Killing Time (2 page)

Which was significant. Max, like
most private detectives of our day, had come to rely almost exclusively on
computers for everything from forgery identification to DNA analysis. If his
programs—and they were the best—weren't catching any evidence of deliberate
manipulation in what we were watching, then something very confusing was going
on. And as that something concerned one of the seminal acts of political
violence of our time, the implications of the disc, along with the cause of
Vera Price's desperate behavior and statements in my office, became
uncomfortably apparent.

"If Price
was
mixed
up in something," Max mumbled, "then we should get a look at the spot
where he was killed."

"The police went over it
pretty thoroughly."

"I used to
be
the
police, Gideon," Max answered, stroking his beard. "We ought to take
a look for ourselves. And there's one other thing ..." He squinted, moving
his fat frame closer to the computer. "I'm picking up something else on
this disc. Something encrypted, and I mean but
encrypted.
It'd take a
while to unlock it, but—I'd swear it's there ..."

"One step at a time," I
said. "If this isn't just some special effects genius's idea of fooling
around, we've opened up one very ugly can of worms already. We don't need
two."

"Hey,
you
brought
this crap to
me,
Sherlock." He belched once and frowned as he went
to work on his keyboard. "Damn it. I should've known better than to let
you get the food ..."

That evening Max combed the
sidewalk outside the Prices' building on Central Park West while I went up to
the penthouse to see the recently bereaved. I found her huddled with her
daughter in a huge living room that overlooked the park and informed her that,
given what I'd seen on the disc, I did understand her fears; but I still needed
to know just who the "they" she'd talked so insistently about that
afternoon were. She explained that her first move on finding the disc among her
husband's effects had been to go to the FBI; but they had only confiscated the
thing immediately and hinted not so subtly that any discussion of it on her
part could prove very risky for both her and her daughter. When Mrs. Price had
found the backup copy, she'd figured she had nowhere to turn, and had been on
the verge of destroying it when she remembered the interview I'd done on public
television.

I asked her if she was aware that
there was apparently a second batch of information on the disc, to which she
said that she wasn't, but that it didn't surprise her; nor did her husband's
evident encryption of it. He'd apparently been doing a lot of contract work
for a private client lately, and although he'd kept her in the dark about its
nature, she had discovered that he was being paid an astronomical fee for it.
"Astronomical," for somebody whose day job already brought down
enough to cover a penthouse on Central Park West, a century-old mansion in
L.A., and one of the few waterfront houses in the Hamptons that had survived
the hurricanes of '05, obviously meant quite a bit; but though my curiosity was
piqued, Mrs. Price could tell me nothing more. So I left the grieving wife and
daughter after receiving the promise of a fee that, by my own humble standards,
was itself pretty damned astronomical.

As soon as I was back on the
street, Max urgently yoked my neck into one of his heavy arms. "Let's get
the hell out of here," he said, eyeing the building's doorman and then the
darkened expanse of Central Park across the street.

"Why?" I asked,
stumbling as he pulled me down the block toward a free taxi.

"Because," he answered,
opening the cab's door and shoving me in, "you have gotten me involved in
some very bizarre crap, Wolfe." At that he jumped in beside me and ordered
the Indonesian driver to take us back to his office.

Max pointedly refused to do
anything more than discuss take-out options for dinner that night as we rode
downtown, prompting our sour-faced driver to extoll the virtues of his native
cuisine. These uninvited comments inevitably led to a diatribe about the
injustice of his country having become, since its total degeneration into
anarchy and violence after the '07 crash, a United Nations protectorate. Max
told him to just shut the hell up and drive, inspiring the bitter little man to
handle both steering and brakes in a fashion unquestionably designed to induce
nausea. All in all, I was confused, sickened, and fairly irritated by the time
we got back to Max's building; and my mood wasn't improved when my friend
jumped out of the vehicle, dosed the door before I could follow, and said:

"This is gonna take a few
hours. Go home, I'll call you."

Before I could argue he was
inside, leaving me alone with the Indonesian zealot. I elected to pay off the
driver and try my luck in another cab for the trip down to Tribeca. But the
world is full of people with axes to grind, and an inordinate number of them
have always ended up driving New York City cabs; and so my journey down the
upper level of the West Side Superhighway was no more pleasant than the trip
from Central Park had been.

I was still thinking about all
those grinding axes when I got back to my loft. Procrastinating until Max's
phone call, I switched on my computer, printed out the first section of the
late edition of
The New York Times,
then settled into my couch with a
bottle of Lithuanian vodka and started leafing through the paper, the
experiences of the day and evening making me see the stories it contained in
other than the usual trusting light. Suddenly no piece of information seemed
entirely reliable, and I was reminded of Thomas Jefferson's admonition that a
citizen can be truly informed only if he ignores the newspapers. Specifically,
the
Times
reported the details of half a dozen hot spots around the
world in which the United States was either diplomatically or militarily
involved; and it seemed increasingly possible that because of the Khaldun
business, Afghanistan would shortly be added to the list. I found myself
wondering if computer discs containing bizarre, undiscovered information about
all those other crises existed; and in that unsettled state of mind I drifted
off to sleep.

Several hours later, I was woken
by the sound of my vacuum cleaner charging out of the hall closet and then
following a series of electronic sensors under the carpet in an effort to carry
out its cleaning program. This sort of thing had been happening with
increasing frequency lately: never much of a housekeeper, I'd dropped a bundle on
one of those "smart apartment" setups, only to watch it go mad over
the ensuing weeks and try to clean up, make coffee, adjust the lighting, and
God only knew what else at all hours of the day and night, generally with
stunning inefficiency.

Cursing the brilliant soul who'd
shrunk microchips to the size of molecules and made such supposedly
"smart" systems possible, I began unsteadily pursuing the vacuum
cleaner around the loft. I'd no sooner corralled the thing and shut it off than
the phone began to ring; and I just managed to get to it before my answering
service, which was almost as brilliant as my vacuum cleaner, had time to route
the call to my wireless phone.

On answering I once again heard
Max's voice: "Get up here—I broke the encryption, and I've got a crapload
of other stuff, too. Jesus, Gideon, this deal is getting spooky."

Another lousy cab ride later, and
I was back at Max's. I found him switching on the various systems he used to
jam and otherwise thwart listening devices, after which he guided me over to a
stack of DNA sequencing and identification equipment near a window that had a
beautiful view of the river.

"I found a few hairs
embedded in the brick wall at the murder scene," Max explained, indicating
the buzzing equipment. "I ran them through my remote terminal while we
were there, but what I got back didn't seem to make any sense, so I wanted to
try it again on the big rig. Results came up the same. A few of the samples
belong to John Price, but the rest? The rest match a guy who's in jail."

"In jail? Then how— ?"

"Don't start asking
questions yet, Gideon, or we'll be here the rest of the night. So while I'm
trying to figure out how somebody who's already locked up could off our boy, I
find these." He dropped a few metal pellets about the size of mouse feces
into my hand. "Any idea what they are?"

"No," I answered dimly.

"I didn't either, until I
ran them for stains. Price's blood was there." Max took a deep breath.
"You know what condition his body was in?"

I nodded. "Almost
disintegrated, the cops said."

"By these," Max went
on, taking one of the pellets and studying it. "Any idea how fast they'd
have to be traveling to do that to a human body?"

"
Could
they do that
to a human body?"

"Sure. Theoretically. If I
toss a little lump of lead at you, it isn't gonna kill you. I shoot it out of a
gun, that's a different story. Fire a bunch of these jobs at a high enough
velocity, and yeah, your body would almost vaporize. But that's a hell of a
velocity. And nobody heard any gunfire, not even the doorman. Or so he
says."

"So what could—?"

"Gideon, I told you—wait
with the questions. Now—" He walked purposefully back over to his main
bank of computers. "It took me a while, but I finally busted Price's
encryption of the second batch of information on the disc—though why he worked
so hard to hide
this is
beyond me."

Touching a keypad, Max called up
an image on his main screen: an old piece of grainy film that offered a glimpse
of what appeared to be—of what, I soon realized, in fact
was
—a
mid-twentieth-century German concentration camp. There was a shot of some
starving, laboring prisoners, a pan off to some SS officers, and then a
further pan to reveal ... a silhouette. A grayish human silhouette, moving,
yes, but as unidentifiable as the similar blank spot in the second of the three
versions of the Forrester assassination we'd seen had been.

"Okay," Max said, watching
my dumbstruck face. "Now you can ask questions."

I took a deep breath.
"Dachau?" I asked.

"Good call, Professor,"
Max answered. "I downloaded some matching footage half an hour ago. It's
pretty stock stuff. Except for the mystery guest there."

I kept staring at the silhouette.
"Something about that general outline looks familiar," I said.
"There—when he turns in profile ..."

"Okay. So maybe then you can
tell me how this connects to some hairs from a guy who's already in prison and
some kind of supergun that apparently turned John Price into so much jelly
without making a sound."

I found it hard to take my eyes
off of Max's computer screen, which kept replaying the same snippet of film
footage over and over. "What's the guy's name? The one who's in jail?"

Max crossed the room to a table.
"Got that, too—hacked into the correctional banks. Here—Kuperman. Eli
Kuperman."

My head snapped around. "Eli
Kuperman the anthropologist?"

"The same. Know him?"

I shook my head. "But I know
his work. Controversial stuff— brilliant, though. The origins of primitive
cultures."

"That's what they nailed him
for. Down in Florida, he was in some Indian burial ground. Digging up graves,
or so the folks who run the reservation say. Kuperman never contested it. Tribe
agreed to the government's sentence—five years in the local state pen."
Max's face grew even more puzzled, and his voice softened. "Strange thing
is, the day after he went up, just last week, the Indians laid concrete over
the whole burial ground. So much for sacred ..."

"Maybe they didn't want any
more desecrations."

"Maybe," Max said with
a shrug. "Point is, what's this guy Kuperman's hair doing at our murder
scene?"

"You're sure it's his?"

Max shrugged again. "The
universal DNA database doesn't lie. So unless he's got an identical twin—"

"That's what I'm talking
about."

"What's what you're talking
about?"

"Kuperman," I said, not
quite believing Max's confused look. "He's got a twin brother."

Max swallowed hard. "Screw
you, Wolfe."

"He does!
Jonah
Kuperman—he's
an archaeologist, just as famous as his brother."

"Well, it wasn't in any of
the hits that
I
pulled up."

"Jesus, Max," I said,
going back to the DNA analyzer. "The sum total of human knowledge is
supposed to be on the damned Internet—you mean they missed something as basic
as
that?"

"Hey, don't start with me
about the Net again, Gideon, a few occasional screwups do not mean—"

Suddenly the window with the
beautiful view in front of me shattered into hundreds of crashing shards.
Instinctively, I went for the floor; but when I looked up, I saw Max—foolishly,
I thought at that instant—still standing. I screamed for him to get down, but
he only swayed strangely in the half-light of his computer. Then I noticed a
bead of blood on his forehead; and looking past him I could see that his
computer screen was splattered with something a good deal more vital and
substantial than blood. I crawled like a pathetic crab across the floor while
he crumpled with grim grace to his knees. He fell forward just as I reached
him, allowing me to see that the missile that had entered his forehead so
neatly had, on exiting, taken much of his brain and a good deal of his skull
away with it.

It wasn't until two days later,
while I was on a filthy, packed old 767 flying from Washington to Orlando, that
the full impact of Max's death descended on me. Up until that time I'd been too
preoccupied with police reports and hiding all traces of what we'd been doing
to really let it sink in. But when I caught sight of a large man who might have
been Max's double sitting three rows in front of me on that flight, I suddenly
felt like I'd been hit in the chest with a mallet. To lose one's last living
connection to childhood is not an easy thing; to lose him in the way I had is
the kind of event that makes you want answers—and makes you capable of doing
almost anything to get them.