Chaos

CHAPTER 35

I EXPLAIN WHAT I CAN say with reasonable certainty, handing off to Benton what I would to other officials who have a right to know. But I’m nicer about it and we’re holding hands as we walk through trees, rooftops peeking over them to our left, the glinting dark river to our right.

“An electrical charge passed through the pendant she had on, magnetizing it,” I’m saying. “She was thrown off her bicycle, lacerating her scalp. Some of her belongings were scattered, and based on glass in her hair,” I conclude, “I believe this happened at the same time the lamp exploded. But I can’t tell you much more than that when she’s not been examined at the office yet.”

“It’s sounds like you’re talking about lightning.”

“Similar, yes. But not quite, which is baffling. Lightning could account for the burn caused by the pendant but not the peculiar threadlike linear burns she has. I honestly have never seen anything like this before.”

“Which brings me to the question we wouldn’t want anyone to know we’re asking,” Benton says. “Is it possible we’re dealing with some sort of DEW, a directed-energy weapon?”

“As opposed to what? Heatstroke? A heart attack?” I’m aware that the leather insoles of my ruined shoes make quiet squishy sounds as I walk.

“As opposed to sabotage,” Benton says. “Such as doing something to booby-trap the lamp or an Endless Pool so that they malfunction catastrophically.”

He turns to look behind us as if he can see the shattered lamp with its swath of exploded glass. But all of that is under the tent. It’s like looking back at a black hole at the far end of the dark park with its smudges of illumination, and I detect people moving about almost invisibly. They keep their distance from us, watching in the velvety blackness, their tactical lights probing and flaring.

“This is what the Bureau is thinking?” I ask. “That someone targeted two different people in two different places with what’s basically weaponized electricity?”

“Like a particle beam, a laser, a rail gun that uses energy instead of projectiles. The technology’s out there. It’s been only a matter of time before something terrible happened.”

“And the delivery system in these two cases?”

“Something like a long-range laser gun. A manned aircraft. Or much more problematic would be a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle converted into a weapon of assassination or mass destruction.”

“As in a drone you can buy off the Internet?”

“This is what we’ve been anticipating, and you’ve been hearing me say it for a while, Kay. A drone is going to take out a major passenger jet, a government building, a world leader. Sufficiently weaponized, a drone could take out a lot more than that. We’re waiting and watching because it’s a certainty when the capability is there.”

“And unfortunately drones are everywhere. Not a day goes by when I don’t see them somewhere,” I reply, and it gives me an uneasy feeling that I spotted one earlier today. “Even when I was walking to meet you, even in this heat, there was one flying around,” I add.

“Did it seem to be following you?”

“I didn’t think that at the time. But as we’re talking about it I remember being aware of one at the Square when Bryce was holding forth through the open car window before I went inside The Coop. And then there was the drone as I was walking through the Yard afterward. But I can’t say it’s the same one, and it didn’t come close.”

“Depending on how technically sophisticated the device is, it might not need to get close if it’s being used to spy or stalk,” he says. “Did you notice how many props it had? Was there anything about it that caught your attention?”

“It looked like a big black spider against the sun. That’s the only impression I recall having because I didn’t pay attention to it. I imagined some kid hanging out in his dorm room and having fun flying the thing. I honestly gave it almost no thought.”

“Kids are high on our list for this very problem, only we’ve been expecting homemade weaponized UAVs-drones armed with explosives, with firearms, pipe bombs, poisonous chemicals, even acid. But there are worse things to fear. Especially if the objective is to terrorize,” and as he talks I remember what Marino said a little while ago:

… If you think about it, Doc, a bolt out of the blue is a tail-end Charlie…

“You’re right,” I tell Benton. “You wouldn’t want the public to know you’re asking questions like this. People would be afraid to leave their homes if they thought they might get attacked from the sky while they’re swimming or riding a bicycle. What about burns? Do we know if Briggs has them?”

“There’s a burn on the back of his neck. A round one about the size of a dime.”

“Round?”

“Yes, and it’s red and blistered,” he says as I think of the skull pendant Elisa Vandersteel was wearing.

“Do we have any idea what caused this round burn?” I ask.

“No, but it must be something he came in contact with while he was in the pool.”

“What about jewelry, anything metal he had on?”

“Nothing except the copper bracelet he always wore. The one that turned his wrist green.”

“If it has alloys mixed in with the metal, it might have been magnetized.”

“It was very weakly when the death investigator from the medical examiner’s office thought to check. Apparently electrocution was top on the list because the pool clearly had malfunctioned for one reason or another,” Benton continues telling me what the police have said.

When they checked they discovered the pump, the wiring to the lights, everything was fried, and I envision the gray 30-amp breaker subpanel on the back of the house, 50 amp, to the left of the door that led into the kitchen. I tell Benton I’m fairly certain the pool was the only thing on it, and he replies that the breaker was thrown.

Then I ask about the main breaker panel outside the house. Was anything thrown in there, and he says no. This suggests the possibility of a transient high-voltage electrical source that came in contact with Briggs or the pool while he was swimming. And this sounds much too similar to what we’ve been saying about the Vandersteel case.

“Something that was there but isn’t now,” I follow what Benton is considering. “Something like manufactured lightning-or a directed-energy weapon, a DEW in other words.”

“Imagine if the water became electrified, and you have a pacemaker,” Benton adds, and my thumb finds his wedding band, a simple platinum one, as I’m reminded of Marino’s refusal to wear jewelry because it’s dangerous.

I ask if Briggs had on anything else metal. Was there anything on his person or around him that could have completed the circuit if he’d come in contact with an electrical source?

“Just the bracelet,” Benton says. “He wasn’t wearing his wedding band or his dog tags.”

“He wouldn’t have been. He always took them off when he swam. The last time I stayed with them he’d place them in a dish on the kitchen table,” I recall.

“That’s where they are in photographs I’ve seen.”

“Everything seems pretty normal.” I stop again to shake another small rock out of my shoe. “He did what he usually does, and yet you instantly suspect foul play? I don’t care that he’s a three-star general with a top-level security clearance. Even spies can drown or have a heart attack. What did you say that got your employer sufficiently interested to mobilize this fast?”

“Literally all it took was one phone call,” and Benton brings up the one he got from Washington, D.C., as we were leaving the Faculty Club.

IT WASN’T HIS DIRECTOR or the attorney general on the line.

My husband was being spoofed. He says he got the same type of call that Marino had gotten minutes earlier, and I don’t know how Benton found out about that. Possibly Lucy told him. But as I replay what happened as we were leaving our untouched dinners, I realize that Marino was on the phone telling me about Interpol contacting him even as Benton answered his own bogus call.

“Someone supposedly from the National Crime Bureau, the NCB.” Benton unlocks his phone, and the display is dimmed sufficiently so that it’s hard to see from a distance. “And this person said he’d e-mailed me a photograph, and sure enough he did.”

He holds his phone so I can see the picture, and I try to remember anyone acting oddly, perhaps loitering near us some ten days ago on Saturday night, August 27. I search my memory for someone who might have paid too much attention, staring or hovering, especially showing undue interest in General Briggs when we had dinner with his wife and him at the Palm in Washington, D.C., not even two weeks ago. The restaurant was packed with mostly a business crowd, and I remember it was loud.

“You weren’t aware of anybody taking photographs, and haven’t a clue who might have…?” I start to say as Benton shakes his head, no.

On the phone’s display, Briggs is all smiles but the picture has been Photoshopped to include a heavy black X over this face. His arm is around Ruthie as they sit across from Benton and me. We’re raising our glasses in a toast at our booth surrounded by cartoons of Dennis the Menace, Spider-Man, Nixon.

It was a festive evening with plenty of shoptalk mixed with pleasure, and Briggs and I discussed our talk. We enjoyed several Scotches as we fine-tuned logistics about tomorrow night’s event at the Kennedy School. As I look at the photograph I find it gut-wrenching and stunning that a happy moment captured in time would turn into something like this.

“Obviously someone was in the restaurant or near a window at some point while we were eating dinner,” I say to Benton. “Do you think it was Carrie Grethen?”

“Frankly yes. I think she or someone directed by her were nearby or passing through, depending on what technology was used. But someone obviously and deliberately took the picture of us and I was none the wiser either.”

“And the point?”

“Destablizing us is certainly a big part of it,” Benton says. “Keeping herself constantly at the center of our focus is important. She wants to remind us of her presence and that she’s smarter than we are, always one step ahead. Never forget this is a competition.”

But I do forget. I can’t possibly spend my waking moments thinking about something like that. I’ve never understood people, including my own sister, who devote most of their resources to besting someone, to winning a match that’s one-sided and imagined.

“She wants our attention and our fear,” Benton continues to tell me what Carrie craves, and I’ve been hearing it forever. “Most of all she has to overpower us, to get in the last word. Control and more control.”

“Who do you think you were actually talking to when you saw the 202 area code for D.C. and took the call?” I ask. “Did you assume it really was an NCB investigator?”

“I wasn’t sure what was going on at first. The person sounded male and reasonably credible until he launched in about the developing Maryland investigation. That was the language, and I had no idea what investigation he was talking about. So I listened, and I asked why he was calling me specifically and how he got my cell phone number. He said I was listed as the contact person on the case.”

“What case specifically?” I look down at my shoes, and one of the heels is coming loose.

“In hindsight, obviously Briggs, who I wouldn’t know about until a little bit later. But at the time this so-called NCB investigator was vague. When I pushed him on details he was in a hurry. He gave me a phone number that turns out to be the desk of the Hay-Adams Hotel.”

“And since that’s exactly what happened to Marino,” I reply, “it can’t be a coincidence.”

“I agree. Two bogus phone calls within minutes of each other, both supposedly from NCB about two different cases that have barely happened yet, mysterious sudden electrical-type deaths occurring almost at the same time hundreds of miles apart,” Benton says, and I remember him in the drawing room of the Faculty Club, on the phone near the grand piano.

“When this so-called investigator was talking to you, did you notice if he coughed?”

“It’s interesting you would say that. Yes, he sounded like he might have asthma.”

It’s possible Carrie is utilizing voice-altering software, and I wonder if she’s sick or maybe her accomplice is. Benton may have been talking to one of them and had no idea. It’s even more bizarre to think Marino might have been. I touch the left arrow at the bottom of the phone’s display to go back a screen to see who e-mailed the photograph.

Tailend Charlie sent it to Benton’s FBI e-mail address some four hours ago, last night at eight P.M. This was an hour and fifteen minutes after Ruthie discovered her husband in the pool, and maybe forty-five minutes after the twins discovered Elisa Vandersteel’s body here in the park and helped themselves to her phone, calling 911.

“We’re supposed to know Briggs was a hit,” Benton says. “That’s why I got the photograph. It’s a way of claiming responsibility. Calling Marino was a way of doing the same thing about the case here in Cambridge. It’s what terrorists do, and never forget that’s what Carrie Grethen is. She and whoever she’s in league with are terrorists who won’t stop until they’re eliminated.”

“I’m glad she’s telling us what she thinks we need to know.” I feel a prick of anger.

“If she took out Briggs herself, and I believe she did,” he says, “then that could place her in Bethesda some six or seven hours ago.”

“Depending on how she did it,” I remind him. “If you’re talking about something like a laser gun fired from an unmanned aircraft? I’m assuming that can be done from the desk of someone sitting thousands of miles away.” Even as I say this I know where Benton is headed.

He and his colleagues will be going south to Maryland. But I won’t be going with them. They’d be wise not to ask.

“I’m supposing she might be in the D.C. area because of the photograph taken of us in the Palm,” Benton confirms what I suspect. “And if the ultimate goal of what we’re seeing is some coordinated attack using UMVs on a massive scale, then I can see her spending time in the Washington-Baltimore area,” and there can be no doubt where this is going.

Or more precisely, where it’s already gone. Over the next few hours, Benton will be on his way to D.C. or Baltimore. I’m supposed to be with him as FBI agents begin arriving at my headquarters, which conveniently will be missing its director and chief. Elisa Vandersteel’s autopsy and virtually everything else will be witnessed and micromanaged.

We’re about to be invaded. At least I’ll be prepared, thanks to Harold, and I’m hoping Anne is already at the office.