Killing Time

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, dosed the door before I could follow, and said:

'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.'

CHAPTER 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