Killing Time (29 page)

"Thank you, Colonel," I
said quietly, shaking his hand.

As he studied my face, his eyes
went thin, the one on his right pulling at the long scar that I no longer even
noticed when I looked at him. "Try not to be too alarmed about Malcolm.
He's exhausted. We'll look after him and make sure he recovers—and once he has,
you may want to return, Gideon. I know there are aspects of this fight you
don't like, but now that you've been part of it I think you're going to find
readjusting to the world you used to know ... difficult."

"I'm sure that's true,
Colonel," I said. "But you shouldn't have someone on your team whom
you can't rely on absolutely. And after—well ... too many questions, that's
all."

Slayton touched his scar briefly,
then clasped my shoulder. "I suppose you're right. But I'm sorry to see
you go, Dr. Wolfe." He began to walk slowly toward the door. "As for
me, I've seen madmen burn cities before. Not on this scale, perhaps, but enough
to know in my heart where the blame belongs. So take my word for it, Gideon—
that's one thing you don't need to burden yourself with while you're on the
run."

As Slayton's soldierly step began
to resound on the stone walkway outside, Eli and Jonah came over to me
together, Eli giving me the same generous smile he had when I'd first faced him
in Belle Isle prison. "I owe you one jailbreak," he said. "So if
they pick you up and you get a chance to make that phone call..."

I chuckled and shook his hand,
then glanced from him to Jonah. "None of it bothers you two—the things
I've said?"

"About Malcolm?" Jonah
answered. When I nodded, he went on, "The colonel's right, Gideon.
Malcolm's mental state is exceptionally intertwined with his physical
condition—I think you can appreciate how and why as well as any of us. But
we've known him since we were teenagers. He comes out of these episodes if he
gets enough time and rest."

"But—this time travel
business—"

"Fatigue and stress, Gideon,
trust us," Eli answered. Then he cocked his head. "On the other
hand—"

"On the other hand,"
Jonah finished for him, "I certainly want to be around just in case. Beats
squabbling over tenure at Yale or Harvard." There being nothing left to
say, both men removed their eyeglasses at almost the same moment, in the same
gesture of uncomfortable emotion. "Well—good-bye, Gideon," Jonah
said.

"And remember what Colonel
Slayton told you," Eli answered as they turned to go. "Life out there
may look awfully strange to you now—say the word, and we can bring you
back."

They both waved as they passed
out the door, still looking and apparently feeling very awkward. I turned
toward Julien, suddenly taking note of a distinct lump in my throat. Fouché
stood tactfully and held up a hand, nodding toward Larissa. "I shall warm
the jet-copter, Gideon," he said. "It will be dark soon—a night
flight always attracts less attention."

Once he was gone I turned to
Larissa, who had her arms wrapped around her body as she stood staring out at
the rocky cove. Ready to sweep her away with soft, irresistible imaginings
about our future together, I smiled and began to approach her—

But just as I did I experienced,
with dizzying suddenness, that same feeling that had hit me at the start of my
final encounter with Malcolm: a swift loss of illusions that was as chilling
and draining as a razor slash through a major artery. The mournful look on
Larissa's face told me in the clearest and most brutal possible manner that if
I forced her to choose between her brother and me I would lose and that the
contest would be only an exercise in cruel futility. All my desperate fantasies
had been made possible, I now saw, by a deliberate avoidance and denial of
what I knew about their shared past, as well as about the extent not only to
which he needed her but to which she needed to live up to their bond. It was
that bond that had preserved both of their fragile, limited capacities for
intimacy and commitment during their ravaged childhoods and that had kept those
capacities alive during the years that had followed. I was therefore not
simply being foolish in thinking that our feelings for each other could never
supersede such an attachment; I was terribly wrong even to have hoped that she
would betray both him and herself so fundamentally.

"It'll be dark soon,"
she said, looking at the sky. "There isn't much time." She tightened
her hold on herself. "Thank God," she breathed, making clear the
pointlessness of further talk.

Though it took every bit of my strength,
I stayed several feet away from her. "If he gets worse, Larissa—"

"I'll know what to do."

I took a deep breath before
continuing uncomfortably, "There was one thing I didn't want to say in
front of the others—he made a reference to suicide. It may have been
argumentative hyperbole, or it may have been sincere. He really has been worn
down to almost nothing."

She nodded. "I'll bring him
back. I always have."

The voice that spoke these few
words was remarkable: utterly ageless, completely heartbroken. The young girl
who had once schemed with the stricken but brave brother who had tried so hard
to protect her was trying to crack through the hard, shell-like composure of
the woman before me to say that though she could never leave him, she
desperately wished I would not go. No sound came out of her, however, for
several very painful minutes; and then, just when I thought that the composure
would remain intact and the cry would go unvoiced, just as I was about to choke
out a good-bye and force myself out the door, the break came. She spun around,
rushed at me in emotional ruin and wrenching tears, and buried her face in my
chest as she had often done.
"No,"
she said, pounding on me
with her fists as hard as she could manage.
"No, no, no ..."

I took her wrists gently in my
hands, kissed her silvery hair, and whispered, "Please be all right,
Larissa." Then I placed her fists by her heaving sides and fairly ran from
the room, still able, it seemed, to hear her sobs long after I'd boarded the
jetcopter and found myself once more cruising low over the icy North Atlantic.

I went south, all right—I went
south in every conceivable way ...

During the jetcopter ride to
Edinburgh's William Wallace Airport, Julien, whose understanding of and
sympathy for such loss went beyond the usual Gallic insight into affairs of the
heart, tried to assure me that there was no way of knowing what would happen in
the future, that at least Larissa and I were both still alive, and that we were
far too well matched simply to end things so suddenly and completely. The
paradoxical effect of his words, however, was to confirm my despairing
conviction that I had lost forever the strange but wonderful woman it had
taken me a lifetime to find. When we reached our destination, Fouché climbed
out of the aircraft, hugged me vigorously, kissed both my cheeks, and gave me
his personal assurance that we would meet again. But when the jetcopter took
off and left me standing with nothing but a small shoulder bag containing two
hand weapons—one capable only of stunning, the other a lethal rail pistol, both
fabricated out of composite resins impossible for any security system to
detect—I had to do some very quick breathing and thinking even to begin to
suppress the feeling of horrifying loneliness that swept over me. For I was
indeed alone now: alone in a way that I once would have considered
inconceivable and that made me quickly question the moral principles that had
landed me in such an unenviable position.

The days to come were even more
confused and bizarre. Everywhere I went—restaurants, bars, hotels—news about
and investigations into the Moscow disaster and its aftermath dominated the
media, as did reports concerning the mysterious aircraft that was rumored to
have been escorting the suicide bomber on his mission. I was believed by
various military intelligence agencies and police forces to have been on that
aircraft, and my picture—along with those of Slayton, Larissa, and poor dead
Leon—flashed onto public video screens with disturbing frequency, making it
necessary for me to change my appearance and adjust my identity discs before
even departing Edinburgh. It also made it necessary for me to get used to
seeing Larissa's face pop up in unexpected places, an additional burden that
was almost unbearable. From Edinburgh I took ship to Amsterdam (traveling by
air was out of the question, given that airlines were required to run all
identity discs through the universal DNA database), and from there I continued
south by bus, train, and even thumb as I attempted to melt into the great
global background, sticking as much as possible to areas where information
technology was not ubiquitous in the hopes of staying unrecognized—and sane.

I succeeded in the first of these
goals; as to the second, I cannot say. I still did not know precisely where I
was going, and as the days became weeks, the constant need to fabricate new
identification, hack into bank databases to secure money (after the bankroll
I'd taken with me from St. Kilda had run out), and flat-out lie about almost
every detail of my existence twenty-four hours a day began to take a severe
mental and emotional toll. This state of affairs was sorely aggravated when one
day, during a slow passage through Italy, I passed a small café that had a
newspaper vending terminal. On the cover of every front page that flashed by on
its screen were headlines containing the word "Washington," as well
as pictures of the first American president. I dashed about until I found a
place that vended
The New York Times,
then deposited my money in the
machine and waited breathlessly for the printout. Swallowing two straight
grappas like so much water, I read of my former comrades' apparent return to
action: the hoax was playing out just as we'd designed it to, except that
Malcolm's hope that it contained fatal flaws was proving a vain one. The story
was being accepted everywhere—especially in Europe, where any apparent proof
of the moral imperfection of the United States was always welcome—as
indisputable.

The shock of the thing was
manifold. Just the reminder that I'd not so long ago been involved in so
insidious an enterprise was, of course, disquieting now that I was away from
it. But even more, I knew that from that moment on any news report I might
happen to read or see, no matter how momentous its details, might be a lie; and
the flimsy connection to reality that I had carefully nursed during my weeks of
hiding began to fall away. I took to drinking heavily, telling myself that it
was simply to blend in with and secure the goodwill of the locals so that none
of the regional constabularies would think to send my face out over the Net or
run my discs through the universal DNA database. But in truth I had nothing
else with which to relieve the utter alienation. As I made my way down into the
lower part of the Italian peninsula, I descended into severe alcoholic
confusion, and when it became difficult to obtain money due to the unreliability
of electronic banking in that near-anarchic part of the country, the confusion
became degradation. By the time I reached lawless Naples, I looked as though I
belonged on its streets; and it was only a chance sighting of a meaningless
piece of wall decoration in a decrepit bar that changed things.

In a stupor, I looked up from the
redolent table on which I'd been resting my addled head for the better part of
an hour one evening to see a yellowing poster that advertised the beauties of
Africa. The thing was, of course, some forty years old, a relic from the time
when what in recent years the public and media had once again taken to calling
the Dark Continent had not been almost depopulated by tribal wars and the AIDS
epidemic; but it nonetheless ignited my drunken imagination. Wild visions of a
land of lush jungles, windswept savannahs, and marvelous wildlife—all of it
uninfected by the plague of information technology, since Africa was the
principal island in the analog archipelago—took an iron hold on my debilitated
mind in the days that followed, and I even spent one night trying to sober up
in order to determine if the idea of going there had any merit at all. I found
to my great surprise that it did, although sobriety also brought a realistic
appraisal of contemporary Africa's afflictions. But I decided that I would
rather take my chances with disease and war than with imprisonment and
insanity. I therefore cleaned myself up, took on the identity of a respectable
American businessman with a bad gambling habit, and found my way to a notorious
Neapolitan loan shark. Thinking me a safe risk who would stray no farther than
the local high-stakes games, this man proved more than willing to provide the
U.S. dollars I needed to achieve my desperate purpose.

During my weeks as a habitué of
the city's worst drinking and drug-dealing dens, I had made the acquaintance of
two particularly unsavory French pilots who ran guns to various parts of the
analog archipelago and who spent their downtime in Naples because they could
get exceptionally potent heroin and hashish on its streets. Returning to one
of their haunts, I discovered that they were delivering a shipment to, of all
places, Afghanistan, but that they were expected back within the week. Those
next days were restless but hopeful ones for me, as I became more convinced
than ever that I would soon be in territory that the information revolution had
passed over, where all the complex philosophical and social issues that had put
my life in such a state of upheaval would not hold sway, and to which continual
rehashings of the destruction of Moscow—and the attendant speculation about the
mysterious "phantom ship" that had been detected in the area of that
disaster—would not penetrate.

As I dried out and began to
invest my money in travel books rather than drink, I even went so far as to
imagine that I might start a new life in Africa; this despite the constant
reminders of those same books that most of the species of wildlife that had
once brought tourists to the continent were now extinct and that because of
widespread disease and unrest, any foreign travelers who still wanted or
needed to visit the area must receive copious inoculations and stay in constant
touch with either their country's consulates or representatives of the United
Nations. These latter admonitions I could not, of course, heed: the first
because it would have meant offering a doctor a DNA sample, the second for even
more obvious reasons. Still, desperately attached to my dreams, I proceeded
with my preparations with a dedication I can only describe as feverish.