Killing Time (24 page)

I was utterly in the dark.
"Neaten his mustache?" I asked. "Why?"

"So that the Americans will
think he's General Said," Slayton explained, smiling as he grasped Leon's
idea.

"At which point,"
Larissa concluded, shaking her head in good-natured wonder at Tarbell,
"they'll kill him themselves—a single satellite-guided missile would be
enough."

Said turned to Larissa in
surprise. "Excellent comprehension! Indeed, given that you are an
unbeliever
and
a woman, it is
doubly
excellent!"

Larissa's patience with the
general was waning, and Tarbell could see it: he quickly took Said by the elbow
and walked him away from her, saying, "His death not only makes a
statement to the vermin in the resort but convinces the Americans that you
yourself are no longer alive—and so they will suspend their satellite
watch."

"Thus allowing
me
to
go
outside
!
A brilliant plan in all respects!" Said turned
to his officers and began barking orders: "We shall use the roof of the
Theme Park Hotel—let the fools blow the rest of it up! Inform the manager of
the casino that in one hour he will suspend all play. The patrons will be
herded outside, at gunpoint if necessary, and everyone in the streets will be
forced onto the plaza to watch, as well!"

During the momentary whirl of
activity that followed, Slayton quietly told the rest of us to follow him into
the shoe room. Once there I adjusted the brushing machine just enough so that
it wasn't actually making contact with Eshkol's feet, while Slayton whispered
in the captive's ear, "Keep screaming, or we'll all get killed."
Eshkol's features had begun to relax with the cessation of the flaying, but he
quickly contorted them again, taking Slayton's meaning. "Listen to me, Dov
Eshkol," the colonel went on. "We know who and what you actually are,
we know why you're here, and we know what your plan is. But if you want to avoid
what the general is planning for
you,
do exactly as we say." Eshkol
nodded quickly between muffled screams, and then Slayton turned to the rest of
us. "We'll need his pack—we certainly can't leave a device like that with
these people. We'd better take the plutonium as well. Larissa, tell your
brother that we'll want to be picked up off the roof of the casino sometime in
the next hour."

"And what happens when the
general doesn't get his execution?" I asked.

"Gideon, really,"
Tarbell scolded. "That question is unworthy of you. By the time the
general realizes that he is not to have his precious execution, we will be
aboard the ship and far away."

"Oh," I said as we all
filed back out of the room. "Yes, of course." I breathed a little
easier at the thought and gave Tarbell a gentle pat on the back. "Well
done, Leon—you could sell ice to Eskimos, my friend, no doubt about it."

Tarbell laughed, quietly but with
his usual fiendish delight. "Yes," he said as he glanced up at me,
"it
is
almost frightening, isn't it? But I can't help myself,
Gideon. The great throws, the lies told for the highest stakes—so immensely
sexual! At such times I really do think that I could talk anyone into
anything!"

Even now, as I sit here waiting
for dawn to break through the African gloom, I can see my brilliant, strange
little friend's grinning face in the flame of the lamp that burns before me;
and though the vision makes me smile, I shudder with sorrow as well. For there
is one sexless wraith that not even Leon could dissuade from his grim purpose,
and he was hovering nearby even as we laughed.

In order for our plan to succeed,
it was of course necessary that Eshkol be able to walk. In addition, the
torment through which Said had put his prisoner roused some primitive form of
empathy in me, despite all the contemptible things I knew about the man. For
both of these reasons I did my best to clean, pad, and bind the bleeding soles
of Eshkol's feet, forgetting in my disgust with such tortures as he'd endured
that someone with his training and temperament could likely have run on
bleeding stumps if he'd thought it would serve his fanatical purpose. What I
did was not merciful but foolish, and it should have been I and I alone who
paid for the mistake. Had it been, the tragedy that ensued might even have made
some sort of twisted sense.

Just before the appointed hour of
Eshkol's death, we all accompanied Major Sadad to the place of execution: the
same abandoned hotel roof where we had first debarked from our ship. Following more
of Tarbell's clever suggestions, the Malaysians had created a false command
center on the roof, such as General Said might himself have used to direct his
forces. Colonel Slayton was relatively sure that we were already under
satellite observation—the United States had, after all, gained a great deal of
experience with such long-range surveillance operations during its efforts to
locate various elusive enemy leaders over the last thirty years—and when we
returned to Said, who was staying carefully out of sight in a half-demolished
suite on a lower floor of the hotel, the colonel declared that the authenticity
of the stage and its props would certainly bring about the desired result.
General Said was delighted with this affirmation from a fellow officer, and
before long he ordered his men to bring up Eshkol.

The prisoner, in accordance with
the plan, had been dressed in a uniform very similar to Said's, and his facial
hair had been carefully adjusted. The general expressed some concern about the
obvious discrepancy between his own height and that of his doppelganger; but
Slayton told him that this shouldn't matter, since the American satellites
would be watching from above. The colonel and Said continued to go over the
details of the operation in an increasingly collegial manner, one that
succeeded in distracting the general completely; and while he was thus engaged
Larissa and Tarbell slipped back to the bowling alley to secure Eshkol's
rucksack and the plutonium containment canister. They soon returned with both
items, and though at the time this seemed a coup, it, too, soon proved a bad
mistake.

At ten o'clock General Said
announced that it was time to proceed: Eshkol was to be taken up to the roof,
where his men would tether him to a heavy slab of concrete rubble. When we got
outside we discovered that, as was apparently often the case on that mountain,
a beautiful mist had formed around the resort, though not above it: the starry
night sky was still quite visible through the vast white halo. Below the
building the enormous crowd ordered by General Said had gathered, and though
armed soldiers had surrounded the area, the spectators seemed to need no
encouragement to cheer and holler in a bloodthirsty—and bloodcurdling—manner.

Just as five of Said's men were
about to secure Eshkol to his Promethean slab of concrete, something that I had
hoped and even expected never to see again drifted up from below a nearby edge
of the roof: it was one of the American surveillance drones, our companions
from the stratosphere, and it was not, of course, alone. Within seconds the
entire roof was ringed with the things, and as they appeared General Said asked
Colonel Slayton in a very agitated voice what they were, though this inquiry
was impeded by the frequent need to tell his severely spooked soldiers to calm
down and hold their positions. Slayton did his best to dismiss the drones as
mere surveillance instruments, but Larissa, Tarbell, and I knew the grim facts
of the situation. To begin with, the drones could at any moment have destroyed
the roof or even the entire hotel, depending on their armament; but what was
perhaps worse was that those of us from Malcolm's ship had now been recognized
by the Americans, and this was likely to lead to a plethora of problems
concerning our ship's escape and continued concealment, since any new anomalous
radar readings would likely be assigned to us.

Bad as the situation was, it was
about to get a great deal worse. The drones did not go on the attack
immediately, most likely because of the confusion that their remote operators
were experiencing as to just what was happening on the roof; but their
appearance gave Eshkol an opportunity, one that he used every ounce of his
training to exploit. After breaking free of the five men who'd been detailed to
chain him to the concrete, he subdued three of them in a frenzy of savage
blows, kicks, and gouges. Having secured a weapon from one of those he'd
felled, he used it to blow the other two quickly over the edge of the roof. But
Eshkol was far too clever to think that he would make it out of that situation
armed with only an ordinary gun. Apparently he had divined, even while he was
strapped down and being tortured, that the weapon Larissa wore slung at her
side was something very unusual; and, spraying a hail of fire that forced us
all to disperse and find cover, he hurled himself at her. Very neatly making
it look as though he meant to do her harm, he instead plucked the rail gun out
of its holster and rolled with it to the far side of the roof, while Larissa,
who had been readying herself for hand-to-hand combat, looked on in stunned
amazement.

We were in trouble, though at
that point only we four visitors knew how bad the trouble was. Education for
the others was, however, on the way. As the drones dashed about the edges of
the roof like onlookers at a brawl trying to decide which side, if any, to take,
Eshkol began moving among the huge pieces of rubble with an agility that would
have been remarkable even had he not just endured long hours of torture. After
several minutes of this display, he finally caught one unlucky Malaysian
soldier out in the open and fired the rail gun. I had not actually seen the
thing used on a man before, and the effect was at once greater and less
violent than I had expected. Most of the soldier's body simply disappeared, as
John Price's had done; and the pieces that were left, being wholly and cleanly
detached from the trunk, had a certain prosthetic quality, as if they had never
actually been part of a living human body. General Said lost about half of his
men to panic after that, though the few who stayed showed admirable resolve in
the face of what seemed certain death. It soon became clear from Eshkol's
movements, however, that he wasn't interested in the Malaysians at all.

He began to vociferously demand
his rucksack and the plutonium canister, the pair of which he had somehow
noticed Larissa and Tarbell bringing up to the roof. Screwing up my courage, I
got to Larissa's side with a few leaps and some low running, but she informed
me that Leon had the deadly goods. Where Leon might be, however, neither she
nor anyone else seemed to know. As General Said shouted to Eshkol that the
rucksack and canister were not on the roof—true, as far as he knew—Slayton,
Larissa, and I crawled about as best we could, urgently whispering Tarbell's
name. My own attempts to contact him became, out of desperation, rather
absurdly noisy; then, from behind the housing of an elevator mechanism, I heard
him whisper:

"Gideon! Be quiet, you fool,
you'll get us both killed!" I couldn't yet see him, but I was relieved to
know that he was alive. "Are you hurt, Leon?" I called.

"Not yet!" he answered.
"Although if you insist on—oh, no." The dread that had suddenly come
into his voice indicated that Eshkol was nearby; and when I looked up I saw the
huge man lying flat atop the elevator structure, safe from the fire of the
Malaysians and pointing the rail gun down over the far side. I heard him demand
the rucksack and canister and offer Tarbell his life in exchange. "You
lying eunuch!" Leon said. "We know you too well—" What came
next, though predictable, was nightmarishly unstoppable. Eshkol had
demonstrated as pronounced a taste for unnecessary killing as any sociopath
I'd ever encountered, and there was no reason to think that Leon—lacking
weapons, cover, or bargaining chips—would receive the mercy that so many others
had been denied. Still, the quiet discharge of the rail gun when it came
brought me out of my hiding place screaming, loud enough for Eshkol to turn in
evident alarm. Perhaps he thought that I would be so foolish only if I had some
other miraculous weapon; or perhaps he had so squandered any human feelings he
still possessed on his dead ancestors that he could not believe that anyone
would put himself in danger simply out of brotherhood or grief. Whatever the
case, he looked utterly confused, a confusion that probably saved me. Certainly
it was a confusion that deepened mightily, as did that of General Said, his
men, and, it seemed, the American drones, when the sky above the hotel cracked
open to reveal Julien, who was once again standing in the hatchway of our ship.

He was holding a long-range stun
weapon, which he aimed at the spot where Eshkol was lying. But again the number
of similar situations that Eshkol must have been in during his career became
evident: he disappeared off his perch, I think, even before Fouché pulled the
trigger of his gun. A sudden outcry from the remaining Malaysians—who had lost
the last of their nerve at the sight of the floating, hollering
Frenchman—indicated that Eshkol was on his way down to the street from the roof
by way of a damaged staircase. None of the soldiers, however, was willing to
give chase, at least not until General Said's exhortations turned into open
threats. When the troops finally did begin to move, Colonel Slayton rushed
toward my position, as did Larissa; but I had already dashed to and around the
elevator structure.

There was nothing left of Leon
save an arm, probably the arm with which, given the care his murderer had taken
not to damage it, he'd held the rucksack and containment canister. Of those
items there was no trace, though at the moment that fact meant nothing to me. I
fell to my knees and, in a kind of utterly spent mourning, began to chuckle
tearfully: for the middle finger of Leon's dead hand was raised, as I was sure
it had been when he'd met his end. Larissa soon put her arms around me and
attempted to pull me up and toward the descending hatchway of the ship, but in
my sorrow I would not be moved from the spot. Fusillades of gunfire began to be
directed at us by the troops in the street, while the drones moved toward the
hatchway with the clear purpose of inspecting it so that their operators could
decide whether or not to attack; yet still I would not go, not until I'd
determined what in God's name to do about Tarbell's arm.