Killing Time

CHAPTER 3

Twenty minutes later, Max and I were sitting in front of a bank of computers that nearly covered an old desk in his office on Twenty-Second Street near the Hudson River. As we stared at his main screen, we did our worst to a couple of vegetable burgers I'd picked up from the deli downstairs, so engrossed in what we were seeing— even the jaded Max — that we didn't even have time to engage in our usual nostalgia for the days before the devastating national E. coli outbreak of 2021, when you could still get a real hamburger at something other than the most careful (and expensive) restaurants in town.

On the screen in front of us was the by then deathly familiar scene of three years earlier: the podium in the hotel ballroom in Chicago; the impressive figure of President Emily Forrester striding up, wiping a few beads of sweat from her forehead and preparing to accept the nomination of her party for a second term; and, in the distance, the face, the assassin's face that had been enlarged and made familiar to every man, woman, and child in the country since the discovery just a year ago of the private digicam images taken by some still anonymous person in the crowd. It was a face that, after only a two-month search, had been given a name: Tariq Khaldun, minor functionary in the Afghan consulate in Chicago. Justice had been swift: Khaldun, constantly and pathetically shouting his innocence, had been convicted within months and had recently begun serving a life sentence in a maximum-security facility outside Kansas City. As a result, diplomatic relations between the United States and Afghanistan, always fragile, had been strained almost to the breaking point.

But Max and I had other problems to worry about that day, specifically the fact that on the disc given to me by Mrs. Price the images, instead of proceeding on to the scene of panic that usually followed the assassination, suddenly disappeared; the screen went black for a few seconds, then came alive again with a replay of the crime, one in which the area where the eye was accustomed to seeing Khaldun's face was a carefully delineated blank. Next the screen went black a second time, and finally a third version of the same sequence appeared; but in this go-round, the man wielding the gun in the background was someone entirely different: Asian, maybe Chinese, certainly not Afghan.

I turned to my bearded friend. "What do you think?"

Eyes on the screen as he chewed on a sliver of potato, Max answered, "I think they cook these fries in llama dung." He tossed his paper dish aside.

"The disc, Max," I said impatiently. "Is it evidence of a forgery or not?"

Max shrugged. "Could be. Nobody was better than Price when it came to image manipulation — and we all know that you can't believe a goddamned thing you don't see firsthand anymore. But this isn't setting off any alarms in my software."

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…"