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dollars.
    His office was the guesthouse. The top floor was used for storage. The bottom floor was one large room with a galley kitchen, a gas fireplace, the obligatory media center, and a large conference table. When he was flying high in the situation comedy business they would often hold story conferences at that table.
    The south wall, like the south wall of the main house, was all glass. The view ranged from Hancock Park to Mar Vista, with Century City, the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard, Baldwin Hills, and of course downtown Beverly Hills in between. At night he could see the long lines of headlights and taillights on the I-10 and the 405, and the planes lining up to land at LAX. It was a killer view, and he had arranged the series of long oak tables he used for a desk to face it. He sat down in his chair and powered up one of the three computers on the desk. He brought up the views from the three street-side security cameras.
    All was still quiet on Mockingbird Drive.
    He saved his treatment onto a flash drive. Then he shredded it, and files of his interviews with Colonel Warner. There was nothing he could do about the bank records of the checks he had written to him. And who was he kidding? If those people thought he had seen data he shouldn’t have seen, there was a waterboard or a bullet somewhere out there with his name on it.
    Once more he went back over the events of the last two days in his mind. Was there any other possible interpretation than what Colonel Warner had shown him? Up until that morning Dave had been leaning toward the theory that he had simply been spinning a tall tale, or maybe exaggerating some rumors he had picked up from some of his friends still in government. Howwas it possible that something of that magnitude was going on, spreading around the globe, and it wasn’t all over CNN? Was that plausible?
    Well, maybe just. Keeping the secret in the Arabian desert would be the easiest. Nobody lived out there except oil workers, and they could be sequestered. The visible evidence—the smoke during the day and the flames at night—reminding him of the biblical pillars that guided the Israelites—could be explained as accidents or sabotage, for a while.
    It would he harder to cover up in Iran, Iraq, and Russia, but not impossible. For a while. That seemed to be the key here: for a while. Weeks? A month? He didn’t know how long this had been going on, so it was pointless to try to figure out how much time might be left until it all came out. Because it would have to. Surely the people living around Samotlor knew something beyond sabotage was going on. You can prevent people from traveling, cut off electronic communications, but you can’t cover all the bases. Word will get out. In time, even the
absence
of news from the region becomes noteworthy.
    So he decided the story was plausible. But plausibility was not truth. If it
was
all true, he should be doing something about it. Even if only a part of it was true, there were probably things he should be doing. Things like stocking up on food and water. Things like—worst-case scenario—buying a gun.
    But what? What would be prudent, and what would be panicky?
    He realized he didn’t have enough information. First he needed to answer the basic question: What would things be like in Los Angeles if there were no gasoline? What would they be like in the state of California, for that matter? What would they be like in America?
    He went online to try to find some answers.
    In a few hours he was much more frightened than he had been before.
    “Did you know that Los Angeles has about a sixty-day supply of water?”
    Karen looked up from her plate of take-out Thai food and frowned.
    “You mean with the drought? We’ve already cut back to watering the plants once a week. What more do they expect us to do?”
    He wasn’t going to tell them the story of the last two days until he was sure of a few more things. But his mind was swimming with recently