Killing Time (14 page)

"I—I was wondering—" As
I fumbled for words, it occurred to me that Slayton might be taking pleasure
from my discomfort; but further inspection of his features revealed nothing to
support such a suspicion. "I was wondering about Malcolm, actually. If I
could be of any medical assistance."

"You think he needs
psychiatric help?" Oddly enough, the question seemed entirely sincere.

"That wasn't what I
meant," I answered. "But I
am
a doctor, I can recognize
chronic pain when I see it. And Larissa's told me his— story."

"Has she?" Slayton's
eyes narrowed. "Well, if she's told you that, Doctor, then you must
already have concluded that there's nothing you or anyone else can do. Pain
medication and rest—that's all there is for him. That's all there ever has been."

"And clearly he has no
trouble taking medication," I said, detecting an opening. "But why
isn't he getting enough rest?"

Something vaguely approximating a
smile seemed to creep into one corner of the colonel's mouth. "Clever,
Doctor," he said. "But I can't answer that. None of us can. For the
simple reason that none of us, not even Larissa, knows what work is keeping him
from sleeping."

"I see." Glancing
around the room I asked, "And you?"

The phantom smile seemed to gain
some substance. "Jonah and I have been assembling and installing a
holographic projection mechanism for the ship. It should allow us to move about
unseen and avoid messes like the business in Florida."

"That's possible?"

Slayton inclined his head
judiciously. "We were close at the Pentagon. Malcolm believes he's worked
out the details."

"Ah." I stood my
ground, shuffling a bit. "But that—that really doesn't explain all this,
does it?" I indicated the screens.

I don't know what kind of a
reaction I expected to such a direct question, but it certainly wasn't the one
I got. Slayton chuckled good-naturedly, then held one hand out to an empty
chair that was next to his. "Sit down, Doctor, and I'll explain," he
said. "Since the entire idea depends on
you . .
."

As I took my place by the
colonel, he said, "In some priestly and monastic orders the custom of
self-flagellation is still practiced. Do you find such behavior aberrant,
Doctor?"

"Extreme," I replied,
looking up with him at the monitors. "But not aberrant. Is that what this
is for you—self-flagellation? With painful light and sound taking the place of
the whip?"

"In some way, I'm sure it
is," Slayton answered with a frankness that was, like everything else
about the man, very impressive. "For most of my life, Doctor, this
world"—he indicated the screens— "was the wilderness into which I
traveled, battling to bring the faith of democracy to the heathens. Until
..." His attention began to wander, but he soon caught himself. "It's
one thing to discover that your god has feet of clay. It's quite another to
find that those feet are soaked in blood. Not only the blood of your enemies
but of your comrades, as well. And to realize that you yourself were complicitous
in their deaths. Complicitous—by omission ..."

I watched as tears welled up in
his eyes again, then said, "Colonel, you're thinking of the Taiwan
campaign. But you can't—"

"Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq,
Colombia, and yes, Taiwan," he interjected quickly. "Or any of the
half-dozen other places where I killed and let my troops be killed in the name
of freedom. Can you imagine what it was like to discover that the only freedom
my superiors were ever really interested in was the freedom of their moneyed
masters to do business in those places? I'm not a fool, Dr. Wolfe. At least, I
don't like to think of myself as one. Why, then, didn't I see it? Any of it?
The international trade organizations and security alliances whose authority we
guaranteed—did they ever stamp out tyranny, exploitation, or inequality in any
of the places we were told they would? Did they ever bring real freedom to a
single country that didn't already have it?"

Slayton shook a tightly clutched
fist. "And yet we continued to obey. To shed our enemies' blood for them
and let our own soldiers die. Then in Taiwan, it became obvious that we were
there only
to
die—that Washington had no intention of stopping Beijing's
takeover, that they were actually
in league
with the commu-capitalists.
I held no brief for the government of Taiwan then, Doctor, and I still don't.
But why should my troops have died for that kind of cynicism? And above
all"—Slayton's chest heaved mightily—
"why
didn't I
see
it?"

I shrugged—there was no point
pulling punches with such a person:
"Mundus vult decipi, "
I
said quietly.

His fleeting smile returned.
"Thank you, Doctor."

"I'm sorry—"

"No, I'm perfectly serious.
Thank you for not patronizing me with false rationalizations. Yes, everyone
wants to be deceived, and so did I. I wanted to believe the lessons I'd learned
as a boy. When my father came home from the Persian Gulf in a bag and we buried
him at Arlington, I wanted to believe that his war hadn't been one of blood for
oil. Somewhere deep inside me the genes that had been passed along from an
African slave told me I was being a fool, but I didn't listen. I fought every
attempt to expose the deception. And then, in Taiwan ... it all fell apart. By
the time I went to work in the Pentagon I was a ghost, one who, having
been
deceived,
learned
to
deceive. And I would have stayed a ghost if I'd never met
Malcolm. Yet even during my time with this team, something's been
missing." He turned to me, his face full of purpose. "Something that
you,
Doctor, are going to help me put right."

Somewhat taken aback, I asked,
"Why me?"

In reply Slayton stood and moved
around the room. "Psychology and American history, Doctor—I require your
expertise." He folded his hands together once and wrung them hard.
"It would surprise you, I think, to learn that I lobbied very hard to get
you on this team."

I almost laughed in amazement.
"I'll admit that it would."

"Not that it was a tough
sell, once they read your book." Slayton picked a copy of that same
Psychological
History of the United States
up off the console and began leafing through
it.
"And
saw your picture," he went on, sounding for a moment
like a knowing, mildly disapproving father. "Your selection at that point
was guaranteed. But I was the one who brought you to their attention." He
stopped his leafing and focused on one page of the volume, then gave me a
bemused look. "Do you
really
think that the death of Jefferson's
mother had something to do with his writing the Declaration of Independence?"

I chose my words more carefully
than I had in the book: "The timing of the two events always struck me as
too close to be a coincidence. They had a difficult relationship, by all
accounts."

Slayton nodded. "There was a
time when such an idea would have disgusted me, Doctor. When this entire book
would have disgusted me. You force the American nation onto the couch and find
it laced with neuroses."

"A good deal more than
neuroses," I ventured.

"Yes," Slayton said.
"And as I say, once I would have cursed you for it. But now..." His
voice trailed off again as his eyes fixed on the dancing light on the floor.

"Colonel," I said,
"please don't take this as any diminution of your own feelings, but—surely
you realize that what you're going through is nothing new in the American
experience? The 'deception' you're describing is only the need to believe in
the inherent philosophical and ethical superiority of the United States—what's
generally called our moral exceptionalism. And it's been with us since the
beginning. Any country commits great crimes to reach a position of
unchallengeable power; ours was no exception. A method of rationalizing those
crimes has to be devised for people to be able to live with themselves."

"All true," Slayton
said, still looking at the floor. "But you and I are going to shake the
foundations of that exceptionalism."

My comforting little sermon
suddenly went out the window. "We are?" I said.

Slayton nodded slowly, then
snapped out of his reverie, turned his chair to face mine, and sat down.
"I spoke with Malcolm an hour ago. He was deeply angered by the
Afghanistan raid, even though we got the people out. He's agreed to my
suggestion—the same hypocrisy that has rationalized everything from the
enslavement of my ancestors to that same Afghan raid will be the target of our
next job. He's leaving it to you and me to work out the details."

"Oh." I took it in as
best I could: I'd expected to be
part
of the next effort, but to
design
it ... "Well—did you have any specific thoughts?"

"Not yet," Slayton
answered. "I've been sitting here with your book trying to come up with
something, but every time I start to consider it my mind gets so swept up
in—"

He stopped suddenly, his head
cocking as he listened to the noises coming from the monitoring equipment.
"There it is again," he murmured. "That's three times
tonight."

"What's three times
tonight?"

Slayton shook his head, still
listening; and it dawned on me that what he'd called his "finely
tuned" ear was actually capable of picking individual messages out of the
confusing din. "It's the Mossad," he said. "Israeli
intelligence. Three times tonight I've caught pieces of wireless calls from or
to several of their European operatives. They keep talking about some kind of
terrorist activity that's focused around a German concentration camp."

I considered it. "Might be
the militant wing of New Germany," I offered. "Ever since the Freedom
Party took over in Austria, their friends across the border have been getting
mighty obstreperous."

"It's possible,"
Slayton said, clearly unconvinced. "But the Israelis seem much too worked
up for it to be just European head butting. Well"—he reached over and shut
off the room's audio and visual monitors altogether—"we have our own work
to attend to, Doctor."

And thus did another clue to the
staggering tragedy that was shortly to engulf us appear and fade very nearly
unnoticed. Even now I cannot speculate on how many lives might have been spared
had Slayton and I chosen at that juncture to listen more closely to the
mysterious messages that were speeding through our monitoring systems—for
contemplating such lost opportunities would surely lead to madness.

How ingenious, how
vital
did
the scheme that Colonel Slayton and I concocted over the ensuing days seem at
the time—and how proud was I to be working alongside a man whose deeds had
inspired •young boys and shamed grown men! Though there was never any question
of actual
equality
in our partnership, Slayton was a more-than-indulgent
(if occasionally cutting) tutor, and we quickly established an effective
working rhythm that allowed us to outline a plan of attack within the first
twenty-four hours. The next forty-eight fairly flew by, and by the end of the
third day we were certain that we had contrived a plan that would more than
serve our purpose— although the only way to be certain was to test it on our
colleagues. We waited a day longer to do so, until Tarbell returned from his
excursion. Grinning in deep satisfaction and walking with an exhausted,
limping gait, Leon entered the room in which the rest of us (save Malcolm) had
gathered for dinner to announce that he was ready for a decent meal—"How
can the Scots
exist
on such food?"— and a productive conversation
(apparently it was only after he'd spent a few days with women of "immense
sexuality" that he was possessed of truly sound judgment). With that
assurance, Slayton nodded my way: he'd earlier decided that I should be the one
to actually propose the plan, saying that he lived in the world of action, not
words, and would only wind up making a hash of it. In view of its source I
allowed the implied slight to roll directly off my back and began to outline
what we'd come up with.

By way of introduction, I noted
that the team's successes to that point seemed to me to have rested on one
element above all: plausibility. Each hoax had been accepted by the public
because it had made some kind of fundamental sense. American politicians, for
example, really were little more than televised ciphers to most people;
whereas anyone who was aware of Winston Churchill's remarkable cunning and
willingness to sacrifice human life in pursuit of his political goals would
have had no trouble accepting the Princip letters. As for Jesus, little about
his life had ever been verifiable; and even the thousands of fossils that
archaeologists and anthropologists had unearthed over the years had not
provided any absolutely indisputable proof of the evolution of man. Finally, of
course, with respect to the Forrester footage, people had always been willing
to blame just about anything on Islamic terrorists. Therefore, our first goal
was to put our plan on a sound historical footing, in order to maintain that
same power of plausibility.

The others accepted all this
without much comment, at which point things got a bit trickier. I announced
that Colonel Slayton and I proposed to use, as our jumping-off point, the
murder of George Washington, a statement that was greeted by a host of blank
expressions that clearly said that either our colleagues didn't know Washington
had been murdered or that they had forgotten the story. I explained that their
lack of awareness was understandable, since the murder was an ugly chapter of
American history that was usually swept under some collective psychological
carpet. But yes, I continued, he had indeed been murdered: he'd come down with
a throat infection, for which several doctors had prescribed bleeding. Those
doctors had, however, been secretly bribed by a group of businessmen and
politicians—including several of the other Founders—who wanted the Father of
His Country shut up for good. During the last months of his life Washington had
come to realize the extent to which the fledgling United States had been sold to
the moneyed and merchant classes, and he intended to say something about it—
publicly. But the powers that were, being remarkably similar to the powers that
currently be, were having none of it. The result: assassination by bleeding
knife.