Killing Time (9 page)

"How—" I mumbled.
"How does
the—what?"

"It's a long-range neural
interrupter," Jonah answered, pulling my limp arm up and squeezing my hand
around the weapon. "In other words, a stun gun, though an extremely
sophisticated one. Painless, with absolutely no aftereffects. I'm assuming that
since you're in the medical profession, you don't want to carry anything
lethal. But you
will
need protection—"

"Excuse me, " I said
slowly, "but would you repeat that last bit?"

Eli's tongue began to click as he
stared at the legs of my coveralls. "You're really a very in-between size,
Gideon. We had a hell of a time finding clothes for you, and I'm afraid this
body armor's strictly off the rack."

"The targeting and firing
mechanisms," Jonah continued, still focused on the gun, "are very
easy to operate—Malcolm was able to simplify the design sketches that Colonel
Slayton brought with him when he left the Pentagon. You can choose either
manual or voice-operated—"

"Jonah?" I said, trying
to be calm. "I really will pay attention to the gun in a minute. But just
that last bit again. Please."

"Uh-oh." Eli smiled,
rolling down the cuffs of the coverall legs so that they touched the boots.
"Didn't I warn you not to go blurting it out, Jonah?"

"What?" Jonah let my
arm fall. "You mean about Larissa?" I nodded once slowly, and he
said, "I don't know why you'd be shocked. Did you think a woman like that
wasn't going to have a past?"

"A
past
?"
I
echoed. "What—how—I mean, how did she—"

"Well," Jonah went on,
"so far as I know, she's always had a kind of fascination with personal
violence—especially politico-corporate killers. I think she got actively
involved through a contact in Germany, and pretty soon she found out that she
was very good at it. In her first year she knocked off three chief execs of
multinationals, along with two heads of state. I'll let her tell you which
ones."

"Okay," Eli said,
standing up. "Listen, Gideon, the suit will monitor your body's vital
signs and make most microclimate and physiological adjustments automatically.
But in Afghanistan there may be—"

I held a quick hand up.
"Just—one second, Eli. Just one damned minute, okay?" I turned back
to Jonah. "But—I mean,
why?
She couldn't have needed the
money"

"Of course not," Jonah
replied, opening a shoulder pouch on the coveralls to reveal a flexible, highly
miniaturized control board. "Hydrocarbon in the microturbine, check,
operating at one hundred watts. Armor integrity uncompromised—"

I put a hand over the pouch,
blocking his view of the board. "Then
why?"
I repeated.

Jonah shrugged. "You've
talked to her. She's got a highly developed, albeit highly idiosyncratic,
moral code. She and Malcolm both do. Take the case that Colonel Slayton tracked
her down on—"

"The case that she
let
Colonel
Slayton track her down on," Eli added, helping me back out of the
coveralls.

"True," Jonah agreed.
"You see, Gideon, she was trying to lure him into a private meeting so she
could convince him to join our effort. It worked, too—and why not? I mean,
there was Slayton, stewing in the Pentagon about the way he and his men had
been betrayed in Taiwan, and then he hears about the murder of an American software
magnate in Taipei. The man had been killed, according to an anonymous tip,
because he'd made an immoral fortune by exploiting the horrendous prison-labor
laws that the Chinese instituted on Taiwan after reunification. Given
Slayton's experience, the story interested him. But he hit a blank wall, I
mean, there were
no
leads. And for the Chinese police to turn up no
leads on that kind of case, well— that's a lot of torturing for no result. But
as Eli says, Larissa eventually let Slayton find her so she could make the
offer." Shifting gears again, Jonah indicated the racks of weapons.
"Now, most of this stuff you're probably never going to use—advanced
antiarmor and antiaircraft ordnance, the rail weapons that you've already
seen, highly miniaturized nuclear devices—"

"Jonah," I said,
"can you please just stay on this subje—
what?"
I moved closer
to a rack of what looked like small compressed-air canisters.
"Nuclear
devices? What the hell are those doing here?"

"Slayton again," Eli
answered.  "When Larissa and Malcolm talked him into defecting, the man
took everything out of the Pentagon that wasn't nailed down. He had the
highest possible security clearance, you see, as he was—"

"One of their top men in
weapons R and D," I finished for him, remembering what Malcolm had said.
"But why did he agree to come over?"

"Well, the rest of us have
speculated on that quite a bit," Eli answered. Then he smiled as I
cautiously edged just my face closer to the nuclear devices. "Oh, go on,
Gideon," he said, picking one up and tossing it to me. Screaming as I
caught it, I glanced up, only to see his grin getting bigger. "They're not
armed," he said with a laugh. "How crazy do you think we are?" I
looked at him dubiously, and he nodded. "Point taken. But they
are
safe."

"All right, then,
you
play
with them," I answered, tossing the canister back. "And go on about
what Slayton's doing here."

Eli laughed again as Jonah took
up the story: "He'd been working on one of the highest-priority projects
in American military history—ever heard of 'influence technology'?"

"No," I answered.
"Doesn't sound particularly deadly, though."

"Maybe not in the
conventional sense," Jonah said. "It's basically the development of
advanced population control techniques— figuring out ways to give the military
the power to make whole communities believe whatever the Pentagon wants them to
believe. You know how every few years most of the population of Phoenix claims
it's being invaded by UFOs? That's Slayton's department— they use air force
squadrons flying in highly synchronized formations, equipped with new kinds of
running lights."

"So you think he got fed up
with the government after Taiwan," I said, "then got interested in
pulling off hoaxes when he was doing this influence technology, and
that's
why
he decided to join you?"

"Close as we can tell,"
Jonah answered. "He's never been the most forthcoming person, the colonel.
At any rate, he brought along the designs for most of these weapons—and for
some that you'll see later. Most were abandoned by the Americans because of
prototype failures and cost overruns, neither of which presented Malcolm with
much of a problem."

I took in a very deep breath,
still studying all the hardware around me. "So what happened then?" I
said. "With your work, I mean."

"Then things
really
got
busy," Jonah said, checking a nearby clock. "We don't have time to
tell you all the stories, but I suppose you'd better hear the big ones, if we
expect you to believe us."

"Yes," I said. "I
suppose I had."

The pair of them exchanged one of
those quick looks of unspoken communication and understanding that are so
often characteristic of twins; then they both nodded, and Eli said to his
brother, "You take the gospel. I'll take the bones."

"Excuse me?" I mumbled.

Jonah turned my way. "Right.
Basically, Malcolm thought it was time we addressed the general subject of
religion, since people had decided to start killing each other over it again in
ways that hadn't really been seen since the Crusades. And thinking of the
Crusades, along with other things, he decided to make Christianity the specific
target." To my immense shock and irritation, Jonah proceeded to pick up three
of the nuclear canisters and begin juggling them. "It was another document
job for Leon and Julien. You must've heard of it—the Fifth Gospel?"

Coming on top of the juggling
bombs, this news was enough to send me reeling into a corner. The "Fifth
Gospel," as not only I but most of the world by then knew, was a text
discovered several years earlier in a remote part of Syria. Purportedly written
by the apostle Paul in the mid-first century, the document described the need
to lie about the life and supposed miracles of Jesus Christ in order to spread
the faith and gave instructions on how to do so to various sect leaders
throughout the area. The results of this "revelation" I hardly need
record—for while the Fools' Congress and Churchill controversies had been
focused, at least initially, on political and historical circles, most of the
world was immediately swept up in and polarized by the battle over the Fifth
Gospel, which inspired the creation of an unprecedented number of Web sites and
on-line journalistic organs devoted entirely to the debate.

"That was
you
people?"
I said, stunned. "But it's the most scientifically examined document in
history!"

"Yes, those boys really did
their work well," Eli answered.

"Jesus," I whispered
without realizing what I was saying and getting a laugh out of the other two
for it.

"For the next big job,"
Eli said, "we did a complete one-eighty." As he spoke he stepped out
and started to receive and return the flipping bombs from his brother.
"I'm sure you know that one, too, Gideon—
'Homo inexpectatus'?"

My shock instantly became blatant
disbelief. "Now you're pushing it," I said, pointing at him.
"You couldn't have done that, that's been scientifically proved
absolutely
genuine!"

"Of course," Eli said,
almost dropping one of the bombs. "Scientifically proved genuine because
scientists designed it. Which is to say, us. And Julien, of course. See,
Malcolm thought it was only fair to give science a dose, since we'd taken a
shot at religion. So Jonah and I got hold of a group of anatomically convincing
contemporary skeletons—comparatively small ones, but adults—and Julien did a
little molecular manipulation. Then Jonah and I snuck them into a remote dig
in—"

"In South Africa," I
said, and all of a sudden I was back in limbo: for the remains they were
talking about, when they'd been found, had ignited an international firestorm,
as even the most skeptical scientists could find no way to dispute the
assertion that they were at least five million years old. In other words, the supposed
existence of any "missing link" between man and ape, along with the
entire theory of evolution, had seemingly been discredited, inasmuch as humans
very much like us had apparently existed alongside more primitive types of man.
What the Fifth Gospel had done to religion, the aptly dubbed
Homo
inexpectatus
did to science; in less than three years two of the most
powerful faiths in the world had been thrown into disarray.

"This is unbelievable,"
I muttered. What I did
not
say, though I felt it strangely and strongly,
was that there was something intriguing about it all, as well.

"And you've only heard
stories,''
Eli said. "Wait until you see the—" He stopped when he again
caught sight of the clock. "Whoops, look at the time. Sorry, Gideon, but
we should really try to get a couple of hours' rest."

Jonah nodded. "Believe me,
you're going to need it. Things in Afghanistan may get hot in more ways than
one."

"What's
that
supposed
to mean?" I asked, a little perturbed.

"Nothing," Eli answered
evasively, gathering up the bombs and restacking them on the rack. "You'll
see. Come on, we can talk more while we're walking—about the other jobs, if you
like."

"Other jobs
?" I
echoed, further astounded; but they were already hustling me outside the room
and then on through the corridors and up to my quarters.

I discovered as we went that the
"other jobs" they'd mentioned were much smaller undertakings, really
just amusements to keep the group's collective hand in, as the Kupermans'
Florida escapade had been. But this didn't mitigate the central conclusion to
which such revelations inescapably led: that Malcolm's earlier claim about it
being nearly impossible to guess at or believe the extent to which contemporary
conventional wisdom and popular debate had been choreographed by his group was
entirely justified. Like those individuals who had been manipulated by
"recovered memory" therapists during the late twentieth century,
human society had begun to view itself, as a result of these people's hoaxes,
in an entirely new experiential context. Our utter reliance on information
technology had caused us all—even those who, like me, vainly fancied ourselves
to be skeptical by nature—to accept the shocking new "facts" that
those systems were delivering and to argue their details rather than their
provenances; and in doing so, we validated all of Malcolm's profound
indictments.

Weary though I was, these
realizations made it difficult to drift off straight away when I finally did
slip into the small but plush bed in my quarters. However, once I achieved
sleep it was a deep and disorienting one, a treatment that turned out to be
very nearly worse than the ailment of exhaustion—for I was awakened far too
soon by the ship's pulsing alarm.

Apparently we had arrived in
Afghanistan.

I managed to ignore the vessel's
Klaxon for several minutes, but then it was joined by the sound of firm
knocking on my compartment door. I dragged myself to my feet and soon found
myself looking into Julien Fouché's broad, bearded features. He was wearing his
body armor and had a sidearm strapped to his waist.

"It's time, Doctor," he
said, handing me my own coveralls and boots, as well as the same stun pistol
that Jonah had shown me in the arsenal. "The Americans will launch their
raid soon, and apparently our Muslim friends are not entirely cooperating. The
situation is delicate—Malcolm feels your assistance on the ground will be of
great value."