Killing Time

CHAPTER 2

In retrospect, the pattern was there to be seen by anyone attentive enough to trace it. A remarkable series of "discoveries" in history, anthropology, and archaeology had made headlines for several years; but they were all, on their surface, attributable to the great advances made possible in each of those fields by the continued march and intermingling of bio- and information technology, and so those of us who might have detected a controlling presence at work simply got on with our lives. Our lives; yes, even I had a life, before all this began…

In fact, by the standards of modern capitalism I had a good life, one graced by both money and professional respect. A psychiatrist by training, I taught criminal psychiatry and psychology in New York (the city of my birth and childhood) at John Jay University, once a comparatively small college of criminal justice that had grown, during the movement toward privatized prisons that gained such enormous momentum during the first two decades of this century, to become one of the wealthiest educational institutions in the country. Even the crash of '07 and the resultant worldwide recession had not been enough to stop John Jay's expansion: the school has always produced America's best correctional officers, and by 2023, with mandatory drug and quality-of-life punishments so stringent that rally two percent of the nation's population was behind bars, the United States needed nothing so much as prison guards. All of which allowed those who, like me, taught the headier subjects at John Jay to be paid a more-than-decent salary. In addition, I'd recently written a best-selling book, The Psychological History of the United States (the second of my degrees being in history), and so I could actually afford to live in Manhattan.

It was those two areas of expertise — criminology and history— that brought a handsome, mysterious woman to my office on September 13, 2023. It was a grim day in the city, with the air so still and filthy that the mayor had asked the populace to venture outside only if their business was urgent. This my visitor's certainly seemed to be: from the first it was obvious that she was profoundly shaken, and I tried to be as gentle as possible as I led her to a chair. She asked in a hushed tone if I were indeed Dr. Gideon Wolfe; assured that I was, she informed me that she was Mrs. Vera Price, and I recalled instantly that she was the wife of a certain John Price, who'd been one of the movie and theme-park industry's leading special effects wizards until he'd been murdered outside his New York apartment building a few days earlier. Murdered, I might add, in a particularly unpleasant way: his body had been torn to such tiny pieces by some unknown weapon that only recourse to his DNA records had made identification possible. I offered my condolences and asked if there'd been any progress on the case, only to be told that there hadn't been and probably never would be — not unless I helped her. "They," it seemed, wouldn't permit it.

Wondering just who "they" might be, I continued to listen as Mrs. Price explained that she and her husband had had two children, the first of whom had died, like forty million other people worldwide, during the staphylococcus epidemic of 2006. The Prices' second child, a daughter, was now in high school in the city, and even she, Mrs. Price claimed, had been threatened by "them."

"Who?" I finally asked, suspecting that this might be a case of hysterical paranoia. "What do they want? And why come to me about it?"

"I remembered a television interview you did last year," she answered, rummaging through her bag, "and downloaded it. Crime and history — those are your fields, right? Well, then, here—" She revealed a silvery computer disc and tossed it onto my desk. "Take a look at that. They confiscated the original, but I found a copy in my husband's safe-deposit box."

"But—"

"Not now. I just wanted to bring you the disc. Come to my house tonight if you think there's any way you can help. Here's the address."

The flutter of a slip of paper, and she was back out the door, leaving me nothing to do but shake my head and slip the disc into the drive of my computer.

It took all of one minute to look at the images that were burnt onto the thing; and then I found myself grabbing for the wireless phone in my wallet in a state of agitated shock. I began punching a familiar sequence of numbers, until Vera Price's words about "them" came back to me. I ended the wireless call and picked up the land line on my desk. Whoever "they" were, they couldn't have tapped it— not yet.

I redialed the number, then heard a disgruntled voice: "Max Jenkins."

"Max," I said to my oldest friend in the world, a former city cop who was now a private detective. "Don't move."

"What do you mean, 'don't move'? What the hell kind of a way is that to talk to people, you bloodless Anglo-Saxon bastard? I'm going out to lunch."

"Oh?" I countered. "And suppose I told you I'm looking at possible evidence that Tariq Khaldun didn't shoot Forrester?"

Silence for an instant; then: "Is that insane statement supposed to make me less hungry?"

"No, Max—"

"Because it isn't—"

"Max, will you shut up? We're talking about the murder of the president."

"No, you're talking about it. I'm talking about lunch."

I sighed. "How about if I bring the food?"

"How about if you bring it fast?"