“I’d like to record our conversation,” I inform him, and in the process, I’m cueing ART to do it if he hasn’t been already.
Setting my phone on the console between Lex and me, I continue to hide my new abilities from him, to keep my SIN to myself and all that goes with it.
“Okay,” I begin. “I’m sitting with Lexell Anderson inside my protective services truck. We’re parked at the Gantry on the NASA Langley campus where I intercepted him after he escaped from our custody at headquarters.”
I state the date and time, adding a few more salient details, asking him to verify that what I said is accurate.
“So far,” he replies with a chip on his shoulder.
“And I made you aware of your rights a few minutes ago.”
“Yes,” he loudly sighs in frustration.
“You said you don’t want an attorney. In other words, you don’t want to be represented by a lawyer even if it’s at no expense.”
He shakes his head.
“No one can hear you nodding or shaking your head on a recording,” I remind him. “You’re indicating that no, you don’t want a lawyer even if it doesn’t cost you. Free, in other words, with nothing to lose. If that’s what you want, Lex, I’ll leave you alone for now.”
“I’m not talking to some lawyer. It won’t do any good,” he repeats flatly.
“You’re waiving the right, yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you say that having an attorney wouldn’t do any good?” I watch him carefully, his hands balled up tightly in his lap.
“If you talk too much or don’t do what people want, bad things happen,” his attention is out the window, and he’s nervously chewing his lower lip. “You think people care, then you find out differently.”
“What got you so spooked you decided to hightail it across campus?”
“I don’t want to end up like them,” wiping his eyes on his sleeve, he refuses to look at me.
“It’s normal to be scared. It wouldn’t be normal if you weren’t,” I tell him plain and simple. “I’m familiar with the photographs you saw in Deputy Chief Lacey’s office. I’m sorry you were exposed to images and information that had to be upsetting,” and I’m assuming he’s most upset by Vera Young.
I don’t know for sure how well they were acquainted but it had to be a shock to see photographs of her body hanging from a door, and as I’m thinking this, the images play in my head like a slideshow . . .
The cord wrapped tightly around her bruised, furrowed neck . . . Her dead eyes bright red from pinpoint hemorrhages . . . Her clothing, the wooden flooring around her dangling bare feet bleached of color by a caustic chemical . . . The gouged-out areas of her fingertips and other parts of her body where sensors were removed postmortem . . .
“That’s what happens,” Lex sounds defeated and far away. “If they decide you’re a problem, that’s how you end up. You saw what was done to punish them! They were nice to me! I wish I’d never met them! I don’t want to be next!”
I have no visible reaction to the extremely disturbing implication that Lex was somehow acquainted with the man in the Denali, the assassin who intended to riddle me with armor-piercing bullets fired from a Chinese machine gun. I roll down our windows halfway to get some fresh air.
“You’re talking about Vera Young and the unidentified dead man you saw in the photos at protective services headquarters,” I finally reply. “Did they know each other?”
“I don’t know why they would have,” Lex says as a black Suburban slowly sloshes by.
I don’t need to run the government plate to know that the SUV with its dark-tinted windows, its antennas and signal jammer is the same one that picked up Dick at Dodd Hall earlier this afternoon. It stops at the edge of the splash basin’s concrete apron.
“In what way were Vera Young and the unidentified dead man nice to you?” I’m careful not to come across as overly concerned.
What I don’t want to do is get Lex fired up again. Based on my observations so far this day, he doesn’t exactly use the best judgment when he panics, and I’ve had enough of chasing after him. It’s a wonder I didn’t take a bad spill in the snow, maybe landing on my gun in front of Dick and everyone. My leg muscles burn from sprinting in unsafe conditions, and I’m ferociously hungry and thirsty.
“She’d invite me to see what her lunar robotics team was doing, promising I’d come work for her at Pandora someday,” Lex can’t keep the disappointment out of his voice, and what kind of monster leads on a kid like that? “She kept saying maybe I’d end up on the moon helping with their antennas, satellites, maybe fly a spaceship. And she bought me lunch sometimes,” he adds sadly, and I just bet Vera did all that and more.
I can well imagine her making any number of grand gestures to win Lex’s admiration and allegiance. Most of all, it was her cold-blooded intention to manipulate someone vulnerable. For that alone I won’t forgive her, and it flickers darkly through my vengeful thoughts that Vera might have deserved what she got.
“I saw the pictures,” Lex reminds me of what he inadvertently witnessed in Fran’s office. “Is that what Neva did? Did she kill her sister?”
“What do you think?”
“I think she used her the same way both of them used me. I think Neva hates everybody but herself,” he says insightfully, uneasily to the background din of diesel engines and warning beeps.
The SNC aerospace engineer named John is piloting the cherry picker again, inching the platform closer to the test model floating in a million gallons of greenish chemical-infused water. As I wait in my Tahoe for Dick to emerge from the Gantry’s main hangar, and I envision his silhouette behind glass in the control room, staring down from on high, witnessing my undignified foot pursuit of a child.
What an inauspicious start for 001, a prototype in a project that’s been Dick’s all-consuming ambition, doesn’t matter if it might have been Carme’s or mine, given a choice. I have no idea what we might have picked, and likely never will. But one thing I do know, I didn’t sign up for babysitting a 10-year-old genius who has an adjustment disorder and behavioral problems.