Killing Time (17 page)

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.

In the United States of the
information age there are many grand houses that were once inhabited by people
who brought life into their rooms but that have now fallen into the hands of
wealthy international transients who do not so much live in this world as move
through it, grabbing at whatever power and pleasure they can. Ari Machen was
such a person, and his villa in Bel Air was such a place. Built in the
mid-twentieth century by that rarest of Angelenos, a person with genuine style,
the house as we approached it that misty night after again being deposited in
an out-of-the-way spot by our ship seemed to cry out for habitation by someone
who would make it a home, who would plant foliage and install furniture that
were expressions of personality rather than of the ability to hire what I'm
certain Leon Tarbell would have called "sexless" designers and decorators.
Melancholy prevailed over obvious signs of money in every chamber of the place;
although, given what we had come to do, such an atmosphere was only too
fitting.

Disabling first the heavyset
security guards who prowled about the estate and then the place's electronic
surveillance system did not even amuse Larissa enough to bring out her
predatory smile; or perhaps the importance of the work at hand was too great for
even her to view it as sport. With weapons at the ready we swept silently
through the house, finally detecting signs of life in the master bedroom
upstairs. It is unnecessary to detail herein what exactly was going on in that
room; suffice it to say that Machen was afflicted by all of the usual sexual
neuroses that so often characterize men whose craving for power and excitement
betrays even to the layman an almost fantastic insecurity. The sight of
strangely dressed and armed intruders was enough to send Machen's several male
and female prostitutes (he likely never would have conceded them to be such,
but they had all the earmarks) screaming toward another room, into which
Larissa promptly locked them after delivering a stern warning to be silent. Machen,
meanwhile, attempted to grab an old Colt .45 automatic from a wall full of
vintage weapons but was thwarted by Colonel Slayton, who, it seemed to me,
handled the producer in a particularly rough and humiliating manner. When
Larissa returned, she and I took up positions by the door and window, keeping
watch over the house and grounds as Slayton's interrogation began.

"You don't remember me, do
you, Mr. Machen?" Slayton asked after trussing our host up in his bed with
some drapery cord.

Machen—a small but athletically
built man of about fifty, with deeply tanned skin, thinning hair, and piggish
eyes—shook his head nervously while using his feet to try to cover his naked
body with a sheet. "Are you CIA?" he managed to get out. "Do you
work for the Palestinians?"

"The two most logical
choices, given your past exploits," Slayton answered, pulling up a chair
and straddling it. "But let's ignore the question of our identity for the
time being." Glancing around, the colonel looked both disgusted and amused
by the situation. "I admire your collection," he said, indicating the
wall of weapons. "You find they're useful in your current line of work? Or
are they trophies of your heroic service to your homeland?"

"I—I am an American
citizen," Machen said.

"Yes," Slayton answered
slowly. "The generosity of this country never ceases to amaze me." He
stood up and went to the wall, taking down an old revolver and opening its
cylinder. "Well," he said appreciatively. "Hollow-point
bullets." He began to point the gun around the room, finally bringing its
barrel to rest in Machen's direction.

Shying away a bit but desperate
to preserve some semblance of what he apparently believed was manliness, Machen
said, "I've been tortured before—by the Syrians!"

"Excellent," Slayton
answered. "Then you know what to expect." Machen's tan face paled a
little at that, and Slayton moved closer to him. "Recently you purchased
some materials from a mutual acquaintance—John Price."

Giving courage another shot,
Machen said, "Of course. He worked for me many times."

That brought the muzzle of the
revolver to his temple and an involuntary whimper from his throat. "Since
you own these weapons, I'm going to assume that you know what they do,"
Slayton said quietly. "If I pull this trigger, there won't be enough left
of your brain to feed a cat. Mr. Price is now dead. We know you weren't
responsible for that, because we were. So take this situation very seriously.
Now—you maintain links to the Mossad, and you passed the materials you bought
on to them. But somewhere along the line they got lost." Slayton cocked
the revolver. "
Where
along the line?"

"I—" Machen was by now
filled with such fear that his legs, instead of trying to cover him for
dignity's sake, were throwing the bedsheet away from him as if he were an
infant. Still he managed to declare, "I would die for Israel!"

"You
will
die for
Israel," Slayton assured him, "unless you talk to me." Machen's
whimpering became more pronounced, prompting Slayton to give him a click of the
tongue. "You've never killed an armed man in your life, have you, Ari?
Those Palestinians you murdered—they were tied up just like you are now. And
that's why you're so afraid."