It seems a dream now, a dream to which I would gladly return if only I could forget the horror that woke me from it.
That horror was not without its warnings, though in those early days I was far too swept up by emotional and intellectual excitement to recognize them. The first still stands out vividly: one evening, with the sun bouncing off the cove outside the leaded bay window in my room (at that time of the year it became truly dark on St. Kilda for only about three hours each night), I happened to be going through the jacket I'd been wearing during the jailbreak just days earlier and found the original computer disc that Mrs. Price had given me. Staring at it, my first thoughts were of Max: not as I'd last seen him, with much of his head removed by a CIA sniper's bullet, but alive and as full of banter and laughter as he'd always been. Then, slowly, I recalled the information that was on the disc—all the information. I'd been so focused on matters surrounding the Forrester assassination that I'd completely forgotten that Max had managed to crack the encryption of a second set of images: the old footage of a Nazi death camp, through which wandered the digitally inserted silhouette of an unidentifiable figure.
Popping the disc into a computer terminal that sat at a rustic desk by the bay window, I called up those images and reviewed them once again.
"Anything good?"
I started a little at the sound of Larissa's voice and turned to see her striding quickly through my open door. I let out a small, pleased groan as she threw herself into my lap, kissed me quickly, and then turned her dark eyes to the monitor. "What in the world is that? Trying your hand at a little revisionism, are you?"
"You mean you don't recognize it?" I said, surprised.
Larissa shook her head. "Doesn't quite look finished, whatever it is."
"No," I said, replaying the images. "Max found it on the disc that Price's wife gave us. I'd forgotten about it — and when I saw it again I assumed it must have been another job Price did for your brother."
"If it is, I've never heard anything about it." Larissa leapt up and went to a glowing keypad by my bed. "Maybe Leon knows something." She touched a few of the keys. "Leon, come over to Gideon's room, will you? He's found something odd."
In a few minutes Leon Tarbell came shooting in, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. "Well, what is your mystery, Gideon?" he said. "I was rather busy when you—" He stopped suddenly when he saw the images on the screen. "What the devil is that?" As I explained the origins of the disc once again, Tarbell's gaze focused ever more intently on the gray figure on the monitor.
"I know who that is," he said, fascinated yet frustrated. "Yes, I'm certain I know who that is, but I can't seem to — there, you see? When he turns in profile. I know I've seen that silhouette somewhere before."
"That's exactly how I felt the first time I watched it," I answered with a nod. "But I couldn't place—"
"Wait!" A look of sudden recognition came into Tarbell's satanic features, and then he rushed around to the computer's keyboard. "I believe I may be able to…" His words trailed off as he went to work on the keyboard. Then a new succession of images began to rapidly appear and disappear on the screen.
"What is it, Leon?" Larissa asked. "Was Price doing something other than the Forrester job for Malcolm?"
Tarbell shrugged. "If he didn't tell you, Larissa darling, he certainly wouldn't tell the rest of us. But as for this mysterious fellow—" He pointed to the screen, where the footage of the concentration camp reappeared, frozen on one frame. Tarbell tapped at the keyboard a few more times with a bit of a flourish. "Here… he… is!"
The mysterious silhouette was suddenly filled in perfectly by a photograph of a man whose name we all knew welclass="underline"
"Stalin," I said, more confused than ever.
"Yes, it's Stalin, all right," Larissa agreed, looking as perplexed as I felt. "But what interest could Price have had in placing him at a Nazi death camp?"
Tarbell only shrugged again, while I asked, "Do you think it's important? I mean, maybe we should ask Malcolm—"
"No, Gideon," Larissa said definitively. "Not now. I've just come from him. He worked all night and drove himself straight into another attack."
My attention diverted to Malcolm's condition, I wondered aloud, "What does he do in that lab, anyway?"
Larissa shrugged in frustration. "He won't say, but he's been at it for months. Whatever it is, I wish he'd drop it — he needs rest desperately. As for this business—" She reached over to shut off the terminal screen, then removed the disc and tossed it to Tarbell. "I'd say it was just some movie that Price was working on. Forget it, Dr. Wolfe." She turned my face toward hers and moved in to kiss me. "Right now I require your full attention."
Tarbell cleared his throat. "My cue," he said, pocketing the disc and leaving as quickly as he'd come. "I told you once, Gideon— you're a lucky man…"
Perhaps I was. But luck is, of course, transitory; and had I known how close mine was to changing at that moment or how much the disc I'd rediscovered would have to do with that change, I would never have let myself be distracted, even by Larissa. For a completed version of the images we'd been watching would all too soon trigger a crime so incomprehensible that it would bring even our senselessly hyperactive world to an astonished, bewildered halt. It would also propel me into this, my jungle exile in Africa, where I await the arrival of my former comrades with the most profound confusion and dread I have ever known.
CHAPTER 23
As the rest of us continued to wait for Malcolm to emerge from his laboratory and announce that it was time to move on to some new deceptive enterprise, patience at times became difficult to sustain— though I'll admit that it was, as Leon Tarbell repeatedly pointed out, easier for Larissa and me than for the others. In fact, so agitated did Tarbell become over the mere thought that members of our group other than himself were engaged in a physical relationship that he first almost fatally electrocuted himself in a supposed "virtual reality sex suit" (really nothing more than thin rubber long Johns embedded with powerful electrodes) and then, a few days later, took a small jetcopter that was stored in one of the mock barns of the compound and headed off for Edinburgh. As he prepared to lift off, I pointed out that Glasgow was closer, but this only brought a look of supreme disdain to his mercurial features.
"Drunken laborers and heroin addicts!" he bellowed. "No, Gideon, the prostitutes of Edinburgh service sex-starved lawyers and deviant politicians — they have immense sexuality, they are for me!"
And with a roar of the aircraft's engines he was gone.
So began a most remarkable evening. I was, unusually, alone, because Larissa had decided to keep watch through the night by her still ailing brother's bedside, to make sure that he spent the time resting rather than working in his laboratory. Again I found myself speculating about what could possibly be consuming the man so ravenously; and it occurred to me that while Larissa had said she didn't know, the ever-secretive and reticent Colonel Slayton might. On asking around I discovered that Slayton had ensconced himself in the compound's communications monitoring room. So I set off to see whether or not, with my supposed psychological guile, I could maneuver him into revealing something about Malcolm's activities.