to need no encouragement to cheer and holler in a bloodthirsty — and bloodcurdling — manner.
Just as five of Said's men were about to secure Eshkol to his Promethean slab of concrete, something that I had hoped and even expected never to see again drifted up from below a nearby edge of the roof: it was one of the American surveillance drones, our companions from the stratosphere, and it was not, of course, alone. Within seconds the entire roof was ringed with the things, and as they appeared General Said asked Colonel Slayton in a very agitated voice what they were, though this inquiry was impeded by the frequent need to tell his severely spooked soldiers to calm down and hold their positions. Slayton did his best to dismiss the drones as mere surveillance instruments, but Larissa, Tarbell, and I knew the grim facts of the situation. To begin with, the drones could at any moment have destroyed the roof or even the entire hotel, depending on their armament; but what was perhaps worse was that those of us from Malcolm's ship had now been recognized by the Americans, and this was likely to lead to a plethora of problems concerning our ship's escape and continued concealment, since any new anomalous radar readings would likely be assigned to us.
Bad as the situation was, it was about to get a great deal worse. The drones did not go on the attack immediately, most likely because of the confusion that their remote operators were experiencing as to just what was happening on the roof; but their appearance gave Eshkol an opportunity, one that he used every ounce of his training to exploit. After breaking free of the five men who'd been detailed to chain him to the concrete, he subdued three of them in a frenzy of savage blows, kicks, and gouges. Having secured a weapon from one of those he'd felled, he used it to blow the other two quickly over the edge of the roof. But Eshkol was far too clever to think that he would make it out of that situation armed with only an ordinary gun. Apparently he had divined, even while he was strapped down and being tortured, that the weapon Larissa wore slung at her side was something very unusual; and, spraying a hail of fire that forced us all to disperse and find cover, he hurled himself at her. Very neatly making it look as though he meant to do her harm, he instead plucked the rail gun out of its holster and rolled with it to the far side of the roof, while Larissa, who had been readying herself for hand-to-hand combat, looked on in stunned amazement.
We were in trouble, though at that point only we four visitors knew how bad the trouble was. Education for the others was, however, on the way. As the drones dashed about the edges of the roof like onlookers at a brawl trying to decide which side, if any, to take, Eshkol began moving among the huge pieces of rubble with an agility that would have been remarkable even had he not just endured long hours of torture. After several minutes of this display, he finally caught one unlucky Malaysian soldier out in the open and fired the rail gun. I had not actually seen the thing used on a man before, and the effect was at once greater and less violent than I had expected. Most of the soldier's body simply disappeared, as John Price's had done; and the pieces that were left, being wholly and cleanly detached from the trunk, had a certain prosthetic quality, as if they had never actually been part of a living human body. General Said lost about half of his men to panic after that, though the few who stayed showed admirable resolve in the face of what seemed certain death. It soon became clear from Eshkol's movements, however, that he wasn't interested in the Malaysians at all.
He began to vociferously demand his rucksack and the plutonium canister, the pair of which he had somehow noticed Larissa and Tarbell bringing up to the roof. Screwing up my courage, I got to Larissa's side with a few leaps and some low running, but she informed me that Leon had the deadly goods. Where Leon might be, however, neither she nor anyone else seemed to know. As General Said shouted to Eshkol that the rucksack and canister were not on the roof — true, as far as he knew — Slayton, Larissa, and I crawled about as best we could, urgently whispering Tarbell's name. My own attempts to contact him became, out of desperation, rather absurdly noisy; then, from behind the housing of an elevator mechanism, I heard him whisper:
'Gideon! Be quiet, you fool, you'll get us both killed!' I couldn't yet see him, but I was relieved to know that he was alive. 'Are you hurt, Leon?' I called.
'Not yet!' he answered. 'Although if you insist on — oh, no.' The dread that had suddenly come into his voice indicated that Eshkol was nearby; and when I looked up I saw the huge man lying flat atop the elevator structure, safe from the fire of the Malaysians and pointing the rail gun down over the far side. I heard him demand the rucksack and canister and offer Tarbell his life in exchange. 'You lying eunuch!' Leon said. 'We know you too well—' What came next, though predictable, was nightmarishly unstoppable. Eshkol had demonstrated as pronounced a taste for unnecessary killing as any sociopath I'd ever encountered, and there was no reason to think that Leon — lacking weapons, cover, or bargaining chips — would receive the mercy that so many others had been denied. Still, the quiet discharge of the rail gun when it came brought me out of my hiding place screaming, loud enough for Eshkol to turn in evident alarm. Perhaps he thought that I would be so foolish only if I had some other miraculous weapon; or perhaps he had so squandered any human feelings he still possessed on his dead ancestors that he could not believe that anyone would put himself in danger simply out of brotherhood or grief. Whatever the case, he looked utterly confused, a confusion that probably saved me. Certainly it was a confusion that deepened mightily, as did that of General Said, his men, and, it seemed, the American drones, when the sky above the hotel cracked open to reveal Julien, who was once again standing in the hatchway of our ship.
He was holding a long-range stun weapon, which he aimed at the spot where Eshkol was lying. But again the number of similar situations that Eshkol must have been in during his career became evident: he disappeared off his perch, I think, even before Fouche pulled the trigger of his gun. A sudden outcry from the remaining Malaysians — who had lost the last of their nerve at the sight of the floating, hollering Frenchman — indicated that Eshkol was on his way down to the street from the roof by way of a damaged staircase. None of the soldiers, however, was willing to give chase, at least not until General Said's exhortations turned into open threats. When the troops finally did begin to move, Colonel Slayton rushed toward my position, as did Larissa; but I had already dashed to and around the elevator structure.
There was nothing left of Leon save an arm, probably the arm with which, given the care his murderer had taken not to damage it, he'd held the rucksack and containment canister. Of those items there was no trace, though at the moment that fact meant nothing to me. I fell to my knees and, in a kind of utterly spent mourning, began to chuckle tearfully: for the middle finger of Leon's dead hand was raised, as I was sure it had been when he'd met his end. Larissa soon put her arms around me and attempted to pull me up and toward the descending hatchway of the ship, but in my sorrow I would not be moved from the spot. Fusillades of gunfire began to be directed at us by the troops in the street, while the drones moved toward the hatchway with the clear purpose of inspecting it so that their operators could decide whether or not to attack; yet still I would not go, not until I'd determined what in God's name to do about Tarbell's arm.
It suddenly occurred to me that Leon would have enjoyed nothing more than the terrifying effect that this lone, eerie remnant of his earthly existence would have should it suddenly plummet into the crowd below. Perhaps the jest seems a ghoulish and even grotesque one, removed from its context; but at that moment I was surrounded by so much violence of such bizarre, even absurd, proportions that the idea seemed entirely appropriate. I therefore lifted one foot and sent the remains of the peculiar little man who from the moment of my arrival on Malcolm's ship had proved a genuine friend down to play his final prank on the world.
CHAPTER 39
Of our escape and removal to a safe distance I can say little, for shock had clouded my senses. The closure of the ship's hatchway after we'd gotten back aboard and the reactivation of the complete holographic projection around the vessel apparently threw the drones off long enough for us to reach the coast and dive into the Straits of Malacca; but the fact remained that four of our number had been observed and no doubt identified. That Slayton should have been seen was bad enough, but Larissa's presence would no doubt prompt our antagonists to ask uncomfortable questions about Malcolm and probably about St. Kilda as well, once it was discovered, as seemed inevitable, that he owned the islands. Yet despite both this danger and his own deep sorrow over Tarbell's death, Malcolm was determined that we should remain in the vicinity of Kuala Lumpur until we knew where the now massively armed Eshkol was going. All ship's systems were set to work monitoring air traffic, both civilian and military, along
