Killing Time

CHAPTER 37

I was too stunned to move or speak, and I could see that my three comrades were in roughly the same shape. We'd spent so many hours preparing ourselves for what we had been sure would be a violent confrontation with Eshkol that discovering him in such a condition— and especially in such a place — left us scrambling to determine our next move. Of course, there was the option of closing the door and letting General Said finish the job he had so enthusiastically started; but for all our recent declarations that Eshkol had to be stopped in a permanent way, I don't think any of us had the stomach for playing a part in his slow death by torture. Then too, as Malcolm reminded Larissa when she reported in concerning the latest developments, we couldn't be sure that Eshkol hadn't told anyone else about the Stalin disc: we needed him to declare those images a hoax to his superiors before he died in order to prevent the propagation of rumors that would likely prove even more troublesome than facts. One by one it dawned on each of us that we were going to have to get him out of that room, that building, and that town; but it was the ever-wily Tar-bell, not surprisingly, who grasped that fact first and took hold of the situation.

"Tell me, General," he said, nonchalantly watching Eshkol writhe in a successful attempt to impress Said. "What exactly has this man done to you?"

"He is a pig, Dr. Tarbell!" the general declared, spitting on Eshkol. "To begin with, he has stirred trouble for me within my family. He came looking for plutonium and promised a great deal of money for it. Then, on his way here, he murdered the man I had sent to escort him. Why? I cannot say, and he will not."

"He has killed before, and just as unreasonably," Tarbell explained. "It is our belief that he seeks to obscure the trail he leaves behind. He may even have tried to kill you, after your business was done."

"Me?" the general cried, dumbfounded. "Here?"

Tarbell let out a flattering sort of laugh. "Absurd, is it not?"

Said began to laugh along with him. "Yes — absurd! He is a madman, then!" Suddenly the general's laughter died down, and he looked at Eshkol in an immensely irritated way. "But the chap he murdered, you see, was my wife's cousin. I had little use for the man, but how does this make me look? Not only to my family, but to that unholy mob outside? Very bad, infidels, very bad. Furthermore" — Said returned to his bowling lane and picked a file up off the scorer's desk—"we are not without our own ways of gathering intelligence. Were you aware that this enemy of yours is actually a CIA agent?"

The general placed a sheet of printout on a lit area of the desk, at which the contents of the page were projected onto a large screen over the bowling lane. It was indeed a copy of a Central Intelligence file, which stated that an agency operative calling himself Vincent Gambon had infiltrated the Doctors Without Borders field office in the Kurdish sector of Turkey, from which, as I have already noted, Israel was currently drawing a good deal of its water, much to the displeasure of the Turks and their American allies. Here, at least, was the probable reason why Eshkol had killed the real and unfortunate Gambon in the first place, although Said apparently knew nothing about such matters, as his next words demonstrated: "No doubt his actual purpose here was to undermine our hold on this mountain— perhaps by way of the nuclear device we found him carrying!" Said held up a small rucksack that bore the same Doctors Without Borders logo we'd seen on Eshkol's clothes. "The very device he intended to arm with the plutonium we had agreed to sell him!" With his free hand the general grabbed a metal radioactive materials canister and held it up; then he looked back through the open door of the shoe room. "Oh, this creature's soul is a pit of evil, infidels, and I intend that he shall regret every minute of his loathsome existence before he dies!"

"Quite understandable," Tarbell said, glancing around the bowling alley and, it seemed to me, silently calculating just how many Malaysian soldiers were in it. "Thoroughly understandable!" he reaffirmed. Then he looked at Colonel Slayton and Larissa, both of whom shook their heads as if to say that the idea of some sort of breakout was unfeasible. Leon acknowledged their assessment with a reluctant nod. "And yet it seems to me," he went on, turning to Said again, "that you are missing a most excellent opportunity."

"I?" Said asked. "How, Doctor?"

"Well, I can certainly understand your desire to kill this man slowly," Tarbell answered. "But privately? You yourself have said that the people in this ridiculous community are a mindless mob. Why not seize the opportunity to tighten your hold on them?"

General Said pondered the question, then began to smile once more. "Ah! I see your point, Dr. Tarbell — a public execution!"

Tarbell grinned back at him. "Exactly."

Said's face went straight for a moment. "Would it have to be quick?"

"Oh, no, not necessarily," Leon answered.

The general began to pace thoughtfully. "We might do it at the old dinner theater — they love their theater, these degenerates, and we could give them something special." He continued to mull it over. "I might crucify him," he said.

Tarbell cocked his head skeptically. "Well," he said. "It's a bit trite, isn't it? Not to mention the implications — you don't want him to seem the martyr, after all."

"Yes, yes, this is so." Said kept pacing, then finally stopped and turned to Tarbell. "Well, then, Doctor, I open the floor to suggestions."

Tarbell took the general aside conspiratorially. "I'm not sure the length of his death is really the most important consideration. My own idea would be this — have your men escort him to a high public spot after attiring him in one of your own uniforms."

"My uniforms?" Said protested. "But why should—"

"I assume," Tarbell interjected soothingly, "that the Americans have you under close satellite surveillance?"

"Oh, by the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, they do indeed!" General Said looked momentarily distraught. "Twenty-four hours a day, I can scarcely ever leave this place—" Suddenly he stopped, getting the point. "Ah! Excellent, Dr. Tarbell — truly, for an infidel that is inspired!" He moved toward the shoe room, studying Eshkol. "We shall have to shave his beard, of course, and neaten his mustache, but other than that…"

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.