Killing Time

This brought a patronizing chuckle out of the general, and the rest of his officers picked up on the laughter. 'You really must excuse us, Lady Infidel,' Said managed to say. 'It is not your sex that amuses us, although your father or husband or brother must live in a perpetual state of agonizing shame to know that you appear in public as you do. But how can one woman—'

Larissa held a hand up and then turned away, putting the same hand to the collar of her bodysuit and talking too softly to be heard.

General Said gave Colonel Slayton a nod. 'Ah. She is favored, then.'

'Favored?' Slayton said.

'By Allah,' Tarbell explained with a smiling nod of his own. 'The general thinks that Larissa is feeble- minded.'

General Said shrugged. 'She wears the clothes of a man and talks to the air, Dr. Tarbell — can I be wrong?'

'Apparently you can, General,' I said, looking to the television above the bar. 'If you'll just observe…' Suddenly the bowling images returned, bringing delighted shouts and more applause from the officers around us. I'd correctly surmised that Larissa had asked Malcolm to use one of the Tressalian satellites to generate a secure signal and beam the Bowling Channel (and how I would have liked to have seen Malcolm's face when he got that request) down to Kuala Lumpur.

'My distinguished infidel guests!' Said gushed. 'This is really too kind — too kind! You have won our friendship, doomed unbelievers though you may be! Tell me, what is it we can do for you? Major Samad says you seek plutonium.'

'Actually, we seek a man,' Tarbell said, pulling out a page of his notes on Eshkol, as well as a photograph of him.

General Said looked confused. 'A man? Not plutonium?'

'The man we seek is in the market for plutonium,' Colonel Slayton explained. 'And that's why we've come to you.'

For the first time Said looked slightly displeased, as though he suspected what our business actually was. 'And what is this man's name?'

Tarbell handed over the photo and glanced at his notes. 'He would be using the name and carrying the identity papers of a man called Vincent Gambon, who once worked for Doctors Without Borders.'

As one, General Said and his officers took a quick step back from us, and their formerly friendly expressions grew hostile. Said put a hand to the sidearm at his waist. 'This man Gambon — he is a friend of yours?'

'No,' I said quickly, sensing that the misunderstanding might easily turn fatal. 'He's our enemy. We're looking for him because he's stolen something of great importance from us.'

Said's expression lightened just a bit, and his hand moved away from the gun. 'Well, then,' he said, 'you may be interested in what I have to show you.'

The general nodded to one of his officers, who led us to a doorway behind the bowling alley's shoe rental counter. As we reached it I thought I made out the sound of muffled screaming; then the officer threw open the door to the shoe storage and repair room, revealing:

Eshkol. He was tightly gagged and strapped into a heavy wooden chair, with his ankles tied firmly to the chair's front legs. A rotating electric brush with wire bristles had been positioned beneath his upturned bare feet and was spinning at high speed, slowly tearing the skin away from his flesh. Saliva was coursing down from the corners of Eshkol's mouth as he continued to scream, and his crazed eyes were opened wide in agony.

When I looked at General Said again, I could no longer see the well-groomed, well-spoken fellow who moments before had so amused me. It was apparent now why he was feared, and all that his continued smiling did was remind me that for centuries Islamic leaders had tortured prisoners in just this manner: by flaying the soles of their feet.

'Here is your enemy!' the general proclaimed proudly. 'And it will no doubt please your infidel hearts to know that his death will be a very slow affair!'

CHAPTER 37

I was too stunned to move or speak, and I could see that my three comrades were in roughly the same shape. We'd spent so many hours preparing ourselves for what we had been sure would be a violent confrontation with Eshkol that discovering him in such a condition— and especially in such a place — left us scrambling to determine our next move. Of course, there was the option of closing the door and letting General Said finish the job he had so enthusiastically started; but for all our recent declarations that Eshkol had to be stopped in a permanent way, I don't think any of us had the stomach for playing a part in his slow death by torture. Then too, as Malcolm reminded Larissa when she reported in concerning the latest developments, we couldn't be sure that Eshkol hadn't told anyone else about the Stalin disc: we needed him to declare those images a hoax to his superiors before he died in order to prevent the propagation of rumors that would likely prove even more troublesome than facts. One by one it dawned on each of us that we were going to have to get him out of that room, that building, and that town; but it was the ever-wily Tar-bell, not surprisingly, who grasped that fact first and took hold of the situation.

'Tell me, General,' he said, nonchalantly watching Eshkol writhe in a successful attempt to impress Said. 'What exactly has this man done to you?'

'He is a pig, Dr. Tarbell!' the general declared, spitting on Eshkol. 'To begin with, he has stirred trouble for me within my family. He came looking for plutonium and promised a great deal of money for it. Then, on his way here, he murdered the man I had sent to escort him. Why? I cannot say, and he will not.'

'He has killed before, and just as unreasonably,' Tarbell explained. 'It is our belief that he seeks to obscure the trail he leaves behind. He may even have tried to kill you, after your business was done.'

'Me?' the general cried, dumbfounded. 'Here?'

Tarbell let out a flattering sort of laugh. 'Absurd, is it not?'

Said began to laugh along with him. 'Yes — absurd! He is a madman, then!' Suddenly the general's laughter died down, and he looked at Eshkol in an immensely irritated way. 'But the chap he murdered, you see, was my wife's cousin. I had little use for the man, but how does this make me look? Not only to my family, but to that unholy mob outside? Very bad, infidels, very bad. Furthermore' — Said returned to his bowling lane and picked a file up off the scorer's desk—'we are not without our own ways of gathering intelligence. Were you aware that this enemy of yours is actually a CIA agent?'

The general placed a sheet of printout on a lit area of the desk, at which the contents of the page were projected onto a large screen over the bowling lane. It was indeed a copy of a Central Intelligence file, which stated that an agency operative calling himself Vincent Gambon had infiltrated the Doctors Without Borders field office in the Kurdish sector of Turkey, from which, as I have already noted, Israel was currently drawing a good deal of its water, much to the displeasure of the Turks and their American allies. Here, at least, was the probable reason why Eshkol had killed the real and unfortunate Gambon in the first place, although Said apparently knew nothing about such matters, as his next words demonstrated: 'No doubt his actual purpose here was to undermine our hold on this mountain— perhaps by way of the nuclear device we found him carrying!' Said held up a small rucksack that bore the same Doctors Without Borders logo we'd seen on Eshkol's clothes. 'The very device he intended to arm with the plutonium we had agreed to sell him!' With his free hand the general grabbed a metal radioactive materials canister and held it up; then he looked back through the open door of the shoe room. 'Oh, this creature's soul is a pit of evil, infidels, and I intend that he shall regret every minute of his loathsome existence before he dies!'

'Quite understandable,' Tarbell said, glancing around the bowling alley and, it seemed to me, silently calculating just how many Malaysian soldiers were in it. 'Thoroughly understandable!' he reaffirmed. Then he looked at Colonel Slayton and Larissa, both of whom shook their heads as if to say that the idea of some sort of breakout was unfeasible. Leon acknowledged their assessment with a reluctant nod. 'And yet it seems to me,' he went on, turning to Said again, 'that you are missing a most excellent opportunity.'

'I?' Said asked. 'How, Doctor?'