"Gideon — where are you, in the turret?"
Giving Malcolm another bewildered glance, I touched a nearby keypad. "In the observation dome, Leon. Do you need me?"
"No, stay, I will come up," he answered. "I have something that may interest you."
For almost a full and very awkward minute neither Malcolm nor I spoke; then he said, very quietly and a bit contritely, "I know all this must sound odd, Gideon. And I know how you must feel, given the effort you've put in. But there's a great danger in this work of becoming overly enchanted by the ability to deceive people en masse. I've been as guilty of it as anyone. That's why—"
"Ah, there you are!" It was Tarbell, bounding up the stairs from the control level. "And Malcolm, as well — you may also find this of some interest, as it concerns our old friend Mr. Price."
The blackness that had seized Malcolm's features moments before returned, even more quickly this time. "What are you talking about, Leon?" he said apprehensively.
"Gideon here — or rather his friend Mr. Jenkins — happened on the results of some other project for which Price had been engaged. We assumed it was a film, but now, Gideon, I'm not so sure." Shooting over to a terminal, Tarbell sat before it and called something up on the screen, while I followed behind quickly; not as quickly, though, as Malcolm. "Here," Leon eventually said. "Transcripts. After that evening, Gideon, I programmed the global monitoring system to pick out any messages involving combinations of the keywords 'Dachau' and 'Stalin.' " Malcolm took in a sudden breath, which, though not loud enough for Tarbell to hear, caused me to turn to him.
He was pressing his body against the back of his chair, looking worse than I'd ever seen him; but it was very apparent that this time his trouble was not physical.
"I had no luck until today," Leon continued. "And then, in a cluster, several hits came up. All from Israeli intelligence." With a sickening droop of my own insides that I didn't really understand, I suddenly thought of the night when Colonel Slayton had sat listening to Mossad agents feverishly talking about terrorists and a German concentration camp. "Apparently they know about the images," Tarbell went on, very amused. "Though the odd thing is that they seem to think that they are entirely genuine! They've got dozens of operatives out now, looking for one of their men who was the first to get hold of a finished version of the sequence." His amusement subsiding, Tarbell's eyes narrowed. "And that's the puzzling part. Why would they be looking for one of their own people—"
"His name." It was Malcolm, who'd finally conquered his shock long enough to speak.
Tarbell turned. "I beg your pardon, Malcolm?"
"His name, damn it!" Malcolm cried, his knuckles going white as he clutched his chair.
Tarbell recoiled a bit. "I — don't know. They make no mention of his name. Deliberately so, I would say."
With one quick move of his arms Malcolm propelled his chair to the screen. He examined its contents for a moment, then grabbed Leon's shoulder hard. "Gather everyone downstairs, Leon," he said, trying to control the inner tempest that was obviously tossing his emotions about. "Right away, please."
Tarbell knew enough to comply quickly, and after he withdrew, Malcolm, eyes wide and empty, turned his chair away from the screen and rolled slowly back over to the transparent hull.
"Malcolm?" I eventually said. "What is it?"
"You were able to break the encryption of those images?" he asked, in the same low voice.
"Max was, yes," I answered.
Nodding for a moment, Malcolm murmured, "He was very good at his job, your friend Mr. Jenkins…"
"Would you like Leon to bring the disc up?"
Malcolm held up a hand. "Unnecessary. I have a complete version."
As the situation began to clarify, I felt my gut ripple again. "Then Price did create them for you."
"Yes," Malcolm whispered with another nod. He paused for what seemed a long time, then went on, "Well, Gideon, I'm afraid your Washington project will have to wait. If I'm right—" He lowered his head and placed his hands on either side of it. "But I must not be right. In fact, we must pray, Gideon, that I am as mad as I sometimes seem…"
CHAPTER 27
Whether or not Malcolm was mad, he was certainly justified in his fearful suspicions about the mysterious Israeli communications concerning the Stalin images. When we'd all gathered at the table that did double duty for dining and conferring on the lower level of the nose of the ship, Malcolm showed us the completed version of those images and explained how they had come to be; and though just a few months earlier it might have been difficult for me to appreciate the dangers posed by such a seemingly random bit of visual documentation, I was now well versed enough in the power of cleverly packaged disinformation to know that we were faced with a potentially disastrous situation.
The images themselves were simple enough: they showed several separate shots of Josef Stalin touring various parts of the Dachau concentration camp sometime in the late 1930s (Dachau having been the first of the really large-scale, factory-modeled German extermination centers). The Soviet strongman was seen watching the laboring prisoners, their abusive guards, and the executions and corpse disposals with an approving eye, occasionally even chuckling as he pulled on his pipe and exchanged information and jokes with several high-ranking SS tour guides — including, in one shot, Heinrich Himmler. The implications were obvious: the Soviet government had been involved not only in its own domestic genocidal policies but, during the years prior to Hitler's invasion of Russia, in the Nazi Holocaust, as well.
"But what was the purpose of creating such an impression, Malcolm?" Jonah asked, deeply troubled by what he'd seen — as, indeed, were we all.
"The Russian government has degenerated from merely unstable to dangerous, even grotesque," Malcolm declared, fists still tight atop the arms of his chair. "Since taking power, the right wing has employed the same tactics that leveled Chechnya in four other rebellious regions. Nuclear weapons and technology, though admittedly crude, are being sold to whoever has the hard currency to pay for them. Virtual slavery is being practiced in factories and fields, and toxic and nuclear wastes are being dumped into shallow repositories in Siberia, which is why that region's separatist movement has become so violent. Each new problem only brings more vicious solutions from the central government, until it now looks as though Russia will be the black hole of the modern world, taking all of civilization with it when it collapses. Yet the rest of that modern world does nothing. Foreign investment in Russia is running at absurdly high levels, and no one can afford to tell the truth or to have it told — information and communications companies are, after all, among the most severely overextended in the Russian market. The argument that loans and investment will bring reform continues to stand as self-serving nonsense of a variety to match the Chinese model. Putting money into such a situation is simply throwing gasoline on a fire." He caught his breath and sat back, his anger slowly giving way to regret. "It seemed to me, in other words, that some kind of popular redefinition of Russia's place, in the world and in history, might be called for."
"You could hardly have picked a more… provocative event of which to make use, Malcolm," Tarbell said; and there was no note of irony or amusement in his voice now.
Malcolm nodded grimly. "Or a worse person, as it turned out, to do the work. I hired John Price because none of us had his visual manipulation skills — but I always had reservations about him. It wasn't just that he was a freelance operator, though that did trouble me. But a freelance operator from a place where betrayal is the unspoken stuff of amiable meals in pleasant restaurants… It was my mother's world; that in itself should have kept me away. But I thought we could control him."