Killing Time

CHAPTER 44

I went south, all right — I went south in every conceivable way…

During the jetcopter ride to Edinburgh's William Wallace Airport, Julien, whose understanding of and sympathy for such loss went beyond the usual Gallic insight into affairs of the heart, tried to assure me that there was no way of knowing what would happen in the future, that at least Larissa and I were both still alive, and that we were far too well matched simply to end things so suddenly and completely. The paradoxical effect of his words, however, was to confirm my despairing conviction that I had lost forever the strange but wonderful woman it had taken me a lifetime to find. When we reached our destination, Fouché climbed out of the aircraft, hugged me vigorously, kissed both my cheeks, and gave me his personal assurance that we would meet again. But when the jetcopter took off and left me standing with nothing but a small shoulder bag containing two hand weapons — one capable only of stunning, the other a lethal rail pistol, both fabricated out of composite resins impossible for any security system to detect — I had to do some very quick breathing and thinking even to begin to suppress the feeling of horrifying loneliness that swept over me. For I was indeed alone now: alone in a way that I once would have considered inconceivable and that made me quickly question the moral principles that had landed me in such an unenviable position.

The days to come were even more confused and bizarre. Everywhere I went — restaurants, bars, hotels — news about and investigations into the Moscow disaster and its aftermath dominated the media, as did reports concerning the mysterious aircraft that was rumored to have been escorting the suicide bomber on his mission. I was believed by various military intelligence agencies and police forces to have been on that aircraft, and my picture — along with those of Slayton, Larissa, and poor dead Leon — flashed onto public video screens with disturbing frequency, making it necessary for me to change my appearance and adjust my identity discs before even departing Edinburgh. It also made it necessary for me to get used to seeing Larissa's face pop up in unexpected places, an additional burden that was almost unbearable. From Edinburgh I took ship to Amsterdam (traveling by air was out of the question, given that airlines were required to run all identity discs through the universal DNA database), and from there I continued south by bus, train, and even thumb as I attempted to melt into the great global background, sticking as much as possible to areas where information technology was not ubiquitous in the hopes of staying unrecognized — and sane.

I succeeded in the first of these goals; as to the second, I cannot say. I still did not know precisely where I was going, and as the days became weeks, the constant need to fabricate new identification, hack into bank databases to secure money (after the bankroll I'd taken with me from St. Kilda had run out), and flat-out lie about almost every detail of my existence twenty-four hours a day began to take a severe mental and emotional toll. This state of affairs was sorely aggravated when one day, during a slow passage through Italy, I passed a small café that had a newspaper vending terminal. On the cover of every front page that flashed by on its screen were headlines containing the word "Washington," as well as pictures of the first American president. I dashed about until I found a place that vended The New York Times, then deposited my money in the machine and waited breathlessly for the printout. Swallowing two straight grappas like so much water, I read of my former comrades' apparent return to action: the hoax was playing out just as we'd designed it to, except that Malcolm's hope that it contained fatal flaws was proving a vain one. The story was being accepted everywhere — especially in Europe, where any apparent proof of the moral imperfection of the United States was always welcome — as indisputable.

The shock of the thing was manifold. Just the reminder that I'd not so long ago been involved in so insidious an enterprise was, of course, disquieting now that I was away from it. But even more, I knew that from that moment on any news report I might happen to read or see, no matter how momentous its details, might be a lie; and the flimsy connection to reality that I had carefully nursed during my weeks of hiding began to fall away. I took to drinking heavily, telling myself that it was simply to blend in with and secure the goodwill of the locals so that none of the regional constabularies would think to send my face out over the Net or run my discs through the universal DNA database. But in truth I had nothing else with which to relieve the utter alienation. As I made my way down into the lower part of the Italian peninsula, I descended into severe alcoholic confusion, and when it became difficult to obtain money due to the unreliability of electronic banking in that near-anarchic part of the country, the confusion became degradation. By the time I reached lawless Naples, I looked as though I belonged on its streets; and it was only a chance sighting of a meaningless piece of wall decoration in a decrepit bar that changed things.

In a stupor, I looked up from the redolent table on which I'd been resting my addled head for the better part of an hour one evening to see a yellowing poster that advertised the beauties of Africa. The thing was, of course, some forty years old, a relic from the time when what in recent years the public and media had once again taken to calling the Dark Continent had not been almost depopulated by tribal wars and the AIDS epidemic; but it nonetheless ignited my drunken imagination. Wild visions of a land of lush jungles, windswept savannahs, and marvelous wildlife — all of it uninfected by the plague of information technology, since Africa was the principal island in the analog archipelago — took an iron hold on my debilitated mind in the days that followed, and I even spent one night trying to sober up in order to determine if the idea of going there had any merit at all. I found to my great surprise that it did, although sobriety also brought a realistic appraisal of contemporary Africa's afflictions. But I decided that I would rather take my chances with disease and war than with imprisonment and insanity. I therefore cleaned myself up, took on the identity of a respectable American businessman with a bad gambling habit, and found my way to a notorious Neapolitan loan shark. Thinking me a safe risk who would stray no farther than the local high-stakes games, this man proved more than willing to provide the U.S. dollars I needed to achieve my desperate purpose.

During my weeks as a habitué of the city's worst drinking and drug-dealing dens, I had made the acquaintance of two particularly unsavory French pilots who ran guns to various parts of the analog archipelago and who spent their downtime in Naples because they could get exceptionally potent heroin and hashish on its streets. Returning to one of their haunts, I discovered that they were delivering a shipment to, of all places, Afghanistan, but that they were expected back within the week. Those next days were restless but hopeful ones for me, as I became more convinced than ever that I would soon be in territory that the information revolution had passed over, where all the complex philosophical and social issues that had put my life in such a state of upheaval would not hold sway, and to which continual rehashings of the destruction of Moscow — and the attendant speculation about the mysterious "phantom ship" that had been detected in the area of that disaster — would not penetrate.

As I dried out and began to invest my money in travel books rather than drink, I even went so far as to imagine that I might start a new life in Africa; this despite the constant reminders of those same books that most of the species of wildlife that had once brought tourists to the continent were now extinct and that because of widespread disease and unrest, any foreign travelers who still wanted or needed to visit the area must receive copious inoculations and stay in constant touch with either their country's consulates or representatives of the United Nations. These latter admonitions I could not, of course, heed: the first because it would have meant offering a doctor a DNA sample, the second for even more obvious reasons. Still, desperately attached to my dreams, I proceeded with my preparations with a dedication I can only describe as feverish.

When the two French pilots finally returned from Afghanistan, they were initially in no mood to hear about ferrying passengers to Africa, regardless of how much money I offered. For a time it seemed that my plan would never be executed; but luck, or what I took for luck, soon swung my way, and the men received an offer from a local dealer to deliver a large shipment of small arms to the man whose tribal forces currently occupied the Rwandan capital of Kigali. After stipulating that they would deliver the goods by airdrop only — for no one outside Rwanda, not even other Africans, could any longer be persuaded to touch down in the pestilential ruins of that city, where local forces battled in streets strewn with rotting corpses like dogs fighting over a poisoned bone — the pilots struck their deal. They then informed me that they intended to make a refueling stop in Nairobi after their drop; if I was willing to accept Kenya as my point of entry into Africa, they would be willing to take me along, provided I still had the large amounts of cash we had earlier discussed.

Thus it was that I found myself two days later lying atop several packed parachutes, which were in turn laid out across a half-dozen crates of shamefully obsolete French weapons. To avoid the interminable savagery of the Sudanese civil war, the plane had flown above the Red Sea as far as the Eritrean coast, where it was safe to go inland: war, famine, and plague had wiped out virtually the entire population of not only Eritrea but Ethiopia beyond. A mad dash across war-torn Uganda was to be the last leg of our inbound flight, a dangerous maneuver for which the two Frenchmen apparently thought they could best prepare themselves by mainlining the large amount of heroin they'd brought along with them. All this would have made life interesting enough; the addition of antiaircraft fire elevated the experience to terrifyingly riveting. The pilots were scarcely up to normal flying conditions by then, much less a fully lethal combat situation, and when we took a direct hit to one of our engines and began to lose altitude precipitously, they began to shout at each other so violently and incoherently that I couldn't see any way the situation was salvageable. The pilots, however, apparently could: one of them seized a pistol, raced back to where I lay, and, holding the gun to my head before I could manage to get one of my own sidearms out of my bag, ordered me into one of the parachutes. Apparently I had been deemed disposable ballast, and though I tried to argue in broken French, it was clear that if I didn't comply the man would simply shoot me and throw me out. Under the circumstances, I jumped.

That my landing near what I later learned were the Murchison Falls cost me only a mildly fractured left tibia was actually miraculous, given that I'd never before parachuted from a plane and had been forced to make my maiden jump over the spectacularly beautiful but utterly treacherous terrain of central Africa. Of course, even a mild fracture of the tibia can be exceptionally painful, and as I gathered both my wits and my few possessions after landing I began to groan with increasing volume: a mistake. Elements of the force that had been shooting at our plane had apparently followed my parachute's decent, hoping for a prize captive. Doubtless they would have been disappointed to get only me, a disappointment spared them by my rather liberal use of the stun pistol that I wasted no time getting into my hand.

Determining my location required some fairly extreme guessing. After stumbling about in fairly high growth for several hours, I suddenly came upon a vast expanse of water; knowing that we had not flown south far enough to have reached Lake Victoria, I could only suppose it to be Lake Albert. I was at the northern end, out of which flowed waters that I thought I could remember reading were among the sources of the White Nile: following them, then, would lead me into Sudan, where I certainly didn't want to go. East and south were the butcher's yard of Uganda, and west? To the west was yet more war-ravaged country, which had been given so many names by so many successive regimes during the last twenty-five years that the rest of the world had gone back to referring to it by its collective ancient title: the Congo. It was into this great unknown that, by process of elimination, I now elected to travel, limping through the Mitumba Mountains with scarcely any idea of where I might be going or what I might hope to do when I got there.

Days passed, and the reports of wildlife extermination that I had read before my departure began to ring true: I saw no signs of any animals big enough to eat and indeed heard scarcely any signs of life at all save for the echo of gunfire throughout the mountains. Insects, rainwater collected from enormous leaves, and analgesic — as well as hallucinogenic — roots became my diet, the last at least keeping my mind off my throbbing leg. But no amount of mental alteration could disguise the fact that I would soon be dead; and when my long trek at last took me back into sight of Lake Albert — for I had no compass, and those who think it's easy for a novice to find his way through a wilderness by the sun and stars alone have evidently never tried it — I simply sat down on a steep incline and began to howl mournfully, keeping up the noise until I finally passed out from hunger and exhaustion.

That I was revived and then carried from that spot by a man who spoke English was, at the time, less remarkable than the fact that I was alive at all. "You are a great fool," the tall, powerful man laughed as he slung me over his fatigue-clad shoulder. "Did you come to see the gorillas, then, and discover that they are all dead?"

"Fool?" I repeated, as I turned my upside-down head around to see several other soldiers walking near us, their camouflaged uniforms faded but their assault weapons gleaming. "Why do you call me a fool?"

"Any stranger in Africa is a fool," the man answered. "This is not a place to be unless you are born here. How is it with your leg?"

In fact my leg was throbbing with every step he took, but I only said, "How did you know—?"

"We saw you jump from the plane. And land. And shoot our enemies! We thought the jungle would claim you. But then you began your womanish wailing. It might have attracted our enemies. So we decided it was better to rescue a fool than become greater fools by letting him be the cause of our deaths."

"Sound thinking," I said. "You speak English very well."

"There was still a school that taught it, when I was a boy," he answered. "Below the mountains."

"Ah." Wondering how long I was to hang there, I asked, "Where are we going, by the way?"

"We will take you to our chief — Dugumbe. He will decide what to do with you."

I eyed the rather ferocious-looking soldiers again. "Is he a compassionate man, by any chance?"

"Compassionate?" The man laughed again. "I would not know. But he is fair, even with fools." Shifting me onto his other shoulder without breaking stride, he added, "It must have been something very terrible."

"What must?" I said, wincing with the shift.

"Whatever drove you here," the man answered simply. "You must have been driven. I know this. Because not even a fool would choose this place."