As if in response to Slayton’s words, the drones suddenly shot forward and surrounded us, their many inquisitive eyes now assuming a menacing quality. Pursuant to the colonel’s orders, our ship slowed down steadily until it seemed that we were going along at no more than a crawl—a very nerve-racking crawl. Fear made it difficult to keep my voice to a murmur, but I had to ask, “Would anybody really set off a nuclear device at this altitude, Colonel?”
He nodded, matching stares with the drones that were floating around us. “I’m assuming they’ve armed these with X-ray lasers—they’re powered by a nuclear explosion and have enormous destructive potential, but the fallout is minimal.”
“ ‘Minimal’?” Larissa whispered.
“They evidently view the threat we pose as worth the risk,” Slayton said. “Even though they obviously don’t yet understand the exact nature of that threat. Not unusual thinking for the American national security machine—as you yourself have written, Doctor.”
“And will the holographic projector keep us safe for the moment?” I asked.
“It should,” the colonel answered. “To the naked eye our ship now appears to be a harmless band of atmospheric mist.”
Larissa nodded. “And the projector works as well on these drones as it does on the eye.”
“Thus turning the drones’ strength back into a weakness,” Slayton said. “But as I say, we still haven’t started emitting a new radar signature—we can expect them to stay locked onto the old one, waiting for some confirmation of human or mechanical activity. We’ll have to continue to be careful about how much noise we make—and how much the ship makes, as well.” Seeing that the devices outside were continuing to make no hostile move, the colonel relaxed just a bit. “But for the moment, at least, they appear fooled.” He allowed himself one more brief smile. “I wonder what my friends down below would say if they’d known they would be pursuing me . . .”
Despite the lessening of tension permitted by the holographic projector, during the initial phase of our journey among the drones we all moved very carefully and, following Colonel Slayton’s instruction, spoke in hushed tones. Half an hour of such behavior was enough to loosen our mood a little, but no more than that; and I was still standing motionless by Larissa’s side when I heard her start to talk to her brother quietly via their communication implants. She spoke in a soothing, sympathetic tone, and from her words I soon got the impression that the pressure of the general situation and the specific moment might be getting to Malcolm, at least a little. This notion was confirmed when Larissa asked if I would join him in his quarters, where he’d gone after suffering a bout of dizziness. Someone, she said, had to try to talk him through the difficult transit, and she intended to stay at her post, ready to fire on the drones should the holographic system fail for any reason.
Moving in a deliberate manner, I climbed down the turret ladder and crept toward the stern of the ship. On entering Malcolm’s quarters—which were styled after the captain’s cabin of an old sailing ship, with a wide, mock-leaded window set in the rearmost section of the hull—I initially thought he must still have been in the observation dome; but then I caught sight of his overturned wheelchair behind a rough-hewn wooden table. His body was caught under the thing and sprawled out across the floor.
“Malcolm!” I cried urgently but quietly, for the drones were visible outside the window. I rushed over, carefully moved the wheelchair, and then lifted him up, shocked and appalled by how light his body was. There was a captain’s box bed set into one bulkhead, and I put him in it, loosening his collar and checking for a pulse.
But try as I might, I couldn’t find one.
C H A P T E R 3 3
Malcolm’s return to consciousness had nothing to do with any efforts of mine, for I had not even begun to administer resuscitating measures when his entire body jerked upward as if it had received a strong electric shock. His lungs took in a huge gulp of air and he began to cough hard, though it didn’t seem that the noise was loud or distinct enough to attract the attention of our observers. I poured a glass of water from a pewter jug and got him to swallow some of it, and once his breathing had returned to something like normal he whispered:
“How long was I gone?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I found you on the floor.” I raised my eyebrows in question. “You had no pulse, Malcolm.”
He drank a little more water and nodded. “Yes,” he breathed. “It happens—more often these days, actually.” Lying back, he tried to calm his body. “One of the more unpredictable symptoms of my condition—spontaneous shutdown of the most basic functions. But it never lasts long.” He looked at the wooden ceiling of his bed in seemingly casual frustration. “I wish I could remember whether or not I dream while it’s happening . . .”
“Have you determined what triggers it?” I asked, slightly amazed by his attitude. “Does exhaustion play a part?”
He shrugged. “Quite probably. However . . .” He rolled over and looked outside, frowning when he saw the drones. “Still there, eh? Well, exhausted or not, I’ve got to get back to Eli—”
But the man couldn’t even sit up straight. “You’re not going anywhere just now,” I said; and as he reached for his transdermal injector I took it away from him. “And I don’t think self-medication following a neuroparalytic crisis of some kind is really called for, either.”
Ever since our first encounter I had recognized that Malcolm’s pride was more important to him than almost anything: he desperately needed to feel that he wasn’t helpless and would go to almost inhuman lengths to avoid that impression. Thus I wasn’t at all sure how he would react to the doctorly dictates I was issuing. But surprisingly, he did no more than glance at me with an expression of acceptance, rather like that of a boy who’s been told he has to stay home from school. “All right,” he said calmly. “But I’ll need my chair.” He actually seemed somewhat relieved at the prospect of being forced to rest for a bit, though I knew he would never admit it; so I simply nodded and maneuvered the wheelchair over to his bed, letting him get into it himself. “Thank you, Gideon,” he said, as if in reply to my not assisting him.
“Just be thankful that your sister worries about you,” I said. “God knows how long you might’ve stayed on that floor if she hadn’t asked me to come down. Or what shape you would’ve been in when we finally did find you.”
He acknowledged the statement by holding up a hand. Then, after a moment’s pause, he looked at me with evident curiosity. “You and Larissa—you care for each other very deeply, it seems.” Assuming that he was still groggy, I smiled in a cajoling way. “What’s it like?” he asked.
I had anticipated Malcolm’s eventually asking many questions about my relationship with his sister, but this was not one of them. His disorientation, I determined, must have been greater than I’d originally estimated. “You mean—what’s it like to be in love with your sister?” I said.
“To be in love with any woman,” Malcolm said. “And to have her love you—what’s that like?”
As he was speaking, I realized from the clarity of both his gaze and his words that my supposition had been wrong—that, though weakened, he wasn’t disoriented at all—and this realization fell like a stone on my spirit. Among the many things of which Stephen Tressalian had robbed his son, this seemed to me the most valuable and shocking. It was unspeakably cruel that Malcolm should not have known the answer to his own question; yet the obviousness of why he did not was crueler still. Desperately searching for an answer that would not betray my own sense of sorrow, I finally said, “Larissa is a far cry from ‘any woman.’ ”
Malcolm pondered the statement. “Do you know that?” he eventually asked. “Empirically, I mean.”
“I think so,” I answered. “At any rate, I believe it. That’s what’s important.”
“Yes,” he said, touching his mouth pensively with his fingers. “That is the important thing, isn’t it? Belief . . .” We sat there without sayin
g another word for about a minute, as air wheezed noisily into and out of Malcolm’s lungs. Then he repeated the word: “Belief . . . I haven’t studied it enough, Gideon. I’ve focused on deception—the deceptions of this age and my own attempts to reveal them through deception. But I should have paid more attention to belief—because it’s what’s put us in this predicament.” He seemed to be gaining strength, though I got the impression that it was more the chance to talk about what had been bothering him than any genuine physical improvement that was behind his surge in energy. “What is it, Gideon? What makes a man like Dov Eshkol so committed to his beliefs that he’s capable of committing any kind of crime?”
Given the palliative effect that the conversation was having on him, I kept up my end; and there, in the bizarre, threatening quiet of the slow-moving ship, surrounded and constantly scrutinized by the mechanized minions of our enemies below, we began to pick away at the mind of the man we were hunting.
“There are a lot of factors involved in that kind of belief, of course,” I said. “But if I had to pick one as paramount, I’d say it was fear.”
“Fear?” Malcolm repeated. “Fear of what? God?”
I shook my head. “The kinds of fear I’m talking about strike long before we encounter any concept of God. From the day we’re born, there are two basic terrors that consume all people, whatever their background. The first is terror prompted by a sense of our true aloneness, our isolation from one another. The second, of course, is the fear of death. No matter how in particular, these fears touch each of our lives and are at least partly responsible for all crimes—including the types that Eshkol has committed.”
I paused and studied Malcolm for a few seconds: he was nodding his head and seemed to be growing calmer by the moment, even though his blue eyes stayed locked on the drones outside. “Go on,” he said after a half minute or so. “We’ve got to know how his mind works.”
“All right,” I replied, “but only if you can stay calm about it.” He waved a hand a bit impatiently, a good sign that he was, indeed, feeling better. “Well,” I continued, “most people try to submerge the first of these fears—the terror of isolation—in a sense of identification within a group. Religious, political, ethnic, it doesn’t really matter—it’s even behind most of the mass marketing that’s done today and behind popular culture itself. Anything, as long as it seems to break down the wall of alienation and impart a sense of belonging.”
“Which creates,” Malcolm murmured, his eyes going self-consciously wide, “enormous opportunities for manipulation.”
“And manipulators,” I agreed. “Otherwise known as leaders. Most of them are simply people who are trying to assuage their own fears by creating a rubric of identity into which the greatest number of souls, differing in everything except their feeling of being disconnected and lost, can fit.”
“Are we talking about Eshkol’s superiors here?”
“In part, but not primarily. His Israeli commanders do fall into the category we’ve been discussing so far, the fairly common variety of leaders that includes almost anyone involved in a political, religious, economic, or cultural movement. But Eshkol? There’s nothing common about him, and if we want to understand how he works, we have to take the whole business to the next level.”
Malcolm sighed. “Fanaticism,” he said, with the same loathing he’d displayed earlier.
“Yes. The common leader and his followers work mainly off of the desire to end isolation, but the fanatical leader and his disciples incorporate the second primal fear, the fear of death, into the equation. And by death I mean annihilation—the utter obliteration of any and every bit of a person’s earthly existence and legacy. The leader who promises his people that adherence to his laws and teachings will not only relieve the pain of their isolation but also allow them to defy death, to achieve some kind of spiritual immortality through worthy deeds, that type of leader achieves a supreme control that the first type can’t match—and creates an entirely different kind of follower in the process. Such a follower is likely to disregard most generally accepted rules of social behavior for the simple reason that to him or her, there is no obscenity save what the leader labels obscene. And such a leader’s definition of obscene is likely to be very specific, because he doesn’t want to limit the range of possible actions to which he can order his followers.”
“All right,” Malcolm agreed, his fingers beginning to tap on the arms of his chair. “But who is it, then? Who’s the leader who’s telling Eshkol what to do?”
“I don’t think anyone’s telling him, in the way that you mean. But he does have leaders—the worst kind. You said it yourself, Malcolm, when we first found out about him—it’s his family, specifically the victims who died almost a century ago.”
Malcolm looked momentarily confused. “But—they’re dead. And they weren’t leaders.”
“Not in the obvious way,” I said. “And that makes them even more dangerous. They embody all the virtues of Eshkol’s ethnic and religious heritage—in fact, being so long dead, they have no flaws of any kind. They demand, in his mind, unquestioning faith—and complete vengeance, to be achieved with the same brutality that caused their deaths. They offer him the promise of welcoming arms, of eternal community, should he die as a result of his efforts. And most of all, the viciousness he embodies, the viciousness that’s inherent in all fanaticism, takes on the gentler trappings of love because it serves their memory. Eshkol’s the consummate lone wolf, and even the Israelis know it—he answers to only one voice, the collective voice he imagines to be coming from his murdered ancestors.”
“And so,” Malcolm said, taking up the train of thought, “when he saw the Stalin images he never questioned them.”
I nodded. “By now Eshkol is almost certainly paranoid. He’s had enough time to obsess over an unequaled cataclysm, to link it to events in his own family and personal life and decide that it’s ongoing and requires an active response from him personally. Based on his activities, it’s safe to say that he suspects the entire world is involved in a plot to exterminate Jews—indeed, Jews themselves, at least some Jews, are apparently not above suspicion in his mind. Paranoia creates fantastic tension, which can never be relieved through disproof—only through vindication. So when he saw the Stalin images, he saw exactly what he’d always wanted to see—proof that he was right and that all his actions had been justified.”
Still staring at the drones, Malcolm began to murmur, “Mundus vult . . .” But the statement seemed to give him no satisfaction now, and he finally sat back, letting out a long breath. “Good Lord, Gideon . . .”
“I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know—or suspect. What bothers me now is, how can we possibly hope to catch him? If I’m right—if he in fact answers to no one living and if he can move through modern society like a phantom—then where’s our advantage?”
Malcolm balled his hands into fists, but he kept his voice low. “Our advantage is ourselves. It’s up to us. No one else can get to him before—”
Malcolm apparently didn’t want to finish the thought; but I, wishing to be absolutely sure that we did indeed understand both each other and the situation, looked at him and said, “ ‘Before . . .’?”
A sudden flurry of movement outside the window distracted us both: in loose formation the drones began to move away from our ship and head back in the direction from which they’d come. Though immensely relieved, I was initially at a loss as to why it was happening. But then I heard Eli’s voice coming over the address system:
“It’s all right—I’ve initiated the new signature, they don’t have anything to lock onto anymore. We should be safe.”
Malcolm turned and touched a keypad by his bed. “Well done, Eli. Julien—let’s get back up to speed. I want to be over France within the hour.” Putting his hands on the wheels of his chair, Malcolm gave me one more critical look. “I think we both have a very good idea of what we need to get to Eshkol ‘before,’ Gideon—an
d I suggest that, however horrifying it seems, we both try to impress that idea on the others.” He turned his chair around and headed for the door. “This man’s mind may be full of vengeful fantasies, as you say—but they will die with him.”
C H A P T E R 3 4
With our ability to move at full speed restored, we were able to reach the English Channel, if not France itself, within the hour’s time called for by Malcolm. Our path of descent from the stratosphere ended above the channel just north of Le Havre, and after once again engaging the holographic projector we flew directly over that city at cruising altitude, following the Seine River as it snaked its way through one of the most congested areas of French suburban sprawl. This sprawl, like all things French, had over the years become steadily more American in its details and trappings, yet because it cut through one of the finest and most historic areas of Normandy, it was in some way even more grotesque to look at than its American counterparts.
Most disturbing about the scene was its eerie illumination. In suburban areas of the United States one had long since grown accustomed to the sterile, flickering light that oozed out of homes every night into the dark streets and yards: the emanations of hundreds of thousands of Internet and computer monitors. The French, on the other hand, enjoyed a lower crime rate than the Americans and could therefore afford to be more subtle with their street lighting and more indulgent of their characteristic aversion to window furnishings, all of which made the glow of those same monitors—as ubiquitous in France as in the United States or indeed anywhere else in the digital world—more than simply apparent: it was dominant.
As we got closer to Paris, the residential congestion beneath us thickened and the incandescence of the countless monitors intensified. Malcolm and I, watching it all roll by from the nose of the ship, were soon joined by Julien, who of course had the greatest reason to be disheartened by what he was seeing. Fouché professed to have accepted long ago that his native country, whatever its pretenses and protestations, was as susceptible to the afflictions of the information age as any other; indeed, it was the ongoing denials of this fact by his fellow academics and intellectuals that had, he said, provoked his emigration. But such statements didn’t seem to help him face that endless, bright testament to his homeland’s secure place in the community of modern technostates.