Free Killing Time by Caleb Carr Page A

the day he was supposed to report for duty in the Capitol—a
national frenzy was touched off. So great was the reaction, in fact, and so
dire the threats of punishment from federal authorities, that Malcolm, Eli, and
Jonah did not again return to the business of disseminating false information
until they'd finished graduate school and had begun to make names for
themselves in their respective fields. When they finally did indulge their
passion for zealous mischief again, however, the effects were even more
astounding—and dangerous.
    Joined now by Larissa, who had
earned several degrees of her own in physics, chemistry, and engineering (as
well as gaining some darker experience to which I shall shortly turn), the
young men selected for their next target nothing less than the whole of the
European continent, over which the clouds of internecine conflict had by 2017
once again gathered. Economic pressures brought on by the '07 financial crash
had finally forced the United States to withdraw the last of its peacekeeping
troops from the Balkans, and the hatreds endemic to that region had once more
become glaringly obvious. The European Union, as pusillanimous as ever when it
came to matters that involved not money but lives, had refused to fill the expensive
gap left by the Americans and indeed prevented the only member state willing to
undertake the task, Great Britain, from doing so. Thus it came about that, for
a decade after the crash, the Balkans endured massacres and reprisals on a
scale not seen for generations.
    In concocting a hoax designed to
show how little the development of information technology had done or could do
to defuse such ancient animosities, Malcolm brought onto his team both Fouché,
under whom he and the Kupermans had studied at Yale, and Tarbell, an
accomplished scientist and scholar but expert in nothing so much as highly
advanced forgery. It may be difficult to believe that the great divisions that
still mark Europe were set in motion by a few sheets of paper created by the
burly, congenial Fouché and the frenetic, gleeful little Tarbell; yet I can now
report that such was indeed the case. Julien used his skills to molecularly
manipulate samples of ink and paper so that they duplicated examples from a
century earlier, while Tarbell, using a text dictated by Malcolm, turned these
materials into a series of notes supposedly written by the British statesman
Winston Churchill to none other than Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who
shot the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and set in motion the chain of
events that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the notes,
Princip was "revealed" to have been a British agent and the
assassination to have been a plot engineered by the ever-devious Churchill and
several other British leaders to ignite a war that, they believed, would end in
the triumph and expansion of their empire.
    The idea was far more outlandish
than the Fools' Congress business had been, but once again—and this was the
very crucial point— Malcolm's speedy and thorough manipulation of all materials
relating to the "discovery" of the notes, on the Internet and in all
ancillary information systems, led to their being accepted as genuine long
before careful observers could offer more skeptical or scholarly opinions. The
Germans rose to the bait laid out by Tressalian's team, declaring that they
would not sit in the halls of European power with the British until London had
disavowed Churchill and accepted full responsibility for the war. France, too,
seized the opportunity to wax indignant, as did every other country that had
been involved in the conflict. The British, for their part, were not about to
accept the demonization of their greatest twentieth-century hero; and so the
first of what became many tumultuous cracks went singing through the Union,
causing riotous demonstrations and several threats of war.
    Even Malcolm had not anticipated
either the violence of the