Killing Time (16 page)

"No, stay, I will come
up," he answered. "I have something that may interest you."

For almost a full and very
awkward minute neither Malcolm nor I spoke; then he said, very quietly and a
bit contritely, "I know all this must sound odd, Gideon. And I know how
you must feel, given the effort you've put in. But there's a great danger in
this work of becoming overly enchanted by the ability to deceive people en
masse. I've been as guilty of it as anyone. That's why—"

"Ah, there you are!" It
was Tarbell, bounding up the stairs from the control level. "And Malcolm,
as well—you may also find this of some interest, as it concerns our old friend
Mr. Price."

The blackness that had seized
Malcolm's features moments before returned, even more quickly this time.
"What are you talking about, Leon?" he said apprehensively.

"Gideon here—or rather his
friend Mr. Jenkins—happened on the results of some other project for which
Price had been engaged. We assumed it was a film, but now, Gideon, I'm not so
sure." Shooting over to a terminal, Tarbell sat before it and called
something up on the screen, while I followed behind quickly; not as quickly,
though, as Malcolm. "Here," Leon eventually said. "Transcripts.
After that evening, Gideon, I programmed the global monitoring system to pick
out any messages involving combinations of the keywords 'Dachau' and 'Stalin.'
" Malcolm took in a sudden breath, which, though not loud enough for
Tarbell to hear, caused me to turn to him.

He was pressing his body against
the back of his chair, looking worse than I'd ever seen him; but it was very
apparent that this time his trouble was not physical.

"I had no luck until
today," Leon continued. "And then, in a cluster, several hits came
up. All from Israeli intelligence." With a sickening droop of my own
insides that I didn't really understand, I suddenly thought of the night when
Colonel Slayton had sat listening to Mossad agents feverishly talking about
terrorists and a German concentration camp. "Apparently they know about
the images," Tarbell went on, very amused. "Though the odd thing is
that they seem to think that they are entirely genuine! They've got dozens of
operatives out now, looking for one of their men who was the first to get hold
of a finished version of the sequence." His amusement subsiding, Tarbell's
eyes narrowed. "And that's the puzzling part. Why would they be looking
for one of their own people—"

"His name."
It
was Malcolm, who'd finally conquered his shock long enough to speak.

Tarbell turned. "I beg your
pardon, Malcolm?"

"His name, damn it!"
Malcolm cried, his knuckles going white as he clutched his chair.

Tarbell recoiled a bit.
"I—don't know. They make no mention of his name. Deliberately so, I would
say."

With one quick move of his arms
Malcolm propelled his chair to the screen. He examined its contents for a
moment, then grabbed Leon's shoulder hard. "Gather everyone downstairs,
Leon," he said, trying to control the inner tempest that was obviously
tossing his emotions about. "Right away, please."

Tarbell knew enough to comply
quickly, and after he withdrew, Malcolm, eyes wide and empty, turned his chair
away from the screen and rolled slowly back over to the transparent hull.

"Malcolm?" I eventually
said. "What is it?"

"You were able to break the
encryption of those images?" he asked, in the same low voice.

"Max was, yes," I
answered.

Nodding for a moment, Malcolm
murmured, "He was very good at his job, your friend Mr. Jenkins ..."

"Would you like Leon to
bring the disc up?"

Malcolm held up a hand.
"Unnecessary. I have a complete version."

As the situation began to
clarify, I felt my gut ripple again. "Then Price
did
create them
for you."

"Yes," Malcolm
whispered with another nod. He paused for what seemed a long time, then went
on, "Well, Gideon, I'm afraid your Washington project will have to wait.
If I'm right—" He lowered his head and placed his hands on either side of it.
"But I must not be right. In fact, we must pray, Gideon, that I am as mad
as I sometimes seem ..."

Whether or not Malcolm was mad,
he was certainly justified in his fearful suspicions about the mysterious
Israeli communications concerning the Stalin images. When we'd all gathered at
the table that did double duty for dining and conferring on the lower level of
the nose of the ship, Malcolm showed us the completed version of those images
and explained how they had come to be; and though just a few months earlier it
might have been difficult for me to appreciate the dangers posed by such a
seemingly random bit of visual documentation, I was now well versed enough in
the power of cleverly packaged disinformation to know that we were faced with a
potentially disastrous situation.

The images themselves were simple
enough: they showed several separate shots of Josef Stalin touring various
parts of the Dachau concentration camp sometime in the late 1930s (Dachau
having been the first of the really large-scale, factory-modeled German
extermination centers). The Soviet strongman was seen watching the laboring
prisoners, their abusive guards, and the executions and corpse disposals with
an approving eye, occasionally even chuckling as he pulled on his pipe and exchanged
information and jokes with several high-ranking SS tour guides—including, in
one shot, Heinrich Himmler. The implications were obvious: the Soviet
government had been involved not only in its own domestic genocidal policies
but, during the years prior to Hitler's invasion of Russia, in the Nazi
Holocaust, as well.

"But what was the purpose of
creating such an impression, Malcolm?" Jonah asked, deeply troubled by
what he'd seen—as, indeed, were we all.

"The Russian government has
degenerated from merely unstable to dangerous, even grotesque," Malcolm
declared, fists still tight atop the arms of his chair. "Since taking
power, the right wing has employed the same tactics that leveled Chechnya in
four other rebellious regions. Nuclear weapons and technology, though
admittedly crude, are being sold to whoever has the hard currency to pay for
them. Virtual slavery is being practiced in factories and fields, and toxic and
nuclear wastes are being dumped into shallow repositories in Siberia, which is
why that region's separatist movement has become so violent. Each new problem
only brings more vicious solutions from the central government, until it now
looks as though Russia will be the black hole of the modern world, taking all
of civilization with it when it collapses. Yet the rest of that modern world
does nothing. Foreign investment in Russia is running at absurdly high levels,
and no one can afford to tell the truth or to have it told—information and
communications companies are, after all, among the most severely overextended
in the Russian market. The argument that loans and investment will bring reform
continues to stand as self-serving nonsense of a variety to match the Chinese
model. Putting money into such a situation is simply throwing gasoline on a
fire." He caught his breath and sat back, his anger slowly giving way to
regret. "It seemed to me, in other words, that some kind of popular
redefinition of Russia's place, in the world and in history, might be called
for."

"You could hardly have
picked a more ...
provocative
event of which to make use, Malcolm,"
Tarbell said; and there was no note of irony or amusement in his voice now.

Malcolm nodded grimly. "Or a
worse person, as it turned out, to do the work. I hired John Price because none
of us had his visual manipulation skills—but I always had reservations about
him. It wasn't just that he was a freelance operator, though that did trouble
me. But a freelance operator from a place where betrayal is the unspoken stuff
of amiable meals in pleasant restaurants ... It was my mother's world; that in
itself should have kept me away. But I thought we could control him."

"I thought we
had,
"
Larissa said, in a tone that clearly indicated she had no regrets about
having been Price's executioner.

"Sometimes, Larissa,"
Malcolm said, "death doesn't put an end to the dangers a person can
pose."

"And what do you think those
dangers are?" I asked, looking around the table.

"I've studied the
communications Leon intercepted," Colonel Slayton replied. "And
putting them together with what
I
heard, I'd say the situation is very
bad. Worse yet, it's fairly advanced. The Israelis are clearly worried about
some specific terrorist response to this new revelation about the Holocaust, a
response that's apparently going to come from one of their own operatives.
Probably the same man who discovered the images."

"A fanatic? "Eli asked.

Malcolm nodded,
self-recrimination all over his face. "It's why I canceled the project in
the first place, before even telling any of you about it. There are certain
historical events, I've come to realize, that even we must never toy with—the
violence of the emotions they unleash is simply too great. We're talking, now,
about what is quite probably the blackest moment in all of human experience.
Even the tortures and brutalities of the Dark Ages had nothing like the scale,
the systematic insanity ..." Malcolm shook his head. "This man may
have lost family in the Holocaust. Or he may simply have grown unbalanced
contemplating it." I felt a quick pang of dread at this thought: not only
did it seem entirely plausible, even likely, but I'd dealt with similar
characters before and knew what they were capable of. "Whatever the
explanation," Malcolm continued, "he has now joined the ranks of
those whom the world should always fear most, those who were responsible for
the Holocaust in the first place:
fanatics.''

"The Mossad is full of
them," Colonel Slayton said, "unlike most intelligence agencies. But
they're being very careful not to use this character's name in communications
that are not absolutely secure— they're determined to handle this
internally."

"That is
understandable," Fouché judged. "Ever since they entered the Turkish
civil war on the side of the Kurds, there has been enormous tension between
America and Israel. It may be that the Israelis had no choice, now that they
are dependent on water that flows from Kurdish territory, but this does not
change the fact that Turkey remains an American ally."

"I have checked CIA communications,"
Tarbell said. "To no one's great surprise, I am sure, they know less than
we do. They are aware that the Israelis have a problem with one of their people
but have no idea why. Still, they are interested. And when the CIA staggers
blindly in the dark, well... unfortunate things have a way of occurring."

"Not to our people,"
Larissa said firmly. "The real thing to worry about is this Israeli. Who
is he? How the hell did he get hold of the images in the first place?"

"And what is he intending to
do about it?" Malcolm added. "These are all questions that
we
must
answer. Not the Israelis, not the Americans, not anyone else. I want
us to
find
this man, secure his copy of the images, and finish him."

The ruthless finality of this
statement caught me off guard. "But—surely we can just hand him over to
his people after we have the images," I said.

"No," Malcolm replied
with the same chilling determination. "If he gets back to Israel, he'll
spread rumors and stories that will be worse than the images themselves. If he
vanishes—or better yet, if we can force him to tell his superiors that the
images are actually fabrications
before
he vanishes—then and only then
will it all blow over."

I glanced quickly from face to
face. I knew that what Malcolm had said made sense, but I nonetheless found
myself hoping that someone else would raise an objection.

None came. "Where do we
begin?" Fouché asked solemnly.

"Unfortunately,"
Malcolm said, "if there were any more information in Price's New York
residence, his wife would, I suspect, have turned it over to Gideon. Which
leaves ..." His face filled with deep reluctance.

"Los Angeles," Jonah
said with a nod.

Slayton tapped the table.
"It won't be easy—the city's in chaos, along with the rest of southern
California."

"Water again," Eli
agreed.

"Yes," Malcolm said,
"but we have no choice. Set a course to approach Los Angeles from the
sea, Colonel—I don't want to get tangled up with any of the National Guard or
militia units. People who've been without adequate water for long enough can be
worse than ethnic fanatics."

"Understood," Slayton
replied, rising.

"Let's hope this will be
simple," Malcolm said as the rest of us moved to follow Slayton. The last
to go, I was almost out the door when I heard him mutter quietly, "By all
means, let's hope once more for the impossible ..."

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.