “and I’m sorry about that, but if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t know the rest of it. Kay Scarpetta high. Now, that’s quite a thought. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see that.”
Benton must have told him.
“This is what we’re up against, Kay,” Briggs says. “Our brave new world, what I call neuroterrorism, what the Pentagon is calling it, the big fear. Make us crazy and you win. Make us crazy enough and we’ll kill ourselves, saving the bad guys the trouble. In Afghanistan, give our troops opium, give them benzodiaze-pines, give them hallucinogenics, something to take the edge off their boredom, and then see what happens when they climb into their choppers and fighter jets and tanks and Humvees. See what happens when they come home addicts, come home deranged.”
“Otwahl,” I comment. “We’re developing weapons like this?”
“We aren’t. That’s not what DARPA’s paying all these millions for, dammit. But someone at Otwahl is, and we don’t think it’s just one. A cell of superbrains engaging in experiments not authorized or approved, and in fact as dangerous as it gets.”
“I assume you know who.”
“Damn kids,” he says, gazing out at the bright afternoon. “Seventeen, eighteen, with IQs off the charts and full of passion but nothing home up here.” He taps his forehead. “I don’t need to tell you about boys especially, their frontal lobes not done, half-baked like a cookie until they’re in their early to mid-twenties, and yet there they are, fucking around in nanotech labs or with superconductors and robotics and synthetic biology, you name it. Difficult enough we give them guns and throw them into stealth bombers, but we have rules,” he says in a hard tone. “We have structures, regimens, leadership, the strictest of supervision, but what the hell do you think goes on at a place like Otwahl where the objective isn’t national security and discipline but money and ambition? Those damn whiz kids like Johnny Donahue and his gang over there don’t know shit about Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq, for Christ’s sake. They’ve never set foot on a military base.”
“I don’t see Jack’s connection to it beyond his teaching martial arts to a few of them.” The sky is a spotless deep turquoise, and below it, the blue ocean heaves.
“He got tangled up with them, and my guess is unwittingly became a science project. You know all too well what goes on with research projects and clinical trials, only the type we’re familiar with are supervised and strictly monitored by human-study review boards. So where do you get volunteers if you’re an eighteen-year-old Harvard or MIT technical engineer at Otwahl? We can only guess that Jack made his contacts, likely through the gym, through tae kwon do. All of us are painfully aware of his lifelong problems with substance abuse, mainly steroids, so now someone is going to deliver the elixir of life, the fountain of youth, through pain-relieving patches. But he sure as hell didn’t get what he bargained for. Neither did Wally Jamison, Mark Bishop, or Eli Goldman.”
“Wally Jamison didn’t work at Otwahl.”
“For a while he dated someone who does. Dawn Kincaid, another one of the neuroterrorists over there.”
“Johnny Donahue’s best friend,” I say. “And where is she right now?” I ask. “It seems everyone you’ve mentioned is dead. Except her.” I feel an alarm going off inside me.
“Missing in action,” Briggs says. “Didn’t show up at Otwahl yesterday or today, supposedly is on vacation.”
“I’m sure.”
“Exactly. We’ll find her and get the rest of the story, because no question she’s going to be the one to tell it, since her expertise is nanoengineering, nanoscale chemical synthesis. Based on what we’ve learned, she’s likely the one developing these nasty little nanobots that found their way to Jack Fielding and turned him into a Mr. Hyde, to put it mildly.”
“Mr. Hyde,” I repeat. “The same thing Erica Donahue says happened to her son,” I point out. “Only I doubt Johnny killed anyone.”
“He didn’t kill that boy.”
“You’re convinced Jack did.”
“Out of control, sloppy,” Briggs says.
“And then he killed Eli.” My comment hangs in the air, and I wonder if it sounds as hollow to Briggs as it does to me. I wonder if he can hear how strongly I don’t believe it.
“You realize this is because of the damn swine flu.” He continues staring out at the day blazing beyond dusty old glass. “If the stepdaughter’s biological father hadn’t gotten sick, Liam Saltz wouldn’t have had the pleasure of giving her away at her wedding, and he wouldn’t have come to the US, to Cambridge, to Norton’s Woods, at the last minute. And Jack wouldn’t have had to stab Eli in the back with a damn injection knife.”
“To stop him from telling Dr. Saltz what you’re telling me.”
“We can’t ask Jack, unfortunately.”
“Maybe I could understand it if Eli was going to tell Dr. Saltz or someone that Jack was selling semen he was stealing from dead bodies. Maybe that would be a motive.”