Killing Time

CHAPTER 28

The developments which led to the "water wars" that have consumed the American Southwest for the last five years have been so well scrutinized that it seems unlikely anyone today could be unfamiliar with their details. True, such an assumption is belied by the fact that the same drastic suburban overdevelopment that originally brought violent chaos into the sunniest corner of the United States is today going on in other similarly warm but arid parts of the world; so perhaps in this instance — as in, I now believe, so many others — it's wrong to think that awareness of history is anything other than intellectual vanity. Whatever the case, my principal concern in these few pages is not to summarize the origins of those vicious conflicts but to tell what came of our efforts to find in water-hungry Los Angeles a connection between John Price and the unknown Mossad operative who had taken possession of the Stalin images and then become a fugitive from his own people.

Following Malcolm's directive, we avoided the skies above southern California, not because we were aware of any specific danger posed by such a route but precisely because the situation was so unpredictable. Throughout the region National Guard units — and on a few occasions even federal troops — were desperately trying to preserve order among battling gangs and militias, each of which believed that their particular town, city, or county held the most legitimate claim to the water they had all once shared. Such engagements might involve sticks and knives, but they were just as likely to involve tanks and handheld missiles captured by the militias during run-ins with state and federal troops; and while it was unlikely that any of these weapons could score a chance hit on our ship (particularly now that we could travel under a holographic cloak), it was best to indulge the better part of valor and approach from the sea. So we climbed back into the stratosphere for half an hour or so, then waited for dark before descending to cruising altitude above the Pacific near the island of Catalina.

During that descent we received a series of satellite images which told us that although the California National Guard was still very much in evidence on the streets of Los Angeles, the city itself was relatively calm south of the Santa Monica mountains. North of that line, however, our aerial reconnaissance revealed a patchwork of hot zones, indicating that the residents of the San Fernando Valley— one of the first places to feel the full effects of the region's water depletion — were rioting and engaging the authorities with the same crazed determination that had consumed them for years. Fortunately, our particular business lay in the fashionable west side of Los Angeles: John Price's appallingly tasteless home was situated in that equally tasteless city-within-a-city, Beverly Hills.

Engaging the holographic projector, we were able to blend the silhouette of our ship seamlessly into its surroundings and thus enter the environs of the wealthy little city and deposit a search party made up of the colonel, Larissa, Tarbell, and myself in a public park. From there we made our way through palm-lined streets and entered Price's house — which was still under scrutiny as part of the investigation into his death — with comparative ease. Several hours of searching produced but one lead, although it seemed at least a hopeful one: Tarbell, digging in a group of seemingly innocuous documents, managed to find a note from one Ari Machen, a well-known film producer of Israeli origin who, Colonel Slayton informed us, had ties to various departments in the Israeli government — and to the Mossad in particular. We took the note, which made tantalizing reference to "the Russian business," and then fled the premises, very narrowly avoiding an encounter with a group of heavily armed policemen and women who were on patrol with attack dogs that had been specially trained to sniff out water: pilfering and hoarding were a booming southwestern industry, even in Beverly Hills.

Back aboard the ship we withdrew to the safety of a high altitude in order to try to piece together a plausible scenario for the several days that John Price had spent in Los Angeles before flying to New York and his fate. This task was made exponentially easier when Tar-bell managed to recover the man's e-mail records and discovered a carefully worded correspondence between the special effects genius and Ari Machen. If read by someone who hadn't seen the Stalin images, these communications might have passed for the ordinary dealings of a producer with one of his department heads; but knowing what we did about Machen's ties to Israel and about the Stalin material, we had little trouble determining that Price had shown Machen those images without revealing that they were forged. Machen, horrified, had then contacted his friends in the Mossad, several of whom actually held positions as executives at the studio where Machen currently had a production deal: given the manner in which the entertainment industry's influence on American politics and politicians had skyrocketed during the last thirty years, the Israelis — and, according to Slayton, several other foreign governments — had found it necessary to have ears in the corridors of Hollywood power.

In his dealings with Machen, Price had, as always, been motivated by money: Machen had promised him a respectable fortune for his copy of the images on the strict understanding that Price would not copy them before turning them over. Should he ever be found to have deceived Machen on this point, Price was informed, he could expect to receive certain visitors who would be happy to end his life. Indeed, from the overall tone of the communications it became clear that Machen liked playing the role of suave yet hard-boiled Zionist agent, an impression that was confirmed when Slayton said that he and Machen had crossed paths many years earlier at a Washington cocktail party. There Machen had bragged of having once been a Mossad agent himself, of having killed several Palestinian leaders, and of having arranged the disappearance from the Los Alamos, New Mexico, lab of several computer discs that contained vital American nuclear secrets. In recent years, it seemed, Machen had grown increasingly angry over the rift between Israel and the United States that had followed Israel's backing of the Turkish Kurds (another dangerous situation created by a need for water) and had used his prominent position in one of America's most crucial international industries to both promote the Israeli cause and perform intelligence services for the Israeli government.

Price had agreed to Machen's rather ominous terms concerning the Stalin images, given the amount of money involved; but that same seemingly insatiable avarice had very soon cost Price his life, when his argument with Jonah and Larissa over the Forrester business had turned violent. (Ironically, had he kept his temper and then gone through with his threat to reveal that those images had been doctored, and had the American government believed him, it would only have served Malcolm's larger purpose.) Up to this point the facts as we were able to piece them together were fairly clear; but we were still left with the rather pointed question of where the chain of revelation started by Price and Machen had broken down. Did Machen himself know the agent who was now on the loose and hiding from the Mossad? Or had there been another intermediary involved in getting the Stalin images to Israel? Such questions, unfortunately, could be answered only by Machen himself, so I made ready to accompany Colonel Slayton and Larissa back to the surface and into the fortress-community of Bel Air, behind whose high electronic fences the very wealthiest of Los Angeles's citizens had withdrawn over the past decade to enjoy their success (and copious amounts of airlifted water) under the protection of a private security force that resembled nothing so much as a secular Swiss Guard.

How, one might legitimately ask, could I have displayed or indeed felt so little reluctance about participating in an endeavor that had as its ultimate object the killing of a man? As a doctor, I had once taken an oath to do no harm, and even as we made ready to visit Ari Machen's expansive Bel Air villa I rationalized to myself that I would certainly not be the one to actually execute our unknown Israeli agent, should we discover his name and whereabouts. But there is no denying that I had gone past the point of questioning whether or not he needed to be executed, a fact for which, even now, I find that I cannot apologize. A man originally trained but now considered dangerous by such lethal shadow creatures as the Mossad was surely just that; and from the moment I'd come aboard Malcolm's ship I had learned and relearned that the seeming game he and the rest of the team were playing with the world had a lethal dimension, revealing as it did that modern economic, political, and social hierarchies were as brutal as any of their historical antecedents. I therefore accepted the kiss and the passionate embrace that Larissa tendered just before we left the ship as readily as I'd accepted her past as an assassin; and I returned them in kind without further question or doubt, prepared to do whatever was required of me. Perhaps I could have chosen differently; perhaps I should have; but I'll wager that those who think so have not faced the hard reality of a constellation of powerful enemies bent on their imprisonment or, worse yet, their destruction. Would that I too never had.