Killing Time Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY CALEB CARR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  T h i s b o o k i s d e d i c a t e d t o

  S U Z A N N E G L U C K

  A n y o n e w h o h a s a p r o b l e m w o u l d d o w e l l t o

  t a k e i t u p w i t h h e r.

  I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past.

  —PATRICK HENRY, 1775

  C H A P T E R 1

  SOMEWHERE IN THE MITUMBA MOUNTAIN RANGE OF CENTRAL AFRICA,

  SEPTEMBER 2024

  We leave at daylight, so I must write quickly. All reports indicate that my pursuers are now very close: the same scouts who for the last two days have reported seeing a phantom airship moving steadily down from the northeast, setting fire to the earth as it goes, now say that they have spotted the vessel near Lake Albert. My host, Chief Dugumbe, has at last given up his insistence that I allow his warriors to help me stand and fight, and instead offers an escort of fifty men to cover my escape. Although I’m grateful, I’ve told him that so large a group would be too conspicuous. I’ll take only my good friend Mutesa, the man who first dragged my exhausted body out of this high jungle, along with two or three others armed with some of the better French and American automatic weapons. We’ll make straight for the coast, where I hope to find passage to a place even more remote than these mountains.

  It seems years since fate cast me among Dugumbe’s tribe, though in reality it’s been only nine months; but then reality has ceased to have much meaning for me. It was a desire to get that meaning back that originally made me choose this place to hide, this remote, beautiful corner of Africa that has been forever plagued by tribal wars. At the time the brutality of such conflicts seemed to me secondary to the fact that the ancient grievances fueling them had been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone; I thought this a place where I might be at least marginally sure that the human behavior around me was not being manipulated by the unseen hands of those who, through mastery of the wondrous yet sinister technologies of our “information age,” have obliterated the line between truth and fiction, between reality and a terrifying world in which one’s eyes, ears, and heart can no longer be trusted.

  There are no newspapers here, no televisions, and above all no computers, which means no damned Internet. Dugumbe forbids it all. His explanation for this stance is simple, though no less profound for its simplicity: information, he insists, is not knowledge. The lessons passed on from one’s elders, taught by the wisest of them but recorded only in the mind, these, Dugumbe has always said, represent true knowledge. The media I’ve mentioned can only divert a man from such wisdom and enslave him to what Dugumbe calls the worst of all devils: confusion. There was a time when I—a man of the West, the possessor of not one but two doctorates—would have laughed at and disdained such beliefs; and in truth, during the time I’ve been here the laws and folklore of these people have come to trouble me deeply. Yet in a world stuffed full of deliberately warped information, of manufactured “truths” that have ignited conflicts far greater than Dugumbe’s tribal struggles, I now find myself clinging to the core of the old king’s philosophy even more tightly than he does.

  There—I’ve just heard it. Distant but unmistakable: the thunderous rumble that heralds their approach. It’ll appear out of the sky soon, that spectral ship; or perhaps it will rise up out of the waters of Lake Albert. And then the burning will begin again, particularly if Dugumbe attempts to forcefully resist the extraordinary brother and sister who command the vessel. Yes, time is running out, and I must write faster—though just what purpose my writing serves is not quite so clear. Is it for the sake of my own sanity, to reassure myself that it all truly happened? Or is it for some larger goal, perhaps the creation of a document that I can feed out over what has become my own devil, the Internet, and thereby fight fire with fire? The latter theory assumes, of course, that someone will believe me. But I can’t let such doubts prevent the attempt. Someone must listen, and, even more important, someone must understand . . .

  For it is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge.

  C H A P T E R 2

  In retrospect, the pattern was there to be seen by anyone attentive enough to trace it. A remarkable series of “discoveries” in history, anthropology, and archaeology had made headlines for several years; but they were all, on their surface, attributable to the great advances made possible in each of those fields by the continued march and intermingling of bio- and information technology, and so those of us who might have detected a controlling presence at work simply got on with our lives. Our lives; yes, even I had a life, before all this began . . .

  In fact, by the standards of modern capitalism I had a good life, one graced by both money and professional respect. A psychiatrist by training, I taught criminal psychiatry and psychology in New York (the city of my birth and childhood) at John Jay University, once a comparatively small college of criminal justice that had grown, during the movement toward privatized prisons that gained such enormous momentum during the first two decades of this century, to become one of the wealthiest educational institutions in the country. Even the crash of ’07 and the resultant worldwide recession had not been enough to stop John Jay’s expansion: the school has always produced America’s best correctional officers, and by 2023, with mandatory drug and quality-of-life punishments so stringent that fully two percent of the nation’s population was behind bars, the United States needed nothing so much as prison guards. All of which allowed those who, like me, taught the headier subjects at John Jay to be paid a more-than-decent salary. In addition, I’d recently written a best-selling book, The Psychological History of the United States (the second of my degrees being in history), and so I could actually afford to live in Manhattan.

  It was those two areas of expertise—criminology and history—that brought a handsome, mysterious woman to my office on September 13, 2023. It was a grim day in the city, with the air so still and filthy that the mayor had asked the populace to venture outside only if their business was urgent. This my visitor’s certainly seemed to be: from the first it was obvious that she was profoundly shaken, and I tried to be as gentle as possible as I led her to a chair. She asked in a hushed tone if I were indeed Dr. Gideon Wolfe; assured that I was, she inf
ormed me that she was Mrs. Vera Price, and I recalled instantly that she was the wife of a certain John Price, who’d been one of the movie and theme-park industry’s leading special effects wizards until he’d been murdered outside his New York apartment building a few days earlier. Murdered, I might add, in a particularly unpleasant way: his body had been torn to such tiny pieces by some unknown weapon that only recourse to his DNA records had made identification possible. I offered my condolences and asked if there’d been any progress on the case, only to be told that there hadn’t been and probably never would be—not unless I helped her. “They,” it seemed, wouldn’t permit it.

  Wondering just who “they” might be, I continued to listen as Mrs. Price explained that she and her husband had had two children, the first of whom had died, like forty million other people worldwide, during the staphylococcus epidemic of 2006. The Prices’ second child, a daughter, was now in high school in the city, and even she, Mrs. Price claimed, had been threatened by “them.”

  “Who?” I finally asked, suspecting that this might be a case of hysterical paranoia. “What do they want? And why come to me about it?”

  “I remembered a television interview you did last year,” she answered, rummaging through her bag, “and downloaded it. Crime and history—those are your fields, right? Well, then, here—” She revealed a silvery computer disc and tossed it onto my desk. “Take a look at that. They confiscated the original, but I found a copy in my husband’s safe-deposit box.”

  “But—”

  “Not now. I just wanted to bring you the disc. Come to my house tonight if you think there’s any way you can help. Here’s the address.”

  The flutter of a slip of paper, and she was back out the door, leaving me nothing to do but shake my head and slip the disc into the drive of my computer.

  It took all of one minute to look at the images that were burnt onto the thing; and then I found myself grabbing for the wireless phone in my wallet in a state of agitated shock. I began punching a familiar sequence of numbers, until Vera Price’s words about “them” came back to me. I ended the wireless call and picked up the land line on my desk. Whoever “they” were, they couldn’t have tapped it—not yet.

  I redialed the number, then heard a disgruntled voice: “Max Jenkins.”

  “Max,” I said to my oldest friend in the world, a former city cop who was now a private detective. “Don’t move.”

  “What do you mean, ‘don’t move’? What the hell kind of a way is that to talk to people, you bloodless Anglo-Saxon bastard? I’m going out to lunch.”

  “Oh?” I countered. “And suppose I told you I’m looking at possible evidence that Tariq Khaldun didn’t shoot Forrester?”

  Silence for an instant; then: “Is that insane statement supposed to make me less hungry?”

  “No, Max—”

  “Because it isn’t—”

  “Max, will you shut up? We’re talking about the murder of the president.”

  “No, you’re talking about it. I’m talking about lunch.”

  I sighed. “How about if I bring the food?”

  “How about if you bring it fast?”

  C H A P T E R 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 . . .”

  C H A P T E R 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, closed the door before I could follow, and said: