“Supposedly, iron protects against malevolent spirits, and thus the explanation for Johnny using iron nails. That’s his explanation. And his story’s completely unoriginal; as you just pointed out, it was one of the theories all over the news the days before he confessed to the murder.” Benton pauses, then adds, “Your own office has suggested black magic as a motive, presumably because of the Salem connection.”
“It’s not our job to offer theories. Our job is to be impartial and objective, so I don’t know what you mean when you say we suggested such a thing.”
“I’m just telling you it’s been discussed.”
“With whom?” But I know.
“Jack’s always been a loose cannon. But he seems to have lost what little impulse control he had,” Benton says.
“I think we’ve established that Jack is a problem I can no longer attempt to solve. What project?” I go back to what Benton mentioned about Johnny Donahue’s female MIT friend. “And what’s Johnny’s major?”
“Computer science. Since early last summer, he was interning at Otwahl Technologies in Cambridge. As his mother pointed out, he’s unusually gifted in some areas….”
“Doing what? What was he doing there?” I envision the solid facade of precast rising up like the Hoover Dam not far from where we just drove past, the part of Cambridge where the SUV with xenon lights was following us before it vanished.
“Software engineering for UGVs and related technologies,” Benton says, as if it is no great matter because he doesn’t know what I do about UGVs.
Unmanned ground vehicles. Military robots like the prototype MORT in the dead man’s apartment.
“What’s going on here, Benton?” I say with feeling. “What in God’s name is going on?”
7
The storm has settled in, the wind much calmer now, and the snow is already several inches deep. Traffic is steady on Memorial Drive, the weather of little consequence to people used to New England winters.
The rooftops of MIT fraternity houses and playing fields are solid white on the left side of the road, and on the other side the snow drifts like smoke over the bike path and the boathouse and vanishes into the icy blackness of the Charles. Farther east, where the river empties into the harbor, the Boston skyline is ghostly rectangular shapes and smudges of light in the milky night, and there is no air traffic over Logan, not a single plane in sight.
“We should meet with Renaud as soon as possible—the sooner, the better.” Benton thinks Essex County District Attorney Paul Renaud should know that there may be something more to Johnny Donahue’s confession, that somehow the Harvard senior and a dead man in my cooler could be connected. “But if this involves DARPA?” Benton adds.
“Otwahl gets DARPA funding. But it isn’t DARPA, isn’t DoD. It’s civilian, an international private industry,” I reply. “But certainly it’s closely tied to government through substantial grants, tens of millions, maybe a lot more than that, since their rather clumsy invention of MORT.”
“The question is what else they’re focused on. What are they focused on now that could have significance in all this?”
“I honestly can’t say, not for a fact. But you know the obvious just by looking at the place.” Were we to drive back toward Hanscom, we would pass within a mile of Otwahl Technologies and its adjoining superconducting test facility, a massive self-contained complex with its own private police force. “Neutron science, most likely, because of materials science and how it applies to new technologies.”
“Robotics,” Benton says.
“Robots, nanotechnology, software engineering, synthetic biology. Lucy knows something about it.”
“Probably more than something.”
“Knowing her, yes. A lot more than something.”
“They’re probably making damn humanoids so we never run out of soldiers.”
“They might be.” I’m not joking.
“And Briggs would know about the robot in this guy’s apartment.” Benton means the dead man’s apartment. “Because of video clips? What else about that? I wonder if he said something to Jack about it, called and alerted him by asking questions.”
I explain it further, giving a more detailed account of the man and the recordings Lucy discovered—recordings that Marino inappropriately e-mailed to Briggs before I had a chance to review them first, and when I did get a chance to see them, it was only superficially, en route to the Civil Air Terminal in Dover. I tell Benton all about the ill-fated six-legged robot, the Mortuary Operational Removal Transport, known as MORT, that is parked inside the apartment near the door, and I remind him of the controversies, of the disagreements I had with certain politicians and especially with Briggs over using a machine to recover casualties in theater or anywhere.
I describe the heartlessness, the horror, of a gas-powered metal construction that sounded like a chain saw lurching across the earth to recover wounded or dead human beings by grasping them in grippers that looked like the mandibles of a bull ant. “Think of the message it sends if you’re dying on the battlefield and this is what your comrades send for you,” I say to Benton. “What kind of message does it send to the victim’s loved ones if they see it on the news?”
“You used inflammatory language like that when you testified before a defense appropriations Senate subcommittee,” Benton assumes.
“I don’t remember what I said verbatim.”
“I’m sure you didn’t make any friends at Otwahl. You probably made enemies you have no idea about.”
“It wasn’t about Otwahl or any other technology company. All Otwahl did was create an unmanned robotic vehicle. It was people at the Pentagon that came up with its so-called useful purpose. I think originally MORT was supposed to be a packbot, nothing more. I didn’t even remember Otwahl was the company until tonight. They were never a preoccupation of mine. My disagreement was with the Pentagon, and I was going to stand my ground.” I almost say
“Enemies who haven’t forgotten. Those kinds of enemies never forget. I’m sorry I wasn’t privy to all this when it was going on,” Benton says, because he wasn’t around when I was making enemies on Capitol Hill. He was in a protective witness program and not exactly in a position to give me advice or counsel or even assure me that he wasn’t dead. “You must have files on it, records from back then.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to take a look, get up to speed. It might explain a few things.”
“What things?”
“I’d like to look at what you have from back then,” Benton says. Transcripts from my testimony, video recordings of the segments aired on C-SPAN: What I have would be in my safe in our Cambridge basement—along with certain items I don’t want him to see. A thick gray accordion file and photographs I took with my own camera. Bloodstained squares of white cardboard improvised before the day of FTA DNA collection kits, because if blood is air-dried it can last forever, and I knew where technology was headed. Plain white envelopes with fingernail cuttings and pubic combings and head hair. Oral, anal, and vaginal swabs, and cut and torn bloody underpants. An empty Chablis bottle, a beer can. Materials I smuggled from a dark continent half a world away more than two decades ago, evidence I shouldn’t have had, items I shouldn’t have had privately tested, but I did. I seriously consider that if Benton was aware of the Cape Town cases, he might not feel the same about me.
“You know the old saying, revenge is best served cold,” he goes on. “You fucked a huge multimillion-dollar project, a joint venture between DoD and Otwahl Technologies, and stepped on toes, and although a number of years have passed, I suspect there are people out there who haven’t forgotten, even if you have. And now here you are, working with DoD in Otwahl’s backyard. A perfect opportunity to calculate revenge, to pay you back.”
“Pay me back? A man dropping dead in Norton’s Woods is payback?”
“I just think we should know the cast of characters.”
