THE STORY SO FAR...

The year is 2023, and Dr. Gideon Wolfe, a professor of criminal psychology, receives a mysterious visitor in his office. She is Vera Price, the widow of a special-effects wizard murdered outside their New York City apartment just days earlier, his body blown to unrecognizable bits by some unknown weapon. She gives Wolfe a computer disc salvaged from her husband's effects, asks him to look at it and leaves.

What Wolfe sees on the disc is shocking. There is the familiar news footage of the assassination of President Emily Forrester five years earlier in a Chicago hotel ballroom. But instead of the well-known assassin's face in the crowd„an Afghan functionary named Muhammed Khaldun, later convicted of the crime and now serving a life sentence„there is the face of somebody else. Was the footage manipulated to frame an innocent man? And if so, how is that connected to the murder of John Price? For help in solving the mystery, Wolfe goes to his friend Max Jenkins, a private detective. Investigating at the scene of Price's murder, Max finds some hairs, whose dna he traces to an anthropologist named Eli Kuperman. Though Kuperman is currently in jail in Florida for desecrating an Indian burial ground, he has a twin brother, an archaeologist named Jonah.

While Max and Gideon ponder this information, a window in Max's apartment suddenly shatters. Max crumples to the floor, shot to death by a sniper. Two days later, after being warned by the fbi to back off investigating the murders of Max and John Price, a shaken Gideon Wolfe is on a plane to Florida. There he pays a visit to the imprisoned Eli Kuperman. The anthropologist is eager to see him and seems oddly well versed in his predicament. Their conversation has not gone on for long before the prison is enveloped by a hum that grows in intensity. A wall of the prison vibrates and then collapses, opening a passage to the outside, where a strange-looking vehicle is waiting. With the help of a young woman who emerges from the doorway toting a gun that can blow objects to tiny bits, Wolfe and Kuperman leap from the prison cell into the waiting vessel.

As soon as the vessel was completely submerged, a series of powerful lights on her hull's exterior came on, offering an extraordinary view of the coastal Atlantic depths as we turned north along the line of the continent. What I saw outside, however, was not an idyllic scene of aquatic wonder such as childhood stories might have led me to expect, but rather a horrifying expanse of brown water filled with human and animal waste, all of it endlessly roiled but never cleansed by the steady pulse of the offshore currents. Sometimes the trapped filth was identifiable„great stretches of medical waste and the detritus of livestock husbandry were particularly disturbing„but for the most part it all blended into one indistinguishable mass that I, left alone to watch and ponder, found utterly disheartening. I knew, of course, that in the years since the '07 financial crash environmental cleanups had been deemed an unaffordable luxury in most countries; nevertheless, to be presented with this sort of firsthand evidence was shocking.

After what seemed a very long time I was escorted to my quarters not by Larissa Tressalian (who I assumed had joined her mysteriously stricken brother), but by the curious little man called Dr. Leon Tarbell. Alone among the crew, the "documents expert" Tarbell was unknown to me by either sight or reputation, a fact that only made him all the more intriguing: for he was certainly treated as an equal by the others, and behaved entirely as such.

"You enjoy the decor?" Tarbell asked pleasantly as we walked down the carved wooden staircase to the ship's lower deck. His accent was hard to pinpoint, and his manner was equally ambiguous: though clearly friendly, he seemed to enjoy my lingering uneasiness. He pulled out a pack of the new, smokeless and supposedly "safe" cigarettes that the American tobacco industry, after a generation of pressure and lawsuits from a combination of East Asian nations, had recently started to market, and offered me one. I declined, and as he lit his he said, "Is not for me, this decor. Is not sexual. Myself, I prefer the modern. Minimalist, athletic-sexual."

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Read Chapter One of Killing Time

Will We Travel to the Stars?