Killing Time (21 page)

Most disturbing about the scene
was its eerie illumination. In suburban areas of the United States one had long
since grown accustomed to the sterile, flickering light that oozed out of
homes every night into the dark streets and yards: the emanations of hundreds
of thousands of Internet and computer monitors. The French, on the other hand,
enjoyed a lower crime rate than the Americans and could therefore afford to be
more subtle with their street lighting and more indulgent of their
characteristic aversion to window furnishings, all of which made the glow of
those same monitors—as ubiquitous in France as in the United States or indeed
anywhere else in the digital world—more than simply apparent: it was dominant.

As we got closer to Paris, the
residential congestion beneath us thickened and the incandescence of the
countless monitors intensified. Malcolm and I, watching it all roll by from
the nose of the ship, were soon joined by Julien, who of course had the
greatest reason to be disheartened by what he was seeing. Fouché professed to
have accepted long ago that his native country, whatever its pretenses and
protestations, was as susceptible to the afflictions of the information age as
any other; indeed, it was the ongoing denials of this fact by his fellow
academics and intellectuals that had, he said, provoked his emigration. But
such statements didn't seem to help him face that endless, bright testament to
his homeland's secure place in the community of modern technostates.

"One attempts to be
philosophical about it," he said, crossing his arms and running one hand
through his beard. "And yet philosophy only sharpens the indictment. You
have read Camus? 'A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated
and read the papers.' We must now change this sentence a bit, I think: 'He masturbated
and logged on to the Internet.' " Fouché's bushy brows arched high.
"But perhaps the order of activity in that statement is wrong, eh?"
He tried to at least chuckle at what, under other circumstances, might have
been an amusing thought; but just then neither he nor I—nor, certainly,
Malcolm—could quite muster the enthusiasm.

Several silent minutes later
Larissa entered, bearing news that, if not uplifting, was at least somewhat
encouraging: Tarbell had been able to identify a man in the general vicinity of
Paris who regularly sold stolen technological secrets and advanced weaponry to
the Israeli government through the Mossad. It seemed more than likely that, as
Eshkol's flying destination had been Paris, he intended to contact this man,
who, according to Leon's research, was capable of laying hands on almost any
sort of hardware—including miniaturized nuclear devices. The dealer lived in
and conducted his business out of an expansive lakefront estate near the
medieval city of Troyes, southeast of Paris in the Champagne province. So we
maintained our heading and increased our pace, perfectly aware that the
likelihood of the dealer surviving any encounter with Eshkol was slim.

Swift as we were, though, we were
not swift enough. Our ship had barely reached the rolling landscape around
Troyes when Leon began to pick up French police reports concerning a murder at
the home of the arms dealer. Given the victim's occupation, the matter was
being kept very quiet, though even in their (supposedly) secure communications
the police admitted that they had no leads at all: apparently the Israelis
were in no rush to acknowledge either that they had done extensive business
with the dead man or that one of their own operatives might have been
responsible for his death. There was nothing for us to do but program our
monitoring system to keep a close watch on all sales of airline tickets for
journeys originating in France; by cross-referencing with other databases
according to the system already set up by Tarbell and the Kupermans, we could reasonably
hope to discover where Eshkol intended to go next.

That revelation, when it came,
was more than a little surprising for some of us:
"Kuala Lumpur?"
I
repeated after Tarbell broke the news.
"Malaysia?
He's going
into the middle of a full-scale war—"

"Ah-ah." Leon wagged a
finger. "A
'United Nations intervention,'
please,
Gideon.
They are very particular about that."

"All right," I said,
irritated. "He's going into the middle of a United Nations intervention
that's turned into the biggest regional bloodbath since Vietnam? What the hell
for? Is he trying to get himself killed?"

"You are the psychiatrist,
Gideon," Fouché said. "That is really a question
we
should be
asking
you, non?"

I took a light but fast swipe at
him, but he dodged it with the impressive agility I'd seen him demonstrate in
Afghanistan. "This isn't funny," I declared. "I hope nobody's
thinking that
we're
going there?"

"Why not?" Larissa
asked.

"Into the middle of the
Malaysian
war!"

"Ah-ah," Tarbell said
again. "It's not a—"

"Leon, will you
shut
up?"
None of them seemed in the least apprehensive, a fact that was
wearing on my nerves. "Do I have to remind you that every Western power
currently has troops in Malaysia?
Real
troops—not militias, not police,
armies.
And the Malaysians have become so damned crazed from two years of fighting
that they're actually giving those armies a run for their money. You don't
expect me to waltz into the middle of
that?"

"Darling?" Larissa
cooed with a little laugh, coming up behind me and putting her arms around my
neck. "You're not telling me you're
afraid,
are you?"

"Of course I'm afraid!"
I cried, which only amused her further. "I'm sorry, but there's only so
much you can ask of a person, and this—"

"This is necessary." It
was Malcolm, ready with another piece of discouraging but unarguable
information: "We have to go, Gideon. There's only one thing that can be
drawing Eshkol to Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysians have been financing their war
effort in part through one of the most extensive black market systems ever
seen—they're laundering Third World drug money, trafficking in everything from
rare animals to human beings, and doing a huge business in stolen information
technology and databases. None of this, however, will interest Eshkol. He'll
want something else, something that will have originated, unless I'm mistaken,
in Japan." By now all jocularity had departed the table. "The
Japanese economy, of course, never really rebounded from the '07 crash. Like
the Malaysians, they've had to use whatever methods have been available to
organize even a modest recovery. Certainly, they've had neither the money nor
the resources to update their energy infrastructure—they still depend primarily
on nuclear power and haven't been able to phase out their breeder reactors."

Eli suddenly clutched his
forehead.
"Breeder reactors,"
he said, apparently getting a
point that was still very obscure to me.

"What?" I asked
quickly. "What the hell's a 'breeder reactor'?"

"A nuclear reactor that
makes usable plutonium out of waste uranium," Jonah said. "Seemed a
very promising idea at one time."

"An idea that was abandoned
by almost every country in the world," Malcolm went on, "because of
safety problems—and because of the enormous temptation that copious amounts of
plutonium lying around in civilian installations poses for terrorists."
Malcolm looked at me pointedly. "As well as for the people who do business
with terrorists. Japanese black marketeers—without, supposedly, the connivance
of their government—have been regularly selling large quantities of their
excess plutonium to such people. In—"

"In Kuala Lumpur," I
said, falling into a chair in resignation.

"Actually, no," Jonah
said. "The U.N. has control over the capital. Most of the serious black
marketeering goes on in the Genting Highlands that overlook the city—the old
gambling resort. But Kuala Lumpur's the only place the Allies will permit
planes to land, since they control both the city and the airport. Eshkol will
head there first, probably masquerading as some kind of humanitarian worker,
then make his way through the lines and into the high country."

I took the news as best I could,
letting my head fall onto the table and drawing several long, deep breaths.
"So what's Malaysian food like?" I mumbled.

"I doubt if you'll have a
chance to try it," Tarbell answered. "There is a war going on there,
you know ..."

There was a time when I
contemplated the ecological effects of African tribal wars like the ones I have
been observing for the last nine months with horrified fascination. I was
aware, of course, that this reaction was due largely to the images of those
conflicts that were being circulated by the world's news services; yet even as
I acknowledged such manipulation, I remained as riveted and moved as was the
rest of the world, enough so that I ignored the much more seriously destructive
campaigns that were being waged against rain forests in other parts of the
world by a constellation of lumber, agricultural, and livestock companies—companies
that were vital parts of larger corporations that owned many of the news
services that were keeping the public's attention focused on places such as
Africa in the first place. The rate of destruction in those other rain
forests—which of course were just as vital to the general health of the planet
as their African counterparts—was far in excess of anything that such characters
as my friend Chief Dugumbe and his enemies could do during even their most
bitter engagements; but jobs were jobs and trade was trade, and so the world
saw nothing of that more extensive defoliation save for occasional glimpses
captured by maverick journalists.

This state of affairs prevailed
until it was almost too late; that is. until scientists began to report rather
than predict the changes in air quality that accompanied the disappearance of
those natural oxygen laboratories. Global atmospheric deterioration, when the
genera] public at last comprehended it, caused widespread panic, and an
unprecedented movement to save the forests that were left got under way, one
that was belligerent rather than evangelical. Its practical result was the
creation of special U.N. "monitoring forces"— multinational armies,
really—that inserted themselves into those locations and situations that seemed
most salvageable: Brazil, various parts of Central America, and Malaysia.

The Brazilians and Central
Americans went along with the policing relatively quiescently. But the
Malaysians, drawing on their ancient warlike traditions, rose up against the
foreign invaders, determined not to let some of the only sources of income
left to them by the '07 crash be taken away without adequate compensation—
compensation that no Western nation was in any position or mood to give. Thus
was born a new type of resource war, one that made the violent conflicts over
oil and water that had already broken out in other parts of the world out seem
tame by comparison. True, Eastern Malaysia was subdued fairly easily, thanks
to a generous donation to the United Nations by neighboring Brunei, whose
sultan was glad for the chance to rehabilitate the image of his scandal-plagued
little principality; but Western Malaysia was another matter. After launching
an invasion from three directions, the U.N. troops met far stiffer resistance
than they'd ever anticipated; and when members of their force were unlucky
enough to be captured they were generally tortured to death, mutilated, and
sent back to the Allied lines with a small U.N. flag stuffed in their mouths.
Eventually the Allied troops did secure most of the cities ringing the
peninsula, but several held out; and those several became conduits to and from
the jungle highlands, which had already proved a military quagmire for the
Allies and were now transformed into a magnet for rogues and mercenaries from
all over the world.

Such was the monster into whose
maw my shipmates were now dragging me. The journey began in Marseille, for it
was from that city that Eshkol had elected to leave France. The same name that
was on his airline ticket, "Vincent Gambon," soon appeared on the passenger
list of a French bullet train headed south from Troyes, and when it pulled out
of the station our ship followed on its shoulder, hugging the French landscape
under the protection of our holographic projector so that there would be no
possibility of Eshkol's eluding us. The train reached Marseille several hours
before Eshkol was due to board his flight, giving him and us enough time to get
to the airport: Malcolm was determined that we should stay just as close to his
plane as we had to the bullet train, even while it was on the ground. This
prospect made not only me but several of the rest of our company uneasy, quite
beyond the simple dread that any sane person feels on approaching one of the
world's overcrowded and overused international airports. Dangerous as was the
elaborate version of Russian roulette known as air travel, flying an
unregistered and virtually invisible aircraft into the midst of so deadly a
circus seemed the very essence of stupidity. But Larissa, having routed the
ship's helm control to the turret, was gleefully anticipating just such an
undertaking, and all I could do was trust to her genetically enhanced mental
agility and try not to look up too often.

Which proved impossible, for as
terrifying as the subsequent exercise was, it was also exhilarating. I could
scarcely have guessed that the same ship that had flown so slowly and
menacingly over the walls of the Belle Isle prison would be capable of the kind
of almost playful aerial agility that it displayed as we darted among the
arriving, departing, and taxiing aircraft at Le Pen International Airport in
Marseille. Not that there weren't solid grounds for terror: the dozens of commercial
planes often veered sharply and unexpectedly simply to avoid hitting one
another, so absurdly high was the rate at which they were told to approach and
depart the airport; and Larissa did, it seemed to me, derive some perverse
pleasure from making her passes at them just a little too close. Yet though I
sometimes howled with fright, I never felt myself to be in truly mortal peril,
and after several minutes I even began to let laughter punctuate my screams.