Killing Time (20 page)

"Malcolm!" I cried
urgently but quietly, for the drones were visible outside the window. I rushed
over, carefully moved the wheelchair, and then lifted him up, shocked and
appalled by how light his body was. There was a captain's box bed set into one
bulkhead, and I put him in it, loosening his collar and checking for a pulse.

But try as I might, I couldn't
find one.

Malcolm's return to consciousness
had nothing to do with any efforts of mine, for I had not even begun to
administer resuscitating measures when his entire body jerked upward as if it
had received a strong electric shock. His lungs took in a huge gulp of air and
he began to cough hard, though it didn't seem that the noise was loud or
distinct enough to attract the attention of our observers. I poured a glass of
water from a pewter jug and got him to swallow some of it, and once his
breathing had returned to something like normal he whispered:

"How long was I gone?"

"I don't know," I
answered. "I found you on the floor." I raised my eyebrows in
question. "You had no pulse, Malcolm."

He drank a little more water and
nodded. "Yes," he breathed. "It happens—more often these days,
actually." Lying back, he tried to calm his body. "One of the more
unpredictable symptoms of my condition—spontaneous shutdown of the most basic
functions. But it never lasts long." He looked at the wooden ceiling of
his bed in seemingly casual frustration. "I wish I could remember whether
or not I
dream
while it's happening ..."

"Have you determined what
triggers it?" I asked, slightly amazed by his attitude. "Does
exhaustion play a part?"

He shrugged. "Quite
probably. However ..." He rolled over and looked outside, frowning when he
saw the drones. "Still there, eh? Well, exhausted or not, I've got to get
back to Eli—"

But the man couldn't even sit up
straight. "You're not going anywhere just now," I said; and as he
reached for his transdermal injector I took it away from him. "And I
don't think self-medication following a neuroparalytic crisis of some kind is
really called for, either."

Ever since our first encounter I
had recognized that Malcolm's pride was more important to him than almost
anything: he desperately needed to feel that he wasn't helpless and would go
to almost inhuman lengths to avoid that impression. Thus I wasn't at all sure
how he would react to the doctorly dictates I was issuing. But surprisingly,
he did no more than glance at me with an expression of acceptance, rather like
that of a boy who's been told he has to stay home from school. "All right,"
he said calmly. "But I'll need my chair." He actually seemed somewhat
relieved at the prospect of being forced to rest for a bit, though I knew he
would never admit it; so I simply nodded and maneuvered the wheelchair over to
his bed, letting him get into it himself. "Thank you, Gideon," he
said, as if in reply to my not assisting him.

"Just be thankful that your
sister worries about you," I said. "God knows how long you might've
stayed on that floor if she hadn't asked me to come down. Or what shape you
would've been in when we finally did find you."

He acknowledged the statement by
holding up a hand. Then, after a moment's pause, he looked at me with evident
curiosity. "You and Larissa—you care for each other very deeply, it
seems." Assuming that he was still groggy, I smiled in a cajoling way.
"What's it like?" he asked.

I had anticipated Malcolm's
eventually asking many questions about my relationship with his sister, but
this was not one of them. His disorientation, I determined, must have been greater
than I'd originally estimated. "You mean—what's it like to be in love with
your sister?" I said.

"To be in love with
any
woman,"
Malcolm said. "And to have her love you—what's that like?"

As he was speaking, I realized
from the clarity of both his gaze and his words that my supposition had been
wrong—that, though weakened, he wasn't disoriented at all—and this realization
fell like a stone on my spirit. Among the many things of which Stephen Tressalian
had robbed his son, this seemed to me the most valuable and shocking. It was
unspeakably cruel that Malcolm should not have known the answer to his own
question; yet the obviousness of why he did not was crueler still. Desperately
searching for an answer that would not betray my own sense of sorrow, I finally
said, "Larissa is a far cry from '
any
woman.' "

Malcolm pondered the statement.
"Do you
know
that?" he eventually asked. "Empirically, I
mean."

"I think so," I
answered. "At any rate, I believe it. That's what's important."

"Yes," he said,
touching his mouth pensively with his fingers. "That
is
the
important thing, isn't it? Belief..." We sat there without saying another
word for about a minute, as air wheezed noisily into and out of Malcolm's
lungs. Then he repeated the word: "Belief ... I haven't studied it
enough, Gideon. I've focused on deception—the deceptions of this age and my own
attempts to reveal them
through
deception. But I should have paid more
attention to belief—because it's what's put us in this predicament." He
seemed to be gaining strength, though I got the impression that it was more the
chance to talk about what had been bothering him than any genuine physical
improvement that was behind his surge in energy. "What is it, Gideon? What
makes a man like Dov Eshkol so committed to his beliefs that he's capable of
committing any kind of crime?"

Given the palliative effect that
the conversation was having on him, I kept up my end; and there, in the
bizarre, threatening quiet of the slow-moving ship, surrounded and constantly
scrutinized by the mechanized minions of our enemies below, we began to pick
away at the mind of the man we were hunting.

"There are a lot of factors
involved in that kind of belief, of course," I said. "But if I had to
pick one as paramount, I'd say it was fear."

"Fear?" Malcolm
repeated. "Fear of what? God?"

I shook my head. "The kinds
of fear I'm talking about strike long before we encounter any concept of God.
From the day we're born, there are two basic terrors that consume all people,
whatever their background. The first is terror prompted by a sense of our true
aloneness, our isolation from one another. The second, of course, is the fear
of death. No matter how in particular, these fears touch each of our lives and
are at least partly responsible for all crimes— including the types that Eshkol
has committed."

I paused and studied Malcolm for
a few seconds: he was nodding his head and seemed to be growing calmer by the
moment, even though his blue eyes stayed locked on the drones outside. "Go
on," he said after a half minute or so. "We've
got
to know how
his mind works."

"All right," I replied,
"but only if you can stay calm about it." He waved a hand a bit
impatiently, a good sign that he was, indeed, feeling better.
"Well," I continued, "most people try to submerge the first of
these fears—the terror of isolation—in a sense of identification within a
group. Religious, political, ethnic, it doesn't really matter—it's even behind
most of the mass marketing that's done today and behind popular culture itself.
Anything, as long as it seems to break down the wall of alienation and impart a
sense of belonging."

"Which creates,"
Malcolm murmured, his eyes going self-consciously wide, "enormous
opportunities for manipulation."

"And manipulators," I
agreed. "Otherwise known as leaders. Most of them are simply people who
are trying to assuage their own fears by creating a rubric of identity into
which the greatest number of souls, differing in everything except their
feeling of being disconnected and lost, can fit."

"Are we talking about
Eshkol's superiors here?"

"In part, but not primarily.
His Israeli commanders do fall into the category we've been discussing so far,
the fairly common variety of leaders that includes almost anyone involved in a
political, religious, economic, or cultural movement. But Eshkol? There's nothing
common about him, and if we want to understand how he works, we have to take
the whole business to the next level."

Malcolm sighed.
"Fanaticism,"
he said, with the same loathing he'd displayed earlier.

"Yes. The common leader and
his followers work mainly off of the desire to end isolation, but the fanatical
leader and his disciples incorporate the second primal fear, the fear of death,
into the equation. And by death I mean annihilation—the utter obliteration of
any and every bit of a person's earthly existence and legacy. The leader who
promises his people that adherence to his laws and teachings will not only
relieve the pain of their isolation but also allow them to defy death, to
achieve some kind of spiritual immortality through worthy deeds, that type of
leader achieves a supreme control that the first type can't match—and creates
an entirely different kind of follower in the process. Such a follower is
likely to disregard most generally accepted rules of social behavior for the
simple reason that to him or her, there is no obscenity save what the leader
labels obscene. And such a leader's definition of obscene is likely to be very
specific, because he doesn't want to limit the range of possible actions to
which he can order his followers."

"All right," Malcolm
agreed, his fingers beginning to tap on the arms of his chair. "But who is
it, then? Who's the leader who's telling Eshkol what to do?"

"I don't think anyone's
telling him, in the way that you mean. But he does have leaders—the worst kind.
You said it yourself, Malcolm, when we first found out about him—it's his
family, specifically the victims who died almost a century ago."

Malcolm looked momentarily
confused. "But—they're dead. And they weren't leaders."

"Not in the obvious
way," I said. "And that makes them even more dangerous. They embody
all the virtues of Eshkol's ethnic and religious heritage—in fact, being so
long dead, they have no flaws of any kind. They demand, in his mind,
unquestioning faith—and complete vengeance, to be achieved with the same
brutality that caused their deaths. They offer him the promise of welcoming
arms, of eternal community, should he die as a result of his efforts. And most
of all, the viciousness he embodies, the viciousness that's inherent in all
fanaticism, takes on the gender trappings of love because it serves their
memory. Eshkol's the consummate lone wolf, and even the Israelis know it—he
answers to only one voice, the collective voice he imagines to be coming from
his murdered ancestors."

"And so," Malcolm said,
taking up the train of thought, "when he saw the Stalin images he never
questioned them."

I nodded. "By now Eshkol is
almost certainly paranoid. He's had enough time to obsess over an unequaled
cataclysm, to link it to events in his own family and personal life and decide
that it's ongoing and requires an active response from him personally. Based
on his activities, it's safe to say that he suspects the entire world is
involved in a plot to exterminate Jews—indeed, Jews themselves, at least some
Jews, are apparently not above suspicion in his mind. Paranoia creates
fantastic tension, which can never be relieved through disproof—only through
vindication. So when he saw the Stalin images, he saw exactly what he'd always
wanted to see—proof that he was right and that all his actions had been
justified."

Still staring at the drones,
Malcolm began to murmur,
"Mundus vult..."
But the statement
seemed to give him no satisfaction now, and he finally sat back, letting out a
long breath. "Good Lord, Gideon ..."

"I'm not telling you
anything you didn't already know—or suspect. What bothers me now is, how can
we possibly hope to catch him? If I'm right—if he in fact answers to no one
living and if he can move through modern society like a phantom—then where's
our advantage?"

Malcolm balled his hands into
fists, but he kept his voice low. "Our advantage is ourselves. It's up to
us. No one else can get to him before—"

Malcolm apparently didn't want to
finish the thought; but I, wishing to be absolutely sure that we did indeed
understand both each other and the situation, looked at him and said, "
'Before ...'?"

A sudden flurry of movement
outside the window distracted us both: in loose formation the drones began to
move away from our ship and head back in the direction from which they'd come.
Though immensely relieved, I was initially at a loss as to why it was
happening. But then I heard Eli's voice coming over the address system:

"It's all right—I've
initiated the new signature, they don't have anything to lock onto anymore. We
should be safe."

Malcolm turned and touched a
keypad by his bed. "Well done, Eli. Julien—let's get back up to speed. I
want to be over France within the hour." Putting his hands on the wheels
of his chair, Malcolm gave me one more critical look. "I think we both
have a very good idea of what we need to get to Eshkol 'before,' Gideon—and I
suggest that, however horrifying it seems, we both try to impress that idea on
the others." He turned his chair around and headed for the door.
"This man's mind may be full of vengeful fantasies, as you say—but they
will die with him."

With our ability to move at full
speed restored, we were able to reach the English Channel, if not France
itself, within the hour's time called for by Malcolm. Our path of descent from
the stratosphere ended above the channel just north of Le Havre, and after once
again engaging the holographic projector we flew directly over that city at
cruising altitude, following the Seine River as it snaked its way through one
of the most congested areas of French suburban sprawl. This sprawl, like all
things French, had over the years become steadily more American in its details
and trappings, yet because it cut through one of the finest and most historic
areas of Normandy, it was in some way even more grotesque to look at than its
American counterparts.