Killing Time

by Caleb Carr

  “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 . . .”

  C H A P T E R 3 5

  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 scientist
s 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 general 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.

  All the same, I was not entirely disappointed when Eshkol’s gigantic Airbus, its two and a half passenger levels stuffed with nearly a thousand trusting souls, lumbered into the sky and began the flight southeast. The plane’s four mammoth engines streamed great trails of exhaust that made it impossible to see out of the turret of our ship while we were flying in its wake, and during those tense minutes we very narrowly avoided a collision with another overcrowded behemoth that was coming in from Africa terribly off course, due to the fact that (as I learned while monitoring air traffic control at the airport) none of the flight crew spoke English or French. Using both computer guidance and her own skills, Larissa soon got us out of that predicament and then to a safe distance just above and alongside Eshkol’s plane—although we were still close enough for me to be able to see, through the plane’s windows, how dismally cramped the conditions within were and to observe the sudden emergence, from one of the overhead compartments, of several live chickens, which appeared to give the flight crew fits.

  There were still more harrowing moments as we plowed along through some of the world’s most heavily congested air lanes and across half a dozen time zones. Then, as we moved east and south of India, the traffic mercifully began to thin out; but this respite proved brief. During our approach to Kuala Lumpur the swarms of civilian aircraft were replaced with military models: fighter-bombers, manned and unmanned, as well as transports, radar craft, and refueling tankers were all in evidence. The sun was setting behind us now, throwing a spectacular golden light forward to reveal columns of smoke ascending from the West Malaysian jungle: apparently the U.N. allies, in their zeal to keep the Malaysians from destroying the rain forest, were willing to do the job themselves. Or perhaps their anger over being shown up in battle by a supposedly weak country for what I calculated to be the eleventh or twelfth time in three decades had simply blinded them to logical considerations. Whatever the case, evidence of just how bitter the conflict had become began to mount as we approached the capital’s battered Subang Airport alongside Eshkol’s plane; and by the time that behemoth set down, we were being forced to dodge not only other aircraft but long-range artillery shells, which were being hurled at the capital from the same Genting Highlands to which we would soon, in all likelihood, be forced to journey.

  The sight of the destruction that had been wrought at the airport during the war was not, on a comparative scale, particularly disheartening, for Subang was one of those many twentieth-century terminals designed by architects who had attempted to anticipate the future with results that in that same future looked fairly silly. Nor did one particularly mind seeing that many of Kuala Lumpur’s famous but no less ugly skyscrapers—including the Petronas Twin Towers, once the tallest buildings in the world—had been damaged or even leveled. But the havoc wrought in the city’s historic district was not so easy to contemplate. During its colonial era Kuala Lumpur had become home to some of the most beautiful late-Victorian architecture ever built, particularly the old Secretariat Building and the famed Moorish train station. Both were gone now and had been little mourned by a world desperate for oxygen. Perhaps this was why, after I was deposited on a field to the west of the airport in the company of Colonel Slayton, Larissa, and Tarbell, my utter lack of sympathy with both sides in the conflict began to take on an angry edge.

  I soon discovered that this was easily the most appropriate mood to be in when first laying eyes on Dov Eshkol. We spotted our man right after he got through Subang customs, and although we had all studied pictures of him in various guises and pored carefully over a list of his vital statistics, the bearded, wild-eyed Eshkol gave the impression of being far bigger and more deranged than any of us had expected. Dressed, as Jonah had predicted he would be, in the uniform of a world relief organization (Doctors Without Borders), Eshkol strode through the crowds of weeping Muslims and Hindus who were waiting
for other passengers on his plane, as well as the many military personnel in the airport, as if he were untouchable—which he was, of course, proving to be. None of us wondered at his not being stopped for questioning—the watch for him here could not have been vigorous, for what kind of fugitive would seek asylum in a war zone?—and before long we were inside a beat-up, stinking old Lexus taxi, following Eshkol’s similar conveyance into the city.

  Our destination, it soon became clear, was the battered Islamic-style tower called the Dayabumi Complex, where Eshkol apparently had an appointment. As we drove, our taxi driver began to complain about the questionable ethics of following another cab in a manner that indicated he wanted more money; and listening to him rattle on I found myself once again thinking of Max and laughing quietly as I thought of how summarily he would have dealt with the grousing little man at the wheel. I wondered, too, what he would have made of my recent adventures; but I didn’t much care for the answers that I soon gave myself. Although I had no doubt that Max would have greatly appreciated Larissa and abusively condemned Dov Eshkol, the Malaysian situation, and many other things I’d come across and through, I couldn’t imagine him actually approving of our current job. I tried to tell myself that such an attitude would have been a product of Max’s endless cynicism, of his unwillingness—hardened by years on the New York police force—to believe that anyone actually had a lofty or principled motive for doing anything. Yet this self-serving disparagement of my dead friend’s philosophy and motivations only disturbed me further, and by the time we pulled up in front of the Dayabumi Complex I found that it was necessary to force his image from my mind altogether.