How could we have known? What would have caused any of us to once again turn our monitoring ears toward Malaysia, where we would have learned about the theft of more than just the B-2 bomber? And even had we by some chance learned that a pilfered American stealth system—so advanced and secret that only a handful of people in the United States knew that its design had been stolen—had been installed in that same B-2, would we have been able to meet the challenge of defeating it in time? All such questions were horrifically moot. One fact held sway, that night as this, and on all nights in between:
At the very moment that each of us began to believe that our luck with regard to Eshkol might have changed, the horizon to the northeast came alive with a lovely, brilliant light. Given that our perspective was unblocked, the sudden glow was enough to attract the attention of all of us; and, deathly aware of what was happening, none of us said a word during the inevitable denouement as the signature cloud, angry with all the terrible colors of the explosion that had just been unleashed, slowly began to form above what had once been the city of Moscow.
C H A P T E R 4 1
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 separ
ate 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.
C H A P T E R 4 2
Malcolm’s quarters in the compound were even more spartan than his cabin aboard the ship, offering, it seemed to me, few comforts that could not have been found on the sparsely populated Hirta of two hundred years earlier. In the far wall a bay window similar to the one in my room looked out over another rocky, mysterious stretch of oceanfront, and before this window Malcolm sat in his wheelchair, bathed in the soft sunlight of St. Kilda and watching the hundreds of seabirds on the rocks with the same simple enthusiasm I’d seen in his features several times before. It was a vivid reminder that the young boy who had entered that hellish hospital all those years ago had not been completely destroyed by the experience; yet, paradoxically, the very youthfulness of the look should have been enough to remind me of the extent to which Malcolm depended on Larissa and to convince me that any notion of his approving of my running off with her was absurd.
He sensed my presence but made no move to face me. “Gideon,” he said in a voice that seemed not so much strong as an attempt at strength. He paused for a moment, during which I prepared to make my case to him; but before I could speak he asked, “Are the materials for your Washington plan still in place?”
The question caught me with my jaw already open; and now that mandible seemed to actually fall to the floor. “I beg your pardon?” I mumbled.
“Your Washington plan,” he repeated, still watching the birds. “How soon can you be ready to implement it?”
I somehow managed to collect my wits enough to say, “You’re not serious.”
Still not turning, Malcolm nodded as if he’d expected just such an answer. “You think that what happened in Moscow means that we should suspend our work. You think it may happen again.”
At that instant every ounce of self-delusion somehow drained out of me like so much blood. I took a few shaky steps toward a straight-backed mahogany chair, falling into it as I suddenly realized the folly of my recent plans as well as the extent of Malcolm’s commitment to his undertaking. Emotional protests and declarations seemed pointless, given the situation, so I answered him in a voice that was as rational and grave as I could make it: “Malcolm—you yourself have said that there are terrible problems inherent in what you’re doing.”
“What I said,” Malcolm answered, quietly but pointedly, “was that we’ve done our job too well. Dov Eshkol proved that.”
It was an almost incredible statement. “Yes. I’d say that he certainly did.”
“And so we learn and go on.” He still seemed unprepared to look me in the eye. “As you and I have already discussed, we must make sure that all future projects will be exposed in a reasonable amount of time. We’ll plant hints—more than hints, obvious flaws—so that even the most obtuse—”
“Malcolm?” I interrupted, too shocked to go on listening to him but still trying to speak in a straightforward, calm manner. “Malcolm, I can’t go on being part of this. What you’re doing, it’s more than just subversive, it’s unimaginably dangerous. Surely even you see that now.” He gave no answer, and my head began to grow feverish with incredulity. “Is it possible—are you really going to try to deny it? This business, this game of yours, it may seem manageable to you, but there are millions of people out there who have to make sense of thousands of pieces of bizarre new information every day, and they don’t have the time or the tools to sort out what’s real from what’s blatant fabrication. The world’s gone too far—people’s minds have been stretched too far—and we have no idea what will set the next lunatic off. What’ll you do if we carry out this latest plan, and some anticorporate, antigovernment lunatic in the States—and there are plenty of them—uses it as a rationalization to blow up yet another federal building? Or something even bigger?” I paused and then shifted gears, trying to direct the discussion away from the kind of moral and political dialectic of which he was a master and focus it instead on my very real concern for him and the others: “Besides, how long can you really hope to get away with it? Look at how narrow our escape was this time and what it cost us. You’ve got to consider something else, this isn’t—”
I cut myself short when I saw his hand go up slowly. “All right,” he said, in a voice choked with sorrow and regret. “All right, Gideon.” He finally wheeled his chair around, his head drooping so low that his chin nearly rested on his chest. When he glanced up again, he still wouldn’t connect with my gaze; but the grief in his features was apparent and pitiful to behold. “I would have done anything to prevent what happened to Leon,” he said softly. “But every one of us knows the risks—”
“ ‘Knows the risks’? Malcolm, this isn’t a war, for God’s sake!”
At last those hypnotic yet unsettling blue eyes met my own hard stare. “Isn’t it?” he asked. He began to reach around for the crutches that were clipped to the back of his chair. “You think,” he went on, his voice getting stronger, “that this method of addressing the problem doesn’t work.” He fought hard to get to his feet, and though I felt more of a desire to help than I ever had before, I once again refrained. “You think that the world’s illness is beyond this sort of treatment. Fine.” He took a few steps in my direction. “What would you prescribe instead?”
I simply could not engage him on this level, and I made that fact plain: “Malcolm, this isn’t about ‘illnesses’ and ‘prescriptions.’ Civilization is going to do whatever it’s going to do, and if you keep trying to stand in the way you’ll just create more disasters. Maybe you’re right, maybe this information society is taking us into a high-tech da
rk age. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe we just don’t understand it. Maybe Julien’s wrong, and this isn’t a ‘threshold moment,’ and maybe there were people like us sitting in some scientifically advanced horse and carriage when Gutenberg ran off his first Bible screaming, ‘That’s it! It’s all over!’ I don’t know. But the point is, neither do you. The only thing we do know is that you can’t stop change and you won’t stop technology. There’s nothing in the past to suggest that it’s possible.”
As I was speaking, Malcolm turned, almost with the slowness of a clock, to look out at the birds again. “That’s true,” he murmured.
Ready as I was to argue on, his statement came as a complete surprise. “It is?” I said a bit dimly.
Malcolm nodded. “Yes. There’s nothing in the past to suggest that it’s possible—yet.”
As he roamed back over to the window, I followed, suddenly feeling very nervous. “What do you mean, ‘in the past, yet’? Malcolm, you’re not making sense.”
As he attempted to explain himself, Malcolm seemed to grow increasingly unaware of who I was or even that there was anyone in the room with him; and the vacant brilliance that his eyes took on as they stared at the similarly dazzling blue of the sky above the ocean offered the first hint of real mental imbalance. “Suppose I were to tell you,” he said, “that through that room”—he indicated an adjacent chamber in the direction of his lab—“and behind a certain very thick door you’ll find a device that may be able to redefine, even destroy, both history and time, at least as we currently understand them. That in a very short while it will be possible to move through our temporal continuum and alter the past, so that ‘history’ will no longer be an unalterable chronological record but a living laboratory in which we will conduct experiments to improve the present condition of our planet and our species.”