“Explain the
“This isn’t my area, obviously, and we don’t have an AFM, an atomic force microscope, here, hint, hint. Because I’d say we’ve just entered a new day where we have to start looking for things like this, things you might need to magnify millions of times. And in my opinion, something like an AFM would have to have been used to assemble this, do the nanoassembly, to manipulate the nanotubes, the nanoparticles, while you’re trying to get them to stick together, using a nanoprobe or whatever. Well, we could probably handle a lot of this with SEM, but an AFM would be a good idea if this is what’s headed down the pike and about to slam into us head-on, Dr. Scarpetta.”
“You don’t know what you’ve found, but it’s a nanobot of some type, possibly, in your opinion, for the delivery of a drug or drugs? You found one on the film backing that was in the lab-coat pocket?” I don’t say whose lab coat.
“Just one admixed with the particulate and fibers and other debris because we didn’t analyze the entire piece of film, just the specimen we mounted on a stub. The rest of the plastic film’s at fingerprints right now, and then it’s going to DNA, then to GC-Mass-Spec,” Matthew says. “And it’s broken or degraded.”
“What is?”
“The nanobot. Or it looks broken, or maybe it’s deteriorating, like it was supposed to have eight legs but I’m seeing four on one side and two on the other. I’m e-mailing this to you now, a couple photographs we took so you can see it for yourself.”
I’m able to pull up the images on my iPhone, and it is an inexplicable feeling to note the eerie symmetry, to have it enter my mind that the nanobot looks like a molecular version of a micro-mechanical fly. I can’t know if Lucy’s holy grail of flybots looks like this nanobot magnified thousands of times, but the artificial structure in the photographs is insectlike with its grayish bucky-ball elongated body. The delicate nanowire arms or legs that are still intact are bent at right angles with gripperlike appendages on the tips, possibly for grabbing onto the walls of cells or burrowing into blood vessels or organs, to find the target, in other words, and adhere to it while delivering medicine or perhaps illegal drugs destined for certain brain receptors.
No wonder Johnny Donahue’s drug screen was negative, it occurs to me. If nanobots were added to his sublingual allergy exacts or, better yet, to his corticosteroid nasal spray, the drugs might have been below the level of detection. More astonishingly, the drugs may not have penetrated the blood-brain barrier at all, but would have been programmed to bind to receptors in the frontal cortex. If the drugs never entered the bloodstream, they wouldn’t have been excreted in urine. They wouldn’t have ended up in hair, and that’s the point of nanotechnology’s use in medicine, to treat diseases and disorders with drugs that aren’t systemic and therefore are less harmful. As is true with everything else, whatever can be used for good most assuredly will be used for evil.
Fielding’s living room is bare floors and walls, and stacked almost to the ceiling are dusty brown boxes, all the same size, with the moving company Gentle Giant’s logo on the sides, scores of cartons in cubed piles as if they’ve never been touched since they were carried in here.
In the midst of this cardboard bunker Briggs sits, reminding me of a Matthew Brady photograph of a Civil War general, in his muted sandy-green fatigues and boots, a Mac notebook in his lap, his broad-shouldered back straight against the straight-back chair. I decide it would be like him to sit and make me stand, to choreograph our conversation so I feel small and subservient to him, but he gets up, and I tell him no, thank you. I’ll stand. So both of us do, moving to a window, where he places his laptop on a sill.
“I find it interesting he has a wireless network in here,” Briggs says right off, looking out at the view of the ocean and the rocks across the icy street that is covered with tan sand. “With all you’ve seen in here, would you expect him to have wireless?”
“Maybe he wasn’t the only person in here.”
“Maybe.”
“At least you’ll entertain the possibility. That’s more than anybody else seems to be doing.” I place my iPhone on the window-sill so he can see what is in the small display, and he looks at it, and then he looks away.
“Imagine two types of nanobots,” he says, as if he’s talking to someone on the other side of the wavy old window, as if his attention is out there in the sunlight and sparkling water and not with the woman standing next to him, a woman who always feels young and insecure with him, no matter her age or who she grew up to become.
“A nanobot that is biodegradable,” he says, “that vanishes at some point after delivering a minute dose of a psychoactive drug, and then a second type of nanobot that self-replicates.”
I always feel like someone else with Briggs, someone other than myself, and as I stand next to him, our sleeves touching and feeling his heat, I think of the wonderful and the terrible ways he has shaped me.
“The self-replicating one is what worries us most. Imagine if you got something like that inside you,” he says, and what’s inside me is the irresistible force that is General John Briggs, and I understand what Fielding felt and how much he must have revered and resented me.
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.”
“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?”
“
