“Oh, I know your little tricks,” he says. “I heard about the ventilation system and that you grossed out Mahant so bad he hit the deck.”
“Almost hit it.” I wave at Georgia as Marino and I pass through the receiving area, headed to the parking lot.
CHAPTER 44
THE LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN flesh, and I should know better than to think I can ignore them.
Driving home is an effort, and I find myself struggling to stay awake as I ease to a halt at a stop sign near the Harvard Divinity School in our Cambridge neighborhood. My blood sugar is low, and I’m feeling the crushing letdown that’s a given after I’ve been fueled by nothing but high-octane adrenaline for hours.
Thankfully I live not even fifteen minutes away from the CFC, and I blast cold air on my face, listening to music, doing whatever I can to stay awake. It’s a few minutes past nine, and the morning sun is bright overhead as I pull into the narrow brick driveway of our nineteenth-century timber-sided house, painted smoky blue with gray shutters and doors. There are tall chimneys at either end of the slate roof, and sunlight blanks out the upstairs windows as I park behind Janet’s green Land Rover.
It has half of the detached garage blocked, and when Page returns from taking the dogs to the groomer, her pickup truck will block the other half. Good luck getting Benton’s or my personal cars out should I need them for some reason.
Everybody’s here, I think dismally, and then I feel selfish. As much as I love my family, what I’d like right now is privacy in my own home. And I need to give that up and get over myself. I need to be a good sport and remember not everything in life is about solving crime. Climbing out with my messenger-bag briefcase, I lock my CFC SUV that I wasn’t going to leave at the office this time. Following pavers through the wooded front yard, I take the brick steps, aware of the early morning heating up. But by all accounts it’s not supposed to reach ninety today. This weekend it’s going to rain, and my garden and lawn could use it.
There’s a lot of cooking I need to do, and I’m not prepared. Had I known this many people including Dorothy would be staying here I would have done major shopping, and maybe I’ll find time this afternoon to get to the store before I have to get ready for the Kennedy School. Maybe I’ll throw together something easy like lasagna that we can heat up after the event is over.
We’ll open a few bottles of a nice Pinot Noir and drink a toast to Briggs, I decide as I stand on the front porch with keys in hand, looking around and listening. I hear a light breeze stir the old hardwood trees in the front yard, and I detect the earthy fragrances of loamy soil and mulch. A car drives by, one of our neighbors, and she waves.
Benton and I live on the northeastern border of the Harvard campus, across the street from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and around us on all sides are lovely antique homes that are manifestations of enlightenment. I love it here. I love fooling myself into believing I’m safe as long as I’m surrounded by smart people, and I look around some more, my hand on the door handle.
I don’t hear anyone, and the dogs aren’t here. But I detect a distant noise, a faint high-pitched whine like a table saw, and there’s a house being renovated two doors down. Another car goes by, another neighbor, and I open the front door, noticing that the alarm isn’t set. That doesn’t make me happy. Stepping into the foyer of dark-paneled walls arranged with Victorian etchings I pause to listen, but I don’t hear anyone, and it occurs to me that Janet, Desi and my sister might be in the backyard. In fact that sounds like a very nice plan. Maybe I’ll drink coffee with them for a while. Then I’ll try to sleep for a few hours.
At some point this afternoon I’ll need to go over my talk for tonight because I’ve confirmed with my contact at the Kennedy School that I’m not going to cancel. I’m going to do this for Briggs. In spirit he’ll be with me as I address policy makers about the dangerous planet we live on and why it’s imperative to incorporate science and the highest level of training into everything we do if we’re to expand our frontiers and protect ourselves.
Inside the kitchen I see used coffee pods on the counter near the Keurig, and someone had cheddar-cheese toast. Probably Desi, as he’s become a big fan of Vermont cheddar since moving here and is quite particular about what color wrapper the block of cheese comes in. For him extra sharp is synonymous with purple, and in the mornings he asks for purple cheese toast, I’m told.
I set my briefcase on the breakfast table near a window, and I head to the back door, where Desi has parked the fishing pole, the baseball bat and glove Marino gave him for his birthday. The pole has a hard rubber casting sinker attached to a long sturdy leader line that’s tied to the monofilament, and he’s been teaching Desi how to cast the same way he once taught me. The nine-year-old is learning patience and precision, and not to muscle his way through life.
It’s fine except for how it makes Benton feel, and as sorry as I might be about that, we have to do what’s best for the child. Marino is good for Desi, and I don’t mind them using the backyard as long as no one tramples my roses, and the rule is when the line gets tangled in trees, no one is climbing anything.
Safety first, and I begin to open the oak door leading outside. Then I stop because I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
CHAPTER 45
LUCY IS IN KHAKI cargo pants, a CFC polo shirt, a baseball cap and dark glasses. She’s near the big magnolia tree with its circular bench, and Desi is standing woodenly next to her. He’s holding what looks like an iPad, barefoot and in Miami Dolphins shorts and T-shirt, and he’s wearing something blue around his neck.
I duck back into the quiet gloom of the hallway as I realize it can’t be Lucy who’s with Desi, and my heart lurches as if I almost stepped on a snake. She’s in Maryland, and even if she magically were back this soon, the androgynous-looking person with short strawberry-blond hair is too thin to be my niece. I realize who I must be looking at as my heart pounds out of my chest, and I go to an app on my phone, turning the cameras on for the house and the property.
I duck into the pantry, where there’s a flat-screen monitor on the butcher block. I zoom in on the backyard, tilting and panning, hoping Carrie Grethen doesn’t know what I’m doing. She should have heard me drive up but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she knows someone is inside the house watching but she might not, and I check every zone monitored by cameras, making sure I don’t see anyone else on the property.
So far it seems Carrie is here alone, and I think of what I assumed was a white construction van parked on the side of the road just past our driveway. I saw it when I was pulling in, and I’m on edge, worried that any second Carrie’s going to notice the cameras move. But she isn’t looking. Her attention is all over the place. On Desi and also straight up at the sky and down at the tabletlike device he’s holding, and across at my sister and Janet, who are out of frame but I know they must be sitting there. I just heard Dorothy’s voice but I didn’t catch what she said.
I turn up the audio on the HD cameras as high as it will go.
“… I don’t want to,” Desi tells Carrie as he shakes his head no. “I don’t want to sting anyone.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s bad to hurt people.”
“Let me show you how much fun it is. Just click on that arrow key pointing at the word enable. It’s in green on the display, and when you touch the key the color turns red because the TC is armed. A Tailend Charlie. Do you know what that is, son?”
“I don’t want to play with you anymore. And I’m not your son,” he says, and Carrie smiles radiantly.
“When you find out who you are it will be like discovering you’re royalty. Prince Desi.” She places a hand on his shoulder.
“You’re scaring me,” he says.
“But why are you doing this?” It’s Dorothy talking again, and I try to find her with the cameras. “I thought we were friends.”
It would be like her to think she could persuade Carrie Grethen to cease and desist, to give up a
nd go away or even more preposterous to believe that Carrie would like her and want to be friends. Of course my narcissistic sister would assume she’s a match for someone who has caused misery and destruction for decades.
I lock in a camera on Dorothy and Janet sitting tensely in chairs some twenty feet from the magnolia tree. A small table with their coffees and bottles of water is between them. Both of them are in scrubs that they probably got from me, and neither of them moves. Their hands are in their laps, but I don’t see any sign of restraints. Dorothy’s eyes are wide, and the morning light isn’t kind on her overfilled Botoxed face while Janet is quiet and steady.
I already know Janet doesn’t have a gun. If she did she would have handled Carrie by now, and all of us have had to develop new habits with firearms now that a child is in the mix. I manipulate the cameras some more and I see the drone, what looks like a big black whirling spider with eight rotor blades hovering at the top of the magnolia tree. That’s the high-pitched whining I was hearing. It’s not construction at the neighbor’s house.
I send Marino a text:
MAYDAY. She’s at my house in backyard. Hostage sit & drone.
I don’t call 911. I can’t have regular patrol cars roar up. That’s not how one deals with something like this, and it’s sneaking up on me what Carrie is doing. She wants Desi to be inducted into her infernal family. She wants him to hurt someone, to kill someone with her weaponized drone.
Remember Sister Twister? Bet you won’t miss her.
Carrie is going to kill Dorothy, and then she’ll get rid of Janet. That leaves only Desi, and it’s clear to me what she’s planned to do as I think of her spying on Natalie. I wonder if Carrie was really spying on the boy.
“But why?” My sister never does know when to shut up, and Desi is a small statue holding the flight controller. “I don’t understand. We had such a nice conversation on the plane,” she foolishly says, and now I know.
Carrie must have orchestrated it so that she would be with my sister on the flight from Fort Lauderdale last night. No doubt she was sitting right next to her in first class, and that’s probably why the alarm is off in the house and Carrie is in my backyard. Dorothy probably let her in just like she would some other new friend she’s made, and my sister never meets a stranger.
She’ll bring anybody home and did all the time when we were growing up. She never asked. It’s always been her right to do whatever she wants, and this time it might cost her and all of us. My mind races crazily as I try to figure out what to do.
“I just can’t understand why you’re here being so awful, and after several drinks and our lovely conversation? I thought I had a new girlfriend, one who reminds me so much of my daughter, which is why we were so instantly taken with each other. And here I thought it was going to be such fun when I came north to see my grandson.” My sister is crying. “Desi? Come over here right now and let’s all go into the house like this never happened. And you just go on and leave us alone, do it now while you can,” she warns Carrie, whose answer is to take the flight controller out of Desi’s hands.
She moves the drone directly over my sister’s head, approximately six feet above her, and the flying blades stir her dyed blond hair, which is long and makes her look harsh.
“Just touch where it says enable,” Carrie says to Desi, and she holds the flight controller close to show him.
“Don’t do anything she says!” Dorothy cries.
“Shut up. Please,” Janet says to her while not taking her eyes off Carrie.
But Janet has no weapon. If she did, she’d know exactly how to use it, and even as I’m thinking this I don’t see a way out. Not in the usual sense of what one does in a dire emergency. It’s very hard to shoot a drone. They’re filled with empty spaces and even if you take out several rotor blades that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop it in time.
You’d need to take out the power source the same way you would an explosive device. But I don’t have a water cannon handy, and taking the lock off the pistol I keep out of reach on a top shelf of a kitchen cabinet isn’t going to help. Spraying bullets in a residential neighborhood is out of the question.
PAGE AND THE DOGS are nowhere to be seen or heard. I hope they don’t return from the groomer anytime soon, and my attention continues to land on the sports equipment rather sloppily tucked in the corner to the left of the door.
I see the fishing pole, and the baseball bat is wooden not metal. The baseball mitt is leather, and it, like wood and dry skin, is a good insulation against electricity. I also notice the empty hooks where Sock and Tesla’s leashes hang, and it prompts me to send a text to Page:
DO NOT return home until U hear from me.
Carrie wouldn’t hesitate to hurt anything we care about, including Page, including our pets.
“I’m going to show you,” Carrie is saying to Desi as I continue to monitor the backyard with the cameras.
I watch the spinning drone hovering over my sister’s head, and Carrie touches the display of the flight controller. The drone makes a vertical assent, and at the same time I see the conductors lowering, four of them so fine they’re barely visible, like thin gray pencil lines with something round and dark weighting each at the end.
Eerily the conductors vanish from view on and off. All I see are the round weights floating in space like tiny dark planets, and I think of the round burn on the back of Briggs’s neck.
“I’m going to show you something cool,” Carrie says to Desi, returning the flight controller to his unwilling hands. “But first you need to do something for me. An experiment. See the bottle of water on the table? Go pour it on Granny Dorothy’s head.”
“No.”
“Do it.”
“No.”
I pick up the fishing pole.
“You need to learn how to be brave. What’s wrong with you? It looks like I’m going to have to toughen you up.” Carrie’s face is transformed by anger. “See what happens when you’re raised by inferiors? Well that’s all about to change, Desi.”
I’ve been fishing a few times in my life, mostly with Marino, who went to great lengths teaching me how to cast. I’m pretty good with my hands, and I flip back the bail on the spinning reel as I walk out the back door. There’s a chance the spinning blades will cut the leader and the line but I also know that even helicopters avoid monofilament. Lucy is careful flying low over beaches because of kites and helium balloons attached to hundreds of feet of fishing line.
Carrie stops me as her face turns murderous and at the same time pleased. I pull back the graceful long pole and snap it forward with just the right flick of my wrist, I hope, and the rubber sinker sails up in an arc toward the top of the magnolia tree. Sunlight catches the graceful monofilament line as it rises high and bends, falling over the whirling dervish, and I wait for the spinning blades to cut the line.
But they don’t, and the drone jerks. At least one of the blades has stopped, and the sudden tugging cues me to start reeling as Carrie yells obscenities, the flight controller unable to override the lowest technology of modern time, a simple fishing pole.
“Run! Run!” Desi is yelling, and Janet is on her feet.
The drone careens like a wounded bird, and I reel and reel as Carrie’s furious strides close in on me. Reeling furiously, and the drone is no more than ten feet away, loud like a whirling fan, the conductors dangling not far over her head.
I tug down hard on the fishing pole at the same moment Carrie pulls out a big stiletto and the long blade hisses out. Then blood is flying everywhere. I hear someone screaming and what sounds like a transformer blowing, and then I’m on the ground. I smell burned flesh.
CHAPTER 46
TWO DAYS LATER, SATURDAY MORNING
FOR AN INSTANT I was Elisa Vandersteel sailing through empty space and landing on my back, remembering nothing. Except I came to in the emergency room. I’m not dead, not even close, and I sit up in bed to the sound of heavy rain.
It dully beats
the slate roof and spatters the windows when the wind blasts, and Sock and Tesla are wedged warmly on either side of me. I hear their breathing, and then it’s drowned out by howling gusts that just now whistled and moaned, and water thrashes and drums in different intensities and tempos. The early morning sounds moody and wounded. Or maybe it’s me who feels like that.
The event at the Kennedy School night before last wasn’t canceled but postponed, and that not only was wise but unavoidable. One speaker was dead, the other in the hospital. Whatever the drone’s conductors came in contact with in addition to Carrie Grethen and her stiletto caused me to be thrown and knocked unconscious. I spent the next day and a half being tested, prodded, probed and scanned, finally coming home last night.
So I didn’t give my presentation to influential people, and here I am resting peacefully in bed with two dogs. I can’t think of anything much better than that. Janet and Desi have been kind and thoughtful about looking after me, and Dorothy is around somewhere. Benton and Lucy should be home any minute, having left the helicopter behind in D.C. because of the weather. We’ll have a wonderful brunch in a little while. I should get going, and I feel strangely lightweight as if someone turned down gravity.
It’s as if the reign of terror has been lifted with the dry spell, the heat wave, as if the balance of life has been restored, and I feel happy in a way I’ve not been in a long while. Carrie Grethen was badly sliced up and burned, her skull fractured by the mechanical monster of her own design. When she’s sufficiently recovered she’ll be held in isolation at the local state psychiatric hospital, in a maximum security forensic unit for the criminally insane. She can’t hurt anyone now, and her partner Theo Portison is in jail, neither going anywhere except to trial.
Meanwhile the police and FBI will continue their search for any other foot soldiers she may have recruited here or abroad. Lucy suspects Carrie can operate her drones remotely the same way military operators do. She could have had one docked in the Bethesda area and piloted it from South Florida to fly to Briggs’s house and kill him. After that Carrie boarded the plane in Fort Lauderdale and enjoyed her friendly flight with my sister. I can’t wait to hear what Dorothy has to say about that. Since I got shocked unconscious, I’ve not talked to her much.