Killing Time (18 page)

"No!" Machen cried out,
clamping his eyes closed. The mere possibility of having more of the lies he'd evidently
generated about himself exposed was enough to reduce the man to submission.
"One of my contacts—Dov Eshkol—I gave what you're talking about to him.
But he—" Recovering a bit, Machen suddenly stopped; too late, however.

"But he's gone missing,
hasn't he?" Slayton said. No confirmation on this point from Machen was
necessary; there remained only the final questions: "How much do you know
about Dov Eshkol? And where is he now, would you guess?"

"I can't—" Machen
stammered. "You don't understand—Dov is—"

I studied the man for an instant
as Slayton kept the gun at his head and thought I saw something. "Just a
moment, Colonel," I said. Then I asked Machen, "It was Eshkol who
threatened to kill Price if he kept copies of the disc, wasn't it?"

Relieved not to have been forced
to say it himself, Machen nodded. "Eshkol is old-school
counterintelligence—he's the first person the Mossad calls on if one of their
own people has turned or even gone soft and needs to be taken care of. He'll—if
I tell you anything more, he'll come back for me."

"He may or may not come
back," Larissa said. "But we're already here. So tell us—where would
he be coming back
from?
^"

"I don't know," Machen
answered, at which Slayton ground the muzzle of the revolver into his scalp
with a vigor that made me wince. "I don't!" Machen cried.
"Nobody does! He's disappeared!"

"Why?"
Slayton
demanded.

"He thought that the disc
warranted an active response," Machen explained. "But word came down
that the government was going to handle it quietly and give the Russians a
chance to explain. Eshkol couldn't tolerate that. He exploded and said he'd
deal with it himself." Trying very hard to get a grip on himself, Machen
went on, "You have to understand, Eshkol isn't—well, he's extreme. And this
... one set of his great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And a lot of
other people in his family didn't make it."

The same dread I had felt at
Malcolm's earlier mention of this possibility returned with Machen's
confirmation of it, and the feeling must have been all over my face, for when I
turned to Larissa she gave me a look of concerned confusion. But I just shook
my head and tried to stay alert as Slayton kept after our prisoner.

"Has the Mossad been able to
track him at all?" the colonel asked.

Machen shook his head. "They
were expecting him to go public with the images—give them to a newsgroup or
post them on the Net himself. They've been tracking down the correspondents
with the most contacts in the Middle East—so far, nothing."

"No sign of where he's
gone?" Slayton asked.

"No, and there won't be. If
Eshkol goes deep, not even the Mossad will find him. He's that good."

Suddenly a deep rumble resonated
through Machen's house, making me think that an earthquake was under way; but
then I realized that the thunderous sound and feeling weren't quite seismic
and that I'd heard and felt them before. As if to confirm my intuition, Larissa
suddenly put her hand to the collar of her bodysuit.

"Yes, Brother?" Her
expression never changed as she nodded and said, "Understood." She
looked at Slayton and then to me, calling over the low, growing hum, "It's
Bel Air Security—Machen's guards were due to report in three minutes ago. A
personnel carrier and an infantry squad are on the way." She opened a pair
of French doors that led to a balcony.

In seconds the air outside the
house began to shimmer and ripple as if it were being exposed to a great heat;
then a seeming crack in the very fabric of reality opened up, revealing Julien
and, beyond him, the interior of the ship's corridor, all seemingly suspended
in midair. The bizarre sight—a product of partially shutting down the vessel's
holographic projector—brought screams from the prostitutes in the next room
and prompted Machen to squirm with heightened vigor. "Who
are
you
people?" he said.

But Slayton only released him in
reply, as Fouché began to wave to us vigorously. "Quickly, all of
you!" he cried.

We bolted for the balcony just as
the ship's humming began to rattle the house hard enough to cause Machen's
weapons collection to crash to the floor. A few of the guns went off, prompting
more howls from Machen; but our thoughts were now all on escape, and in seconds
Larissa, Slayton, and I were back aboard and the ship had gotten under way.

Thus were we able to give a
name—and soon, thanks to the continued hacking efforts of Tarbell, a rather
hard and frightening face—to the man we were seeking. Further monitoring of
official Israeli communications indicated that Machen had not lied when he had
said that Dov Eshkol's superiors believed the bitter passions inspired in
their wayward operative by the Stalin images would find their vent in some kind
of public exposure of the materials. But those of us aboard the ship suspected,
only too presciently, that the world would not get off so lightly.

Unaware of whether Dov Eshkol had
yet made his way out of California or even the United States, we again sought
refuge in the deep Pacific as Tarbell—assisted now by the Kupermans—continued
to hack into the databases and monitor the communications of various American
and Israeli intelligence agencies in order to assemble a complete picture of
the fugitive. The rest of us, meanwhile, gathered once more around the
conference table to fuel ourselves with an impromptu meal prepared by Julien
and to discuss the few bits of information we'd been able to squeeze out of An
Machen. This conversation produced few new insights, and those few were deeply
discouraging: Machen's claim that if Eshkol went into deep cover even the
Mossad wouldn't be able to find him seemed entirely plausible, given his
ability to elude detection thus far; and we all agreed that if the Israelis
failed in their efforts to find him, the chances of the United States (the only
other nation aware that there was some sort of problem) turning anything up
were virtually nil. Nor did the confirmation of Malcolm's instinctive feeling
about Eshkol's being descended from Holocaust survivors give us any sense of
encouragement: clearly the man was considered highly violent and something of
a loose cannon by his superiors, and if his murderous tendencies— which had
apparently been turned, on occasion, against his own countrymen—stemmed from
rage over the fate of his relatives and his race, he would have little trouble
thinking in large numbers when it came time to conceive a punishment for any
and all previously un-exposed accessories to the genocide in Nazi Germany.

But we would need more hard
information before we could determine just what form that punishment might
take; and after several hours Leon, Eli, and Jonah were able to provide it.
They filed bleary-eyed into the nose of the ship, hungry and bearing a raft of
notes, as well as several pictures of Eshkol, each of which bore little resemblance
to the next. These they began to explain as Julien brought them food; and while
the information they'd gleaned offered no reason to doubt that Eshkol was an
extremely dangerous man, it also showed why our team might be better equipped
to hunt him down than either the Israelis or the Americans.

"He is a murderer, yes—a
butcher, really," Tarbell said, cramming food into his mouth, "but
he also plays on our field, you might say."

To the rest of our puzzled looks,
Jonah, who was eating slightly less ravenously, said, "He's got the usual
undercover and covert skills—disguise, languages—but the real secret of his
success is that he's an information junkie. He's a brilliant researcher, and he
can manufacture any sort of personal documents and records to gain access to
just about anything—and then destroy any evidence that he was ever there. He's
even fooled the universal DNA database."

"I thought that was
impossible," Larissa said.

"Not impossible," Eli
answered. "Just very, very difficult. The trick is getting the
corroborative samples. If you're going to, say, travel by air using the
identity of someone who's actually dead, you're going to need some sample DNA
to offer when you check in, and it had better come from someone who bore more
than a passing resemblance to you—and, most important, someone whose death was
not recorded in the database. Eshkol's apparently got quite a collection of
alter egos—and I think you can guess how he got them."

"The other Mossad agents he
executed," Colonel Slayton said with a nod.

"Also many of the Arab
operatives he's killed," Tarbell confirmed, checking his notes and
indicating the pictures, some of which showed Eshkol in traditional Arab dress.
"The narcissism of minor differences, eh? Your colleague Dr. Freud would
be deeply satisfied, Gideon. At any rate, whichever side they serve, such
victims are not given obituaries—and their deaths are, of course, kept from the
DNA database. They are ideal, really, as sample donors—nearly
un-traceable."

"Eshkol was reprimanded
several times," Jonah said as Tarbell went back to eating. "The first
was in 2011, when he was twenty-six. Mutilating the body of one of his victims,
was what the Mossad called it."

"It's not exactly unknown in
that game," Larissa said. "That kind of trophy taking."

"True," Eli agreed,
flipping through still more scribbled pages, "and so they let it go at a
warning. Quite a few times. And that's where we may have him. Neither the
Israelis nor the Americans know about Eshkol's modus operandi—we only happened
to stumble on it when we cross-referenced the names of his victims, which we
got out of the most secure Mossad files, with every travel database we could
crack into. A few hits came up, then a few more."

"He's gone on several
extracurricular outings over the years," Jonah threw in. "And I don't
think it was tourism—not the way he was covering his tracks."

"You're saying he's engaged
in private vendettas," Malcolm judged, quietly and grimly.

Eli nodded. "Neo-Nazis,
skinheads, Arab intellectuals at foreign universities who are ardently opposed
to peace with Israel—they've all mysteriously died when Eshkol has been in
their respective countries, under cover of his identity-switching scheme. In a
few cases we can even put him in the specific town or city where the execution
took place."

Malcolm nodded slowly, gazing
silently out at the ocean in the way he generally did when things took an
ominous turn.

"And you think you can track
him?" Slayton asked, recognizing Malcolm's mood and assuming the mantle of
leadership for a moment. "Using this method?"

"We've already begun,"
Jonah answered with an enthusiastic nod.

"And?" Larissa asked.

"And," Eli replied,
"it seems that he has in fact left the United States—for Paris. Two days
ago."

General murmuring ensued as we
all puzzled with the question of why Eshkol should have chosen to flee to such
an apparently visible hiding place as the French capital. It was Malcolm who,
without turning to us, finally and quietly declared:

"A weapon. He'll want a
weapon."

Fouché looked further confused.
"But he's moving quickly, Malcolm. He can hardly afford to bring along a
tank or even a particularly large gun, which are the usual French exports.
Explosives would be easy enough to get anywhere, so why—" His mouth
freezing in midsentence, Julien's eyes widened with horrific realization.

Malcolm didn't even need to see
the look. "Yes, Julien," he said. "Your countrymen rationalize
trading in such technology by saying that it has always been and will always be
impossible to get weapons-grade plutonium in France—but the Iraqis were able to
get the plutonium elsewhere and the mechanism in Paris. Or, should I say, in a
town just southeast of the city."

Instantly we all realized what
Malcolm was driving at. In 2006, Iraqi president and longtime Western nemesis
Saddam Hussein decided to challenge the economic embargo that had been in
place against his country for nearly two decades by declaring that he had
attained nuclear capability. This struck many in the West as absurd, since their
renewed monitoring of Iraqi weapons facilities had not revealed any sudden
advances that would have permitted Saddam to construct such devices. So, to
drive his point home, Saddam dispatched a suicide bomber to explode a tactical
nuclear device in one of the most prosperous Kurd communities in the
Allied-protected north of his country. The man was intercepted, the device was
captured, and its miniaturized mechanism was eventually determined to have
been purchased in France.

"I suggest that we all man our
stations," Malcolm continued. "Set course for France—the quickest
course, Colonel, that you can possibly determine. We've no time to worry about
interference from any of our usual antagonists."

As the rest of us rose to comply,
Eli asked, "What about the Israelis and the Americans? Do we let them
know what's happening?"

Malcolm shrugged.
"Certainly, though I don't think they'll believe it. Especially as it
comes from an anonymous and unconfirmable source. But by all means, tell
them." Looking out at the sea again, he added, "Tell them that this
marvelous age has produced a monster—a monster who can use their own tools
better than they can possibly imagine."

I watched Malcolm for a moment as
he glanced down, took out his transdermal injector, and held it to his hand;
and I found myself wondering if his last remark had been about Dov Eshkol at
all.

Although the need to get to
France quickly outweighed that of staying hidden from the warplanes of America
and her allies, it nevertheless made sense to take what precautions we could
to avoid detection during our voyage east. Malcolm and Eli therefore set about
creating a new radar signature for our ship, to ensure that any anomalous
readings picked up by long-range stations on the ground would fail to match
those that the Americans and English had no doubt put on file following our
encounters in Afghanistan and over the North Sea. This undertaking made it
necessary for someone else to man Eli's monitoring post in the turret; and
since that was a job with which I'd already become at least somewhat
acquainted, it seemed logical for Larissa to suggest that I be the one to take
over. Yet had logic dictated some other course, she would, I think, have found
a way to refute it: the more time I spent with her, the more she seemed to
want me around, a situation that was, as I told her, utterly unprecedented in
my experience.