Killing Time (25 page)

It suddenly occurred to me that
Leon would have enjoyed nothing more than the terrifying effect that this
lone, eerie remnant of his earthly existence would have should it suddenly
plummet into the crowd below. Perhaps the jest seems a ghoulish and even
grotesque one, removed from its context; but at that moment I was surrounded by
so much violence of such bizarre, even absurd, proportions that the idea seemed
entirely appropriate. I therefore lifted one foot and sent the remains of the
peculiar little man who from the moment of my arrival on Malcolm's ship had
proved a genuine friend down to play his final prank on the world.

Of our escape and removal to a
safe distance I can say little, for shock had clouded my senses. The closure of
the ship's hatchway after we'd gotten back aboard and the reactivation of the
complete holographic projection around the vessel apparently threw the drones
off long enough for us to reach the coast and dive into the Straits of Malacca;
but the fact remained that four of our number had been observed and no doubt
identified. That Slayton should have been seen was bad enough, but Larissa's
presence would no doubt prompt our antagonists to ask uncomfortable questions
about Malcolm and probably about St. Kilda as well, once it was discovered, as
seemed inevitable, that he owned the islands. Yet despite both this danger and
his own deep sorrow over Tarbell's death, Malcolm was determined that we
should remain in the vicinity of Kuala Lumpur until we knew where the now
massively armed Eshkol was going. All ship's systems were set to work
monitoring air traffic, both civilian and military, along
with
naval
communications, private wireless phone calls, e-mail, secure Internet servers,
even the radio transmitters of small commercial fishermen. Eshkol could have
been anywhere in Malaysia, but he had to be somewhere, and when he made his
inevitable move to depart, Malcolm intended for us to be right behind him.

My initial participation in this
endeavor lacked both full concentration and a certain heart. The circumstances
surrounding Tarbell's death, like those of Max's, had revealed a side of human
behavior that I thought worse, in its way, than anything I had encountered
during all my years of studying criminal behavior. But whereas Max's death had
filled me with a desire for explanations from and revenge against persons who
had grievously abused their positions of power, Leon's fate seemed to confirm
what I had already begun to suspect: that participating in such high-stakes
games, even for the best of motives, would prove not only disastrous but
corrupting. In short, the tragic events we were experiencing were being
produced by the collective desires of
all
players, not merely Dov
Eshkol, to see their own concept of right prevail.

"What are you saying,
Gideon?" Larissa asked me as we lay on the bed in my quarters after some
twelve hours of keeping relatively silent vigil in the turret. "That we're
as bad as Eshkol?"

"No," I said, bridling
a bit at her loaded simplification. "But you can't deny that if we'd just
stayed out of the entire thing he would have been quietly killed in General
Said's bowling alley. Or what if Malcolm had never ordered the creation of the
Stalin images in the first place? Eshkol would have just kept on doing what
hundreds of intelligence operatives do every day. There would have
been
no
crisis."

Larissa sat up. "I've never
had much use for 'what-if's," she said crisply. "In situations like
this, in
any
situations that involve questions of force and power,
virtue's a relative thing. And speaking relatively, I'd say we're the only ones
in this mess even trying to do any good."

I stared at the ceiling.
"What's that old saying—about it always being the good men who do the most
damage in the world?"

Larissa looked even more
irritated; perhaps, I thought, because in her heart she agreed with me.
"Old sayings like that tend to depend on who came up with them."

"I think it was Henry
Adams," I said. "Who, admittedly, chose to be an observer in the power
game throughout his life. Unlike his forebears."

"Exactly." Larissa lay
back down, trying very hard to douse the quick spark of misunderstanding that
flared between us. "The point isn't that Leon died, Gideon—it's that he
died as well as anyone could." She smiled fondly. "Certainly as
characteristically..
."

I chuckled once, quietly and
sadly, along with her. "He
was
fairly unbelievable. Even when he
took pleasure in something he just seemed so—
contemptuous
of it. By the
way—" I turned onto my side, my face inches from Larissa's. "Did
anybody ever actually find out where he came from? I asked him a couple of
times, but he always dodged it."

"He told me a story
once," Larissa said. "I have no idea whether it was true. It was just
after he'd joined us, and I think he was trying to inspire sympathy as a way of
seducing me. God knows sex was the only thing that could ever have made him
show that side of himself. He claimed that his mother was a Siberian prostitute
in Vladivostok and his father was a visiting English telecom executive. The
mother was killed during a Russian bombing raid. After that his grandmother
took him to Indonesia to get away from the war and supported his schooling by
working in a microchip sweatshop. It killed her eventually. He began stealing
and later forging to complete his education."

I considered it.
"Well," I breathed, "it would explain at least some of his
attitude. And if it's not true, he's the only one who could have made it
up."

Although I think she wanted to,
Larissa could not let my moment of doubt pass without asking, "So is this
going to be a problem for you? What we have to do now?"

I gave it several minutes' hard
thought. "I won't deny that I have questions," I finally said.
"But I also know that since this situation is at least partly our doing,
the solution should be, too. Maybe we shouldn't have walked into it—but things
aren't going to get any better if we just walk out."

Larissa pulled me close.
"That's true ..."

I don't think she was entirely
reassured by my lofty words; certainly
I
wasn't. But the conversation
had nowhere left to go, and it was somewhat merciful, therefore, that Malcolm's
voice came over the address system at that moment, telling us to join him
forward. Apparently we at last had a lead, one that we were pursuing with
evident dispatch; by the time Larissa and I managed to dash through the ship's
corridors to the nose, the vessel was already heading up toward the surface at
a good clip, and we joined the rest of our team (minus Julien, who was still in
one of the labs) just in time to watch as we burst into the sky above the
straits. At this point, however, any encouragement that might have been
inspired by Malcolm's announcement vanished:

The waters directly below us were
full of American naval vessels, which immediately began bombarding our ship.
The electromagnetic fields around the vessel succeeded in throwing these
missiles off target or detonating them at a safe distance, but that didn't
explain how the warships had been able to locate us in the first place.

"They're finally getting
smart," Slayton said, anxiously guiding the ship through the hail of fire
from the guidance console. "They monitored the wake we left in the water
and any air disturbances that originated with our surfacing point. Then they
opened a blanket fire."

"But—don't they run the risk
of hitting each other?" I asked. "Or other ships that are farther
off?"

"Of course," Malcolm
said, wheeling his chair into position beside the colonel. "But they seem
more willing than ever to take the chance—not surprisingly."

I was confused for an instant,
but Eli quickly turned to explain: "We monitored a Malaysian transmission
about fifteen minutes ago, which said that somebody'd made off with the one B-2
bomber they had left—it was being kept at a remote airfield because the only
Malaysian pilot who could fly it had been killed. Anyway, there was a lot of
garbled, panic-stricken screaming that included a reference to a nuclear
device."

"Eshkol,"
Larissa
said. "The bastard can
fly,
too?"

"He's the complete covert
operative," Jonah answered with a nod. "We're on his tail, but the
Malaysians also talked about the four of you and about what they saw of our
ship. The Americans, according to
their
transmissions, have concluded
that the mystery vessel they've been hearing about and occasionally running
into all these months is on the B-2 job, somehow. So things are likely to get
very hot on this ride."

"But why?" I asked.
"They can't be tracking us."

"No," Jonah went on,
"but we've got to follow Eshkol's plane—"

"Which is an old American
model," Slayton said, "whose stealth systems the American air force
knew how to defeat even when they were still using it. They think our ship's
escorting Eshkol, not chasing him. They'll stay fixed on him and look for
patterns of air disturbance that match what they monitored when we came out of
the sea."

"Do we have to stay so close
to Eshkol, in that case?" Larissa asked. "We can track him from the
stratosphere, after all—"

"Where we'll be too far away
to prevent his doing anything rash," Malcolm cut in.

Larissa considered this with a
nod. "Then we shoot him down."

"The Americans may be
willing to risk radioactive fallout," Malcolm answered, "but I am
not. No, Sister, this time the idiots have us, I'm afraid. For the
moment."

"Just for the moment?"
I asked, alarmed at the explosions that were surrounding the ship but more
unsettled still by Malcolm's concession of even a momentary disadvantage.
"What do you mean? What can we do later?"

"It depends on Eshkol's
nuclear device," Eli said. "Julien's studying the plans now. If it
has electronic components that can safely be disabled—"

"Which we know his plane
has," Jonah added.

"Then," Eli went on,
"we can hit him with a pulse."

"A pulse?" I asked, at
first making the medical connection; then I remembered the kind of ship on
which I was traveling. "An
electromagnetic
pulse," I said,
breathing easier as I realized that we might indeed have a chance.

This feeling was reinforced when
Julien suddenly burst in from the corridor.
"Tonnerre!"
he
cried, seeming a little amazed himself. "It will work!"

During the next several hours the
hopes engendered by my shipmates' admirable scheme were summarily dashed by
Dov Eshkol's seemingly inexhaustible cunning. It quickly became apparent that
his admittedly brilliant plan of escape rested on four principal considerations:
first, that the U.N. alliance would hardly allow someone to fly out of Malaysia
in a B-2 bomber—an obsolete piece of technology, perhaps, but still a deadly
one—without giving chase with a view toward capture or, when that proved
impracticable, termination. And when aerial combat was joined, Eshkol would
have no chance against the squadrons of more advanced aircraft that would be
dispatched to intercept him. Therefore the only real weapon at his disposal
was the plane itself: if he kept to the skies above populated areas and
refrained from forcing an engagement, no nation in the world would risk having
its air force be the one to shower the earth's surface with a flaming mass of
wreckage that would conservatively claim hundreds—and potentially thousands—of
lives. Finally, Eshkol's tactic would be equally effective against our ship,
for while we had planned a less cataclysmic way of ending his flight than
shooting him down, the chance that a failure of the B-2's electrical systems
might result in a crash as devastating as any result of combat was enough to
stay our hand.

What made the situation doubly
frustrating was that as we followed Eshkol at a comparatively low altitude
into Thai airspace, where he made a point of traveling as far north as he could
above the crowded outskirts of Bangkok, the American navy apparently relayed
the intricate tracking system it had designed to keep tabs on our ship to their
own as well as the English air force: the naval guns that had given us such a
rude shock when we emerged from the Straits of Malacca were replaced by the
cannon fire of fighter jets, which attempted to harass both our ship and
Eshkol's B-2 into landing without a struggle (their missiles went unused,
presumably out of the same fear of collateral damage that prompted their
reluctance to shoot Eshkol down). We initially assumed that this situation
would go on only as long as we were within the range of the first squadrons to
intercept us; but as we streaked over Bangladesh we saw fresh squadrons appear
from carriers in the Bay of Bengal, and it became apparent that the Allies
intended to do everything they could to put

an end to what they had no doubt
decided was some sort of grand terrorist plot.

So on we went into the Indian
sunset, with the Allied planes keeping up an almost incessant fire and Eshkol
cleverly matching his course to the population density on the ground. His
general heading seemed to be west by northwest, though it was impossible to
guess at his ultimate destination due to the circuitous nature of his flight
path. We of course feared that he was heading for Russia, a fear that was
seemingly validated when he made a run for the Caucasus; but then he
unexpectedly moved west into Turkey, flying over town after town along the
Black Sea toward Istanbul.

"Can it be that he really
does
wish
only to escape?" Julien asked as he stood with the Kupermans,
Larissa, and myself behind Malcolm and Colonel Slayton at the guidance console.