Little Deadly Things (42 page)

For the first years of Eva Rozen’s life, Mama and Papa treated her first as an object of pride and then as one that inspired disdain. The child Eva looked into this mirror and found herself both worthy and contemptible. Her self-loathing grew despite the nurturing she received from her sister. Eva developed survival strategies—aggression and an exaggerated sense of entitlement to bolster a fragile ego. Strike first, lest ye be stricken; strike harder if ye are struck.

For four decades, she balanced antagonism with an unrelenting need for acceptance. She found this acceptance in only three people. The first was her sister, Gergana, who loved and sheltered and comforted the infant Eva and the juvenile Eva. The second person who had accepted her without reservation was Jim Ecco, whose marriage to another Eva facilitated. And she found acceptance from Dana. Eva idealized him as the child she could have been, the life she could have lived, the child she could have borne, until Marta ripped Dana out of her orbit.

The weight of memory, the inexorable pull of longing unfulfilled became unbearable, and the structures that supported her rational mind collapsed. The mechanisms that filtered the bewildering din from the Table of Clamorous Voices were swept away, and with them Gergana’s murmurs of comfort and adoration were lost. The loudest voices—those of Bare Chest, Doran, Papa—held sway.

Eva Rozen began to decompensate and an unquenchable rage emerged.

Jim and Dana waited while Marta excused herself to her home office and lab.

“What’s Mom doing?” Dana asked.

Jim shrugged. “Either something with science or something with Yocahu. I can’t always tell the two apart.”

“Do you believe in Yocahu and Juricán?” Dana asked. He sounded nervous, as if trying to replace fear with philosophical speculation.

“I don’t know. It works for her. And the herbs and plants that she’s found also work. If your mom wants to credit Yocahu, then that’s fine with me.”

Their desultory conversation trailed into silence. Dana told his father that he worried about him. What would happen when he found Eva? “I can help you, if you let me, but you just think of me as a kid. Remember, Eva herself taught me computer science and nanotech.”

Jim said, “We’ll see,” the universal parental response which means, “The answer is no but I don’t want to discuss it now.”

“What about Mom?” Dana pressed.

“She needs your help, Dana. The last few days have been tough on her.” Marta’s gait, already slowed by her long battle with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, had deteriorated. Her range of motion narrowed and she hobbled more than walked. Her skin was flushed with a rash. This meant that her periodic fevers were raging once again.

A few minutes later Marta reemerged. “Let me tell you what I found. I started to wonder why Eva had what appears to be a psychotic break.”

Dana interrupted, “What’s that?”

“Loss of contact with reality,” Marta answered. “A major personality change. Did you notice how her language had become reduced to simple sentences? Her language pattern suggests thought disorder. It’s a clue to her thinking.”

“She did talk strangely,” Jim agreed.

“She also is extremely jumpy and excitable. Lately, she’s even moving more quickly, almost like she had taken a stimulant. For a while I thought maybe she was using cocaine. It fit, except for the language patterns.”

“Couldn’t she be just plain nuts?” asked Jim.

“Yes, but how is she nuts? That’s the question. And can she get back to normal?”

“Who cares?” asked Jim. “I mean, why not let the police take over? They’re a helluva lot better equipped to handle her, don’t you think?”

“She holds the key to restoring the public health programs, to undoing the damage. If she stays in a psychotic state, she may not be willing to help. She may not be able to help.”

Dana asked, “Why’d she break now?”

“That’s the key question and I think I found the answer. I grabbed her coffee mug from her office to test for stimulants, amphetamines, cocaine, and even SNAP but there were no traces of anything like that. On impulse, I tested the cup for traces of neurotransmitters and found incredible levels of acetylcholine, or ACh. That explains a lot.

“Neurotransmitters relay instructions from the brain to muscles,” Marta said, warding off Dana’s next question. “ACh governs the speed of your thinking and reactions. Not enough ACh and your brain slows. Remember the old syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease? When a person loses her memory and gets confused? That was linked to low levels of ACh. My theory is that she attempted to use ACh to speed up her thinking and reflexes.”

“Why would she do that?” asked Dana.

“I think she experimented on herself when Rockford ran so far behind schedule. Again, I’m just guessing, but I believe that she was hoping that an ACh boost would help her think faster and work faster. And we did get the bid in just on time.”

“Fat lot of good that did,” Jim said. “What went wrong?”

“Too much ACh, then you can become excitable and paranoid. I don’t think that Eva knew how delicate brain chemistry is. Or she didn’t care and was willing to bet everything on this bid. Her body must be under as much strain as her mind.”

Dana asked, “So, does this, this neurotransmitter make her more dangerous?”

“That’d be my guess.” She turned to her husband. “Jim, if I’m right, when you confront her, you have to be careful. She’ll be paranoid and irrational. And you can count on her moving a lot faster than anyone you’ve ever encountered.”

The conversation was interrupted when a messenger delivered the package Marta was expecting. Inside the bulky container were two formfitting pieces of nanotextile clothing.

“Okay,” said Jim. “So, what’s up with the skinsuit?”

“Dana and I are going back to NMech to search her work areas again to try to restart the public health programs. The skinsuit is for you. It may keep you alive.”

The Great Washout was about to award Eva Rozen with the credentials of a mass murderer, and a unique one at that. It was carried out singlehanded, initiated in seconds, and fulfilled in less time than it would have taken to read a roster of the dead. There were some 20,000 fatalities from the Caribbean water riots and another 120,000 dead from dehydration. Nearly a half million IDD users; 110,000 dead from diabetic convulsions. Lt. Colonel Fierra’s dozen troops. Hundreds of recreational drug users. And millions of others were imperiled, including a close-knit Boston family that shared a passion for science and humanity.

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THE FOURTH FLOOR

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2045

C
ommonwealth Avenue begins at the western edge of Boston’s Public Garden, under the watchful eyes of no less a luminary than George Washington. At thirty-eight feet, the mounted leader on his bronze steed is the city’s largest public sculpture and perhaps the most impressive. The horse’s eyes looked ahead. Its ears were pricked forward, drawn to a looming battle.

The boulevard leaves the tranquility of the Public Garden and stretches through Back Bay, Allston, Brighton, and Newton. It crosses the Charles River and continues west. Eva Rozen’s home was a stately brownstone in an elegant and exclusive neighborhood just three blocks from George Washington’s prescient horse. A grassy mall dotted with statuary and memorials divides the avenue. A few months earlier, the mall had been sanctified in the first snow of winter. Today it was cold and raw, gray and forbidding.

Jim’s senses were on high alert as he approached Eva’s home on foot, scanning the building with caution. He’d often strolled here, but in all the years Eva called Commonwealth Avenue home, she’d never entertained a single guest. Jim had long admired the rowhouse’s sandstone facing. An eagle guarded the entrance, its copper green wings unfurled.
Today,
he thought,
it should have been a vulture.

He walked west, away from the Public Garden, past Eva’s home. He wanted a good look at the building without being noticed. He adopted the posture and gait of other pedestrians in order to blend into the street scene. He did not even turn his head, but examined the front entrance with his peripheral vision. The door’s lock appeared to be keyed with biometrics. This would not be a problem but surveillance devices might be.

Jim continued west at a stroller’s pace past Eva’s building and turned right on Dartmouth Street. He crossed the mall that bisected Commonwealth Avenue and turned right again. There was an alley between Commonwealth Avenue and Marlborough Street and Jim ducked into its narrow passage. He shed his outer garments, touched his datasleeve and activated the skinsuit Marta had given him, pulling its hood up over his head.

She’d obtained it from a small company founded by a former NMech scientist who remembered Marta’s kindness and was willing to provide the suit. “It provides invisibility and partial armor,” Marta had explained. “The armor isn’t as good as NMech’s, but Eva can disable an NMech skinsuit. And it has a chest pocket so you can carry a few small items without compromising your stealth mode.”

“How is it different from NMech’s military garb?”

“NMech’s smart fabrics use layers of light-sensitive plastic threads that copy the appearance of the environment. It’s better than camouflage but it’s not true invisibility. This suit uses a different technology that will render you invisible.”

Jim took the unimpressive-looking suit. It was covered with a pattern of tiny hexagons that resembled a quilted mattress pad for a doll house. “You sure?”

“I hope so. It bends light using tiny crystals, stacked like a woodpile. Anything underneath the crystals is undetectable at both the visible and infrared spectrums.”

“How does it work? Give me the simple version, please.”

“It’s an old technology, developed in the early 2000s. Back then, scientists weren’t able to cloak objects larger than a tiny fraction of an inch. My colleague found that by building the crystals from nano-sized carbon molecules the cloaking effect would work on larger objects.”

Jim played with the suit. “It feels like it would be comfortable. You say it’s armored?”

“Partially. That’s the tradeoff. Complete invisibility but the armor isn’t as good as magnetic shearing fluid. It uses silicon woven into tiny hexagonal cells. Each cell transmits the energy of an impact to its six neighboring cells, and these in turn to twelve more cells. Then to the next eighteen, and so on. It spreads impact over the whole suit.”