Killing Time (8 page)

Without turning toward us
Tressalian called out, "Oh, Sister—if I may interrupt, perhaps you'd care
to explain what avenue of approach you've chosen. Toward our
geographical
objective,
that is."

Larissa gave me one more
searching look before answering him.
"Very
droll, Brother. We'll
make landfall south of Karachi, then follow the Indus Valley north. We're safe
from any radar, of course, and because the river's been a nuclear dead zone
since the start of the Kashmir war, we shouldn't be risking any visual contact.
We'll move west along the thirty-fifth parallel into the Hindu Kush, then north
to the valley of the Amu Darya. The camp is strung out along the Afghan side of
the border with Tajikistan. We'll arrive just past dawn, right on schedule. The
apparatus will already have engaged."

"Good." Tressalian
turned away from the transparent hull just as a black strip of coastline became
faintly visible in the dark distance and fixed his gaze on me. "Then
there's time, yet, for the doctor to ask the rest of his questions."

"Questions," I said,
trying to focus. "Yes, I've got questions. But there's one thing I've got
to know right now." I moved over to stare down at him intently. "How
many other lies like the Forrester assassination story am I believing without
even knowing it?"

"You mean," Tressalian
answered, "how much of the
information
that makes up your reality
is utterly unreliable?" I nodded and he opened his eyes wide, raising his
brows as if to prepare me for what was coming: "Certainly more than you'd
suspect, Doctor. And, quite probably, more than you'll believe ..."

How can I describe the hours that
followed? How do I explain my transformation from skeptical (if fascinated)
observer of Malcolm Tressalian's outlandish, even mad, schemes to full-fledged
participant in them? There were so many factors involved, not least the lingering
trauma of having seen my oldest friend murdered before my eyes, along with the
lack of any meaningful sleep in the days since that event. Yet mere emotional
and physical exhaustion would be inadequate hooks upon which to hang my swift
spiritual metamorphosis. No, the cascade of intellectual, visual, and physical
stimuli that continued to rain down on me in those predawn and morning hours
would, I think, have converted the strongest and most doubting of souls, and I
say that not simply to excuse my reaction; rather, it is a testament to all
that I heard, saw, and felt as we passed over the Pakistani coast and
penetrated to the interior of the subcontinent. As Larissa had said, the valley
of the once-proud Indus River, mother of one of the mightiest and most
mysterious of ancient civilizations, had been turned into a nuclear wasteland
during the still-raging war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. But my
beautiful companion's further statement that the valley was uninhabited was
not, strictly speaking, correct. As we sped along above the surface of the
water, past riverbanks strewn with rotting bodies and bleached skeletons, we
occasionally saw groups of what were perhaps the most desperate people on
earth: farmers and villagers whose bodies and ways of life—whose very chances
for
life—had been terribly damaged as a result of the vicious nationalism and
religious zealotry of both their enemies and their countrymen. They were
moving down the hillsides in limping, shuffling lines, those weakened wraiths,
moving down by the light of the moon to fill buckets with the river's poisoned
waters, which they would later boil in a futile attempt at purification so that
they might try to go on for a few more days or weeks in the only way that, given
the decimated condition of their nation and the unwillingness of the rest of
its citizens to accept such nuclear lepers, was possible for them.

The sight hit all of us hard,
suspending even my urgent curiosity about my companions; but it seemed to take the
greatest toll on Malcolm. It was well-known that the development of India's
rabidly bellicose new breed of nationalism in the years since the turn of the
century had coincided with the rise to economic and social primacy of
information technologies and networks in that country; and Larissa would later
tell me that Malcolm had always held their father and his ilk personally
responsible for the fact that the systems they had designed could be and were
used to disseminate lies and hatred among such peoples in as unregulated a
manner as characterized the purveyance of consumer goods. The extent of
Malcolm's anger, despair, and what I took at the time to be guilt over this
matter was certainly evident as I watched him that night; indeed, it soon propelled
him into something of a relapse. He once again began to hiss and clutch at his
head—more covertly now, given the size of his audience—and these telltale signs
quickly brought Larissa to his aid. She took his right hand in her two,
whispered a few calming words in his ear, and then, reaching into the pocket of
his jacket, withdrew a small transdermal injector and held it for an instant to
a vein in his left hand. In moments he seemed to be dozing, though fitfully, at
which point Larissa spread a small comforter over his legs.

Only when they were sure that
Malcolm was asleep did the rest of the ship's company feel comfortable
attending to other duties. Colonel Slayton descended to the control level of
the nose to man the ship's helm, while Fouché and Tarbell went off to make sure
that the vessel's engines had come through the various "system
transfers" smoothly. As for the Kupermans, Larissa asked if they wouldn't
mind prepping me for our visit to Afghanistan while she continued to look after
her brother. Jonah replied that he thought it imperative that everyone on board
get some rest before we reached our destination, but both he and his brother
did agree to take me down to the armory first to show me how to operate the
basic gear with which I would need to equip myself when we arrived. On our way
out Eli added that the session would offer me a chance to ask at least a few
questions about the group's past activities, and it was therefore in a mood of
no little anticipation that I descended into the deepest recesses of the
vessel.

As we approached and then entered
the armory—a compartment filled with racks of weapons unlike anything I'd ever
seen—Eli and Jonah told me that the first members of the team to find their way
to one another had been themselves and Malcolm, who had all been in the same
class at Yale. Apparently the Kupermans—who since childhood had been idealistic
opponents of the dominance of information technology over every field of human
endeavor, including scholarship—had originally sought the young Tressalian out
to confront him: Malcolm had recently assumed control of his father's empire
following the latter's death under seemingly tragic circumstances, and Eli and
Jonah wanted to know if he intended to end the Tressalian Corporation's
reliance on Third World hardware sweatshops, as well as conduct the company's
other operations in a more ethical and responsible manner. On finding that
Malcolm's philosophy was in fact far closer to their own than to his father's,
Eli and Jonah took to spending long hours in the company of the silver-haired
young man in the wheelchair, hacking into corporate and government databases
and generally raising informational hell. Malcolm eventually proposed that the
three take their activities to a new and more daring level, and the twins
quickly signed on for what turned out to be the first in a long string of
attempts to hold a mirror up to the global information society and point out
its very serious flaws and dangers. The result of this endeavor was to become
infamous, in the years that followed, as the "Fools' Congress" of
2010.

Utilizing the Tressalian
Corporation's resources but working in strict secrecy, Malcolm and the
Kupermans created an imaginary, digitally generated candidate for the U.S.
Congress. The fact that they were able to convince the good people of southern
Connecticut that their almost absurdly virtuous creature actually existed was
remarkable enough, but when they went on to get the imaginary character
elected to office through clever manufacture and manipulation of bogus
background information and news footage on the Internet and in other
information media—and when genuine news cameras failed to find any trace of the
up-and-coming leader on the day he was supposed to report for duty in the Capitol—a
national frenzy was touched off. So great was the reaction, in fact, and so
dire the threats of punishment from federal authorities, that Malcolm, Eli, and
Jonah did not again return to the business of disseminating false information
until they'd finished graduate school and had begun to make names for
themselves in their respective fields. When they finally did indulge their
passion for zealous mischief again, however, the effects were even more
astounding—and dangerous.

Joined now by Larissa, who had
earned several degrees of her own in physics, chemistry, and engineering (as
well as gaining some darker experience to which I shall shortly turn), the
young men selected for their next target nothing less than the whole of the
European continent, over which the clouds of internecine conflict had by 2017
once again gathered. Economic pressures brought on by the '07 financial crash
had finally forced the United States to withdraw the last of its peacekeeping
troops from the Balkans, and the hatreds endemic to that region had once more
become glaringly obvious. The European Union, as pusillanimous as ever when it
came to matters that involved not money but lives, had refused to fill the expensive
gap left by the Americans and indeed prevented the only member state willing to
undertake the task, Great Britain, from doing so. Thus it came about that, for
a decade after the crash, the Balkans endured massacres and reprisals on a
scale not seen for generations.

In concocting a hoax designed to
show how little the development of information technology had done or could do
to defuse such ancient animosities, Malcolm brought onto his team both Fouché,
under whom he and the Kupermans had studied at Yale, and Tarbell, an
accomplished scientist and scholar but expert in nothing so much as highly
advanced forgery. It may be difficult to believe that the great divisions that
still mark Europe were set in motion by a few sheets of paper created by the
burly, congenial Fouché and the frenetic, gleeful little Tarbell; yet I can now
report that such was indeed the case. Julien used his skills to molecularly
manipulate samples of ink and paper so that they duplicated examples from a
century earlier, while Tarbell, using a text dictated by Malcolm, turned these
materials into a series of notes supposedly written by the British statesman
Winston Churchill to none other than Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who
shot the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and set in motion the chain of
events that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the notes,
Princip was "revealed" to have been a British agent and the
assassination to have been a plot engineered by the ever-devious Churchill and
several other British leaders to ignite a war that, they believed, would end in
the triumph and expansion of their empire.

The idea was far more outlandish
than the Fools' Congress business had been, but once again—and this was the
very crucial point— Malcolm's speedy and thorough manipulation of all materials
relating to the "discovery" of the notes, on the Internet and in all
ancillary information systems, led to their being accepted as genuine long
before careful observers could offer more skeptical or scholarly opinions. The
Germans rose to the bait laid out by Tressalian's team, declaring that they
would not sit in the halls of European power with the British until London had
disavowed Churchill and accepted full responsibility for the war. France, too,
seized the opportunity to wax indignant, as did every other country that had
been involved in the conflict. The British, for their part, were not about to
accept the demonization of their greatest twentieth-century hero; and so the
first of what became many tumultuous cracks went singing through the Union,
causing riotous demonstrations and several threats of war.

Even Malcolm had not anticipated
either the violence of the reaction that his European work sparked or the
danger to which he'd exposed himself and his team. Investigations were launched
not merely by police forces and academics but by the various European security
services, especially the British; and none of the band wanted to end up with an
SAS bullet in his or her head. Realizing that they were now playing on a new
and much more deadly field, Malcolm decided to enlist the aid of someone who
could help him organize his efforts along the lines of what they appeared to
have become: a campaign.

He examined the dossiers of
disaffected military officers from around the world, although it was Larissa
who eventually brought Colonel Justus Slayton to her brother's attention. And
in learning why she'd been in a position to make that introduction, I
discovered something that caused me to recoil in shock:

Apparently, after completing her
university studies, this impressive, beautiful girl with whom I'd been so
taken since the moment of our first meeting had become an international
assassin.

The revelation hit me like a
proverbial brick. I stood there for long, dazed minutes, attempting to regain
my composure as Eli fitted me first for a pair of highly insulated but
lightweight boots and then for a seemingly ordinary suit of coveralls that was
in fact highly advanced body armor. Jonah, meanwhile, removed some kind of
handgun from one of the many racks around me and, slapping the thing into my
palm, said, "There—that seems like a good fit. How does the balance feel,
Gideon?"