Killing Time (13 page)

On the main island of Hirta,
Malcolm had constructed the base of his operations near the decaying remains of
a small village that was centuries old. The buildings that made up his facility
were cleverly designed to match those older stone ruins, though the technology
that the newer structures housed could not have belonged any less to the past.
All maintenance and operative systems were so fully automated that there was
no need for any human presence at all; the island could be left deserted for
weeks or even months at a time. As to style, the interior of the compound
echoed the marked contrast aboard ship: functional minimalism in the
laboratories and control rooms, inviting antiques in the living and lounging
areas. Housed in one mock church was the projection unit for the ozone weapon,
which apparently could also be used to adjust conditions on the island
temporarily when the climate of the North Atlantic became too severe. As
Larissa and Colonel Slayton got Malcolm settled into his regimen of rest,
self-treatment, and self-medication (he had an understandable aversion to
doctors), the others showed me to a room that had a truly striking view of an
eerie cove and the sea beyond. During the next two weeks or so, as Malcolm
privately regained his strength and then went to work in a lab that he reserved
as his sanctum, I passed the time with the rest of the team, investigating the
islands, learning more about the technologies the group had developed, and
pondering the effects of our recent escapades. It was an energizing time, and
as it passed I became aware that I was speaking and acting not like Dr. Gideon
Wolfe of Manhattan, professor at John Jay University and respected member of
American society, but rather as someone who, like the others, had renounced his
native citizenship and become a man without a country. When I'd boarded
Malcolm's ship in the Belle Isle prison, I'd become an outlaw—in the finest
sense of the word, I told myself, but such distinctions would matter very
little if I crossed paths with the authorities. And so I dived headlong into
my new role, discussing potential new hoaxes and learning about new weapons and
technologies during the day and becoming ever more passionately fascinated by
Larissa at night.

It seems a dream now, a dream to
which I would gladly return if only I could forget the horror that woke me from
it.

That horror was not without its
warnings, though in those early days I was far too swept up by emotional and
intellectual excitement to recognize them. The first still stands out vividly:
one evening, with the sun bouncing off the cove outside the leaded bay window
in my room (at that time of the year it became truly dark on St. Kilda for only
about three hours each night), I happened to be going through the jacket I'd
been wearing during the jailbreak just days earlier and found the original
computer disc that Mrs. Price had given me. Staring at it, my first thoughts
were of Max: not as I'd last seen him, with much of his head removed by a CIA
sniper's bullet, but alive and as full of banter and laughter as he'd always
been. Then, slowly, I recalled the information that was on the disc—
all
the
information. I'd been so focused on matters surrounding the Forrester
assassination that I'd completely forgotten that Max had managed to crack the
encryption of a second set of images: the old footage of a Nazi death camp,
through which wandered the digitally inserted silhouette of an unidentifiable figure.

Popping the disc into a computer
terminal that sat at a rustic desk by the bay window, I called up those images
and reviewed them once again.

"Anything good?"

I started a little at the sound
of Larissa's voice and turned to see her striding quickly through my open door.
I let out a small, pleased groan as she threw herself into my lap, kissed me
quickly, and then turned her dark eyes to the monitor. "What in the world
is that? Trying your hand at a little revisionism, are you?"

"You mean you don't recognize
it?" I said, surprised.

Larissa shook her head.
"Doesn't quite look finished, whatever it is."

"No," I said, replaying
the images. "Max found it on the disc that Price's wife gave us. I'd
forgotten about it—and when I saw it again I assumed it must have been another
job Price did for your brother."

"If it is, I've never heard
anything about it." Larissa leapt up and went to a glowing keypad by my
bed. "Maybe Leon knows something." She touched a few of the keys.
"Leon, come over to Gideon's room, will you? He's found something
odd."

In a few minutes Leon Tarbell
came shooting in, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. "Well, what is
your mystery, Gideon?" he said. "I was rather busy when you—" He
stopped suddenly when he saw the images on the screen. "What the devil is
that?"
As I explained the origins of the disc once again, Tarbell's gaze focused
ever more intently on the gray figure on the monitor.

"I know who that is,"
he said, fascinated yet frustrated. "Yes, I'm
certain
I know who
that is, but I can't seem to—there, you see? When he turns in profile. I
know
I've seen that silhouette somewhere before."

"That's exactly how I felt
the first time I watched it," I answered with a nod. "But I couldn't
place—"

"Wait!" A look of
sudden recognition came into Tarbell's satanic features, and then he rushed
around to the computer's keyboard. "I believe I may be able to ..."
His words trailed off as he went to work on the keyboard. Then a new succession
of images began to rapidly appear and disappear on the screen.

"What is it, Leon?"
Larissa asked. "
Was
Price doing something other than the Forrester
job for Malcolm?"

Tarbell shrugged. "If he
didn't tell
you,
Larissa darling, he certainly wouldn't tell the rest
of us. But as for
this
mysterious fellow—" He pointed to the
screen, where the footage of the concentration camp reappeared, frozen on one
frame. Tarbell tapped at the keyboard a few more times with a bit of a
flourish. "Here ... he ...
is
!"

The mysterious silhouette was
suddenly filled in perfectly by a photograph of a man whose name we all knew
well:

"Stalin,"
I
said,
more confused than ever.

"Yes, it's Stalin, all
right," Larissa agreed, looking as perplexed as I felt. "But what
interest could Price have had in placing
him
at a Nazi death camp?"

Tarbell only shrugged again,
while I asked, "Do you think it's important? I mean, maybe we should ask
Malcolm—"

"No, Gideon," Larissa
said definitively. "Not now. I've just come from him. He worked all night
and drove himself straight into another attack."

My attention diverted to
Malcolm's condition, I wondered aloud, "What does he
do
in that
lab, anyway?"

Larissa shrugged in frustration.
"He won't say, but he's been at it for months. Whatever it is, I wish he'd
drop it—he needs rest desperately. As for this business—" She reached
over to shut off the terminal screen, then removed the disc and tossed it to
Tarbell. "I'd say it was just some movie that Price was working on. Forget
it, Dr. Wolfe." She turned my face toward hers and moved in to kiss me.
"Right now I require your full attention."

Tarbell cleared his throat.
"My cue," he said, pocketing the disc and leaving as quickly as he'd
come. "I told you once, Gideon— you're a lucky man ..."

Perhaps I was. But luck is, of
course, transitory; and had I known how close mine was to changing at that
moment or how much the disc I'd rediscovered would have to do with that change,
I would never have let myself be distracted, even by Larissa. For a completed
version of the images we'd been watching would all too soon trigger a crime so
incomprehensible that it would bring even our senselessly hyperactive world to
an astonished, bewildered halt. It would also propel me into this, my jungle
exile in Africa, where I await the arrival of my former comrades with the most
profound confusion and dread I have ever known.

As the rest of us continued to
wait for Malcolm to emerge from his laboratory and announce that it was time to
move on to some new deceptive enterprise, patience at times became difficult to
sustain— though I'll admit that it was, as Leon Tarbell repeatedly pointed out,
easier for Larissa and me than for the others. In fact, so agitated did Tarbell
become over the mere thought that members of our group other than himself were
engaged in a physical relationship that he first almost fatally electrocuted
himself in a supposed "virtual reality sex suit" (really nothing more
than thin rubber long Johns embedded with powerful electrodes) and then, a few
days later, took a small jetcopter that was stored in one of the mock barns of
the compound and headed off for Edinburgh. As he prepared to lift off, I
pointed out that Glasgow was closer, but this only brought a look of supreme
disdain to his mercurial features.

"Drunken laborers and heroin
addicts!" he bellowed.  "No, Gideon, the prostitutes of Edinburgh
service sex-starved lawyers and deviant politicians—they have immense
sexuality, they are for me!"

And with a roar of the aircraft's
engines he was gone.

So began a most remarkable
evening. I was, unusually, alone, because Larissa had decided to keep watch
through the night by her still ailing brother's bedside, to make sure that he
spent the time resting rather than working in his laboratory. Again I found
myself speculating about what could possibly be consuming the man so ravenously;
and it occurred to me that while Larissa had said she didn't know, the
ever-secretive and reticent Colonel Slayton might. On asking around I
discovered that Slayton had ensconced himself in the compound's communications
monitoring room. So I set off to see whether or not, with my supposed
psychological guile, I could maneuver him into revealing something about
Malcolm's activities.

The monitoring room was located
in a mock tavern opposite the church that housed the projection unit of
Malcolm's ozone weapon. Beneath the tavern was an underground chamber some
hundred yards square, which housed the equipment that did the actual work of
listening in on the world's electronic communications, both official and
private. The governments of the United States and its English-speaking allies
had for decades operated a similar system called Echelon that required several
such monitoring installations, each made up of acres of equipment: once again,
Malcolm had achieved the next level of technological development.

I knocked on the simulated wood
exterior of the room's door several times without receiving any answer. But as
I could hear unintelligible chattering noises within, it seemed safe to assume
that the colonel was indeed at work. So I quietly entered—only to be faced with
one of the stranger tableaux that I had come across since my arrival.

The overhead lights in the room
were out, but the darkness in the windowless chamber was cut by the light of
some twenty monitors, most not particularly large but a few taking up the
better part of a wall. The flashing shapes on these screens at first appeared
nonsensical, but as my eyes adjusted to the gently stroboscopic light I
realized that they were rapidly changing bodies of text, both encrypted and
decoded, as well as an occasional blueprint or diagram. Each screen's contents
varied from the next, and the cacophony that I'd heard outside, which became
quite deafening once I entered, was being produced by dozens of audio
signals—again, some intelligible and some encoded—that were playing at the same
time.

Slayton sat at a console in the
midst of all this, facing the largest pair of monitors and staring at them,
even though the information that was flashing across their screens was clearly
moving too fast for him to comprehend fully. Wanting to ask what in the world
he was doing and unable to gain his attention even through the loudest and most
absurdly theatrical of throat clearings, I took one or two steps further into
the room. But then I froze:

As I came around his side, I
could see that the long scar on his face had been moistened by a thin stream of
tears. His expression, however, was as dispassionate as ever: only the
slightest quiver of his grimly set jaw indicated any emotion at all. In such a
man, however, even so tiny a movement bespoke volumes.

It was a moment of profound
embarrassment for me, and I tried to end it by slowly retracing my steps to the
door. But before I'd gotten halfway there I saw the colonel's hand reach
slowly for a keypad, and touch one of its glowing keys with a finger. The
volume in the room came quickly down to a level that only intensified my embarrassment.
Then, without turning, Slayton said quietly:

"What you're hearing and
seeing, Doctor, are the transmissions of various defense and intelligence
agencies around the world."

"Ah" was all I could
think to answer.

"Tell me," Slayton went
on. "Is it true that the human ear is not sensitive enough to detect
dishonesty?"

There seemed to be nothing to do
but continue the conversation. "Most of the time, yes," I said.
"Those kinds of interpretations are usually emotional judgment calls, not
perceptive certainties."

The colonel grunted.
"Perhaps. Perhaps my ear has simply become finely turned over the years.
But I can tell you with absolute certainty, Doctor, that this"—he raised
the volume in the room again—
"this is
the sound
of lying
..."

I don't know how long I stood
there, watching Slayton's rigid form as he continued to stare at the enormous
monitors. Eventually he reached out to knock the volume back down, and then,
after quite openly dabbing at his scar as well as his opposite cheek with a
handkerchief, he turned his chair to face me. "Something I can do for
you, Dr. Wolfe?" he asked, scrutinizing me with curiosity.