Waterworks Read online

  Waterworks

  a novel

  Lara and Uri

  Book 5

  Jack Winnick

  Copyright © 2020 Jack Winnick

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  ISBN: 9798637542901

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Waterworks is a novel; it is fiction, pure and simple. The persons described in this book, except for some well-known political figures, are creations solely from the author’s imagination. Furthermore, the events depicted have not occurred; let’s hope they never do. But the science here is real, not science fiction.

  The technology is also real—and available. Additionally, the desires, resources, and abilities of the current Iranian regime are known to us all; there is no mistake about that. The leaders of Iran have been totally transparent as to what they can and will do, given the opportunity, to annihilate the lawful nation of Israel and its citizens.

  The murder by poisoning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko is well documented. The element polonium is not found in nature; it can be produced only in a nuclear reactor as described in this book. It is as lethal as portrayed.

  The factual elements in this book have been obtained from a variety of reliable technical sources. None originated from entries in Wikipedia or any other unsubstantiated forums.

  The author wants to make these realities, chilling as they are, totally clear.

  —Jack Winnick

  Los Angeles

  March 2020

  Chapter 1

  Eddie sat back in his chair and stared out the window. It was a bright, sunny day in the San Fernando Valley, or just “the Valley,” as they called it in the Los Angeles area. Nothing new about that; almost every day was like that out here. Eddie Moskowitz had moved out here from Chicago, like many thousands of others, looking for just that: unlimited sunshine, no problems with cold, snow, or rain; and lots of girls in bikinis.

  His old pal from high school, Steve Finley, had planted the seed a couple of years ago in the midst of a typical Chicago winter. Steve called him one day, as Steve was prone to do, and as Eddie complained about the grim weather and lack of action, Steve yelled at him over the phone: “Schmuck! When are you going to listen to me and get out of that crappy Midwest?”

  It was not the first time he had heard this from Steve, who had moved to the Coast five years earlier. It seemed like every time a particularly brutal winter storm hit Chicago, he would call Eddie and tell him to “get your ass out here where there’s abundant sunshine and available young women.” But this year, it finally hit home. Eddie quit his lousy job with the city, packed his bags, and drove to Los Angeles. He shared a place with Steve out in Van Nuys, where the rent was at least reasonable, and scouted for a job.

  He’d searched around for a couple of weeks, looking for a “starter” job, one that he could use as a base while he looked for something better. He didn’t have a whole lot going for him: a diploma from a Chicago public high school and a couple of years working in a testing lab at a mortuary. Not a brilliant resume, but he was a steady worker with an excellent recommendation from his boss. He’d gotten lucky with this Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant, part of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The plant was in Sylmar, in the northern reaches of the Valley. Someone had quit the position unexpectedly, leaving the Waterworks, as they jokingly called it, with an urgent need for a lab assistant. It turned out that the simple testing he had learned at the mortuary fit well with the requirements at the plant.

  The drive from Van Nuys to Sylmar and back turned out to be lucky as well. It was counter to the bulk of the traffic; most commuters headed into LA in the morning and back to the Valley in the evening. His drive was short and painless. He fit into the job well, too. The requirements were simple: routine testing of the water coming in and out of the filtration plant. Most of the time Eddie just had to check the readings on the computer and note them on a scoreboard, a holdover from the old days when everything had been done by hand.

  There was rarely a problem; the system practically ran itself. He had lots of time to sit around, read, and daydream about his evenings at the clubs and weekends at the beach. His pasty-white body would soon match those of the young men who frequented the beach volleyball courts. Well, once he tuned up with weightlifting and running, he promised himself.

  As he looked lazily around the room, checking the readouts on the computer screens, his eyes happened on the fishbowl. They kept a few goldfish in a standard bowl on the cabinet next to the sink. Someone refreshed the water every day, using water from the filtration system. It was their “canary in the coal mine.” Hank, Eddie’s helper in the lab, had to make sure the goldfish got their daily ration of fish food. Hank was the only employee beneath Eddie at the plant; he didn’t even have a high-school diploma.

  Eddie’s eyes froze as he stared at the fish. They were floating belly-up, dead. He knew he had checked them only a half hour ago. They had been fine. “Hey, Hank,” he yelled to his helper in the lab, “what the hell you been feeding the fish?”

  Hank walked over to the fishbowl and looked at the corpses. They had occasionally lost fish, usually because the aerator quit working or one died from old age. But to lose all three in such a short time was rare. “We better call Burt,” Hank said unnecessarily. Eddie was already dialing the head of the laboratory.

  “Don’t get all in an uproar,” Burt said over the line moments later, calming Eddie down. “Happens once in a while. One gets sick, then the others get it. Been feeding them on schedule?”

  “Sure, boss,” Eddie replied. He glanced at Hank, who was listening on the speakerphone. Hank nodded meekly.

  “Aerator running OK?” Burt inquired with no sense of panic.

  “Yes,” the employees replied simultaneously.

  “When’s the last time you changed their water?”

  “I did it early this morning, as usual,” Hank replied at once.

  “Dechlorinate?”

  Hank nodded.

  “OK, well, then, check the oxygen levels, OK?”

  Hank scrambled over to the oxygen meters, reporting that the levels were well within the required limits. There was an alarm that buzzed if any of the water-chemistry limits were breached, or even close. Eddie scanned all of them; the whole bank of gas and chemical-element analyzers were well within their normal values. Lead, arsenic, chlorine, bromine, ozone, and many other chemicals were continuou
sly monitored. Chemists tested the instruments every morning using accepted analytical techniques. Nothing had been out of order during Eddie’s tenure at the plant; in fact, he had never heard of a disruption.

  When he heard that news, Burt told them he was on his way from his office and they should stay calm. It was then that Eddie looked out at the holding tanks and saw the birds. Gulls and other birds often stopped for a drink of the only fresh water in the vicinity. The water would get a final cleaning downstream. Eddie’s stomach turned as he saw no fewer than five gulls and a couple of smaller birds lying dead in the grass around the tanks. This was bad—real bad.

  Burt came in and took one look at the fish and the birds; he was immediately on the phone to city hall. Eddie couldn’t hear the conversation, but Burt’s face told everything.

  “We’re in emergency conditions as of right now,” Burt announced, his voice cracking. “We’ve got to figure out what’s going on before this water hits the city!” He raced around the control room, looking out at the tanks and ponds every few seconds, pulling at his face and hair, clearly in panic mode. “Get the chemists out there right now! We got to figure out what’s in that water.”

  The word had apparently gone to the top within minutes. The mayor, Christian “Chris” Atkins, ordered his senior staff to hustle out to the Sylmar Plant immediately. By 10:00 a.m. Atkins and his entourage arrived. There, they were shown the sudden and unexplained deluge of dead animals around the holding tanks. The chemists and other technical staff were at a loss to explain it.

  The mayor’s staff advised him to put out an immediate alert to the city and environs to stop using city water for food preparation at once. “There is no need to panic,” he assured everyone in a hastily called televised news conference in a meeting room at the plant. “It appears that some foreign substance has found its way into the storage tanks. That could be the result of our heavy winter rains; we just don’t know yet. But just to be safe . . . use bottled water for all drinking and food preparation. The city water is perfectly safe for other purposes, such as washing and watering.” Everyone in the conference room noticed his knees were shaking; Atkins hoped the home audience didn’t.

  Two hours had elapsed since Eddie had noticed the problem. The chemists had found nothing out of order in their check for contaminants. There was nothing unusual in the water; they were sure. No physical or chemical contaminant. No color or odor. No measurable radioactivity. The water was crystal clear and sparkling clean. They found no heavy metals: lead, mercury, strontium, chromium, even uranium, and plutonium were absent to the parts per billion!

  Maybe it was a fluke, the administrative head of the LADWP suggested. Maybe those birds and goldfish were already sick . . .

  “You really want to wait until a couple of people drop like those birds?!” The mayor’s hands were white with rage and fright as he squeezed the podium, totally frustrated. The other officials in the meeting room at the Plant had nothing to offer. The local and national news stations had repeated the warning about the water for more than an hour.

  The LADWP, meanwhile, was in a holding pattern. As the public demanded an update, Atkins agreed to another news conference. “The matter is receiving the utmost attention from local, state, and federal scientists and other authorities . . . ,” he said. This wasn’t completely true, although water chemists in other cities had been consulted—without success. They had nothing to suggest beyond the comprehensive chemical tests that the LADWP’s scientific staff had already performed. But they all agreed with the water advisory.

  Suddenly, in the midst of the news conference, Regis Trombley, the LADWP’s chief scientist in residence, strode majestically into the room and pronounced, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with this water!” Trombley had a PhD from Cambridge University. He drew a glass of water from the drinking fountain behind him and held it out for everyone, including the television audience, to see. Trombley had the final word on anything and everything to do with the city’s air and water chemistry.

  There was dead silence from the officials as the distinguished, silver-haired Englishman displayed his glass of tap water. “Our team of chemists has thoroughly tested this water and found nothing whatsoever wrong with it,” he declared with authority. Before anyone could stop him, he drained the glass.

  There was absolute silence in the room as the professorial Briton placed the glass on the shelf by the sink, glared at everyone in the room, and sat down jauntily. Nothing happened. The Englishman sat there, straight as an arrow, for a full fifteen minutes while the mayor reassured everyone watching before finally rising and saying, “Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.” Then he strode out of the room to a sprinkle of applause.

  The mayor stared at Burt, the head of the LADWP, who declared, “Don’t try that at home, not yet.”

  There was brief, nervous laughter from the assemblage. Then the mayor declared that this did not mean that the emergency situation was over. The ban on drinking and cooking with the city’s water was still in place until further notice.

  Chapter 2

  In the next few hours, word started to come in to the newsrooms of birds and pets falling over sick after drinking tap water left for them in the last few hours. Television stations broadcast emergency warnings to use only bottled water for feeding all animals as well as people. In the meantime, stores met with an unimaginable panic as people raced in an effort to hoard as much bottled water as humanly possible.

  In the midst of all this, Dr. Trombley made an appearance in a news conference. He was dressed, as usual, as if he were about to give a lecture at the Royal Society of London. “As you can see,” he declared emphatically, brandishing his ebony walking stick like an implement to ward off the demons of hell, “I’m still around.” He gave the cameras a wan smile and waved as he left the room.

  “Son of a bitch,” the mayor whispered to his staff. “What the hell is he thinking?” He quickly called the LADWP chief. “Any more word on the water?”

  “Don’t drink it, and tell everyone in the city the same thing. I think we have something. And it isn’t good.”

  “What is it?”

  “You remember what happened to that Ukrainian guy in London a few years ago?”

  “You mean the politician who suddenly got sick and then died from that Russian poison . . . ?” There was a ghastly pause on the line as he waited for the chief to respond.

  “It could be . . . polonium, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean, you’re afraid? Do you know, or don’t you?!”

  “We’re not completely certain, but a lot of things point that way. We’ve examined the gulls who died at the ponds. Their organs show the kind of damage you might expect—”

  “Might expect!” the mayor exploded. “We’ve got the whole city in a panic and you don’t really know?”

  “Polonium is a very rare type of radioactive material, extremely poisonous. Trombley is sick,” the chief continued soberly. “Just the early signs, but it’s scary. I told him not to show his face or say anything. We’re getting him the only stuff that may be able to help. It’s a chelating agent that—”

  “Oh my God! Don’t let any of this get out. People are frightened enough already . . . ”

  “You’ve got to get the word to the emergency rooms. They’re going to see some people with the symptoms. People who didn’t follow the warnings, or just didn’t know . . .”

  “What do we tell them?”

  “To prepare for a rush of patients with urgent digestive or urinary problems; possibly facial ulcers. They should know how to handle it. As long as it’s not too widespread.”

  The terror on everyone’s face was obvious.

  Chapter 3

  Four weeks prior to the water poisoning in Los Angeles, a clandestine meeting occurred in Tehran. Afternoon sunlight gracefully lit the tall, beautiful dining room in the extravagant palace that held two of the most powerful men in the Middle East. It filtered through luxurious dra
peries giving an almost heavenly atmosphere to the elegant mountainside structure. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the general secretary of Hezbollah, a portly, bearded man, sat calmly beside the table he shared with his host, the current president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two had enjoyed a pleasant meal of roasted chicken flavored with herbs in keeping with Nasrallah’s known preferences.

  These men shared many qualities: both were firmly committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. They had similar, totally anti-Semitic views of that entity, vocalized loudly and often. Nasrallah was quoted as calling the Jews “sons of apes and pigs,” while the Iranian vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.” They had comparable views of their Sunni-Arab neighbors but kept their comments away from the world press. The envy and hatred were there nevertheless.

  Nasrallah was physically similar to his Iranian benefactor as well; both were in their mid-sixties, short in stature and sported equally heavy facial hair. But the hold on his people, the militant Lebanese group known as Hezbollah, was even more precarious than that of his host. The president of Iran owed his office entirely to the whims of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the religious demigod of the Shia nation of Iran. Nasrallah’s hold on Hezbollah depended on his ability to convince the people of Lebanon that he was acting in their best interest. His was a tenuous grip, to which the numerous attempts on his life attested. But he survived, mainly due to his support of the notoriously vicious Syrian president in the massacre of his own people. Indeed, the unholy alliance of Syria, Iran, and Russia had a willing ally in Nasrallah and his Hezbollah.

  “Well, then,” the Iranian said as he wordlessly gestured for two young women to clear the table, “let us get down to business.” He made sure that the servants were out of the room before he proceeded. What he had to say was for no one else’s ears, especially the delicate ears belonging to the lovely girls.