around him when he collapsed. There was no reason he was of interest, and the agents maintained their posts. They had to. In case it was some diversionary maneuver. You always maintain your post when you’re on a protective detail; with rare exception, you don’t divert.”
I focus on the discomfort in the center of my chest and my shortness of breath. I’m sweating and light- headed, but there’s no pain in my arms. No pain in my back. No pain in my jaw. No, radiating pain and heart attacks don’t cause altered thinking, and I look at my hands. I hold them in front of me as if I can see what’s on them.
“When you saw Jack last week, did he smell like menthol?” I ask, and then I say, “Where is he? What exactly has he done?”
“What about menthol?”
“Extra-strength Nuprin patches, Bengay patches, something like that.” I get up from Fielding’s desk. “If he’s wearing them all the time and reeks of eucalyptus, of menthol, it’s usually an indication he’s abusing himself physically, tearing the hell out of himself physically in the gym, in his tae kwon do tournaments, has chronic and acute muscle and joint pain. Steroids. When Jack’s on steroids, well… That’s always been the prelude to other things.”
“Based on what I saw last week, he’s on something.”
I’m already taking off Fielding’s lab coat. I fold it into a neat square and place it on top of his desk.
“Is there a place you can lie down?” Benton says. “I think you should lie down. The on-call room downstairs. There’s a bed. I can’t take you home. You can’t be there right now. I don’t want you going out of this building, not without me.”
“I don’t need to lie down. Lying down won’t help. It will make it worse.” I walk into Fielding’s bathroom and snatch a trash basket liner from a box under the sink.
Benton is on his feet, watching what I’m doing, keeping an eye on me as I tuck the folded lab coat inside the liner and return to the bathroom. I scrub my hands and face with soap and hot water. I wash any area of skin that might have come into contact with the plastic film I found in Fielding’s lab coat pocket.
“Drugs,” I announce when I sit back down.
Benton returns to his chair, tensely, as if he might spring up again.
“Something transdermal that certainly isn’t Nuprin or Motrin. Don’t know what, but I will find out,” I let him know.
“The piece of plastic you were touching.”
“Unless you poisoned my coffee.”
“Maybe a nicotine patch.”
“You wouldn’t poison me, would you? If you don’t want to be married anymore, there are simpler solutions.”
“I don’t see why he’d be on nicotine unless as a stimulant? I guess so. Something like that.”
“It’s not something like that. I used to live off nicotine patches and never felt like this, not even when I would light up while I still had a twenty-one-milligram patch on. A true addict. That’s me. But not drugs, not whatever this is. What has he done?”
Benton stares at his coffee mug, tracing the AFME crest on the black glazed ceramic. His silence confirms what I suspect. Whatever Fielding is involved in, it’s connected to everything else: to me, to Benton, to Briggs, to a dead football player, to a dead little boy, to the man from Norton’s Woods, to dead soldiers from Great Britain and Worcester. Like planes lit up at night, connected to a tower, connected in a pattern, at times seeming at a standstill in the dark air but having been somewhere and going somewhere, individual forces that are part of something bigger, something incomprehensibly huge.
“You need to trust me,” Benton says quietly.
“Has Briggs been in contact with you?”
“Some things have been going on for a while. Are you all right? I don’t want to go before I know you are.”
“This is what I’ve trained for, made so many sacrifices for.” I decide to accept it. Acceptance makes it easier for me to know what to do. “Six months of being away from you, of being away from everyone, of giving up everything so I could come home to something that’s been going on for a while. An agenda.”
I almost add
I see them on dented gurneys with rust in their welded seams and wheels that stick, and I remember my feet sticking as I walked across an old white stone floor that would not stay clean. It was always bloody in the Cape Town morgue, with bodies parked everywhere, and the week I was there I saw cases as extreme in their grotesqueness as that continent is extreme in its magnificent beauty. People hit by trains and run over on the highway, and domestic and drug deaths in the shantytowns, and a shark attack in False Bay and a tourist who died from a fall on Table Mountain.
I have the irrational thought that if I go downstairs and walk into my cooler, the bodies of those two slain women will be waiting for me just as they were on that December morning after I’d flown nineteen hours in a small coach seat to get to them. Only they had already been looked at by the time I showed up, and that would have been true if I’d flown Mach II on the Concorde or been a block away from them when they were murdered. It wasn’t possible for me to get to them fast enough. Their bodies may as well have been on a movie set, they were so staged. Innocent young women murdered for the sake of a news story, for the sake of power and influence and votes, and I couldn’t put a stop to it.
I not only couldn’t stop it, I helped make it happen, because I made it possible for it to happen, and I replay what PFC Gabriel’s mother said about hate crimes and being rewarded for them. My office at Dover is right next to Briggs’s command suite. I remember someone walking past my closed door several times while I was talking to her. Whoever it was paused at least twice. It crossed my mind at the time that someone might be waiting to come in but could hear through the door that I was on the phone and was unwilling to interrupt. The more likely answer is that someone was listening. Briggs has started something, or someone allied with him has, and Benton’s right, it’s been going on for a while.
“Then these last six months have been nothing more than a political ploy. How sad. How tawdry. How disappointing.” My voice is steady, and I sound completely calm, the way I get before I do something.
“Are you okay? Because we should go downstairs if you’re okay. Anne is here. We should talk to her, and then I need to go.” Benton has gotten up and is near the door, waiting for me with his phone in hand.
“Let me guess. Briggs made sure I got this position so he could keep it open for whomever he really has in mind.” I go on and my heart has slowed and my nerves feel steadier, as if they’re firing normally again. “Wanted me to keep the seat warm. Or was I the excuse to get this place built, to get MIT, get Harvard, get everybody on board, to justify some thirty million in grants?”
Benton reads something else as messages drop out of the thin air, one after another.
“He could have saved himself a lot of trouble,” I say as I get up from the desk.
“You’re not going to quit,” Benton says, reading what someone has just sent to him. “Don’t give them that satisfaction.”
“‘Them.’ Then it’s more than one.”
He doesn’t answer as he types with his thumbs.
“Well, it’s always been more than one. Take your pick,” I say as we walk out together.
“If you quit, you give them exactly what they want.” As he reads and scrolls down on his phone.
“People like that don’t know what they want.” I shut Fielding’s door behind us, making sure it’s locked. “They just think they do.”
We begin our descent in my bullet-shaped building that on dark nights and gloomy days is the color of lead.
I’m explaining to Benton the indented writing on a pad of call sheets as we glide down in an elevator I researched and selected because it reduces energy consumption by fifty percent. It can’t be a coincidence that
