Killing Time

CHAPTER 41

The horrendous, transfixing fireball had begun to fade long before any of us could find words to acknowledge it. When at last someone did speak, it was Eli, giving voice to the same question that was in all our minds: How had Eshkol gotten away from us? No one could provide an answer, of course, and the terrible query was to hang accusingly in the air throughout our journey back to St. Kilda, where Colonel Slayton, after long hours in the monitoring room, would finally discover the explanation. For the moment, however, we all just shook our heads and went on staring silently, bewildered not only as to how the tragedy had been possible but about what we should do next. At length it was, not surprisingly, Malcolm who brought us out of our horrified daze: in a voice that grated like grinding rocks and matched the deathly pallor of his face, he ordered Larissa to pilot the ship into the burning city, a command that brought a collective gasp of disbelief from the rest of us. Seeing the extent of her brother's devastation, Larissa spoke very gently and carefully when she suggested that such a flight might be dangerous; but Malcolm angrily retorted that the ship would keep us safe from radiation, at least for a time, and that he needed to see the devastation — as, he added, did we all. Without further discussion Larissa took the helm, and we made the flight — and in so doing experienced a loss of innocence such as comparatively few people in the world's history have, thankfully, ever known.

There are no words; none that I can find, at any rate. Shall I describe how many shades I discovered there to be in what are usually labeled "gray" ashes, as well as the infinite range of colors that characterize what is generally dismissed as "scorched earth"? And what prose can describe the sickening image of those thousands of brutally burned and torn human bodies, both living and dead, that had escaped actual vaporization? Yet I could not turn away. I once heard it said that destruction perversely but consummately intrigues the eye; but I'd never expected to see the assertion borne out by my own fixation on so nightmarish a panorama.

Ground zero of the blast had, predictably, been the Kremlin, behind whose walls the demented Josef Stalin had once drunk peppered vodka and plotted genocide, though not the genocide in which Dov Eshkol had imagined him to be complicit. Nothing remained, of course, of this structure and its surrounding district; nor was there very much left of Red Square or of the Tverskaya commercial district, which Stalin himself had redesigned, or of fashionable Arbatskaya or of the medieval suburb of Zamoskvorechie across the Moscow River. The miniature bomb had been powerful enough to tear the very heart out of the city, and out of Russia itself — all to avenge an imaginary sin that the profoundly unbalanced Eshkol had desperately needed to believe was real so that he might finally have a rationalization for his brutal maintenance of what he thought was faith with his ancestors and prove himself worthy in the imagined eyes of all those who had died so long ago.

Mundus vult decipi.

The grim tour of the devastated city that Malcolm had believed so necessary ultimately proved too much for him: guilt, exhaustion, and shock all combined with his chronic weakness to produce a crisis, one that I don't think came as a shock to any of the rest of us. Indeed, it seems a wonder now that more of our party didn't collapse under the burden of those sights. Colonel Slayton once again slung the terribly stricken Malcolm's left arm around his shoulders and with his own right arm lifted that drastically underweight body fully off the floor and started off toward the stern of the ship. Larissa pressed herself against me once hard, somehow suspecting — quite rightly — that everything had changed as a result of what we had just witnessed; then she went off to tend to her brother, holding his dangling right hand tightly as Slayton carried him. Eli set the ship's helm on a preprogrammed course for St. Kilda, and then at last the rest of us drifted away, each trying to find some solitude in which to come to terms with the incomprehensible.

Even before we reached the Scottish coast I'd decided that I couldn't go on playing a part in Malcolm's grand scheme. The doubts about his work that perhaps I should have heeded ever since we'd first heard reports concerning the man we would come to know as Dov Eshkol — a man pathologically prepared to be consumed by fabricated information, a man willing, in fact, to commit murder on an unprecedented scale because of it — now created a deafening crescendo in my skull. How many more Dov Eshkols were loose in the world? How could we ever court similar disasters by manufacturing more hoaxes? And hadn't Malcolm's own complaints that the world was unwilling to accept that his elaborate lies were just that now been horrifically borne out? Human society was not becoming any less entranced by or besotted with information as a result of what Malcolm and the others were doing, I now realized; and the responsibility for driving a madman over the edge, if not direct, was close enough, in my own mind, to prevent my continuing to play a part in the operation.

Such intellectual and moral conclusions, while difficult to reach, seemed simple when compared to the emotional and practical problems posed by the prospect of departure. First and foremost, of course, there was Larissa. Having years earlier accepted the unlikelihood of finding a woman who would not only tolerate but admire the way in which I lived and worked, it was no easy thing to contemplate giving up the one I'd finally found — particularly when our natural attraction to and ease with each other were augmented by the strong bonds that often grow between people whose childhoods were marred by violence. There was, of course, the possibility that Larissa would abandon her brother for me; and indeed the alternative was so heartbreaking, and my thinking had become so muddled, that I found myself latching onto that idea more and more during the balance of the flight back to St. Kilda.

This badly misguided fantasy, which flew in the face of not only my professional training but all my experience with Malcolm and Larissa, was nonetheless powerful enough to influence the problem of how I would handle my status as an international criminal, as well. Would I throw myself on the mercy of world justice, explain that I personally had played no part in the hoax that had resulted in the deaths of millions of people, and risk imprisonment? I would not; but I might learn to tolerate and even enjoy life as an international fugitive, using the skills I had learned from Malcolm and the others — provided, of course, that Larissa would come with me. As the ship sped over the Isle of Skye, my dream grew steadily more elaborate and romantic: Larissa and I would live on the run, plucking whatever we needed or wanted from a world unable to stop us.

And so, when at last Larissa entered my quarters after making sure that Malcolm was resting quietly and proceeded to fall tearfully into my arms, I elected to view it as a sign that her love for me was beginning to outweigh her dedication to her brother. I said nothing to that effect and nothing about my deluded plans for the future, thinking it only fair to broach the subject with Malcolm first. I maintained this silence through several ensuing days on Hirta, during which each member of our group continued to try to reach some separate peace with all that we had seen and endured. It wasn't an easy time; despite the fact that we successfully avoided discussing the subject with one another, a near compulsion to privately read and view news reports concerning the Moscow disaster afflicted us all, and as the casualty numbers mounted, a common but unacknowledged grief bore down hard. The truth about Dov Eshkol eventually did emerge, but so did reports that he'd had accomplices who'd escaped in some sort of advanced aircraft, at which point apprehension over possible aggressive moves against St. Kilda joined the list of anxieties that were afflicting everyone on the island.

The last of these fears, at least, was allayed when Larissa emerged from two days of ministering to her brother to announce to the rest of us that Malcolm had been in contact with Edinburgh: the Scottish government had refused to reveal anything about Malcolm's purchase of St. Kilda to the U.N. allies, and he had promised more funding for the Scots' war of independence. Relieved that we would be left in peace, at least for a time, the others went back to the business of pondering the recent past as well as the uncertain future. I turned to do the same, but Larissa caught my arm.

"He wants to see you," she said, indicating Malcolm's quarters, which were situated so as to block any entrance to his private laboratory. "But don't let him get excited, Gideon — he's better, but he's not well." She kissed me quickly but tenderly. "I've missed you."

I ran one hand through her silver hair and smiled. "It's been lousy."

She held me tighter at that. "Very lousy," she murmured.

"Larissa," I whispered. "There's something—" I looked into her eyes, wanting to see curiosity but finding only severe exhaustion. "Jesus, you've got to rest."

She nodded, but managed to ask, " 'Something'?"

"We can talk about it later," I answered, believing that we would have plenty of time to do so and still wanting, like some well-heeled suitor, to talk to her brother before I sprang the idea on her. "For now, rest."

She sighed acknowledgment, kissed me again, and strode wearily away, leaving the door to her brother's quarters ajar.

I stepped inside, sure of what I was going to say and hopeful that Malcolm would approve of the plan; wholly unsuspecting, in short, that he was about to tell me what he considered the greatest of his many secrets, a tale so bizarre and unbelievable that it would force me to the conclusion that he had, in fact, lost his mind.