Killing Time by Caleb Carr Read Free Book Online Page B

of such a man's heirs, yet that fact alone did not explain the
most urgent questions at hand, which I grappled with yet again as I washed and
changed for dinner: What exactly were these people up to, and why had they
decided, in Larissa's phrase, that they needed me?
    In twenty minutes I was headed
back toward the nose of the ship, determined this time to get answers that were
more than cryptic.
     
CHAPTER 13
     
    The conference table in the
lowest level of the nose had been draped with a rich cloth and laid with china,
silver, and candles, and the color of the panorama outside the ship had turned
a rich blue-black, indicating that we had taken an eastern turn into the deeper
waters of the Atlantic, away from the waste that had marked the coast. The
ship's exterior lights cut lovely shafts through these storied depths, yet even
as I admired the beauty there seemed something odd about the sight, something
lonely that I couldn't initially explain. I tried to shake the feeling off,
attributing it to my own general sense of being on my own in a strange
place—and then I realized that it actually stemmed from the surprising but very
apparent lack of any signs of life in the water.
    Tarbell was already standing by
the table, along with the Kupermans; and although I couldn't see who was
responsible for the cooking or where it was being done, the aromas filling the
area were singularly appetizing. Tarbell handed me a glass of his personal
vodka—a Russian brand I did not know—and then Eli Kuperman asked:
    "You like lamb, don't you,
Dr. Wolfe? Medium rare, I think it was. It'll be ready in just a few
minutes."
    "None of us has time to eat
much during the day," Jonah Kuperman added, heading through a small door
that evidently led to some sort of galley, where I could see Julien Fouché
laboring in a sweat over a stainless-steel stove. "So we try to make
dinners as civilized as we can."
    I picked up a few pieces of the
china and silver: very elegant and very old. "I guess you do" was all
I could say, taking a sip of Tarbell’s vodka and trying yet again to orient
myself: after all, moments earlier I'd been standing in this same area watching
a battle take place outside. "I don't suppose," I went on,
"that anybody would like to tell me what it is that keeps you all so busy
during the day? I mean, when you're not busting people out of jail."
    Fouché raised his voice to call
from the galley, " That should never have happened! A pet project of les frères Kuperman that grew completely out of hand!"
    "Oh, come on, Julien!"
Eli shot back. "It had just as much validity as anything else we've done.
You've seen the statistics: gambling's become an epidemic since the crash, and
there's no way I'm going to let a lot of anthropologically nonsensical folklore
rationalize it. If we'd been able to plant that evidence—"
    " 'Plant?' " I
interrupted, surprised. "You mean you weren't stealing anything?"
    Jonah Kuperman threw me a
friendly glance. "There's really nothing in that particular burial site
worth stealing, Dr. Wolfe."
    "Gideon," I said.
    "All right—Gideon. Well, as
you probably know, it's been apparent for years that the various peoples who
call themselves 'Native Americans' were not, in fact, the first inhabitants of
this continent. But many of the tribes have attempted to suppress or destroy
evidence that might support this conclusion. They're afraid, and with reason,
that if they're suddenly revealed as simple conquerors of their predecessors,
they'll lose emotional and historical justification for a lot of questionable
activities—including the creation of a generation of gambling addicts in their
casinos."
    "That burial ground in
Florida," Eli said, "is currently being explored by a team from
Harvard, and Jonah and I were trying to slip several artifacts in to
demonstrate—"
    Eli cut his words short at the
sound of Malcolm Tressalian's wheelchair moving about on the control level
above us. From the looks on the faces of the men