Lock In (Lock In, #1)(30)

And then, for extra added fun, Haden truckers locked up Interstate 66 and the toll road into Virginia.

“Late on the third day of your job,” Vann said to me, from her desk, as I got into the office. She pointed to the desk next to hers as she did it, indicating that it was my desk now.

“Everyone’s late today,” I said. “I should be graded on that curve.”

“How did you manage to get in from Potomac Falls, anyway?” Vann asked. “Tell me you borrowed your dad’s helicopter. That would be kind of amazing.”

“As it happens, Dad does have a helicopter,” I said. “Or his company does. But it’s not allowed to land in our neighborhood. So, no. I got dropped off at the Sterling stop of the Metro and took the train in.”

“And how was that.”

“Unpleasant,” I said. “It was super crowded and I got a lot of nasty looks. Like it was my fault the roads were crushed. I almost said, look, people, if it were my fault, I wouldn’t be on the goddamn train with the rest of you, now would I.”

“It’s going to be a long week with this shit,” Vann said.

“It’s not an effective protest if it’s not pissing people off.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t effective,” Vann said. “I didn’t even say I wasn’t sympathetic. It just means it’s going to be a long week. Now, come on. Forensics has got news for us.”

“What news?” I asked.

“On our dead guy,” Vann said. “We know who he is. And apparently there’s something else, too.”

* * *

“First off,” Ramon Diaz said, “meet John Sani, your no-longer-mystery man.”

We were back in the imaging suite, looking at a highly detailed, larger-than-life image of Sani on the morgue slab. It was cleaner and less annoying to the medical examiners to have field agents look at their handiwork this way. The model Diaz was projecting could be manipulated to examine any part of the body that the examiners scanned or opened. At this point the body did not look as if it had been cut into any more than it already had been at the neck. This was the “cover” scan.

“So the Navajo came through for us,” Vann said.

“They did,” Diaz said. “Looks like they sent his information to us around midnight their time last night.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“As far as the information we have tells us, he’s not anyone,” Diaz said. “The Navajo Nation have him on file for a single drunk and disorderly when he was nineteen. No time, community service. Other than that what we’ve got is his birth certificate and Social Security, a few medical records, and his high school transcripts, which run through tenth grade.”

“How’d he do?” Vann asked.

“The fact it stops at the tenth grade might tell you something.”

“No driver’s license or other sort of ID?” I asked.

“No,” Diaz said.

“What else?” Vann asked.

“He’s thirty-one and was in less than great health,” Diaz said. “Some liver damage and heart disease, and signs of incipient diabetes, which is not too surprising in someone with a Native American background. Missing a few teeth in the back. Also, that slash in his neck is consistent with a self-inflicted wound. He did it to himself and he did it with that broken glass you found.”

“Is this everything?” I asked.

Diaz smiled. “No, it’s not. I have something for you that I think you’re going to find really interesting.”

“Cut the suspense, Diaz,” Vann said. “Get to it.”

“They did an X-ray of his skull before they took out his brain,” Diaz said. He popped up the three-dimensional scan on Sani’s head. “Tell me what you see.”

“Holy shit,” I said, immediately.

“Huh,” Vann said, after a second.

The X-ray of Sani’s head showed a network of thin tendrils and coils in and around the brain, converging on five junctions distributed radially around the interior surface of the skull, the junctions themselves linked to one another in a mesh of connections.

It was an artificial neural network, designed to send and receive information from the brain, displayed in almost perfect detail.

Two groups of people had structures like these. I belonged to one of those groups. Vann belonged to the other.

“This dude’s an Integrator,” I said.

“What’s his brain structure?” Vann asked Diaz.

“The report says it’s consistent with someone who contracted Haden’s,” Diaz said. “And that’s consistent with his medical records, which show he had meningitis as a kid, which could mean the Haden’s variety. He’s got the brain structure to be an Integrator.”

“Shane,” Vann said, still looking at the X-ray.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Problems with this scenario,” Vann said.

I thought about it for a minute. “This guy didn’t get through high school,” I said, finally.

“So?” Vann said.

“So Integrator training is a post-graduate thing,” I said. “You undertake it after getting a suitable undergraduate degree, like psychology. What’s yours?”