“Death,” he echoed, dropping the Ben-Gurion medal. The bronze disc bounced off the rim of the bucket and clanked against the steel floor. “Death by Zyklon-B.”
“Huh?” said Kommandant Zook.
Neil’s brain was airborne, hovering outside his skull, bobbing around on the end of his spinal cord like a meat balloon. “I know your game, Kommandant. ‘Lock those prisoners in the showers! Turn on the Zyklon-B!’ ”
Like spiders descending on silvery threads, a pair of Dragen rigs floated down from the weather deck. Caught in the beam of Neil’s hard-hat lamp, the oxygen tanks glowed a brilliant orange. The black masks and blue hoses spun wildly, intertwining. Lunging forward, he flexed his unfeeling fingers and began loosening the rubbery knot.
“Zyklon what?” said Zook.
Neil freed up a pear-shaped mask. Frantically he strapped it in place. He reached out, arched his fingers around the valve, rotated his wrist. Stuck. He tried again. Stuck. Again. It moved! Half an inch. An inch. Two. Air! Closing his eyes, he inhaled, sucking the sweetness through his mouth — nose — pores. Air, glorious oxygen, an invisible poultice drawing the poison from his brain.
He opened his eyes. Kommandant Zook sat on the floor, skin pale as a mushroom, lips fluted in a moan. One hand held his mask in place. The other rested atop the tank, curled over the valve like a gigantic tick in the act of siphoning blood.
“Help me.”
It took Neil several seconds to grasp Zook’s predicament. The Nazi was completely immobile, frozen by some dreadful combination of brain damage and fear.
“Plague,” said Neil. Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, he hobbled to Zook’s side.
“P-please.”
Freedom rushed through Neil like a hit of cocaine. YHWH wasn’t watching. No eyes on Neil. He could do whatever he felt like. Open the Kommandant’s valve — or cut his hose in two. Give him a shot of oxygen from the functioning rig — or spit in his face. Anything. Nothing.
“Famine,” said Neil.
The Kommandant stopped moaning. His jaw went slack. His eyes turned dull and milky, as if made of quartz.
“War,” Neil whispered to Leo Zook’s corpse.
From his breast pocket he drew out his Swiss Army knife. He pinched the spear blade, rotated it outward. He clenched the red handle; he stabbed; the blade pierced the rubber as easily as if it were soap. Laughing, reveling in his freedom, he carved a long, ragged incision along the axis of the Nazi’s hose.
“Death.”
Neil crouched beside the suffocated man, drank the delicious oxygen, and listened to the slow, steady thunder of the retreating horsemen.
PLAGUE
FOR OLIVER SHOSTAK, learning that the illusory deity of Judeo-Christianity had once actually inhabited the heavens and the earth, running reality and dictating the Bible, was hands-down the worst experience of his life. On the scale of disillusionment, it far outranked his deduction at age five that Santa Glaus was a mountebank, his discovery at seventeen that his father was routinely screwing the woman who boarded the family’s Weimaraners, and the judgment he’d suffered on his thirty-second birthday when he’d asked the curator of the Castelli Gallery in SoHo to exhibit the highlights of his abstract-expressionist period. (“The great drawback of these paintings,” the stiff-necked old lady had replied, “is that they aren’t any good.”) But the fruits of Pamela Harcourt’s recent expedition could not be denied: a dozen full-color photographs, each showing a large, male, grinning, supine body being towed by its ears northward through the Atlantic Ocean. The 30 X 40 blowups hung in the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall like ancestral portraits — which, in a manner of speaking, they were.
“Our labors of late have been, if I may speak mythologically, Herculean,” Barclay Cabot began, his haggard face breaking into a yawn. “Our itinerary included stops in Asia, Europe, the Middle East…”
Oliver fixed on the blowups. He loathed them. No feminist forced to sit through a Linda Lovelace film festival had ever felt more offended. Yet he refused to admit defeat. Indeed, on receiving Pamela’s dire bulletin from Dakar he’d swung into action immediately, deputizing Barclay to form an ad hoc committee and lead it on a frantic journey around the world.
Winston Hawke finished off a petit four, wiping his hands on his Trotsky sweatshirt. “After eighty-four hours of unbroken effort, our team has reached a sobering conclusion.”
Rising, Barclay slipped a sheet of legal paper out of his waistcoat pocket. “By presenting yourself as the agent of a foreign government eager to prevent its financial resources from falling into the wrong hands…”
“Its own people, for example,” said Winston.
“…you can, these days, obtain almost any tool of mass destruction that catches your fancy. To be specific” — Barclay perused the legal paper — “the French Ministry of Defense was prepared to rent us a Robespierre-class attack submarine equipped with eighteen forward-launched torpedoes. The Iranian State Department proposed to sell us the nine million gallons of Vietnam-surplus napalm it acquired from the American CIA in 1976, plus ten F-15 Eagle fighter jets with which to dispense it. The Argentine Navy offered us a two-month lease on the battleship Eva Peron, and if we’d closed the deal on the spot, they’d have thrown in six thousand rounds of ammunition for free. Finally, as long as we agreed to keep the source a secret, the People’s Republic of China would’ve given us what they called a ‘package deal’ on a tactical nuclear weapon and the delivery system of our choice.”
“Every one of these offers fell through the minute the merchants learned we did not in fact represent a sovereign state.” Winston selected a second petit four. “It’s immoral and destabilizing, they said, for private citizens to possess such technologies.”
“The sole dissenter from this policy was itself a private institution, the American National Rifle Association,” said Barclay. “But the things they wanted to sell us — four MHO howitzers and seven wire-guided TOW missiles — are useless for our purposes.”
Oliver groaned softly. He’d been hoping for a more encouraging report: not simply because he wished to impress Cassandra, whose fax had clearly contained a subtext — prove yourself, she was saying between the lines, show me you’re a man of substance — but also because he truly wanted to spare his species a millennium of theistic ignorance and mindless superstition.
“So we’re licked?” asked Pamela.
“There is one ray of hope,” said Winston, devouring the tiny cake. “This afternoon we spoke with—”
The Marxist stopped in midsentence, stunned by the ascent of Sylvia Endicott, a surge so abrupt it was as if the springs of her Empire chair had suddenly popped free. “Have I missed something?” the old woman demanded in a low, liquid hiss. “Did I fail to attend a crucial meeting? Was I out of town during an emergency session? When, exactly, did we agree on this sabotage business?”
“We never put it to a formal vote,” Oliver replied, “but clearly that’s the consensus in the room.”
“Not in this part of the room.”
“What are you saying, Sylvia?” snarled Pamela. “ ‘Sit back and do nothing’?”
“The Svalbard tomb can hardly be a secure place,” Meredith Lodge hastened to add. “Hell, I suspect it’s vulnerable as Cheops’s pyramid.”
“Obliteration’s the only answer,” said Rainsford Fitch.
Scowling profoundly, Sylvia shuffled to the bust of Charles Darwin stationed by the fireplace.
“Assuming for a moment the Valparaíso is really towing what Cassie Fowler says it’s towing,” she began, “shouldn’t we have the collective courage, if not the simple decency, to admit we’ve been wrong all these years?”