black gloved hand and crushed against his coat collar.
“If someone has the data gloves and looked for the flybot before the snow started, is it really possible the person wouldn’t have found it?” I ask my niece.
“Sure it’s possible. Depends on a number of things. How badly damaged is it, for example. There was a lot of activity around the man after he went down. If the flybot was there on the ground, it could have been crushed or damaged further and rendered completely unresponsive. Or it could be under something or in a tree or a bush or anywhere out there.”
“I assume a robotic insect could be used as a weapon,” I suggest. “Since I don’t have a clue what caused this man’s internal injuries, I need to think about every possibility imaginable.”
“That’s the thing,” Lucy says. “These days, almost anything you can imagine is possible.”
“Did Benton tell you what we saw on CT?”
“I don’t see how a micromechanical insect could cause internal damage like that,” Lucy answers. “Unless the victim was somehow injected with a micro-explosive device.”
My niece and her phobias. Her obsession with explosives. Her acute distrust of government.
“And I sure as hell hope not,” she says. “Actually, we’d be talking about nanoexplosives if a flybot was involved.”
My niece and her theories about super-thermite, and I remember Jaime Berger’s comment the last time I saw her at Thanksgiving when all of us were in New York, having dinner in her penthouse apartment. “Love doesn’t conquer all,” Berger said. “It can’t possibly,” she said as she drank too much wine and spent a lot of time in the kitchen, arguing with Lucy about 9/11, about explosives used in demolitions, nanomaterials painted on infrastructures that would cause a horrendous destruction if impacted by large planes filled with fuel.
I have given up reasoning with my phobic, cynical niece, who is too smart for her own good and won’t listen. It doesn’t matter to her that there simply aren’t enough facts to support what has her convinced, only allegations about residues found in the dust right after the towers collapsed. Then, weeks later, more dust was collected and it showed the same residues of iron oxide and aluminum, a highly energetic nanocomposite that is used in making pyrotechnics and explosives. I admit there have been credible scientific journal articles written about it, but not enough of them, and they don’t begin to prove that our own government helped mastermind 9/11 as an excuse to start a war in the Middle East.
“I know how you feel about conspiracy theories,” Lucy says to me. “That’s a big difference between us. I’ve seen what the so-called good guys can do.”
She doesn’t know about South Africa. If she did, she would realize there isn’t a difference between the two of us. I know all too well what so-called good guys can do. But not 9/11. I won’t go that far, and I think of Jaime Berger and imagine how difficult it would be for the powerful and established Manhattan prosecutor to have Lucy as a partner. Love doesn’t conquer all. It really is true. Maybe Lucy’s paranoia about 9/11 and the country we live in has driven her back into a personal isolation that historically is never broken for long. I really thought Jaime was the one, that it would last. I now feel certain it hasn’t. I want to tell Lucy I’m sorry for that and I’m always here for her and will talk about anything she wants, even if it goes against my beliefs. Now is not the time.
“I think we need to consider that we might be dealing with some renegade scientist or maybe more than one of them up to no good,” Lucy then tells me. “That’s the big point I’m trying to make. And I mean serious no good, extreme no good, Aunt Kay.”
It relieves me to hear her call me Aunt Kay. I feel all is right with us when she calls me Aunt Kay, and she rarely does it anymore. I don’t remember the last time she has. When I’m her Aunt Kay I can almost ignore what Lucy Farinelli is, which is a genius who is marginally sociopathic, a diagnosis that Benton scoffs at, nicely but firmly. Being marginally sociopathic is like being marginally pregnant or marginally dead, he says. I love my niece more than my own life, but I’ve come to accept that when she is well behaved, it is an act of will or simply because it suits her. Morals have very little to do with it. It’s all about the end justifying the means.
I study her carefully, even though I won’t see what’s there. Her face never gives away information that could really hurt her.
I say to her, “I need to go ahead and ask you one thing.”
“You can ask more than one.” She smiles and doesn’t look capable of hurting anything or anyone unless you recognize the strength and agility in her calm hands and the rapid changes in her eyes as thoughts flash behind them like lightning.
“You aren’t involved in whatever this is.” I mean the small white box and the flybot wing inside it. I mean the dead man who is getting an MRI at McLean—someone we may have crossed paths with at a da Vinci exhibition in London months before 9/11, which Lucy incredibly believes was orchestrated from within our own government.
“Nope.” She says it simply and doesn’t flinch or look the slightest bit uncomfortable.
“Because you’re here now.” I remind her she works for the CFC, meaning she works for me, and I answer to the governor of Massachusetts, the Department of Defense, the White House. I answer to a lot of people, I tell her. “I can’t have—”
“Of course you can’t. I’m not going to get you into trouble.”
“It isn’t just you anymore—”
“No need to have this conversation,” she interrupts again, and her eyes blaze. They are so green they don’t look real. “Anyway, he doesn’t have thermal injury, right? No burns?”
“None that I can see so far. That’s correct,” I reply.
“Okay. So if someone poked him with a modified shark bang stick? You know, one of those speargun shafts with something like a shotgun cartridge attached to the tip? Only in this case, a tiny, tiny charge containing nanoexplosives?”
I push the power button to start my desktop computer. “It wouldn’t look like what I just saw. It would look like a contact gunshot wound minus the patterned abrasion made by the muzzle of a gun. Even if we’re talking about using nanoexplosives as opposed to some type of firearm ammunition on the tip of a shaft or something shaftlike, you’re right, you’d see thermal injury. There should be burns at the entrance and also to underlying tissue. I assume you’re implying something like a flybot could be used to deliver nanoexplosives. Is that what you fear this so-called renegade scientist or more than one of them might be doing?”
“Deliver. Detonate. Nanoexplosives, drugs, poisons. Like I said, let your imagination be the limit what a device like this might be capable of.”
“I need to take a look at the security footage that shows the body bag leaking.” As I look for files in my computer. “I’m not going to have to go see Ron for that, am I?”
Lucy comes around to my side of the desk and starts typing on my keyboard, entering her system administrator’s password that grants complete access to my kingdom.
“Easy as pie.” She taps a key to open a file.
“Nobody could get into my files without your knowing.”
“Not in cyberspace. But I can’t know if someone’s been in your physical space, especially since I’m not up here all the time, in fact, not even most of the time, because I work remotely when I can,” she says, but I’m not sure I believe she wouldn’t know.
In fact, I don’t believe it.
“But no way anyone has gotten into your password-protected files,” she says, and that I do believe. Lucy wouldn’t permit it. “You can monitor the security cameras from anywhere, by the way. Even from your iPhone if you want. All you need is access to the Internet. I found this earlier and saved it as a file. Five-forty-two p.m. That’s what time it was yesterday when this was captured by a closed-caption security camera in the receiving area.”
She clicks on play and turns up the volume, and I watch two attendants in winter coats pushing a stretcher bearing a black body bag along the lower level’s gray tile hallway.
Wheels click as they park the stretcher in front of the cooler, and now I can see Janelle, stocky with short brunette hair, tough-looking with a surprising number of tattoos, as best I recall. Someone Fielding found and hired.
Janelle opens the massive stainless-steel door, and I hear the rush of blowing air.
“Put it…” She points, and I notice she is wearing her coat, a dark jacket with
