Killing Time

CHAPTER 4

That evening Max combed the sidewalk outside the Prices' building on Central Park West while I went up to the penthouse to see the recently bereaved. I found her huddled with her daughter in a huge living room that overlooked the park and informed her that, given what I'd seen on the disc, I did understand her fears; but I still needed to know just who the "they" she'd talked so insistently about that afternoon were. She explained that her first move on finding the disc among her husband's effects had been to go to the FBI; but they had only confiscated the thing immediately and hinted not so subtly that any discussion of it on her part could prove very risky for both her and her daughter. When Mrs. Price had found the backup copy, she'd figured she had nowhere to turn, and had been on the verge of destroying it when she remembered the interview I'd done on public television.

I asked her if she was aware that there was apparently a second batch of information on the disc, to which she said that she wasn't, but that it didn't surprise her; nor did her husband's evident encryption of it. He'd apparently been doing a lot of contract work for a private client lately, and although he'd kept her in the dark about its nature, she had discovered that he was being paid an astronomical fee for it. "Astronomical," for somebody whose day job already brought down enough to cover a penthouse on Central Park West, a century-old mansion in L.A., and one of the few waterfront houses in the Hamptons that had survived the hurricanes of '05, obviously meant quite a bit; but though my curiosity was piqued, Mrs. Price could tell me nothing more. So I left the grieving wife and daughter after receiving the promise of a fee that, by my own humble standards, was itself pretty damned astronomical.

As soon as I was back on the street, Max urgently yoked my neck into one of his heavy arms. "Let's get the hell out of here," he said, eyeing the building's doorman and then the darkened expanse of Central Park across the street.

"Why?" I asked, stumbling as he pulled me down the block toward a free taxi.

"Because," he answered, opening the cab's door and shoving me in, "you have gotten me involved in some very bizarre crap, Wolfe." At that he jumped in beside me and ordered the Indonesian driver to take us back to his office.

Max pointedly refused to do anything more than discuss take-out options for dinner that night as we rode downtown, prompting our sour-faced driver to extoll the virtues of his native cuisine. These uninvited comments inevitably led to a diatribe about the injustice of his country having become, since its total degeneration into anarchy and violence after the '07 crash, a United Nations protectorate. Max told him to just shut the hell up and drive, inspiring the bitter little man to handle both steering and brakes in a fashion unquestionably designed to induce nausea. All in all, I was confused, sickened, and fairly irritated by the time we got back to Max's building; and my mood wasn't improved when my friend jumped out of the vehicle, dosed the door before I could follow, and said:

"This is gonna take a few hours. Go home, I'll call you."

Before I could argue he was inside, leaving me alone with the Indonesian zealot. I elected to pay off the driver and try my luck in another cab for the trip down to Tribeca. But the world is full of people with axes to grind, and an inordinate number of them have always ended up driving New York City cabs; and so my journey down the upper level of the West Side Superhighway was no more pleasant than the trip from Central Park had been.

I was still thinking about all those grinding axes when I got back to my loft. Procrastinating until Max's phone call, I switched on my computer, printed out the first section of the late edition of The New York Times, then settled into my couch with a bottle of Lithuanian vodka and started leafing through the paper, the experiences of the day and evening making me see the stories it contained in other than the usual trusting light. Suddenly no piece of information seemed entirely reliable, and I was reminded of Thomas Jefferson's admonition that a citizen can be truly informed only if he ignores the newspapers. Specifically, the Times reported the details of half a dozen hot spots around the world in which the United States was either diplomatically or militarily involved; and it seemed increasingly possible that because of the Khaldun business, Afghanistan would shortly be added to the list. I found myself wondering if computer discs containing bizarre, undiscovered information about all those other crises existed; and in that unsettled state of mind I drifted off to sleep.

Several hours later, I was woken by the sound of my vacuum cleaner charging out of the hall closet and then following a series of electronic sensors under the carpet in an effort to carry out its cleaning program. This sort of thing had been happening with increasing frequency lately: never much of a housekeeper, I'd dropped a bundle on one of those "smart apartment" setups, only to watch it go mad over the ensuing weeks and try to clean up, make coffee, adjust the lighting, and God only knew what else at all hours of the day and night, generally with stunning inefficiency.

Cursing the brilliant soul who'd shrunk microchips to the size of molecules and made such supposedly "smart" systems possible, I began unsteadily pursuing the vacuum cleaner around the loft. I'd no sooner corralled the thing and shut it off than the phone began to ring; and I just managed to get to it before my answering service, which was almost as brilliant as my vacuum cleaner, had time to route the call to my wireless phone.

On answering I once again heard Max's voice: "Get up here — I broke the encryption, and I've got a crapload of other stuff, too. Jesus, Gideon, this deal is getting spooky."