Of course, there was the strange matter of that silver hair, with which Larissa too had been born; but Stephen Tressalian refused to see this as anything other than a coincidence and emphasized the differences between his two children rather than their similarities.
"He never even suspected the most important thing that Malcolm and I had in common," Larissa said, as we lay on my bed together.
Yes, together: for her story had quickly transformed my uneasiness about her work as an assassin into an emotion that ran much deeper than the infatuation I'd felt to that point.
"Which was?" I murmured, touching her silvery locks and looking deep into her ebony eyes.
She looked at the ceiling rather blithely. "We were both a little mad. At least, I can't think of any other way to describe it."
It didn't seem an entirely serious statement. "I'm sure you were," I said in a tone to match hers. "And your parents never suspected?"
"Oh, 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 I'd been feeling began, without my quite realizing it, to deteriorate, overcome by a set of powerful empathetic reactions that were remnants of my own troubled past. And so, at that crucial moment, I simply put my hand to her face and said, "I suppose it made the assassinations easier— having already done, well, that."
She shrugged. "I suppose it must have. But more than making it easier, I think it inspired me. It was quite a feeling, destroying people who so thoroughly deserved it. I got to have quite a taste for the experience. I remember that when I shot Rajiv Karamchand—"
"You shot him?" Karamchand, of course, was the Indian president who had authorized the use of the first atomic weapons in the Kashmir war. Despite the best efforts of many intelligence agencies, his murder had remained a mystery.
Larissa smiled and nodded. "And when I did it, I felt just the way that I had watching Father fall out of that plane. A man who takes responsibility for the lives and well-being of others and then betrays that trust so completely — I really can't think of anything quite as vile. Plus" — she turned over onto her stomach, her words coming faster—"think about this: Why has there always been such a taboo against assassination? It's ludicrous. A political leader can order people to their deaths or to kill others, and corporate executives can commit any kind of crime in the name of trade — yet they're all considered untouchable. Why? Why should Karamchand have felt any safer when he went to bed at night than one of his own soldiers or than the Pakistanis he slaughtered? Why should an executive who profits from slave labor be immune to the terror his workers feel? The odd assassination is the only way to make people like that start to think a little more seriously about what they do. As for making the rest of the world think a little harder about whose orders they decide to follow and what they choose to believe — well, that's the whole point of what we're doing now, isn't it?"
I weighed the statement. "Yes, I can see that," I answered slowly. "Though I still don't get what part I'm supposed to play in it all."
Larissa threw her arms around my neck, again looking very pleased. "Keeping me happy — isn't that enough?" Seeing the continued look of inquiry in my face, she feigned a frown. "No? All right — the truth is, Malcolm wanted a psychological profiler. We made up a list, and your background in history put you at the top of it. Then" — she moved in to kiss me—"when I saw that picture of you…"
As she pulled her lips away again, I asked, "But why a profiler?"