glass breakers, and I said they had to. Unfortunately, one of the old wavy-glass windows original to the building didn’t survive the upgrade. So you’ve got a bit of a breeze in the garage at the moment. Did you know all this?”
“Benton’s been in charge.”
“Well, he’s been busy. You got the freq for Millville? I think one-two-three-point-six-five.”
I check the sectional and affirm the frequency and enter it into Comm 1. “How are you?” I try again.
I want to know what I’m coming home to in addition to a dead man awaiting me in the morgue cooler. Lucy won’t tell me how she is, and now she’s accusing Benton of being busy. When she says something like that, she doesn’t mean it literally. She’s very tense. She’s obsessively watching the instruments, the radar screens, and what’s outside the cockpit, as if she’s expecting to get into a dogfight or to be struck by lightning or to have a mechanical failure. I’m sensing something is off about her, or maybe I’m the one in a mood.
“He has a big case,” I add. “An especially bad one.”
We both know which one I mean. It’s been all over the news about Johnny Donahue, the patient at McLean, a Harvard student who last week confessed to murdering a six-year-old boy with a nail gun. Benton believes the confession is false, and the cops, the DA, are unhappy with him. People want the confession to be genuine, because they don’t want to think someone like that might still be loose. I wonder how the evaluation went today, as I envision Benton’s black Porsche backing out of our driveway on the video clips I just watched. He was on his way to McLean to pick up Johnny Donahue’s case file when a young man and a greyhound walked past our house. Several degrees of separation. The human web connecting all of us, connecting everyone on earth.
“Let’s keep one-two-seven-point-three-five on Comm Two so we can monitor Philly,” Lucy is saying, “but I’m going to try to stay out of their Class B. I think we can, unless this stuff pushes in any tighter from the coast.”
She indicates the green and yellow shapes on the satellite weather radar display that show precipitation moving closer, as if trying to bully us northwest into the bright skyline of downtown Philadelphia, fly us into the high-rises.
“I’m fine,” she then says. “Sorry about him, because I can tell you’re pissed.” She points her thumb toward the back, meaning Marino. “What’d he do besides be his usual self?”
“Were you listening when he talked to Briggs?”
“That was in Wilmington. I was busy paying for fuel.”
“He shouldn’t have called him.”
“Like telling Jet Ranger not to drool when I get out the bag of treats. It’s Pavlovian for Marino to shoot off his mouth to Briggs, to show off. Why are you more surprised than usual?” Lucy asks as if she already knows the answer, as if she’s probing, looking for something.
“Maybe because it’s caused a worse problem than usual.” I tell her about Briggs wanting the body transported to Dover.
I tell her that the chief of the armed forces medical examiners has information he’s not sharing, or at least I suspect that he is withholding something important from me. Probably because of Marino, I say. Because of what he’s managed to stir up by going over my head.
“I don’t think that’s all of it by a long shot,” Lucy says as her tail number is called out over the air.
She presses the radio switch on her cyclic and answers, and as she talks to flight following, I enter the next frequency. We hop-scotch from air space to air space, the shapes on the weather radar mostly yellow now and bird-dogging us from the southeast, indicating heavy rains that at this altitude will create hazardous conditions as supercooled water particles hit the leading edges of the rotor blades and freeze. I watch for moisture on the Plexiglas windscreen and don’t see anything, not one drop, while I wonder what Lucy is referring to. What’s not it by a long shot?
“Did you notice what was in his apartment?” Lucy’s voice in my headset, and I assume she means the dead man and what I watched on the video clips recorded by his headphones.
“You said that’s not all of it.” I go back to that first. “Tell me what you’re referring to.”
“I’m about to and didn’t want to bring it up in front of Marino. He didn’t notice, wouldn’t know what it was, anyway, and I didn’t point it out because I wanted to talk to you and I’m not sure he should know about it, period.”
“Didn’t point out what?”
“My guess is Briggs didn’t need it pointed out,” Lucy goes on. “He had a lot more time to look at the video clips than you did, and he or whoever else he’s showed them to would have recognized the metal contraption near the door, sort of looks like a six-legged creepy crawler welded together with wires and composite pieces and parts, about the size of a stackable washer and dryer. Picked up by the camera for a second when the man and Sock were on their way out to Norton’s Woods. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on you, of all people.”
“I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a crude metal sculpture.” Obviously, I missed a connection she’s made. A big one.
“A robot, and not just any robot,” Lucy informs me. “A prototype developed for the military, what was supposed to be a tactical packbot for the troops in Iraq, and then another creative purpose was suggested that went over like the proverbial lead balloon.”
A glint of recognition, and an ominous feeling begins working its way up from my gut, tightening my chest, creating awareness, then a memory.
“This particular model didn’t last long,” she continues, and I think I know what she’s talking about.
MORT. Mortuary Operational Removal Transport.
“Never made it into service and is obsolete if not silly now, replaced by biologically inspired legged robots that can carry heavy loads over rough or slippery terrain,” she says. “Like the quadruped called Big Dog that’s all over YouTube. Damn thing can carry hundreds of pounds all day long in the worst conditions imaginable, jumps like a deer and regains its balance if it trips or slips or you kick it.”
“MORT,” I go ahead and say it. “Why would he have a packbot like MORT in his apartment? I think I’m misunderstanding something.”
“You ever see it in person back then, when you got into a debate about it on Capitol Hill? And you’re not misunderstanding anything. I’m talking about MORT.”
“I never saw MORT in person.” I saw it on videotaped demonstrations only, and I got into more than one debate, especially with Briggs. “Why would he have something like that?” I ask again about what Lucy claims is in the dead man’s apartment.
“Creepy as hell. Like a giant mechanical ant, gas-powered,” she says. “Sounds like a chain saw when it’s ambulating slowly on its short, clunky legs with two sets of grippers in front like Edward Scissorhands. If you saw it coming at you, you’d run like hell or maybe lob a grenade at it.”
“But in his apartment? Why?” I remember demonstrations that I found horrifying, and heated discussions that became nasty skirmishes with colleagues including Briggs at the AFME, at Walter Reed, and in the Russell Senate Office Building.
MORT. The epitome of wrongheaded automation that became the source of a controversy in military and medical intelligence. It wasn’t the technology that was such a terrible idea, it was the suggestion of how it should be used. I remember a hot summer morning in Washington, the heat rising off a sidewalk crowded with Boy Scouts touring the capital as Briggs and I argued. We were hot in our uniforms, frustrated and stressed, and I remember walking past the White House, people everywhere, and wondering what would be next. What other inhumanities would be offered by technology? And that was almost a decade ago, almost the Stone Age compared to now.
“I’m pretty sure—in fact, more than pretty sure—that’s what’s parked inside the guy’s apartment,” Lucy is saying. “And you don’t buy something like that on eBay.”
“Maybe it’s a model,” I suggest. “A facsimile.”
“No way. When I zoomed in on it, I could see the composite parts in detail, some wear and tear on it from usage, probably from R-and-D on hard terrain and it got scraped up a little. I could even see the fiber-optic connectors. MORT wasn’t wireless, which was just one of a number of things wrong with it. Not like what they’re doing today with autonomous robots that have onboard computers and receive information through sensors controlled by man-wearable units instead of lugging around a cumbersome Pelican case-based one. Like the military guys are doing so their field-embedded operators are hands-free when they’re out with their robotic squads. This whole new thing with lightweight ruggedized processors that you can wear in your vest, saying you’re operating an unmanned ground vehicle or the armed robots, the SWORDS unit, the Special Weapons Observation Remote
