Killing Time by Caleb Carr Page B

Mother did,"
Larissa answered. "The entire time we were poisoning her she kept
screaming to Father that she knew we were killing her and that we were both
insane."
    I propped myself up on my elbows
and dropped the bit of her hair I'd been toying with. " 'Poisoning'?"
    But Larissa didn't seem to hear
me. "Father never would believe it, though," she went on. "That
is, not until we pushed him out of the airplane. Then—just then —I think
he realized that there might have been something to it..."
     
CHAPTER 20
     
    I sat up on the bed. "How
old were you?" was all I could think to say.
    Larissa's face screwed up in a
childlike fashion. "I was eleven when we took care of Mother. The business
with Father happened about a year later."
    Utterly at a loss, I found myself
reverting to the role of psychiatrist. "And did they—was
it—premeditated?"
    She glanced at me a bit
dubiously. "Gideon, everything Malcolm and I do is premeditated.
It's what we were bred for. But if what you're really asking is whether or not
there was provocation, then the answer is yes, there was." She looked at
the ceiling again. "Rather a lot, actually."
    I kept watching her, retreating
further into professional objectivity yet somehow angry with myself for the
reaction. "Such as what?" I asked.
    She suddenly gave me a small,
genuinely happy smile and pulled me back down against her warm body. "I
like sleeping with you," she said. "I wasn't sure I would."
    I returned the smile as best I
could. "A gift for flattery was not, apparently, the primary goal of your
genetic engineering."
    "I'm sorry," she
laughed. "It's just that—"
    "Larissa," I said,
touching her mouth. "If you don't want to tell me about it, you don't have
to."
    She took my hand. "No, I
will," she said simply. "It's really not very complicated." She
turned to the ceiling again. "Father'd bred me to be smarter and prettier
than Mother—so I suppose it shouldn't have been much of a surprise when he decided
that he'd rather have sex with me than with her." I winced in shock, but
Larissa proceeded with a detachment not uncommon to victims of such trauma.
"She thought it was my fault—he'd have sex with me, and then she'd beat me
for it. Malcolm always tried to stop both of them. But he's never had any real
physical strength." Her eyes glistened with profound love and admiration.
"You should have seen him, though—swinging those crutches at them, calling
them every evil name imaginable."
    "Which they deserved,"
I said. "You know that, don't you?"
    She nodded. "Cognitively, as
they say. Emotionally—it's a bit trickier. So—eventually we decided we'd just
have to get rid of them. Mother first, because she was not only vicious but
completely useless. Father—well, we had to wait, to let him finish building the
satellites."
    "You went on enduring that," I said, once again stunned, "because you wanted him to finish the four-gigabyte
satellite system?"
    "Well, I knew how much it
would be worth to Malcolm and me once he was dead," Larissa replied.
"The reinvention of the Internet? Yes, I could endure his touch a few more
times if it meant that my brother and I would get those profits. Then, once the
system was in place and working smoothly, Father was called in on the '07 economic
summit. So we waited until after that. Right after. We went to Washington with
him—even got to meet the president. On the jet back to Seattle it was just the
three of us. He was very pleased with himself—why shouldn't he have been? He
and his friends had just become the most powerful people in the country. He got
drunk. Fell against the emergency hatch and released it during descent. Apparently."
Letting out a brief sigh, Larissa held up one finger. "Fortunately, his
loving children were smart enough to be wearing their seat belts and to keep
their heads while the copilot got things back under control." She shook
her head. "I never will forget the look on his face ..."
    As she said all this, the
objective detachment