by Caleb Carr
I paused in confusion for a moment. “I didn’t think a hoax could be ‘too good.’ ”
“A hoax that’s designed to be exposed can,” Malcolm replied. “Has that thought occurred to you yet, Gideon?”
“Which?”
“That our work has yet to be refuted.”
My confusion deepened. “I thought that was the whole point.”
“Hardly the whole point.” Malcolm sounded deeply disappointed, an impression that was increased when he spun his chair around in frustration. “Scarcely half the point!” he went on, the medication reviving both his strength and his passion. “Eventual discovery was part of the overall plan—we’ve disseminated these fabrications as a method of exposing the dangers of this age, not to fill people’s heads with more meaningless information!”
I shrugged and tried to calm him down: “It’s an inherent dilemma, Malcolm. Only sound hoaxes will demonstrate your point—yet sound hoaxes will, at the same time, prevent that point from being recognized. In the end, I suppose, you yourself will have to reveal what you’ve done.”
“I’ve tried!” he shot back. “Surely Larissa’s told you—we as good as revealed to the Americans that the Forrester images had been doctored. And what happened? They still unleashed those damned pilotless monstrosities on Afghanistan! And just last week I sent messages to the English and the German governments about the Churchill letters, but what was their response? Dismissal from the Germans, who have no interest in exposing the hoax—and the English say they are not prepared to present the public with refutations that are bizarre, self-serving, and therefore utterly without credibility!” He attempted to get a grip on himself. “I have not voiced these thoughts to the others, Gideon, and I would ask you not to repeat them—but there are times when I have doubts about this entire scheme. Something else, something far more drastic, may be called for.”
Remembering his passion for secrecy, I tried not to sound as curious as I felt. “Is that what you’ve been working on?”
“No.” The hardness of his tone was startling, as was the way in which his features became utterly still; then he shook his head several times, looking very uncomfortable. “That is—perhaps.” He banged a hand on the arm of his chair. “I don’t want to discuss it! The point is, I want you and the colonel to build some kind of guarantee into this one. I want to be sure—” He spun his chair to face me and held up a finger. “I want to be very, very sure that this thing will eventually be exposed. This goes much deeper than the Forrester job—we’re tampering with the very psyche of the most powerful nation on Earth, a country that no longer has to even risk the lives of its young people to enforce its political morality. We must get this one right.”
It was a little difficult to absorb this idea after so many days of trying to ensure that our hoax would be more plausible than anything the group had yet done; and with my thinking warped by those days of work, I think I might actually have tried to argue the point with Malcolm, had Tarbell’s voice not suddenly come over the address system:
“Gideon—where are you, in the turret?”
Giving Malcolm another bewildered glance, I touched a nearby keypad. “In the observation dome, Leon. Do you need me?”
“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 . . .”
C H A P T E R 2 7
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.
“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 wantus 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 . . .”
C H A P T E R 2 8
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.
