Killing Time Read online

  “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.”

  C H A P T E R 5

  Another lousy cab ride later, and I was back at Max’s. I found him switching on the various systems he used to jam and otherwise thwart listening devices, after which he guided me over to a stack of DNA sequencing and identification equipment near a window that had a beautiful view of the river.

  “I found a few hairs embedded in the brick wall at the murder scene,” Max explained, indicating the buzzing equipment. “I ran them through my remote terminal while we were there, but what I got back didn’t seem to make any sense, so I wanted to try it again on the big rig. Results came up the same. A few of the samples belong to John Price, but the rest? The rest match a guy who’s in jail.”

  “In jail? Then how—?”

  “Don’t start asking questions yet, Gideon, or we’ll be here the rest of the night. So while I’m trying to figure out how somebody who’s already locked up could off our boy, I find these.” He dropped a few metal pellets about the size of mouse feces into my hand. “Any idea what they are?”

  “No,” I answered dimly.

  “I didn’t either, until I ran them for stains. Price’s blood was there.” Max took a deep breath. “You know what condition his body was in?”

  I nodded. “Almost disintegrated, the cops said.”

  “By these,” Max went on, taking one of the pellets and studying it. “Any idea how fast they’d have to be traveling to do that to a human body?”

  “Could they do that to a human body?”

  “Sure. Theoretically. If I toss a little lump of lead at you, it isn’t gonna kill you. I shoot it out of a gun, that’s a different story. Fire a bunch of these jobs at a high enough velocity, and yeah, your body would almost vaporize. But that’s a hell of a velocity. And nobody heard any gunfire, not even the doorman. Or so he says.”

  “So what could—?”

  “Gideon, I told you—wait with the questions. Now—” He walked purposefully back over to his main bank of computers. “It took me a while, but I finally busted Price’s encryption of the second batch of information on the disc—though why he worked so hard to hide this is beyond me.”

  Touching a keypad, Max called up an image on his main screen: an old piece of grainy film that offered a glimpse of what appeared to be—of what, I soon realized, in fact was—a mid-twentieth-century German concentration camp. There was a shot of some starving, laboring prisoners, a pan off to some SS officers, and then a further pan to reveal . . . a silhouette. A grayish human silhouette, moving, yes, but as unidentifiable as the similar blank spot in the second of the three versions of the Forrester assassination we’d seen had been.

  “Okay,” Max said, watching my dumbstruck face. “Now you can ask questions.”

  I took a deep breath. “Dachau?” I asked.

  “Good call, Professor,” Max answered. “I downloaded some matching footage half an hour ago. It’s pretty stock stuff. Except for the mystery guest there.”

  I kept staring at the silhouette. “Something about that general outline looks familiar,” I said. “There—when he turns in profile . . .”

  “Okay. So maybe then you can tell me how this connects to some hairs from a guy who’s already in prison and some kind of supergun that apparently turned John Price into so much jelly without making a sound.”

  I found it hard to take my eyes off of Max’s computer screen, which kept replaying the same snippet of film footage over and over. “What’s the guy’s name? The one who’s in jail?”

  Max crossed the room to a table. “Got that, too—hacked into the correctional banks. Here—Kuperman. Eli Kuperman.”

  My head snapped around. “Eli Kuperman the anthropologist?”

  “The same. Know him?”

  I shook my head. “But I know his work. Controversial stuff—brilliant, though. The origins of primitive cultures.”

  “That’s what they nailed him for. Down in Florida, he was in some Indian burial ground. Digging up graves, or so the folks who run the reservation say. Kuperman never contested it. Tribe agreed to the government’s sentence—five years in the local state pen.” Max’s face grew even more puzzled, and his voice softened. “Strange thing is, the day after he went up, just last week, the Indians laid concrete over the whole burial ground. So much for sacred . . .”

  “Maybe they didn’t want any more desecrations.”

  “Maybe,” Max said with a shrug. “Point is, what’s this guy Kuperman’s hair doing at our murder scene?”

  “You’re sure it’s his?”

  Max shrugged again. “The universal DNA database doesn’t lie. So unless he’s got an identical twin—”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “What’s what you’re talking about?”

  “Kuperman,” I said, not quite believing Max’s confused look. “He’s got a twin brother.”

  Max swallowed hard. “Screw you, Wolfe.”

  “He does! Jonah Kuperman—he’s an archaeologist, just as famous as his brother.”

  “Well, it wasn’t in any of the hits that I pulled up.”

  “Jesus, Max,” I said, going back to the DNA analyzer. “The sum total of human knowledge is supposed to be on the damned Internet—you mean they missed something as basic as that?”

  “Hey, don’t start with me about the Net again, Gideon, a few occasional screwups do not mean—”

  Suddenly the window with
the beautiful view in front of me shattered into hundreds of crashing shards. Instinctively, I went for the floor; but when I looked up, I saw Max—foolishly, I thought at that instant—still standing. I screamed for him to get down, but he only swayed strangely in the half-light of his computer. Then I noticed a bead of blood on his forehead; and looking past him I could see that his computer screen was splattered with something a good deal more vital and substantial than blood. I crawled like a pathetic crab across the floor while he crumpled with grim grace to his knees. He fell forward just as I reached him, allowing me to see that the missile that had entered his forehead so neatly had, on exiting, taken much of his brain and a good deal of his skull away with it.

  C H A P T E R 6

  It wasn’t until two days later, while I was on a filthy, packed old 767 flying from Washington to Orlando, that the full impact of Max’s death descended on me. Up until that time I’d been too preoccupied with police reports and hiding all traces of what we’d been doing to really let it sink in. But when I caught sight of a large man who might have been Max’s double sitting three rows in front of me on that flight, I suddenly felt like I’d been hit in the chest with a mallet. To lose one’s last living connection to childhood is not an easy thing; to lose him in the way I had is the kind of event that makes you want answers—and makes you capable of doing almost anything to get them.

  My first stop on the road to what I was determined would be an explanation had been the offices of several acquaintances at the FBI’s national headquarters in D.C. What I heard there, along with the manner in which my contacts delivered it, was unnerving: couched in ostensibly friendly terms was a firm warning to back off of any investigation having to do with the deaths of John Price and Max Jenkins. Apparently both the attorney general and the head of the Bureau didn’t much like me to start with, given that I’d had the temerity, in my book, to put some of the leading figures of American history under the psychological microscope and make a modest pile of money in the process. But there was more than just personal animosity conveyed during the meetings, and by the time they were over, I was feeling disoriented and isolated. In my line of business you come to expect idle threats from local police forces, which have always viewed profilers with deep suspicion; but to have the rug pulled out from under you by the feds—well, that’s a lonely feeling.

  Nonetheless, I pressed on to Florida to attempt an interview with Dr. Eli Kuperman, anthropologist and convict. He was incarcerated in the Belle Isle State Correctional Facility outside Orlando, which was yet another of the country’s new corporately operated prisons. The structure had originally been intended as a high school; but given the remarkable levels of violence that had come to characterize teen behavior in the increasingly ghettoized suburbs of nearly every American city, the design of high schools was not all that different from that of prisons. Thus when Florida fell into line with the rest of the country by giving the people’s mania for punishment precedence over education, converting the sheer stone and nearly windowless mass at Belle Isle into a penitentiary hadn’t been much of a trick.

  I arrived at midday, made my request, and found, much to my surprise, that Dr. Kuperman was not only willing but anxious to see me. He insisted, however, that he would do so only during evening visiting hours on the following day. By the time I took my seat at a clear, bulletproof panel on the second floor of Belle Isle’s visitors’ building at seven the next evening, it was nearly dark. A guard soon appeared through a door in the room on the other side of the transparent divider, followed by a man of moderate height and similar weight who had dark features and curly brown hair and wore delicate tortoiseshell glasses: Eli Kuperman. He recognized me as quickly as I did him and proceeded to sit eagerly opposite me. The guard switched on an intercom that allowed us to talk.

  “Dr. Wolfe,” Kuperman said with a smile. “It’s an honor. I’ve read your book—fascinating, really.” The fact of imprisonment seemed to be having no effect on him at all.

  “Dr. Kuperman,” I said, acknowledging his compliment with a nod. “I’ve read a great deal about your work, too—though I’ll admit I can’t quite figure how it’s landed you in this place.”

  “Can’t you?” Kuperman asked, again very pleasantly. “Well, you’ll find out soon enough. Oh, that reminds me—” He unbuttoned the cuff of his sky blue shirt, revealing a small, flexible keypad adhered to his skin. Touching a few of the keys, he then rebuttoned his cuff with another smile and looked back up. “There. We have a few minutes yet. How would you like to pass them?”

  I assumed that the “few minutes” he was referring to was the balance of the time I’d been allowed with him, and so I put my query bluntly: “Suppose you tell me what your brother had to do with John Price’s death.”

  Kuperman waved me off cordially. “Oh, plenty of time for that later. And Malcolm will be able to explain it much more thoroughly than I can.”

  “Malcolm?”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll understand. I’m sorry about Mr. Jenkins, by the way. We’d hoped he’d come along, too.”

  “Come along?” I said, now completely at a loss.

  “Yes.” He moved closer to the glass. “I know you’re confused, but try to keep up some kind of a conversation, will you? Otherwise the guard—”

  Kuperman suddenly stopped talking when we began to hear an extraordinary noise: a deep, rumbling hum that seemed to come from all directions at once, even from inside my own head. It grew in volume and intensity at a quick but steady rate, until the metal chairs and tables in the room began to vibrate noticeably.

  Looking up at the ceiling, Kuperman checked his watch again. “Well,” he said, strangely unconcerned. “That was quick. They must have been closer than I thought . . .”

  As the hum grew louder, I dashed to the only window in the visiting room and looked out into the darkness. There was precious little to be seen save the lights atop the prison walls, and then something appeared to blot even those beacons out. Moving above and across the walls was a dark mass, perhaps as long as a pair of train cars and twice as high.

  “What the hell?” was all I could whisper; and then I noted Kuperman’s shouting voice coming over the intercom and just cutting through the ever-intensifying hum:

  “Dr. Wolfe! Dr. Wolfe, move away from the window, please!”

  I did as he said, and just in time, too; for the bars outside the window, loosened by the mounting vibration, suddenly broke free of their anchors and flew away, while the wired glass panes did not so much shatter as explode. I ran back to the partition and saw that Kuperman’s guard, clutching his ears, was screaming in terror.

  “What is it?” I shouted through the intercom. “Kuperman, what’s happening?”

  Kuperman smiled; but before he could give any explanation the wall behind him began to shake violently. In just a few seconds it collapsed, the stone falling away and revealing a ten-foot-square passage into the night air. Once the dust had cleared, I could see, outside this gaping hole, what appeared to be a metallic wall about three feet from the violated stone edifice of the visitors’ building; and over the insistent humming I began to make out the sound of gunshots coming from the prison yard below.

  “It’s all right, Dr. Wolfe!” I became conscious of Kuperman saying through the amplified intercom. “Don’t worry! But try to get under one of those tables, will you?”

  Once again my prompt observance of Kuperman’s order saved me from being severely injured, this time by flying fragments of the transparent partition that had divided us. When I emerged from under the table and returned to Kuperman, I found him waving an arm and urging me to climb over the remains of the partition and join him. I did so, only to find myself faced by Kuperman’s guard as well as a second officer. Both had their guns drawn, prompting Kuperman to turn to his man and cry out earnestly:

  “Mr. Sweeney! Please! You don’t really think that’s going to do any good, do you? If you and Mr. Farkas leave now, I promise no harm will—”


  Before Kuperman could finish we were presented with yet another extraordinary sight: the sudden delineation, by a series of small green lights, of a doorway in the metal surface outside the hole in the building’s wall. Then, with a decompressing hiss, the door opened rapidly; in fact, it seemed to my eyes to almost disappear. Beyond the vanished portal was a dimly lit corridor in which stood a group of figures: four male, one quite distinctly female. The men wore coveralls; the woman was sheathed in a gray bodysuit that clung to her with what I might, under other circumstances, have called enticing tenacity.

  With marvelous agility the young woman leapt through the three feet of open air and into the prison, the light of the room making two extraordinary things immediately apparent: first, the straight, chin-length hair that framed her delicate features was a strange silver color; and second, she held in her hands a device—presumably a weapon—that was obviously more complex and sophisticated than any handgun I’d ever seen.

  The woman trained the device first on one officer and then on the other. Kuperman’s man, Sweeney, had the good sense to drop his gun and head for the still intact doorway out of the room. But the second guard, Farkas, was foolish enough to let off a round from his pistol, even though his apparent fear made an accurate shot impossible. The bullet struck the wall above the woman, and she ducked for an instant; then she fixed her dark eyes on the guard with what seemed as much amusement as anger. Leveling the device in her hands at the man, she appeared on the verge of firing; but then she suddenly turned and trained the weapon on a desk that sat near the room’s exit. She pulled what looked like a trigger, and then, without much of a sound, the desk was bombarded by a series of high-speed projectiles, reducing it to mere bits.