More Stories from the Twilight Zone (9 page)

“Good morning,” Nobis said pleasantly. “Could I talk to you?”

The girl said, “What happened to Lenny? Did she OD?”

“We don't know yet. Did you ever see her using drugs?”

The girl had a thin face and a thinner mouth. She kept it closed. The boy snorted.

“I seen her do lots of things,” he said wisely.

“Shut up, Rog,” the girl said, taking an openhanded swipe at his head and missing as he grinned. She looked down and sniffed sorrowfully. “Lenny was always nice to us. Show some respect.”

Rog wouldn't shut up. “Maybe she killed herself,” he said helpfully. “ 'Cause I heard her say she couldn't stand the idea of going to jail.”

“You are
so
naive,” the girl said. “What she did was an
ac
cident, dummy. And Lenny was really truly sorry anybody got hurt.”

“What happened?” Nobis said to Rog, although he already knew what they were talking about.

Rog shrugged and spun several wheels of the car.

“DUI. Her
second
DUI. This time she drove up on a sidewalk in the village and nailed some people waiting to get into Sea Fare. Nobody got killed, but I think one's still in a coma.” He shrugged again. “Yeah, her lawyers probably had it fixed already. Not that it matters now,
does
it, Chrissy?”

“Shut up—and this time I mean it,” his sister said, making small fists.

“Mind telling me where you got that flam car?” Nobis asked the boy.

“Lenny gave it to me 'bout a week ago. I thought I lost it, but I found it again this morning.”

“Where?”

Rog pointed to the terrace. “It was just sitting there outside the doors to her bedroom. So I went up and got it.” He folded his lower lip between his teeth. “Doors were open, like always. I didn't know she was dead then. I mean, I didn't look inside.”

Chrissy said, “Lenny always likes to sleep with the doors open. She says air-conditioning dries out her skin. She has . . . beautiful skin.” A look of pain crossed the girl's face. “I mean . . . I can't think of her being, like, dead.” She trickled tears.

Nobis took out his ID folder.

“Rog, I have to ask you for that car. It could be part of an ongoing investigation.”

Rog made a face, but he seemed impressed by Nobis's tone of quiet urgency. And anyway you didn't say
no
to the FBI. He put the shiny black speedster on the table and heaved a sigh.

“Can I get it back, d'you think?”

“Do my best,” Nobis said. “And thanks for your cooperation.”

 

In Lenny Vespasian's
luxe
bedroom, Nobis showed the little car to his team. Saint-Philèmon's only comment was a raised eyebrow. Nobis put the toy into an evidence bag and handed it to one of
the Bureau's evidence response techies who had taken over the crime scene investigation.

“Turn a chopper around and get this to Ludecke and Hopkins at DARPA right now.”

The Interpol inspector said, “You will want to see what has been found in the recreation room.”

Nobis glanced at the bed where Lenny, a pale sack of blood, was being zipped into a body bag for transporting. The techies handling her wore surgical masks, and it was a special kind of body bag. Nobis heard Lenny's superstar boyfriend blubbering and moaning in another part of the four-room suite. He followed Saint-Philèmon.

Two other members of the FBI's ER team were measuring and photographing a spill of what Nobis assumed was cocaine on the marble floor. He kneeled for a closer look and saw little tire tracks from four sets of wheels through the white powder.

“Playing with their little toy while they were getting high?” the inspector mused.

“Miss Vespasian gave the car to the caretaker's kid. I don't think she knew it was here last night. And not conscious while it was on the move.” Nobis looked at the bedroom, turned to a techie. “Microscopic particles of coke would have rubbed off the tires as it rolled along. I want to know if the car went straight to her bed.”

“The bedroom's carpeted,” the techie said. “Cashmere, but still tough going for a toy car with wheels less than a millimeter in diameter. Unless something was pushing it along.”

“Something, or someone, was,” Nobis said. “As for the obstacle of a carpet—I've seen one of these roach chariots roll up a vertical wall and across a ceiling upside down. The big question is, when they get where they're going, how do they kill? And why?”

“
Two
questions,” Saint-Philèmon said with a slightly haunted smile. “Two deeply perplexing questions,
mon ami
.”

“And to answer them I think we had better be both lucky and quick. So far eight people with no apparent connection to one another have died after being informed
You're next
.”

“No apparent connection,” the inspector said. “Yet all of the victims seemed to have had a notable deficiency in moral values, and all enjoyed a certain level of notoriety that unfortunately has been enhanced by the mystery surrounding their deaths. Is there a plan? Who or what are we looking for?”

Nobis rarely smiled. He did so now.

“Another god gone mad.”

 

Dinner at the Wrixtons' showplace home, a mid-nineteenth-century Victorian in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, ends, as do all of their intimate and socially-significant gatherings, at a few minutes past eleven. Wry Wrixton and his coltish third wife Julia, half his age, are fitness fanatics who arise early and play hard at their health club. Tough daily schedules demand of them at least six hours of sound sleep nightly in their third-floor bedroom, overlooking a walled garden and an additional wall of backyard oaks and red maples to further ensure their privacy.

August in Washington is usually hot enough to boil sap out of the African tribal wood carvings Julia collects, but even with the central-air thermostats set at sixty-eight degrees, Julia still likes to sleep with one window partly open near her bed, to enjoy the sweet midnight breath from the garden below.

Private security on the perimeter of their property and inside the house has been doubled following the latest, cryptic (death?) threat that appeared three days ago in Wry's personal e-mail. Just a precaution, Wry tells his wife, while he must be in Washington at the wrong season and for the most part under the radar, conducting secret confabs at the Pentagon.

He's in his pj's and using his ultrasonic toothbrush, eyeing himself
for flaws in the old barbershop mirror mounted behind his-and-hers sinks.
Shave and a haircut, four bits
. Wry moves armaments and ammunition around the world for hefty fees to legitimate governments—and also to less visible tribal and religious troublemakers. He has, at sixty, the shrewd mien, the pitchman's polished baritone, the eerie essence and urbane lech of a wholesaler of death.

Julia comes into the bathroom looking perplexed, something in her hand.

“Wry, where did this come from?”

He puts down his toothbrush with another overly wide grin of self-approval (he's always had marvelous teeth), and turns for a better look at the object.

“Toy car.”

“I know, but—”

“You mean the four sets of wheels? Don't think I've ever seen one like—where did you find it, sweetheart?”

Now Julia is looking at herself in the kitschy old mirror. Even at the end of a long day, aswirl in frothy, clingy night clothes, she illumines Cecil Beaton's famous dictum: The Truly Fashionable Are Beyond Fashion.

“Oh . . .” Julia reties her hair with a velvet ribbon so it is well off her shoulders and the back of her neck for sleeping. “It was there on the sill when I went to raise the windows by my side of the bed. Probably belongs to Myra's little boy. He follows her around the house while she does the vacuuming.”

“Great workmanship,” Wry observes, picking up the little car Julia has left on the marble sink. He gives the four sets of wheels a spin, sets the car down again, and instantly it's in motion, rolling straight and true to the edge of the sink, where it stops as if sensing an abyss before it.

“You know, I used to collect those when I was a kid,” Wry says
fondly. “Matchbox cars, they're called. Can't remember now what I did with all of them.”

 

Special Agent Nobis and Pierre Saint-Philèmon were on hand for Wry Wrixton's autopsy, as they had been for all of the autopsies, some postburial, of the nine victims. The findings of the pathologist remained consistent and as puzzling as ever.

 

“In each case,” Nobis explained to a packed house in the largest conference room available at FBI headquarters the afternoon following Wrixton's funeral, “certain proteins concentrated in the heart valves of the victims were ingested by agents widespread in nature, found in—among other taxonomic species—the Venus flytrap and the venom of the Japanese hornet. In each case the delivery system was contained in one of these hobby cars.”

He picked up one of the eight identical black racers from a table beside him. The components of the ninth car (some so small a strong magnifying glass was required to see them) were arranged in orderly fashion a little distance away. While Nobis spoke, another of the components, somewhat like a near-microscopic Swiss Army knife with dozens of tools, was robotically rebuilding the ninth car.

“The metal is a nickel-titanium alloy called nitinol,” Nobis continued. “Motive power is contained in nickel hydride batteries, each the size of a grain of sand.” He gave the wheels of the car he was holding a spin and put it upside down on a leg of the table. The car descended and, with a version of eight-wheel drive, smoothly made the transition from table leg to floor. It then made a right turn and stopped half an inch from the FBI agent's right foot. Nobis returned the little car to the table.

“The wheels are coated with a substance similar to the adhesive found on the hairs that sprout at the ends of a gecko's toes. It
provides sticking power that nevertheless doesn't impede smooth forward or reverse motion.”

There was dead silence in the room until the director of Carnegie-Mellon University's Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab spoke up.

“Where in God's name did the technology come from?
We
can't do this!”

The Pentagon's rep, bristling with gold stars, said darkly, “And who's funding it? Not us.”

Other representatives of world governments or R and D divisions of biobusinesses who were present via satellite looked puzzled; or they shook their heads emphatically.

“
Tant pis
,” Pierre Saint-Philèmon said softly. “It gets worse. Or better, perhaps, depending on one's scientific viewpoint.”

From Prague a Nobel laureate in integrative biology asked, “Do you have an explanation of how the bacteria confine their destruction to the heart valves? Can the bacteria distinguish one protein from another? As we all know, there are millions of different proteins in the human body, thus far uncatalogued.”

The chief pathologist for the FBI took over.

“No, we can't answer that. But examination of each victim's tissues by electron microscope reveals an infinitesimally small borehole through the sternum and into the heart wall.” A computer graphic on another large LCD screen illustrated his remarks. “The secondary delivery vehicle, which we believe is off-loaded from one of the toy cars—a nanobiomimetic ‘creature,' for want of a better word—completes the drilling process into the heart wall, then disperses bacteria that immediately set to work, um, replicating themselves.”

“Have you isolated the bacteria?” asked the director of Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology.

“No. The chief characteristic of the bacteria is that it seems to
be amazingly fast-acting, and somehow genetically engineered to, um, cease to exist once the heart valves are destroyed.”

“How contagious is it?” the head of the CDC in Atlanta wanted to know.

“Not contagious in the sense of disease pathogens. I've tried to make it clear that what we are dealing with are, um, robotic bacteria.”

He winced at the ensuing uproar, with the kindest word distinguishable in several languages being “Preposterous!”

“That remains our, um, most viable theory to date.”

“Let us have some order, please!” the deputy director of the FBI demanded after another twenty seconds of outrage, denial and, possibly, fear.

His counterpart from the Hong Kong police, a small ravishing Eurasian woman, said calmly, “Assuming for the moment we accept the hypothesis that extremely advanced work in robotics has been conducted somewhere in total secrecy—rather like the plot of a James Bond movie—what then is the logic behind the selection of victims, which required too much diligence to be considered random? A Mexican drug lord, a Hong Kong hedge-fund swindler, a rogue nuclear scientist, a wife-killer that an incompetent American prosecutor failed to convict, and our most recent victims. From the intelligence available to date, these people—of no particular significance in a moral context—were unknown to one another.”

Nobis took the floor again.

“The dominant, or Alpha Perpetrator—let's deal with only one for now, although we believe there are several brilliant individuals working together—deliberately courted our attention. Which he certainly has at this point. He's been . . . toying with us, so to speak. There probably is no personal revenge motive behind the murders. Nor are we dealing with a serial killer. The choice of victims is largely irrelevant, although there is a definite aspect of
self-righteousness. Our profile suggests the Alpha Perp considers himself to be ethically and morally superior to just about everyone else on the planet, thus justifying his killing spree. A towering intellect, a scientific genius. Give him that. But emotionally he is a despot, a failed human being, a common voyeur, probably impotent and totally insane.”