“It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”
– WOODROW WILSON IN Leaders of Men
Most people think about age and experience in terms of years, but it’s really only moments that define us. We stay mostly the same and then grow up suddenly, at the turning points.
His life being pretty sweet just as it was, Noah Gardner had devoted a great deal of effort in his first twenty-something years to avoiding such defining moments at all costs.
Not that his time had gone entirely wasted. Far from it. For one thing, he’d spent a full decade building what most guys would call an outstanding record of success with the ladies. Good-looking, great job, fine education, puckishly amusing and even clever when he put his mind to it, reasonably fit and trim for an office jockey, Noah had all the bona fide credentials for a killer eHarmony profile. Since freshman year at NYU he’d rarely spent a weekend night alone; all he’d had to do was keep the bar for an evening’s companionship set at only medium-high.
As he’d rounded the corner of age twenty-seven and stared the dreaded number thirty right in the face, Noah had begun to realize something about that medium-high bar: it takes two to tango. While he’d been aiming low with his standards in the game of love, the women he’d been meeting might all have been doing exactly the same thing. Now, on his twenty-eighth birthday, he still wasn’t sure what he wanted in a woman but he knew what he didn’t want: arm candy. He was sick of it. Maybe, just maybe, it was time to consider thinking about getting serious.
It was in the midst of these deep ruminations on life and love that the woman of his dreams first caught his eye.
There was nothing remotely romantic about the surroundings or the situation. She was standing on tiptoe, reaching up high to pin a red, white, and blue flier onto a patch of open cork on the company bulletin board. And he was watching, frozen in time between the second and third digits of his afternoon selection at the snack machine.
Top psychologists tell us in Maxim magazine that the all-important first impression is set in stone within about ten seconds. That might not sound like much, but when you count it off it’s a long damn time for a guy to stare uninvited at a female coworker. By the four-second mark Noah had made three observations.
First, she was hot, but it was an aloof and effortless hotness that almost double-dared you to bring it up. Second, she wasn’t permanent staff, probably just working as a seasonal temp in the mailroom or another high-turnover department. And third, even in that lowly position, she wasn’t going to survive very long at Doyle & Merchant.
They say you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. That’s especially true in the public relations business, considering that that’s where appearance is reality. Apparently the job this girl wanted was head greeter at the Grateful Dead Cultural Preservation Society. But that wasn’t quite right; she didn’t strike him as a wannabe hipster or a retro-sixties flower child. It was more than the clothes, it was the whole picture, the way she carried herself, like a genuine free spirit. An appealing vibe, to be sure, but there was really no place for that sort of thing-neither the outfit nor the attitude-in the buttoned-up world of top-shelf New York City PR.
At about five seconds into his first impression, something else about her struck him, and he completely lost track of time.
What struck him was a word, or, more precisely, the meaning of a word: line. More powerful than any other element of design, a line is the living soul of a piece of art. It’s the reason a simple logo can be worth tens of millions of dollars to a corporation. It’s the thing that makes you believe that a certain car, or a pair of sunglasses, or the cut of a jacket can make you into the person you want to be.
The definition he’d received from an artist friend was rendered not in words but in a picture. Just seven light strokes of a felt-tip marker on a blank white page and before his eyes had appeared the purest essence of a woman. There was nothing lewd about it, but it was the sexiest drawing Noah had ever seen in his life.
And that is what struck him. There it was at the bulletin board, that same exquisite line, from the toes of her sandals all the long, lovely way up to her fingertips. Unlikely as it must seem, he knew right then that he was in love.
Can I help you with that?”
Noah’s opener, not one of his smoothest, was punctuated by the thunk of his Tootsie Roll into the metal tray of the candy machine.
She paused and glanced across the otherwise deserted break room. It was a cool, dismissive gaze that took him in with a casual down-and-up. Without looking away she hooked a nearby footstool with her toe and dragged it close, stepped up onto it, and then went back to pinning her flier in place high up on the corkboard. The gesture made it clear that if all he could offer was a few extra inches off the floor, she would somehow find a way to live without him.
Fortunately, Noah was blessed with a blind spot for rejection; she’d winged him, sure, but he wasn’t nearly shot down. He smiled and, even at a distance, imagined he could see just a hint of dry amusement in her profile as well.
Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory. Without a doubt all the goodies were in all the right places, but no mere scale of one to ten was going to do the job this time. It was an entirely new experience for him. Though he’d been in her presence for less than a minute, her soul had locked itself onto his senses, far more than her substance had.
She hardly wore any makeup, it seemed, nothing needed concealment or embellishment. Simple silver jewelry, tight weathered jeans on the threadbare outer limits of the company’s casual-Friday dress code, everything obviously chosen and worn for no one’s approval but her own. A lush abundance of dark auburn hair pulled back in a loose French twist and held in place by two crisscrossed number-two pencils. The style was probably the work of only a few seconds but it couldn’t have been more becoming if she’d spent hours at a salon.
A number of unruly strands had escaped confinement in the course of the workday. These liberated chestnut curls framed a handsome face made twice as radiant by the mysteries surely waiting just behind those light green eyes.
He walked nearer, reading over her flier as she pressed a final pushpin into its upper corner. It was an amateurish layout job but someone had taken the time to hand-letter the text in a passable calligraphy. The heading was a pasted-on strip of tattered, scorched parchment that looked like it had been ripped from the original draft of the U.S. Constitution.
We the People
If you love your country but fear for its future,
join us for an evening of truth that will open your eyes!
Guest speakers include:
Earl Matthew Thomas-1976 U.S. Presidential candidate (L) and bestselling author of Divided We Fall
Joyce McDevitt-New York regional community liaison, Liberty Belles
Maj. Gen. Francis N. Klein-former INSCOM commanding general (ret. 1984), cofounder of GuardiansOfLiberty.com
Kurt Bilger-Tri-state coordinator, Sons of the American Revolution
Beverly Emerson-Director emeritus, Founders’ Keepers
Danny Bailey-The man behind the YouTube phenomenon Overthrow, with 35,000,000 views and counting!
Bring a friend, come lift a glass, and raise your voice for liberty!
www.FoundersKeepers.com
The date, time, and location of the meeting were printed underneath.
“This event, it’s happening tonight?” Noah asked.
“Congratulations, you can read.” She was moving some other bulletins and notices, repinning them elsewhere to give her announcement a bit more prominence.
“Maybe you should have posted that last week. People make plans-”
“Actually,” she said, finishing her rearrangement, “this was just an afterthought. I don’t really expect anyone here to be all that interested.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She turned, a little taller than eye level from the summit of her step-stool. Close-up now and face-on, she had a forthrightness that was every bit as intriguing as it was disquieting.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, I really want to know.”
“All you PR people do is lie for a living,” she said. “The truth is just another story to you.”
He felt an automatic impulse to mount a defense, but then swallowed it before he could speak. In a way she was absolutely right. In fact, what she’d just said was an almost perfect layman’s translation of the company’s mission statement, all weasel words aside.
Seemed like an excellent time to change the subject.
“I’m Noah,” he said.
“I know. I sort your mail.” The following details were blithely enumerated, thumb to fingertips, summing him up neatly on the digits of a single hand. “Noah Gardner. Twenty-first floor, northwest corner office. Vice president as of last Thursday. And a son of a… big shot.”
“Wow. For a second I wasn’t sure where you were going with that last one.”
“Your dad owns the place, doesn’t he?”
“He owns a lot of it, I guess. Hey, I have to confess something.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“You haven’t told me your name yet,” Noah said, “and I’ve been trying to read it off your name tag, but I’m worried that you’ll get the wrong idea about where I’m looking.”
“Go for it. I’m not shy.”
On their way down, his eyes wandered only twice, and only briefly. He caught a glimpse of a small tattoo, finely drawn and not quite hidden by the neckline of her top. All that was visible was an edge of the outstretched wing of a bird, or maybe it was an angel. And a necklace lay against her smooth pale skin, a little silver cross threaded on a delicate wheat chain.
Her ID was clipped low along the V of her pullover sweater, which fit as though it had been lovingly crocheted in place that very morning. The badge itself was a temporary worker’s tag, only one notch above a guest pass. She was smiling in the photo, but a real smile, the kind that made you want to do something worthy just so you could see it again.
“Molly Ross,” he said.
She tipped his chin back up with a knuckle.
“This is fascinating and all, Mr. Gardner, but I need to go and service the postage meter.”
“Just wait a second. Will you be at this meeting tonight?”
“Yeah, I sure will.”
“Good. Because I’m going to try to make it there myself”.
She looked at him evenly. “Why?”
“Why do you think? I’m very patriotic.”
“Really.”
“Yes, I am. Very patriotic.”
“That reminds me of a joke,” Molly said. “Noah comes home-Noah from the Bible, you know?”
He nodded.
“So Noah comes home after he finally got all the animals into the ark, and his wife asks him what he’s been doing all week. Do you know what he said to her?”
“No, tell me.”
Molly patted him on the cheek, pulled his face a little closer.
“He said, ‘Honey, now I herd everything.’”
She stepped down to the floor, scooted the stool back to where it had been, and headed for the hallway.
“Don’t forget your candy bar,” she added, over a shoulder.
Despite his normally ready wit, the door to the break room had hissed closed and clicked behind her long before a single sparkling comeback came to mind.
Classified: TS-CCO//ORCON
“Constitutionalists,” Extremism, the Militia Movement, and the Growing Threat of Domestic Terrorism
Executive Summary
As the Administration continues to be tested by economic, social, and political challenges unprecedented in our country’s history, the rise of radical/reactionary organizations and the accompanying dangers of “patriotic rebellion,” virulent hate-speech, and homegrown terrorism must now be acknowledged as a major threat to national security.
With this clear and present danger in mind, it is our recommendation that contingency plans be developed (using data from previous exploratory actions [e.g., Ops. REX-84] and in accordance with HSPD-20 / NSPD-51) with the following objectives:
1. Identification
Educate law enforcement and enlist the populace in a program designed to profile, identify, and report individuals and groups engaging in suspect behaviors, protests/advocacy, distribution of inciting literature, and/or evidencing support of issues that are known “red flags”: [1]
– Militant anti-abortion or “pro-life” organizers / “Army of God” / home-schoolers
– Anti-immigration / “border defenders” / NAU alarmists / Minutemen / “Tea Parties”
– Militia organizations / military reenactors / disenfranchised veterans / survivalists
– Earth First / Earth Liberation Front / “green anarchists” / seed-bankers
– Tax resisters / “End the Fed” proponents / IRS/WTO/IMF/ World Bank protesters
– Anti-Semitic rhetoric: Bilderberg Group / CFR / Trilateral Comm. / “New World Order”
– Third-party political campaigns / secessionists / state sovereignty proponents
– Libertarian Party / Constitution Party / “patriot movement” / gun rights activists
– “9/11 Truth” / conspiracy theorists / Holocaust deniers / hate radio/TV/Web/print
– Christian Identity / White Nationalists / American Nazi Party / “free speech” umbrella
2. Classification / isolation / aggressive watchlisting
Classify identified individuals and groups based on updated DHS threat-level criteria. [2] Aggressively deploy surveillance, law enforcement tactics (e.g., “knock-and-talk” “sneak & peek,” checkpoints, exigent search & seizure), and other available preventive and punitive measures / resources (e.g., No-Fly / No-Buy list) as appropriate to scale.
3. Detention / rendition / interrogation / prosecution
The extralegal practice of indefinite preventive detention / enhanced interrogation / rendition of nonmilitary enemy combatants has been normalized in the public perception, at least to a serviceable extent. The precedent has been established and remains supported by a neutral-to-positive portrayal in the mainstream media. However, with U.S. citizens suddenly in the news in the place of al-Qaeda terrorists, some level of psychological resistance must be anticipated and then defused when it arises. It is the opinion of the committee that such a reflexive populist reaction would prove to be a major obstacle to progress. In fact, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event (on the order of a Pearl Harbor / 9/11 attack), there is a potential that the government’s reasonable actions in this critical area may be met with significant public outrage and even active sympathy and misguided support for these treasonous/seditious elements and their hate-based objectives.
“I think I’ve read quite enough.”
Arthur Isaiah Gardner closed his copy of the new client’s binder, placed it carefully on the conference room table, and then slid it a precise few inches forward, to a spot just outside his circle of things that mattered.
Noah had grown up with a healthy dread of this gesture but, in more recent years, he’d come to appreciate its versatility. As an all-purpose expression of deep fatherly disappointment it worked just as well for a prep-school report card as it did for a disastrously leaked presidential briefing document set to splash on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post.
The old man breathed a shallow, weary sigh and stood at his place, looking every bit as elder-statesmanly as he did in the portrait that loomed over the main lobby downstairs. That oil painting was the closest that most of D &M’s four-hundred-odd employees ever got to their company’s patriarch. When he wasn’t traveling he kept to his office, and his office had an elevator all its own.
“Actually, Mr. Gardner, I think the team would be well served by reviewing-”
“Who spoke?”
Noah’s father hardly ever expressed his anger directly anymore. Not like the olden days; his legendary temper had refined with age and in the past ten years it was a rare thing to hear him even raise his voice. The venom was all still there, but it had been distilled and purified to the point that its victims often failed to notice the sting of the lethal injection. “Who spoke?” was uttered with genuine wonder, as though the old man had been addressing a cage full of laboratory rats when suddenly one in the back had raised his little pink paw with a question.
The room fell dead silent.
“I did.” It was an older man at the far side of the long table, positioned in the power seat on the client side. Nice suit and a fresh, careful haircut, a touch of a rosy blush now rising in his cheeks.
“Stand up.”
The man leaned back a bit in his chair, grinned sheepishly, and then let it fade away. He glanced around, seeking moral support from the others in his party, but no one met his eyes.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said feebly.
Arthur Gardner answered only with a slight upward motion of his open hand, reminding the man that he’d been clearly directed to get up onto his feet. A few long seconds crawled by before he complied.
“To put your busy mind at ease,” the old man said, “let me assure you that the trifling problem you brought us today is already put safely to bed. The story in the Post has been spiked, an eager team of computer sleuths is tracking down the source of your leak, and the memorandum itself is now being thoroughly and plausibly denied by its authors and blamed on an overzealous local bureaucracy somewhere in the barren Midwest. Who will be the culprit again, Noah?”
“Illinois National Guard,” Noah said.
“There. Crisis averted. All neatly handled before ten a.m. this morning by my son. Noah is a brilliant boy, if I do say so myself, though I’m sure he would agree that he hasn’t yet inherited his father’s taste for blood. Even so, he’s more than a match for such a minor predicament.”
In the midst of a sip of coffee, Noah raised his cup in mock acknowledgment of the faint praise. From the corner of his eye he saw the standing man over on the client side raise a curt index finger for attention.
“With all due respect, Mr. Gardner, that may very well be, but-”
“Enough!”
With surprising vigor for a man of seventy-four, Arthur Gardner suddenly swept the heavy binder from the table and sent it crashing into the wall. The government man stopped talking, his eyes a little wider, the rest of his face suspended in mid-syllable. Before the released papers finished fluttering to the carpet, a set of interns quietly scurried from the shadows like Wimbledon ball boys to spirit the wreckage away.
“A columnist in the Wall Street Journal once wrote”-Noah’s father straightened his cuffs from the preceding exertion as he spoke-” that I had more money than God. I can’t attest to that. I don’t believe in God, and like a growing number of the world’s other major economies, I no longer believe in the dollar, either. Only two things are sacred to me now. One is my time, and I’ll caution all of you not to waste another second of it. The other is my legacy. It had been my wish today to present you with an opportunity to share in that, but these interruptions are making that nearly impossible. Now, if there are no further objections to deviating from your faxed agenda, I would love to continue.”
No one said a word, and he nodded.
“Very well, then. In my review of that unfortunate document, along with your wider state of affairs, I was reminded of two significant events in my life. The first occurred in early 1989, when a coalition of businessmen came to me with a challenge.
“Their predecessors had sweated out a tidy little hundred-million-dollar market over the preceding century or so, and these men were happy with the success they’d inherited, but they wanted a tiny bit more. Maybe just three to five percent domestic expansion on an annual basis. So they came to me, hats in hands, and asked if I thought such a heady level of growth might somehow be within their reach. And they brought a binder with them, much like yours, full of their fears and worries and their modest little hopes and dreams.”
He turned to directly address the other man still standing across the room. “Mr. Purcell, isn’t it? A very slowly rising star, I understand, in our mighty Department of Homeland Security?”
A tight little nod, nothing more.
“You were so eager to guide me along earlier. A virgin whiteboard awaits there along the wall, freshly erased, with a new set of colorful markers all at your disposal. I believe we can even muster a laser pointer to help you direct our rapt attention around your fascinating illustrations. So, would you like to lead this meeting now, or will you indulge me to continue?”
A muscle tensed in Purcell’s jaw but he didn’t speak. After a moment he moved to return to his chair but was stopped by the slightest tic of the old man’s hand. It was the sort of unspoken cue that a dog trainer might give to a spirited bitch on her first session off the choke chain.
“Stay another moment, Mr. Purcell. Help me. Ask me what it was that these men were selling, and I’ll show you the path to a whole new world in which everything you want is laid out before you, ripe for the bountiful harvest.” The old man walked around to the other side of the table, until the two were nearly toe-to-toe. He nodded, encouraging. “Go ahead, ask me.”
When Purcell finally spoke his voice was weak and low. “What was it?”
Arthur Gardner let a smile touch the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, nothing of any value. Only water.” The old man put his hand on Purcell’s shoulder, gripped it warmly, and then motioned for the bewildered man to resume his seat, which he did. “Forgive me, everyone. Our colleague Mr. Purcell has graciously assisted me in a demonstration, the point of which we will return to shortly.”
Projection screens began to hum down from the ceiling, gradually covering the paneled walls of the wide, round room. As the screens clicked to their stops in unison the lights dimmed to half brightness. All that remained was a circle of soft illumination that dutifully followed Arthur Gardner as he made his way back to his place.
“I’ll tell you all what I told those bottled-water men, twenty years ago in this very room. If that binder is the limit of your ambitions, then you’ve come to the wrong place. Both sides of Madison Avenue are lined with hucksters and admen, the most backward of which can deliver such a minor achievement for an insignificant fee. Go in peace if that’s all you want. But they stayed, as I hope you will, and I led them to where they stand today, with their goals not only realized, or doubled, or quadrupled, but in fact multiplied a thousandfold. And I can do the same for yours.”
A bookish younger woman in the client party hesitantly raised her hand just a bit above the edge of the table, as though volunteering for a solo frontal assault on the guns of Navarone. She spoke, but only after a nod of permission from the man at the podium.
“I’m not sure we understand what you mean, Mr. Gardner,” she said. “Our goals?”
“Your goals, yes. Your future. The future of the government you serve. Which is to say, the future of this country, and the urgency to act on her behalf. And that brings us to my second story, which strangely enough continues our watery theme.
“A while ago I was vacationing abroad in Sri Lanka-what year was it now? Ah yes, 2004, just after Christmas. A servant girl came to me and woke me from the most wonderful dream. She was breathless, the poor young thing, and told me an urgent message had arrived, word of an earthquake near Sumatra, and that we needed to leave as soon as possible. Well, I had my breakfast brought in as my things were packed and an aircraft was chartered, and we all dressed for travel and then went up to the roof to await our departure.
“A wave was coming, you see. This earthquake had released the energy of half a billion atomic bombs under the ocean and a tsunami was spreading out from the epicenter at five hundred miles per hour in all directions.”
He took a moment to sample his tea and then set the cup back carefully onto its saucer.
“The helicopter soon arrived and our party began to board. It was such a beautiful morning, everything seemed as though all was right with the world, and by every appearance all the people down on the beach were completely unaware of what was coming. I wanted to stay, and so we stayed. There were teenagers surfing, families walking their dogs along the sand, or boating, or flying kites; children were searching for shells with their buckets and shovels. I couldn’t look away; it was fascinating to me-the people down there either didn’t know or didn’t understand that something unthinkable was on its way to destroy them.
“From the roof I watched the waters slowly pull back from the beach. They all watched as well. It must have been an illusion but it seemed the sea receded halfway out to the horizon. For every one of those people who turned and ran for higher ground there were hundreds who stayed, mesmerized as their impending doom gathered strength.
“I was later told that there had been some form of warning system in place but it had failed, or that those in charge of the public safety had become so complacent that the red phones and radio alerts went unheard and unanswered. But I’ll tell you what I believe.
“I believe those people stayed because they thought the fragile things they’d built would last forever. They looked at the breakwater walls and they trusted them. Nothing could breach those walls, because nothing ever had before. But when the seas came in it wasn’t in the form of a wave at all, it was an uprising of Nature herself, steady and swelling and ruthless and patient, completely oblivious to the frail constructions of mankind. And it was all swept away. My holiday was cut short, and two hundred and fifty thousand people in the region lost their lives.”
The old man looked to each of the attendees, one by one.
“Bear Stearns, a cornerstone firm of Wall Street founded when my father was a young man, a company whose stock had quite recently been selling at a hundred and sixty dollars a share, was bailed out by the Federal Reserve and J.P. Morgan at two dollars per share. That was the beginning, my friends. That was your earthquake under the sea.
“As I reviewed your situation this morning it occurred to me: you’re just like those people down on the beach in Kalutara, aren’t you? You’re watching a world-changing disaster on the rise, and yet for some odd reason you seem to be fretting about how the American people would feel if they were to read of your perfectly justified panic in their morning newspaper. That isn’t your problem at all, of course. It’s not what they might think of you that should be keeping you up at night; it’s what they might very well do to you, and to your superiors, in the aftermath of the global catastrophe that’s just around the corner.
“Look at you. You’re stacking sandbags when your entire coastline is about to change forever. All the while the crimes you’re so worried that people will discover are still in progress. We are in the midst of what will become the most devastating financial calamity in the history of Western civilization, and just this week-please do correct me if my figures are wrong-the Congress and the administration have committed to funnel almost eight trillion dollars to the very institutions that engineered the crisis. And in your infinite wisdom you’ve openly placed their cronies and henchmen in charge of the oversight of this so-called economic stimulus. It’s a heist, an inside job. It’s been done before, of course. Social Security was the boldest Ponzi scheme in history until now. But all the bills for all those years are finally coming due, and there’s not enough money in the world to pay them.”
A ring of digital projectors near the ceiling awoke out of standby and the wraparound screens encircling the room came alight with an unbroken panorama of changing, flowing imagery. Charts and graphs, spreadsheets and Venn diagrams, time lines and flowcharts and nomograms, none displayed long enough to absorb, except as a blurry continuum of research and market intelligence behind the old man’s words.
“Over the last century you’ve saddled your hapless citizens with a hundred thousand billion dollars in unsecured debt, money they’ll be paying back for fifty generations if there are still any jobs to be had by then. Meanwhile you’re up to your necks in misguided, escalating wars on two unforgiving fronts with no sign of the end. That’s trillions more in unpayable IOUs.
“Banks are failing across the country. More banks have failed so far this year than in the whole of the last decade. Your debt-fueled economy is entering a spiraling free fall, yet your first reaction was to ignore the needs of the voting public and reward the perpetrators themselves. While foreclosures of your citizens’ homes are breaking all records and unemployment is exploding in every state you’ve been busy dodging audits and nationalizing the mountainous gambling losses of the Wall Street elite. For heaven’s sake, you nationalized General Motors just to get your union friends off the hook. As you know, those union pensions you just took over are severely underfunded, adding another seventeen billion dollars to your tab. Seventeen billion, I might add, that you don’t have.”
Arthur Gardner’s silvery voice had been gathering strength until it filled the room to the rafters, point upon point with the swelling command and cadence of a tent-revival preacher calling down the Rapture.
“Just to stay afloat the government is borrowing five billion dollars every day at ever-rising interest rates from our fair-weather friends in Asia. But that will all come to an end as they see the waters receding from the beach. Sooner or later the truth will be undeniable, that these massive debts can never be repaid, and there’ll be a panic, a worldwide run against the dollar, and through your actions you’ve ensured that the results will be fatal and irreversible.
“It’s not only happening here, it’s everywhere. Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope: the only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace. And that was done, but with unintended if predictable consequences. Instead of helping each other, these international bankers have all used their power for short-term gains, running up unimaginable debts on the backs of the public. We’re all shackled together at the wrists and ankles as the ship goes down, and, once it begins, this mutually assured destruction will come on us not over months, but overnight. A depression that makes the hell of the 1930s look like heaven on Earth will sweep across this country in a tidal wave of ruin, the scale of which has never been imagined. And when that happens, who do you think the masses will come for? Here’s a little hint: The people who will be held responsible are sitting around this table.”
The room fell silent. The humming of the projectors was the only discernible sound.
“Yes, they will come for you. All of you. You built this system; you told them everything would be fine. It is your lies they will remember when they realize that their money is as worthless as the promises you made them. It is your deceit they will recall when they realize that the future of their children has vanished. And, trust me when I tell you, it is your faces they will picture when they realize that forty-hour weeks at minimum wage have replaced their retirements.
“How do I know all of this? Simple: When things go wrong, there must always be someone to blame; a villain, if you will. As they say in your neck of the woods, ‘If you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.’ If you walk out of here today with the same arrogance you came in with, then you, my friends, will all soon be the special of the day.”
He paused to take them in again, a half circle of understandably pale, stricken faces lit only by the cold proofs of impending doom projected on the screens around them.
“But all is not lost,” the old man said. His features softened with the tiniest hint of a knowing smile.
“Tell us what we need to do.” It was the woman who’d spoken up earlier. Judging by the breathy reverence in her voice, she’d already entered the early stages of baptism into the cult of Arthur Gardner.
He stepped to a neat stack of identical folders at the near corner of the table and took the top copy in his hands. “Your answer is in here,” he said. “I am a strategist, and a man of some modest renown in that sense, though in this case I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants-Woodrow Wilson, Julian Huxley, Walter Lippmann, Cloward and Piven, Bernays and Ivy, Saul Alinsky. The list is long. All I’ve done here”-he held up the folder-”is to crystallize the vision of those who’ve come before me, those who dreamed of a new and sustainable progressive nationalism but never saw their dreams fully realized.
“Because we must, we will finally complete what they envisioned: a new framework that will survive when the decaying remains of the failed United States have been washed away in the coming storm. Within this framework the nation will reemerge from the rubble, reborn to finally take its rightful, humble place within the world community. And you,” he said, looking around the table, “will all be there to lead it.”
A hand went up on the far side, a question from the senior member of the party, who’d so far only listened in silence.
“Mr. Gardner,” the man said. “What about the public?”
“What about them? The public has lost their courage to believe. They’ve given up their ability to think. They can no longer even form opinions, they absorb their opinions, sitting slack-jawed in front of their televisions. Their thoughts are manufactured by people like me. What about the public? Twenty years ago in this room I showed a small group of shortsighted businessmen how to sell the public the most abundant substance on the face of the earth at ten times the price of premium gasoline, the very same water that flows from their own kitchen faucets for one-tenth of a penny per gallon. That would seem unbelievable; it defies all logic and reason. Your grandparents would have called it larceny, fraud, or wanton thievery… and rightly so, I might add. But that experience proved one thing to me: there’s a double-edged sword by which the public can be sold anything, from a three-dollar bottle of tap water to a full-scale war.”
The screens winked out at once, and left behind were three tall words in black on white, dominating the room from floor to ceiling.
HOPE AND FEAR
“Do you see? If the people are simply swindled there’s always a chance they might one day awaken and rebel against the crime. But we don’t change their minds; we change the truth. Most people simply want to be left alone; they’ll go along with anything as long as we maintain their illusions of freedom and the American way. We leverage their hopes and feed their fears, and once they believe, they’re ours forever. After that they can be taken by the scruff of the neck and shown the indisputable scientific proof, with their own eyes they can read the label that says contents drawn from a municipal water supply, and they will only nod their sleepy heads and walk past the faucet to the vending machine. That’s when you know that anything is possible.
“You!” He pointed to Mr. Purcell at the far end of the table, who flinched as though he’d just been goosed by a cattle prod. “You entered this room thinking of me as a hired hand, believing you were a master of these proceedings, and since you pay my salary, by all rights you should have been correct. Why then did you allow me, your humble employee, to overpower you, to control you, to humiliate you in front of your peers and subordinates? Why?”
When it became clear that not even a stammering answer was forthcoming the old man continued.
“Indoctrination. I made you afraid, Mr. Purcell, and in your fear you accepted my truth, my power, and you abandoned your own. The public will do the same; leave them to me. The misguided resistance that still exists will be put down in one swift blow. There’ll be no revolution, only a brief, if somewhat shocking, leap forward in social evolution. We’ll restore the natural order of things, and then there will be only peace and acceptance among the masses.” He smiled. “Before we’re done they’ll be lining up to gladly pay a tax on the very air that they breathe.”
Arthur Gardner walked a few steps closer to the group at the other end of the table.
“Each of you was invited here this afternoon at my suggestion. The small but serious problem you brought with you was merely a point of entry, a premise for our introduction today. That leaked document sparked a conversation that I’ve had with your superiors, and they with theirs and so on, about a wide-ranging plan of action that has long been in development and now awaits its execution.
“I told them that now is the time, and ultimately they concurred, with one condition. You, all of you here, are to be put in charge of enforcement-the boots on the ground, if you will. Before this new order of things can be brought forth, it was decided that you must all, unanimously, agree to protect and defend and rebuild what will remain of this country after its transformation.”
On the screen behind him a quotation faded in, finely lettered as though written in the author’s original hand. It took a moment but Noah soon recognized the words from Julius Caesar.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
and we must take the current when it serves,
or lose our ventures.
The old man watched them as they read, and then he spoke again.
“Shakespeare wrote of a time of great decision, and ladies and gentlemen, that time has come. We stand at a crossroads; the civilized world stands at a crossroads. Down one path all men are created equal: equal in poverty, equal in ignorance, equal in misery. Down the other is the realization of the brightest hopes of mankind. But not for all men; that was a brief experiment, tried and failed. Abundance, peace, prosperity, survival itself-these coveted things are reserved for the fittest, the deserving, the most courageous of us, the wisest. The visionaries.”
The room was still again, and he let it stay that way for a while.
“Now,” Arthur Gardner said, his voice just above a whisper, “while the tide is in our favor-come with me. You can still save yourselves, and in so doing, you can help us build a whole new world upon the ashes of the old.”
Noah stopped in the middle of the main hallway and stood there for a while, his head full of unfinished thoughts and that troubling fogginess you feel only when you’ve forgotten where you’re going, and why.
That meeting was still going on, but without him. His father had called a break and passed him a note with a list of phone numbers and a few bullet points of instructions-one last errand to perform before he could leave for the weekend. These were apparently VIPs to be invited for the after-hours portion of the presentation, provided the first part had gone as hoped. Evidently it had.
This task he’d been given had started out strange, and then one by one the calls had only gotten stranger.
There were no names, only numbers. Each of the calls was answered before the second ring, not by a service but by a personal assistant. Every one of those phones was professionally attended after business hours on a Friday night, and probably twenty-four hours a day by the sound of it. That seemed oddly extravagant, but maybe it wasn’t so unusual considering the circles in which his father was known to travel.
There’d been audible indications of a scrambler during at least four of the brief conversations, and some sort of voice-alteration gizmo on one of them. Everyone had seemed extremely wary of revealing any information about the identity of the person associated with each number, but the last one hadn’t been quite careful enough.
Noah had caught a last name spoken in the background during this final call. It was a Manhattan number, a 212 area code, and the name he’d heard was an uncommon one. He’d also seen it in the newspaper earlier in the day. That call had been to the private line of the most likely nominee for the next U.S. Treasury secretary, assuming the election went as forecast.
This man was also the current president of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. He and twenty or so others of comparable status were apparently now dropping everything and coming here, bound for a conference room where Noah’s father was waiting with the previous attendees.
He walked to the southeast corner suite and keyed himself into the private kitchen used to prepare his father’s meals on those days he was in town. The room was all tile and polished granite and stainless steel, larger than most of the executive offices and equipped for Arthur Gardner’s personal chef.
Noah flipped on the blower over the range, lit the cooktop in back, and followed the final instruction on his list of things to do.
Destroy this paper; be certain to watch it burn.
His errand complete, Noah resumed his drift through the halls. It was hard to say how much time had passed since he’d been ordered out of the remainder of that meeting. No clocks were allowed on the walls or the wrists at Doyle & Merchant.
It was one of the many quirks meant to remind everyone that this wasn’t just another workplace. Over the decades this office had morphed into a science-fair diorama of the inside of the old man’s brain, furnished with everything he liked and nothing that he didn’t. Sometimes these oddities arose from an impulse or an outburst, other times from long deliberation, but once King Arthur had passed final judgment on a thing he never, ever changed his mind. The clock business happened a few years before Noah was born.
In 1978 an account executive had checked her watch during Arthur Gardner’s heartwarming remarks at the company Christmas party. She’d looked up when the room got quiet and had seen in Noah’s father’s eyes what time it really was: time for her to find another job, in another city, in another industry. By the following Monday the unwritten no-timepiece rule was in full and permanent effect. It was only by His grace that windows were still tolerated, though access to any view of the outside world was strictly confined to the executive offices.
Noah resumed his stroll and took a meandering right turn, still without a clear destination. There wasn’t a soul in the place, though some would say that in the PR business that phrase always applies.
This particular corridor was the company’s walk-through résumé, a gallery of framed and mounted achievements, past to present. Press clippings, puff pieces, planted news items and advertorials, slick, crafted cover stories dating back to the 1950s, digitized video highlights running silently in their flat-screen displays. It was a hall of fame unparalleled in the industry and the envy of all competitors.
No trophy case, though; you’d never see a flashy award show for outstanding PR campaigns, God no, not for the serious stuff. It’s the first rule, and one of the only: The best work is never even noticed. If the public ever sees your hand in it, you failed.
Near the beginning of the walk were the relatively small potatoes: crazy Pet Rock-style fads that had inexplicably swept the country, the yearly conjuring of must-have Christmas toys (murders had been committed for a spot in line to buy some of these), a series of manufactured boy bands and teen pop music stars, most of whom could neither carry a tune nor play an instrument. On a dare, Noah’s father had once boasted that he could transform some of the century’s most brutal killers into fashion statements among the peace-loving American counterculture. And he’d done it; here were pictures of clueless college students, rock stars, and Hollywood icons proudly wearing T-shirts featuring the romanticized images of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara.
Last in this section were a few recently developed pharmaceuticals that had required some imaginative new diseases to match them. Drugs weren’t so very different from other products; it was all just a matter of creating the need. If you hear about restless-leg syndrome often enough, one day soon you might start to believe that you’ve got it. Cha-ching; another job well done.
Farther along, just past Big Tobacco, was a small exhibit devoted to the poster-child client in the world of public relations: the lottery. Fun fact: as a naïve youngster during a rare family chat at the Gardner dinner table, Noah had come up with the tagline displayed in this frame. It had been the first time he’d ever earned a pat on the head from the old man: You can’t win if you don’t play. Sure, kid. And you can’t fly if you don’t flap your arms.
No other product could demonstrate the essence of their work as perfectly as the lottery. The ads and jingles might remind all the suckers to play, but it was the PR hocus-pocus that kept them believing in the impossible, year after year. A fifth-grade math student could seemingly blow the lid off the whole scam: to reach even a fifty-fifty chance of winning you’d have to buy a hundred million Powerball tickets. Everybody knows that, but still they dream on. Take their money and give them nothing but a scrap of paper and disappointment in return, and then- and this is the key-make them line up every week to do it again. If you can pull that much wool over the eyes of the public and still sleep at night, you’ve got a long and rewarding career ahead of you.
Each of these PR triumphs represented a defeat for someone else, of course. That was simply the nature of the business, of all business really. The whole concept of winning requires that others lose, and sometimes they lose everything. That’s just the way it had to be. A person could waste his whole life trying to work out the right and wrong of it all.
Case in point: Noah had a friend in college, not a close friend, but a self-described bleeding-heart lefty tree-hugging do-gooder friend who’d gone to work for an African aid organization after graduation. She’d kept in touch only casually, but her last sad letter had been one for the scrapbook. It turned out that after all the fund-raising and banquets and concerts and phone banks, all the food and clothing and medical supplies they’d shipped over had been instantly hijacked and sold on the black market, either by the corrupt provisional government, the corrupt rebel militias, or both. Most of the proceeds bought a Viking V58 cruiser for the yacht-deprived son of a parliament member. The rest of the money went for weapons and ammunition. That arsenal, in turn, fueled a series of sectarian genocidal massacres targeting the very starving men, women, and children whom the aid was meant for.
Back in his younger days, Noah had been quick to snatch a moral from this story: You can’t fix everything, and maybe you can’t fix anything at all. It’s all too big, and too broken. So don’t rock the boat, kid. Just count your blessings, keep your head down, and play the lucky hand that’s been dealt to you. This had come as a welcome vindication for a young man who’d given up early on his own high ideals and drifted into the safe though stormy harbor of his father’s business. It was a comforting answer, so long as you didn’t think too hard about the questions.
And what had that woman said today? All you PR people do is lie for a living.
That’s right, sweetheart. Well, Miss Holier-than-thou, to paraphrase the artful response of a prominent client of the firm, I guess that all depends on what the definition of lie is, now doesn’t it? And while you’re looking that up in the dictionary under L, run your uppity little finger down the column to the last word of your indictment: living. We all have to make one, and unless I’m mistaken, you and I both get paid with the same dirty money. The difference is, one of us isn’t kidding himself.
By now he’d arrived at an alcove that showcased the truly world-class events and power players, political and otherwise, that the company had helped to invent.
A number of U.S. presidents were on display here, a nearly unbroken succession from the present and upcoming administrations all the way back to JFK. To hear the old man tell of the only two holdouts, Jimmy Carter had been too high-and-mighty to accept this sort of assistance, and Nixon had been too cheap. Republican or Democrat, it didn’t matter; to the realists of modern politics, ideology was just another interchangeable means to an end.
Noah was nearly to the end of the hall when a small, unassuming case study caught his attention. There was no title or description on this one, just a silent running video, the testimony before Congress of a volunteer nurse named Nayirah al-Sabah. She was the fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl whose tearful story of infants being thrown from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers became a podium-pounding rallying cry in the final run-up to the 1991 Gulf War.
Undeniably moving, highly effective, and entirely fictional.
The client for this one had been a thinly veiled pro-invasion front group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The girl wasn’t a nurse at all; she was the photogenic daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The testimony had been written, produced, and directed by Arthur Isaiah Gardner, the distinguished gentleman sitting just behind her in the video.
A dull headache had begun to pound at his temple, and Noah abruptly remembered where he’d been meaning to go: the bulletin board in the break room. He had to grab the address of that meeting of flag-waving wackos, and then finish his conversation with an attractive but naïve young woman who might need to be straightened out on a thing or two.
“Aw, come on, man, what are we doing on Park Avenue?”
Over the years Noah had confirmed many times that there truly is such a thing as a bad night. When these doomed evenings arrive you can’t avoid them. The jinx comes at you like a freight train, and by the time you’re caught in the glare of those oncoming lights it’s far too late to avoid the disaster. The best you can do is make your peace with doom and ride out the curse until sunrise.
If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that bad nights that don’t kill you can sometimes make you a little bit smarter. For instance, he’d learned that when the situation starts to go downhill it’s often due to avoidable errors in judgment, always involving things you should have foreseen but didn’t, and that those errors usually come in threes. A pilot will tell you the same thing; a plane crash is rarely the result of a single failure. It starts small, an innocent mistake or a bad decision that leads to another one, and then another, and before you know it you’re at the bottom of a smoking hole wondering what in the hell just happened.
Take this night, for example: Noah’s first mistake had been opting to hail a cab instead of waiting a few minutes for a limo from the company motor pool. Then he’d become immersed in his BlackBerry just after the ride got under way. Minutes later when he looked up, the road ahead was a sea of twinkling red brake lights. The pre-weekend traffic was stacked bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. That was his second mistake.
As the windshield wipers slapped in and out of sync with the beat of some atonal Middle Eastern music blaring from the radio, the man at the wheel launched into an animated flurry of colorful epithets in his native tongue. He seemed to be deflecting all blame for the gridlock onto his GPS unit, the dispatcher, the rain, the car ahead, and especially the yellowed ivory statuette of St. Christopher glued cockeyed to the dash.
“Look, forget it, just head west.” Noah rapped on the cloudy Plexiglas and caught the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. “West.” He pointed that way, assuming a serious language barrier, and spoke with exaggerated clarity. “Get us off Park Avenue, shoot crosstown to the West Side Highway, then just take it south all the way down to Chambers Street.” To ward off any protest he took a twenty from his money clip and passed it through the flip-door in the bulletproof divider. “I’m late already. Let’s go now, okay? Step on it”
Those last three magic words were his third mistake.
The shifter slammed into reverse, the steering wheel cranked to its stop, and the engine roared. On instinct Noah turned to look behind, so it was the side of his head instead of his face that thumped into the divider as the cab lurched backward. The Lexus to the rear somehow squeaked out of harm’s way with maybe an inch to spare.
They were nearly a full city block from the intersection in a solid traffic jam and there was absolutely nowhere to go, but that couldn’t limit a man with this kind of automotive imagination. Apparently at whatever driving school he’d graduated from there was only one rule of the road: Anything goes, as long as you keep at least two tires on the pavement.
Noah braced himself against the roof and the door as the cab mounted the curb and surged forward at a twenty-degree tilt, half on and half off the street, threading the needle between a hot-dog cart and a candied-nut wagon on the sidewalk and the line of incredulous fellow drivers to the left. The right-side mirror clipped a corner bus shelter as the driver pulled a full-throttle, fishtailing turn onto East Twenty-third.
And then he slammed on the brakes and everything screeched to a stop.
A soldier in desert camouflage and a rain slicker was standing right in front of the cab, his left hand thrust out flat in an unambiguous command to halt. His other arm was cradling an assault rifle, which, while not exactly aimed at the cab and its innocent passenger, wasn’t exactly pointed elsewhere, either. Other men in uniform came up beside the first and were directed with a muzzle-gesture to positions on either side of the taxi.
It immediately became obvious that this cabdriver had seen a military checkpoint or two in his former homeland. With no hesitation the ignition was killed and both his hands were raised where the armed men outside could see them. Noah had no such prior experience to guide him. All he felt was the Lenny’s hot pastrami sandwich he’d enjoyed at lunch suddenly threatening to disembark from the nearest available exit.
Two sharp taps on the window, and through the glass he heard a single stern word.
“Out.”
Noah laid his umbrella on the seat, took a deep breath, and got out.
Though the soldier he faced looked to be all of nineteen years old, his bearing was far more mature. He had a command in his eyes that made his rifle and sidearm seem completely redundant. It wasn’t just the steely calm, it was readiness, a bedrock certainty that whatever might happen next in this encounter, from a perfectly civil exchange to a full-on gunfight, he and his men would be the ones still standing when all the smoke had cleared.
“Sir, I need to see your ID.” The words themselves were courteous but spoken with a flat efficiency that made it clear there would be no discussion of the matter.
“Sure.” Despite his earnest desire to cooperate, for several tense seconds Noah’s driver’s license refused to slide out of its transparent sleeve. Another man in uniform had come near and, after watching the struggle for a while, he stepped up, held open a clear plastic pouch, and gave an impatient nod. Noah dropped the entire wallet into the bag, and after another wordless prompt from the man with the rifle, emptied his remaining pockets as well. The bag was zipped closed and passed to a nearby runner, who trotted off toward an unmarked truck parked up the block.
The rain had been light and sporadic but as if on cue, now that he was outside the shelter of the car, a downpour began.
The young soldier across from him didn’t seem to take any notice of the deteriorating weather. He was watching Noah’s face. It wasn’t a macho stare-down, nothing of the kind. There really wasn’t any engagement at all on a man-to-man level. The soldier kept his cool, stoic attention where he’d been trained to keep it, on the eyes, where the changing intentions of another first tend to show themselves.
A low roll of thunder made itself heard over the city sounds, not close by, just a deep tympani rumble off in the distance. Noah pulled his coat together, one hand clenched at the collar.
“How about this rain, huh?” he said idiotically, as if blowing some small talk was the perfect way to play this out.
No answer. Not a twitch.
He heard a whump and a scuffle behind and to his left. When he looked that way he saw his cabdriver being forcibly subdued with his hands held behind him, bent over the hood of the car. He started yelling a plea of some kind over and over, held facedown by one uniformed man as a second went through his pockets and two more set about searching the trunk and interior of his car.
There was a faraway siren somewhere to the south, then more of them, and soon up the street a few blocks away a noisy line of police cruisers sped through the intersection headed uptown, followed by a series of stretch SUVs, all black, late-model, identical.
Of course, that was it-both presidential candidates had flown into town today for a full weekend of campaigning in the run-up to the November election. That meant hundreds of politicians, bigwigs, and assorted hangers-on from both parties were here, too. On top of that, he seemed to recall that some emergency faction of the G-20 was meeting downtown in response to the various calamities boiling over in the financial district. Along with all those high-rollers comes high security; all the cops and evidently some division of the armed forces must be out combing the streets looking for trouble.
Times had certainly changed, seemingly overnight, though Noah hadn’t yet seen anything quite as intense as this. Fourth Amendment or not, with all the fears of terrorism in recent years, the definition of probable cause could become pretty blurred around the edges. People were getting used to it by now; a law-abiding citizen could easily get stopped and frisked for taking a cell-phone video of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building, never mind riding in a high-speed taxicab that had just jumped the curb to avoid a roadblock.
The soldier on his right touched a free hand to the side of his helmet, squinting as though listening to a weak incoming communication, and then looked up and motioned for Noah to walk with him toward the truck where his pouch of belongings had been taken earlier.
This vehicle was the size and shape of a generic UPS truck but instead of dark brown it was matte black with deep-tinted windows. At a glance the logo on the side looked official, though he didn’t immediately recall any government agency to which it might belong.
Inside it was warm and dry, the interior dimly lit only by a desk lamp and the glow of computer screens arrayed around a central workstation. The man who’d escorted him left, the side panel door slid shut with a clank, and Noah was alone with a woman sitting behind a metal desk in front of him.
“Have a seat, Mr. Gardner.” She was fortyish, stocky, severe, and clearly wrapped too tight, with prematurely gray hair trimmed like a motel lampshade. Some people just seem like they hatched from a pod at a certain drab midlife age and have never been a single minute younger. Sitting there was a textbook example. Her suit was dark and from the ultraconservative bargain bin, and while it wasn’t a uniform, her manner suggested there might be some military discipline in her background. “I just need to ask you a few questions, and then I’m sure you can be on your way.”
Noah sat in the straight-back chair across from her. “What’s this about? I mean, I understand the traffic stop-”
“One second.” She left-clicked the mouse on a pad to her right and a few seconds later Noah’s photo appeared within an onscreen form on one of the monitors. There were still some blanks in the form but most of the information fields were already filled in.
“Now hold on a minute,” he said.
“Just a few questions, all right? It’s just routine, and it’s required.”
He blinked, and sat back. “Could you show me some identification?”
“Of course.” She took out a leather wallet, flipped it open, and held it out under the desk light so he could see. No actual badge, but the gilded crest from the side of the van was there again on her card, along with her embossed name and a title of Senior Field Investigator. And then he remembered where he’d seen that logo before.
Several months earlier Doyle & Merchant had pitched for the international PR business of this company. They’d been in the market for a complete image makeover in the face of some major allegations in the news, the growing list of which ranged from plain-vanilla war profiteering, graft, and smuggling all the way up to serial rape and murder. Noah and his creative team hadn’t won the account, but ever since the pitch he’d followed the developments when related stories happened to hit the Internet.
This woman, her hairdo, and her truck were from Talion, the most well-connected private military consulting firm in the foreign and domestic arsenal of the U.S. government.
“Look,” Noah said, “I’m aware of who’s in town tonight, and I know the whole tristate area’s on red alert or whatever, but I was a passenger in a taxi with an overzealous driver, and that’s it. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
“Are you acquainted with this man who was driving?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“I don’t know anything about him. There are twenty thousand cabs in this city. I hailed one and he pulled over.”
The woman was taking her notes on a keyboard beneath the desk with her eyes on one of the monitors. “And where were you coming from tonight?”
“From work.”
“And where were you going?”
His heart rate was picking up; adrenaline will do that whether you like it or not. Before he’d been afraid, but now he was getting angry. He didn’t answer right away, waiting until she acknowledged the silence and looked over to him. Then he spoke. “Do I need to call an attorney?”
“I don’t see why you’d want to do that.”
“Am I being detained here?”
“Well…”
“Am I being detained.”
“No.”
“So I’m free to go, then.”
“I’m not sure I understand your reluctance to speak with us-”
“Thanks for everything,” Noah said, and he got up. “Good night.”
“Is this where you’re headed this evening?”
She held out the meeting announcement from the break room that he’d folded up and brought along in his pocket.
From some lecture in his first doomed semester of pre-law at NYU, a wise bit of counsel came back very clearly: The first thing you tell your clients when they call you from custody, innocent or guilty, is don’t say a word: never, ever talk to the cops. But for good advice to work, you’ve got to take it. And besides, this stiff was no cop.
“I’m just dropping in to meet someone there, and then we’re going somewhere else.”
“What do you know about this group, Mr. Gardner?”
“Absolutely nothing at all. Like I told you-”
“They have ties to the Aryan Brotherhood,” she said, having begun to thumb through a file folder on her desk, “and the Lone Star Militia, the National Labor Committee, the Common Law Coalition, the Earth Liberation Front-”
“Hold it, wait up,” Noah said. “The National Labor Committee? The National Labor Committee is a little shoestring nonprofit that busts sweatshops and child-labor operations. You want my advice, lady? You people had better update your watch list if you don’t want to get laughed out of this nice truck. And, like I told you, I don’t know anything about this group or what they do or who you think you’ve linked them to. I’m meeting someone there and then we’re going somewhere else. Believe me, I wouldn’t have many friends in the Aryan Brotherhood.” He pointed to her computer screen. “But you’ve probably checked out my record by now, and you know that already.”
“We know who you are, Mr. Gardner.”
“By that, I think you mean you know who my father is.”
“All right.”
“Good. So unless there’s anything else, I’m going to leave now.”
She nodded, then gestured to the evidence bag of his belongings on the desk. He picked up the bag, plucked the flier from her hand, and left without another word.
As Noah hit the street the rain had subsided again to a chilly drizzle. He walked away, refilling his pockets with his things as he went. Halfway down the block he heard someone calling out behind him. It was the cabbie being manhandled toward the truck by two guys who were each at least twice his size.
Their eyes met, Noah and that driver. What he was yelling now wasn’t hard to understand, probably words he’d practiced from a phrase book for some bad night that might come along when he’d need them.
Help me, my friend.
That’s what he was saying, over and over in simple variations, as if maybe with the next repetition Noah would understand that this guy was in serious trouble and just needed someone to step up and vouch for him so he could get out of this mess and maybe get back to his family tonight.
But what could Noah do? You can’t get involved with every unfortunate situation. It wasn’t his place to intercede. For all he knew, the guy was the leader of a major terrorist cell. And besides, he was late for an appointment with a certain young woman who was in dire need of a dose of reality.
Noah turned away and kept on walking, letting the man’s pleas fade away and then disappear behind him. It wasn’t nearly as hard to do as it should have been.
A lot of empty cabs had passed by on his walk downtown but Noah hadn’t been able to bring himself to raise a hand and flag another one down. The gridlock was still a citywide nightmare, and despite the sporadic rainfall it just seemed like a better idea to suck it up and hoof it rather than risk another ill-fated ride. In any case, in keeping with the evening’s unbroken run of bad decisions, walking was what he’d decided to do.
Eyes down, shields up, keep a brisk steady pace, and you can get almost anywhere on this island in a reasonable amount of time. Focus is the key. It’s not that New Yorkers set out to be rude as they walk along; they simply want to get where they’re going. With seventy thousand people coming at you per square mile, the only way to try to keep a schedule is to avoid connecting with random strangers.
But, try as you might, you can’t always avoid making contact.
The look on that driver’s face earlier, it hadn’t really registered until Noah had fully turned his back on the guy, and by then it seemed like it was too late to turn around. It was dark enough and he’d been far enough away that the picture of that hopeful, desperate face should have been too dim to recall, but it was somehow zoomed in close and crystal clear in his memory.
Help me, my friend.
Noah took a deep breath and shook it off as he pressed on. First of all, buddy, I’m not your friend. Second, it wasn’t my responsibility. And third, there is no third required. You can’t take them all under your wing. Once you start trying to rescue everybody, where would it ever stop?
This sort of glib self-acquittal had worked pretty well in the past but now it left him feeling empty, and worse, guilty. And then as he forced himself to change the mental subject, he found there were some still darker things nagging at the back of his mind.
What had really happened in that meeting back at the office? And what might still be happening there now?
Noah’s father had built an empire in the PR industry based almost solely on his reputation as an unrepentant firebrand, a ruthless hired gun for any cause with the cash to buy his time. He went wherever there was a fortune to be made, and those opportunities were everywhere, in good times or bad, provided a person could maintain a certain moral flexibility when scrolling through the client list.
Survey the landscape, identify the players, pick a side, build a battle plan, and execute. That’s the game, and old Arthur Gardner had always played it to win. A huckster of the highest order, he could make a do-or-die conflict out of thin air and then cash in selling weapons of mass deception to either side, or, more likely, to both.
And it had long ago gone beyond Coke versus Pepsi. Pseudoliberal Democrats versus faux-conservative Republicans, union versus management, pure-hearted environmentalists versus the evil corporations, oil versus coal, rich versus poor, engineered problem/reaction/ solution schemes to swing elections, manipulate markets, and secure the dominance of the superclass at home and abroad-these were world-spanning issues he exploited, whether real or manufactured, from global cooling in the 1970s to global warming today. Right versus wrong didn’t matter to the bottom line, so it didn’t matter to him, either. War and peace and politics had always been a part of the business because that’s where the real money was.
But money alone wasn’t the key motivation. Not money at all, really, not anymore. Arthur Gardner could burn through $30 million a week for the next twenty years before he even came close to clearing out those offshore accounts. The goals and rewards had gotten steadily larger over the years until they’d gone far beyond the merely financial. Today it was only power and the wielding of it that could still fascinate a man like him.
In his distraction Noah had drifted close to the curb on the sidewalk, an error no seasoned pedestrian should ever commit when it’s been raining. Right on cue a city bus roared by, shooshed through a sinkhole puddle the size of Lake Placid, and a rooster tail of oily gutter water splashed up and soaked him to the waist. As the bus rolled on he could see a bunch of kids in the back pressed to the windows, pointing and hooting, absolutely delighted to have played a part in his drenching.
Perfect.
Noah stopped under an awning and took stock of himself. Now he’d reached a milestone: head to toe, there wasn’t a single square inch that didn’t feel soaked to the skin. He checked the street signs for a gauge of his progress-just a few more blocks to go.
As he walked he thought back to that meeting with the government reps at the office. Maybe he was overthinking it. Over the years he’d heard his father give a similarly passionate call to action many times, hawking everything from a minor come-from-behind congressional campaign to some spin-off brand of laundry detergent. Whether it was a revolutionary new choice in artificial sweeteners or this afternoon’s so-called fundamental transformation of the United States of America, it was all just the same empty carnival-barking the clients loved to hear, and the old man loved to deliver.
That sounded good enough to ease his mind, at least for the time being. Besides, what was that old saying? Don’t ask the question if you don’t want to know the answer. Noah most certainly did not want to know the answer. It was far easier to follow orders and cash the checks if you honestly had no idea what the consequences of those orders were.
According to the flier the location of tonight’s all-American shindig was the Stars ’n Stripes Saloon, a charming, rustic little dive down here in Tribeca. Noah had been there a few times before on downtown pub crawls with clients. The Stars ’n Stripes was known as something of a guilty pleasure, a little patch of down-home heartland kitsch complete with friendly, gorgeous waitresses, loud Southern rock on the jukebox, and cheap domestic beer on tap.
In the last remaining block Noah had been holding out hope that the rally, or whatever it turned out to be, would be sparsely attended and quiet enough to allow him to corner this Ross woman for a quality conversation. The odds of a low turnout seemed pretty good. After all, how many right-wing nutcases could possibly live in this enlightened city, and how many among them would knuckle-drag themselves out of their subbasement bunkers for a club meeting on a chilly, rainy Friday night?
The depressing answer to that question, he saw as he rounded the final turn, was absolutely all of them.
From the corner of Hudson and West Broadway, Noah could see the overflow crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk. The place was packed wall to wall; light from inside the tavern was dimmed by the press of a standing-room-only audience lined around the interior windows.
Just keep on walking-this sage advice piped in from his rational side-write off this whole wretched night, and get home to that nice, hot Jacuzzi. Maybe a wiser young man would have listened, cut his losses, and punted, but he felt a stubborn commitment that trumped any thoughts of turning back. To stop now would mean the miserable trip had all been for nothing.
Noah checked his look in a darkened shop window, ran a rake of fingertips through his hair until it looked somewhat presentable, straightened his dirty, wet clothing, and crossed the street to wade into the rowdy sea of redneck humanity.
Live music from inside was filtering out through the buzz of the crowd. There were so many people it was impossible to keep to a straight line as he walked. The diversity of the gathering was another surprise; there seemed to be no clear exclusions based on race, or class, or any of the other traditional media-fed American cultural divides. It was a total cross section, a mix of everyone-three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six-hundred-dollar haircut there-all talking together, energetically agreeing and disagreeing as he moved through them. In the press, these sorts of meetings were typically depicted as the exclusive haunts of old white people of limited means and even more limited intelligence. But this was everybody.
As Noah edged his way inside the door he saw the source of the music, a lone guitarist on a makeshift elevated stage. His appearance didn’t match up with the power of his voice-on the street you’d never notice him, just another skinny little guy with bad skin and a three-day stubble-but he was owning that stage like a rock star. He was in the middle of a 1960s-era grassroots folk song, singing and playing with a quiet intensity that let every note and phrase say just what it had been written to say.
At the turn of the chorus the musician pointed to the audience, lowered his lips to the harmonica harnessed around his neck, and played on with a rousing, plaintive energy as the people raised their voices and sang along.
This music and the mood it was creating, it was a smart PR move if they could make it work. If their enemies were trying to paint them as a bunch of pasty-white NASCAR-watching, gun-toting, pickup-driving reactionaries with racist and violent tendencies, what better ploy could these people make than to subtly invoke the peace-loving spirits of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi? If nothing else it would drive their critics on the left right up the wall.
Noah ducked a passing tray of Budweisers and was jostled from behind as he stepped back to let the server squeeze by. He turned to see whom he’d run into, and there, standing before him, was Molly Ross.
The first thing he noticed was that she’d changed her outfit. More stylish jeans and a warm autumn sweater, nails freshly done, a little purple flower in her hair instead of the pencils. But more than just her clothes had changed. The difference was subtle but striking and it probably boiled down to one thing: she gave a damn how she might come across to these people, in contrast to her obvious disdain for those at the office. That’s what it was; she seemed like she was right where she belonged, and the effect was very easy on the eyes.
“Well,” Molly said, allowing him only a conditional hint of a smile, “look what the cat dragged in.” For the first time he noticed a light Southern lilt in her words.
“Yeah, I made it. I said I would.”
She pulled aside the lapel of his overcoat, tsked, and shook her head. “What did you do, walk all the way down here in the rain?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Hold still.” With a disapproving sigh she helped him off with his overcoat, then folded it over her arm. “Come on, I’ve got a table over there by the jukebox. I’ll go look around-somebody here’s got to have an extra shirt you can wear.”
“No, really, don’t bother-”
But she’d already turned, offering her hand so he wouldn’t lose her. He took it, following as she worked their way through the thick of the crowd.
Soon they arrived at a little round pub table for two near the stage, with high stools on either side. In a higher-class joint, seats this close would have been reserved for the VIPs.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and then she disappeared into the noisy multitude.
After one more all-American number the singer finished his set to spirited applause and loud bar-thumping. As the ovation subsided a passing waitress asked Noah what she could get for him.
“For some reason,” Noah said, “I’ve suddenly got a craving for a Samuel Adams.” She took the order down on her pad, but his not-so-subtle dig at the goings-on in the bar seemed completely lost on her.
Molly came back with two cups of coffee, a choice of three dry shirts, and an enormous bearded man in jumpsuit coveralls and a Beech-Nut baseball cap. The clothes she’d apparently foraged from the luggage of some out-of-towners in attendance. It wasn’t clear where she’d picked up the big guy, but he looked like he might have hiked here straight from a hayride.
The big man ticked his chin in Noah’s direction. “Who’s your boyfriend?” he asked.
“Not my boyfriend,” Molly said, in a tone meant to emphasize what a far-fetched idea that really was. “This is Noah Gardner, from where I work, and Noah, this is my friend Hollis.”
A beefy right hand the size of a fielder’s mitt came toward him, and Noah put out his own. “Good to know you, Hollis,” he said, with a clasp only firm enough to transmit sincerity without throwing down a challenge for that iron-grip competition some men love to engage in upon first meeting.
“The pleasure’s all mine,” the big man said. Good etiquette had obviously been drilled into him from childhood; by his manner it seemed that shaking hands with a total stranger was an event to be treated with great respect. In contrast to his physical size his voice was unexpectedly high and reedy. The overall effect was something like being introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh, if Winnie-the-Pooh had been a seven-foot, mostly shaven, talking grizzly bear.
Molly had brought back a selection of men’s tops, including a faded sweatshirt from Kent State, a dark burglar’s hoodie with a torn pocket and a pattern of moth holes, and a two-tone T-shirt that said presumed ignorant on the front. He took the sweatshirt.
“Thanks,” Noah said, looking around. “Where can I go to put this on?”
“For heaven’s sake, it’s just your shirt. Go ahead and change right here if you want to.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in her palms, with a bewitching innocence on her face that was not quite as pure as the driven snow. “I doubt you’ve got anything under there me and Hollis haven’t seen before.”
“Aha. So you admit that I’m human.”
She seemed to study him deeply, as if the piece to a stubborn blank in a jigsaw puzzle might be hiding somewhere within his gaze. It must have been only a second or two, but it felt so much longer than any other mere moment he could remember.
“We’ll see,” she said.
Being between tans, Noah had opted to change his clothes in private, though the restroom turned out to be nearly as crowded as the bar itself. There was a definite scent of weed smoke in the air. He’d already seen a few hardcore, single-issue hemp-heads in the crowd. Maybe they were here to attach their cause to the larger group’s ambitions.
He slipped out of his damp shirt and into the fresh top he’d borrowed.
His pants he’d have to live with, but they were already starting to dry out. At least without his dress shirt and tie he might blend in a little better with the majority of the yahoos outside.
When he returned to the tavern proper he saw that the big guy was gone, but another man had joined Molly at the small table by the stage.
Noah stopped by a floor column at a point where he was half obscured from their line of sight. It hadn’t been his conscious intention to stand there and watch the two of them from a distance, not at all. That would be impolite, not to mention a little creepy if either of them should have glanced over to notice him there. But as the brief pause stretched into a minute or more, his minor worry of what she might think if she saw him watching was pushed aside by a different concern.
They were sitting close together, hand on hand, talking and whispering, intent on one another, each finishing thoughts for the other, laughing easily. It was an intimate relaxation between them, a togetherness without any pretense, the kind of closeness you see only rarely between siblings, and sometimes among old friends, but often between two people in love.
“That Molly, she’s a nice girl, don’t you think?”
Noah flinched at the sound of the voice near his ear. He turned to see Molly’s large friend Hollis towering beside him, watching the distant table just as he had been.
I was just-
“Nice girl. Smart one, too. Quick as a whip.” Now that he’d said a few more words his regional accent was coming through loud and clear. This guy wasn’t just from Appalachia; he looked and sounded like he might’ve eaten one of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Whatever,” Noah said, “I just met her, so-”
“That boy with her there, his name’s Danny Bailey. Molly tells me they was tight with one another some time ago, but beyond that I didn’t pry no further.”
Feigning disinterest didn’t seem to be of much further use. Either Hollis was an excellent judge of character or it was so obvious that Noah was smitten with this woman that there was no more need to try to hide it.
“Okay, so that’s his name,” Noah said, “but who is this guy?” His cover was now blown; Molly had just spotted him and was waving him over.
“To be honest I don’t know that much about him,” Hollis said, and his next words sounded strange coming from a giant of a man who could probably bear-hug the fight out of a silverback at the Bronx Zoo.
“But he scares me some.”
• • •
When he returned to the table they pulled over another chair and all three sat back down.
“So, you must be Noah,” Danny Bailey said. “Molly’s told me almost nothing about you.”
If the twinkle in his deep voice was any indication, Bailey found himself pretty damned amusing. He had the air of someone who was accustomed to being seen from a stage or on camera and had put his look together accordingly. He was handsome enough, but up close you could see all the things the footlights would obscure: too many cross-hatched wrinkles for a man so young, desperately spiky hair with too-careful highlights, face a bit too thin, eyes a little sunken and dry. It was a picture of a guy on the wrong side of thirty trying hard to remember twenty-one.
“I’m not surprised,” Noah said. “We hardly know each other, and what she knows so far, I doubt she likes too much.”
Bailey nudged Molly with his shoulder. “What do you say about that, sweet thing?” She looked embarrassed, and was rescued from answering by the arrival of the waitress with a round for the table. “Aw, come on, lighten up, everybody. I kid because I love. Here, look.” He picked up his shot glass and downed whatever brownish liquor it was filled with, then held up the empty in a toast of sorts. “Here’s to new friends, and maybe a new fan.”
Noah picked up his glass and sipped it. “I’m sorry, you said a new fan?”
“Yeah, man.” He held out his hand in introduction, and Noah shook it. “Danny Bailey.” He seemed to wait for a sign of dawning recognition, and got none. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the video.”
Noah blinked, and shook his head.
“Overthrow, man, the video. It’s gonna bring on the total downfall of the whole frickin’ evil empire, thirty-five million views on YouTube. That’s me. I’m shocked, you really haven’t seen it? There’s e-mails about me flying around all over the Internet.”
“Well,” Noah said, “I guess I’ve got a really good spam filter.”
For a long moment the legendary Danny Bailey looked like he’d just been double-smacked across his face with the ceremonial dueling gloves.
“Down, boys,” Molly said.
Bailey let the air between them simmer just a little while longer. Then he smiled and shook his head, picked up the shot glass in front of Molly, drank its contents in one gulp, and got up to leave. He leaned down and kissed Molly on the cheek, whispered something elaborate in her ear, and then looked across to Noah.
“Lots of luck,” Bailey said.
“Hey, really, you too.”
With the other man gone Noah turned to Molly and tapped the lip of her empty glass. “Can I get you another one?”
“No, I don’t drink. That’s why he did that; he wasn’t being rude.”
“Oh no, not at all.”
“Danny’s a good guy, he’s just living in the past of this movement, I think. I’m not telling you anything that I haven’t said to him. You’ll see what I mean when he speaks tonight. He doesn’t have much of a BS-filter, and he gets people fired up about the wrong things, when there are plenty of real things to fight against. But, there’s no denying he gets a lot of attention.”
“Just my opinion,” Noah said. “but it’s a pretty informed one. You should be careful who you associate yourselves with. In PR we have a saying that the message is irrelevant if you don’t choose the right messenger. And it’s not always true, you know, that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” She looked him over. “I’m glad to see that shirt fits you so well.”
“Yeah, I’m an off-the-rack medium-large,” Noah said, placing his bundle of wet things on the now-vacant barstool between them. “Thanks again.”
She nodded. “I’m happy you came. Now”-she scooted a few inches closer-“tell me something about yourself that I don’t already know.”
Noah answered instinctively. “I will if you will.”
Molly seemed to think about that for a moment. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He bit his lip as if in deep thought, considering what to choose as a first revelation. “I have an almost supernatural ability to tell when a person is hiding something.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. While the other kids went to Cub Scouts I was sitting behind one-way glass eating M &Ms and watching about a million focus groups. I know people.” He thumped his temple with an index finger. “Human lie detector.”
“Prove it.”
Noah looked briefly around the bar and then settled on one man and studied him for a few seconds. “All right. Behind you, over your left shoulder, halfway to the exit sign. Muscle shirt, pirate earring, loose coat, and a blond biker mullet. Be discreet.” She turned to look, and then her eyes came back to him. “He’s not one of you. If that’s not an infiltrator, I’ve never seen one before.”
Molly turned her head again. When she turned back she didn’t look impressed; she looked troubled, and then angry.
“Calm down,” Noah said. “What do you think, there’s not going to be a spy or two from the enemy camp at a thing like this?”
“It’s not right.”
“Come on, forget about it,” he said. “So, I went first, now tell me something about you.”
Molly nodded, took a deep breath, and then climbed up to stand on the seat of her stool and shouted across the bar. “Hey, you!” She pointed to the man in question, who had turned to face her along with most of those nearby. “Enjoying the show, are you? Look, everybody! We’ve got a Benedict Arnold in the house!”
From the malevolent look on the guy’s face, getting publicly busted was one of his least favorite things to do on a Friday night. To a rising chorus of jeers from others around him, with a last venomous glance at her over his shoulder he abruptly packed it in and headed for the door.
Molly sat back down, with a sweet, vocal sigh.
“Something about myself… let me see.” She leaned forward, closer to Noah, as though about to share a secret nobody knew.
“I can sometimes be a little impulsive,” she whispered.
The jukebox abruptly faded down to silence and a female speaker took the stage. She was maybe fifty-five years old, with a bright, easy confidence in her eyes. The honest beauty she must have enjoyed in her younger days was still shining through, but mellowed and matured with the years. She waited until some of the noise subsided and then stepped to the microphone.
“As I look out at you all, I remember what James Madison said of his country in those early days: ‘The happy union of these states is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of liberty throughout the world.’”
The applause that followed was loud and enthusiastic. With a gesture she quieted the room and continued.
“The U.S.A. was that example for many years, my friends, and I promise you, we can be again. But today we’re facing a threat to our future unlike anything seen since the days of the first revolution.
“There are a hundred conspiracy theories that try to explain what’s happened to us over the last century. I’ve seen many of these theories represented here tonight, in the speeches, in person, and in slogans on signs all around this room. All of us are trying to make sense of the same damning evidence. But I’m afraid that sometimes we see only the symptoms, and not the disease.
“That disease is corruption, plain and simple. Corruption is a virus, always floating in the halls of power, ready to infect and spread among those whose immune systems are compromised by greed and blind ambition. This is the way it’s always been, and our system of government was made like it was, with a division of powers among three separate branches of government, all constrained by limited scope and common-sense principles. Our founding documents established this new form of government to protect us from the sickness that has destroyed freedom since the dawn of civilization: the inevitable rise of tyranny from the greed and gluttony of a ruling class.
“The enemy we now face is the same enemy that’s always sought to enslave free people. This threat isn’t new. Human history is a chronicle of the struggle of the people against oppression by the few. Those few are always among us, in every generation, waiting for an opportunity to step forward and seize power. Thomas Sowell presented our struggle clearly: ‘The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.’
“You don’t need to create a conspiracy theory to explain what’s going on around us today. The ruling class has written and published their plans and their history, as plain as day.”
She picked up and held out a massive hardbound book.
“This book is titled Tragedy and Hope. It’s nearly fourteen hundred pages of the history and the relentless goals of the enemy. We know this book holds the truth because it’s not a wild piece of fiction written by one of us; it’s a calm and rational book of facts written by an insider and historian sympathetic to the goals of the power elite, and a mentor to presidents, by the way, named Carroll Quigley.”
A man behind her reached out and exchanged that large book in her hands for an older, thinner one, and she held it out. “If that’s their history, then this is an early, published example of their plan of action. The Promise of American Life, by Herbert Croly, first printed in 1909, before the beginning of the great decline. Its author advocated what he called a New Nationalism. Big government, ever-expanding programs and departments, a nanny state with confiscatory powers and jurisdiction over every aspect of our lives. He believed that in the new Industrial Age the people simply weren’t fit to rule themselves as the well-meaning but misguided Founders had envisioned.
“Croly renounced his own life’s work in the end, when he saw what he’d helped to set in motion. But his writings lived on, and they influenced every fundamental change brought on by what became known as ‘the progressive movement’ in the first half of the twentieth century, from the Federal Reserve Act and the income tax to the spiral into crushing debt and dependence that began with the New Deal.”
She put the book down, and spoke quietly and deliberately when she began again.
“But Herbert Croly was not an evil man.” This declaration was met with silence from the crowd, and she let it hang for a while. “He wanted a better life for the people of his country. He wrote about his ideas on achieving that, and he was free to do so. America today is full of opinions and movements and agendas that differ radically from ours; even among us here, we differ, and that’s the way it will always be. The danger comes when good intentions are hijacked and perverted by the culture of corruption-when those elected to represent us begin to act not for your own good, but for their own gain.
“It’s the same today. People who, for their own gain, would replace equal justice with social justice, trade individual freedom for an all-powerful, all-knowing central government, forsake the glorious creative potential of the American individual, the beating heart of this nation, for a two-class society in which the elites rule and all below them are all the same: homogenized, subordinate, indebted, and powerless. That’s what corruption will do, and we’ve allowed it to run rampant for too long.”
Noah looked away from the speaker to take a gauge of the crowd; old habits die hard. Nearly everyone throughout the room was engaged and listening, but there were exceptions. A variety of men and women, about ten or fifteen, were scattered around the bar looking just slightly unlike the others. It wasn’t their dress that was out of place, but rather their demeanor. They were far more concerned with one another than with what was happening onstage. And at least half of them were fiddling with small digital videocameras.
“Hey,” Noah whispered, tapping the table near Molly’s arm. She only shushed him, keeping her attention on the woman in the spotlight. With a last uneasy glance around the room, he turned back to the speaker as well.
“There are thirty-five thousand registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C.” the woman said, to a scattering of boos and hisses that arose from the onlookers. “That’s nearly seventy lobbyists for each member of Congress. Together they spent almost three and a half billion dollars last year-that’s over six and a half million dollars per congressman. With that money they buy influence, not on behalf of you, but to put forward the agendas of their clients. Huge corporations, international banks, the power brokers on Wall Street, foreign governments, media giants, the real, self-appointed ruling class-their lobbyists write the bills, your congressmen work as scripted front men for the tainted legislation, and then they vote as they’re told by their handlers.
“Not all of them, mind you. There are still good men and women in Washington, D.C.-but more than enough of them have long gone bad. In return for abandoning their oath of office they’re promised fortune, and fame, and reelection if they play along, and if they don’t, they know they can kiss their careers in so-called public service good-bye.
“This country was founded as a representative republic, but you’re no longer represented here, are you?”
A resounding No! was shouted from the back, and that triggered a chorus of more shouts from every quarter of the bar. She let the clamor go on for a while and then motioned for quiet, holding up a thin document in her hand.
“This is the Constitution of the United States of America. It’s just about fifteen pages when printed out like this, only four sheets of parchment when it was originally written out by hand. Here it is. That’s all of it, the supreme law of the land, the entire framework of our system of government.
“And do you know why it’s so small? Because the government itself was meant to be small. Is a federal government vital and important to our country? Yes. Should it exist as the heart and symbol of our unity and a compass to guide our journey as one nation? Yes. But it was meant to be small. And why? Because we, you and I, are the real government in this land of ours. That’s the forgotten truth that calls out to us from these few pages here.
“What the Founders knew is that governments go bad. That’s why Thomas Jefferson told us that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. They understood that evil, like gravity, is a force of nature. Corruption always comes. Like weeds in a garden, it infiltrates, gets a foothold, grows, and takes over. Keep watch, we were told, keep the government in check, or this haven of freedom and opportunity could disappear in a single generation. And my friends, we have looked away from our sacred responsibility for too long. We forgot our charge to keep eternal vigilance, and as we slept another framework, corrupt and ever expanding, was being built to replace our founding principles the moment they grew weak enough to fail. And now we look around and find that our future has nearly been stolen away.
“Our representatives in government swear an oath, when they take office, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. But for many of them these are only empty words. They never even consult the wisdom they’ve sworn to uphold. Once spoken, that oath is forgotten, and the Constitution of the United States never again enters their mind.”
She laid the document in her hand on a nearby table and picked up a dark blue volume the size of the Brooklyn white pages.
“The entire Constitution can be folded and carried in your shirt pocket, and may I recommend that you keep a copy with you like that if you don’t already. But this“-she held up the massive book-“is one volume of the federal tax code.” She dropped the book flat from waist-high and it whammed to the stage floor at her feet. “Fourteen hundred pages, and that’s just one volume; there’s a bookcase full of these. Sixty-seven thousand pages of rules and penalties and crimes for which you’re all guilty until you prove yourselves innocent. There’s no due process when the Internal Revenue Service comes to kick in your front door.
“And do you know why they’ve made it so big, and why it gets bigger every year? It’s the same reason the IRS is involved with health-care legislation and the Treasury was in charge of enforcing Prohibition. Because the power to tax involves the power to destroy. That’s not my opinion, it’s the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court!
“But you don’t need a judge to tell you what is obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to fill out a tax form. The tax code is not meant to be read and understood by the people. It’s meant as a shelter for those who’ve taken power from us, and a weapon of selective enforcement to be used against any who would dare to raise an opposing voice. The law is not for them, it’s for you: Right now a hundred thousand federal employees together owe almost a billion dollars in back taxes, and the Treasury secretary himself is one of them.”
The crowd reacted with loud boos and angry shouting, and it took a while for them to quiet down. When they finally had, she began again, but now her voice was much softer.
“Those of us gathered in this room tonight aren’t simply fighting taxes, out-of-control spending, or unsustainable debt, we’re fighting for something much larger: equal justice. We’re fighting for the end of special exceptions and perks for those who have the right people on their speed-dials. There’s no reason why the person who runs the IRS, the congressman who writes our tax code, or the CEO who has friends in the White House should get a free pass when you and I must pay the consequences for our decisions.
“John Adams once said that we are ‘a government of laws, not men.’ Ask yourself: Is that still true today? Your income, your family name, and your connections matter more than ever. They can help you succeed or they can ensure you fail. How can that reality coexist in a society where all men are created equal?
“The answer is that it can’t. That is why we are here. And it’s also why our message of equal justice is impossible for any honest person to refute. How do I know that? Because it was the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Noah noticed that the atmosphere in the bar seemed to have changed during the few minutes that the woman had been on the stage. It wasn’t just that you could hear a pin drop, it was the whole feel of the place. She had them in the palm of her hand.
“While others throughout our history have resorted to violence to achieve their agendas, it’s important to remember that they all failed. But Dr. King was different. He told people to get down on their knees, to be peaceful in their words and actions, to stay together and fight relentlessly for their cause.
“Dr. King understood what all of us gathered here must: that those who fight to correct injustice must be willing to accept suffering, if necessary, but never to inflict it.”
All of the normal activity you might expect to see in a bar had stopped. Even the waitresses and bartenders seemed to be completely focused on the words flowing from the stage.
“Dr. King once said that ‘no lie can live forever.’ He knew that once the American people understood the depth of the injustice being perpetrated on them, they would choose the right side. Today we face that very same challenge, and if we are patient, we can expect the very same result.
“Americans are still a fair and just people. They know the difference between racism and race-baiting, between violence and accusations of violence, between hatred and patriotism. Let them weigh the evidence for as long as they need, because when the verdict comes down, we will once again be on the right side.
“You’re angry, I know you are, and you should be,” the speaker continued. “but now I need to urge you, to demand of you, that you renounce anyone who suggests violence. Just like Dr. King, we aim to eliminate evil, not those who perpetrate it. To speak of violence in any form is to play right into the hands of those who oppose us. They’ve already invested countless hours into portraying us as violent, hateful racists, and they are just waiting for the chance to further that story line. Don’t give it to them. Instead of Bill Ayers, give them Benjamin Franklin. Instead of Malcolm X, give them Rosa Parks. Instead of bin Laden, give them Gandhi. They are well prepared on how to use violence to their advantage, but they have absolutely no idea how to use peace.
“Besides, everything we need to prevail,” the woman on stage held up her printout of the Constitution again, “every shield and weapon against tyranny and oppression, even at the late stages of the cancer of corruption that’s sickened us, everything we need is given to us right here. All we must do is find the strength and the wisdom to awaken our friends and neighbors, take back our power under the law, and restore what’s been forgotten. Restore. Not adapt, not transform… restore.
“Let me ask you all a question. Many of us in this room are painted as ‘anti-government’-but who loves America more, those who want to restore it, or those who want to transform it?”
The hushed silence that had overtaken the room for a while evaporated in an instant. Enthusiastic shouts and chants came from all corners. The misfits at the bar even put their cameras down and turned their backs as if by its nature this material would be of no use to them.
“Don’t be fooled, ‘transformation’ is simply a nice way of saying that you don’t like something! If you live in an old house that you adore, do you talk about ‘restoring’ that home or ‘transforming’ it into a modern-day McMansion? Same goes for an old car or an old painting-things that have real value aren’t changed or transformed, they’re preserved.”
She paused and looked slowly around the room as though she were talking to each person individually. “I don’t know about you, but I happen to believe that the America our Founders created is still worth preserving. Thank you, all, God bless you, and may God bless the U.S.A.”
The woman left the stage on the other side as a Toby Keith song began to play over the sound system, and Molly looked over at Noah as she applauded the end of the speech. Then she leaned toward him, raising her voice over the bar noise.
“So what do you think?”
Noah took a thoughtful sip from his glass, then shrugged as the room quieted down. “Can I get you a club soda, or some juice?”
“No thanks. What did you think of what she said?”
“I don’t know. I guess it sounds like she believes what she’s saying.”
“Wow,” Molly said. “That could be the most noncommittal string of words I’ve ever heard a man put together. You really are a PR executive.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like to talk about politics. I’ve always thought it was kind of a waste of time.”
“So if I’m hearing this correctly, you’re willing to grant that the person who was up there speaking-my mother, by the way-probably believed what she was saying, and yet it’s not worth a second of your time to even think about?”
“That was your mother?” Noah asked.
“Just answer the question.”
“No, I didn’t say that. It’s complicated.”
“No,” she said flatly, “it really isn’t.”
“Could we change the subject, just for a few minutes? I don’t want to argue with you-”
“That horse is already out of the barn, Mr. Gardner.”
“Okay, then, listen. I see how people of a certain mind-set could start to hate the government-”
“We don’t hate government. We’re against an out-of-control government that’s lost sight of its principles and has been overrun by corruption.”
“All right, point well taken. I understand that you’re upset about what’s being done to the country-”
“I’m so glad you understand that.”
“I do. Things are bad, and they’re going to get a lot worse before this crash is over, but all this“-he gestured around at the bar full of people-“what do you all think you’re accomplishing here?”
“We’re getting together and taking a stand.”
“Taking a stand? Against what? Against the way things have always been? Because that’s not going to change.”
Molly shifted in her seat to square off with him, then looked into his eyes. “Why did you really come here tonight?”
He sighed, and sat back. “I guess I just wanted to get to know you.”
“Well,” she said. “This pointless meeting, that deluded woman onstage, and all these other misguided people? That’s me. Now you know me.”
With that she gathered her things and left him sitting there alone with his beer.
Noah had lost count of the refills after his first pint, but by then he was averaging around thirty-two ounces of suds per special guest speaker. He’d briefly considered playing a drinking game with himself, wherein he would pound one back each time he heard one of the dirty words progressive, socialist, or globalism, but by those rules he’d have drunk himself under the table within a few minutes. Their spiels were all different but the highlights were mostly the same, with only minor deviations in two areas: where to place the blame for their country’s troubles, and what to do about it.
He was still in his lonely seat by the stage. After he’d struck out with Molly there was no real reason to hang around but he felt too beat to get up and leave. Besides, the angry beer buzz he was stoking seemed like the best medicine for putting this malignant night into remission.
The nearby crowd parted at the end of another onstage musical interlude. He’d been hoping to see the waitress bringing him another tall one, but instead it was a familiar, enormous bearded man who walked up to the table.
Hollis-no last name had been offered for him-gently touched the barstool across from Noah with a finger. The expression on the part of his face not covered with bristly hair asked politely if that seat was taken.
“Please,” Noah said, “be my guest.” The barstool looked like doll-house furniture next to this soft-spoken behemoth, but somehow it held up as he sat down. “Though I’ll tell you the truth, when you’ve got your choice of a few hundred people here who I guarantee are better company than me, I wonder why you’d decide to sit here.”
The waitress came and put a beer down for Noah and a bottle of Coca-Cola for his new tablemate. Hollis waited until she was gone to answer.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You looked kinda sad, I guess.”
As if to drip gasoline on Noah’s already smoldering mood, tonight’s headliner, the illustrious Danny Bailey, now took to the stage in a swell of heavy-metal music and an ovation that rattled every shelf of glassware behind the bar.
“Hello, New York!” Bailey shouted, like an aging rock star kicking off his annual farewell tour. He held out the microphone to pump up the roar of the answering crowd and made no move to settle them down. On the contrary, the clamor continued until he produced a piece of paper and took back the mike almost a full deafening minute later.
“Thank you, really. I could listen to that all night long. Let me see if this is my crowd, though. How can we tell if a politician is lying?” He turned the mike briefly to the crowd again for their answer.
“Their lips are moving!” the people shouted.
“That’s right,” Bailey said. “And watch what they name things, especially those bills they’re all voting on without even reading them. If they call something the Patriot Act, you can bet it won’t be long before they’re using it to hunt down us patriots. If it’s called Net Neutrality, it’s going to be used to neutralize their enemies. If it’s called the Fairness Doctrine, it’s meant to un fairly put free speech under government control and create a chilling effect on your First Amendment rights. Immigration reform, health-care reform-do me a favor, when you hear them say the word ‘reform,’ I want you to hear the word ’transform! And the next question you’ve got to ask is, What are they trying to transform us into? A better, stronger, freer country? Or a place filled with more and more people who are easier to control, easier to exploit, easier to keep under their thumb?”
This drew a loud and positive reaction from the crowd, which continued until Bailey produced a piece of paper and made a motion to quiet them down.
“Hey, is anybody out there looking for a job? Unemployment just shot up past twenty percent, real unemployment that is, not the bogus numbers we get spoon-fed on the nightly news. And that’s nothing; it’s almost forty percent if you’re a young black man in this free country of ours. Since I thought maybe some of you might be looking for a new career, I brought this job opportunity for you.”
He held the printout in his hands at an angle so he could read from it under the lights. “I found this last week on a government website. It’s a really good job for what they call an Internment and Resettlement Specialist.”
The crowd’s reaction was immediate, loud, and angry.
“Now, calm down, give it a chance. Of all the world’s prisoners, we’ve got twenty-five percent of them right here in this country. And hell, the U.S. has only five percent of the planet’s population, so there must be a disproportionate number of undesirables in America, don’t you think?”
A man just outside the circle of the spotlight handed up a stack of stapled papers.
“Oh, wait,” Bailey continued, hamming up an incredulous reaction to the new document on top. “What’s this? I don’t believe we’re supposed to see this. This is Army Regulation 210-35, dated almost five years ago. And will you look at that? The title is ‘Civilian Inmate Labor Program.’ Maybe this is what they need all those new internment and resettlement specialists for.”
Another burst of outrage from the crowd.
“Now hold your horses. These are dangerous criminals. After all, somebody’s got to keep them in line, right? Why not put ‘em in a military work camp, where we can get some free labor out of them? As long as we’re not the criminals we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
He flipped to another one of the documents in his hands. “But what do we have here? A memo from 1970, written by a man who later became the director of FEMA, advocating the rounding-up and internment of twenty-one million quote-American Negroes-unquote, in the event of civil disorder. Now, I left my exact figures at home, but I believe at that time twenty-one million would have been roughly all of the black people in America.
“And here”-he squinted as he read briefly from the document on top of his stack-“United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2 will authorize and direct the secretary of defense to use the U.S. armed forces to restore law and order in the event of a crisis. Under this umbrella plan they ran an exercise in 1984-so you see they do have a sense of humor-and that exercise was called Rex-84. The purpose was to see how efficiently they could pick up and corral all those disobedient Americans on their lists.”
Bailey held up document after document as he continued. “What lists, you ask? All kinds of them. The FBI’s ADEX list from the late 1960s-ADEX, that stands for Agitator Index-it was full of dangerous intellectuals, union organizers, and people who spoke out against the Vietnam War. Now there’s almost a million and a half people on the DHS Terrorist Watch List, and it’s growing by twenty thousand names every month.
“Have you registered a firearm? You’re on a list! Have you made a political contribution to a third-party candidate? You’re on a list! Have you visited my website? You’re on a list! Have you given a speech about government lists to a rowdy group of patriots? You’re on a list!
“But who needs a list when they can monitor you whenever they want? You’ve all heard of that ‘Digital Angel’ device that can be implanted under your skin, right? They say it’s to store medical information and for the safety of children and Alzheimer’s patients.”
At that, the crowd began to boo and hiss.
“Now, now… maybe for once they are being honest with us, but you know what? It doesn’t matter! ‘Digital Angel’ is a Red Herring. We’re all busy worrying about implantable chips as we’re standing in line to buy the next iPhone or BlackBerry. Read the fine print, people! They don’t need to sell new technologies to track us, we’re eagerly signing up for the old ones!
“Oh, and this just in, thanks to our friends on the Internet-a place where, at least for now, we can track them as easily as they can track us.”
Noah felt his face getting hot. In Bailey’s hand was a printout of the leaked government memorandum from that afternoon meeting at the office, the one he’d spent his entire morning trying to nullify. It was effectively harmless now, it was a nonissue, and he repeated that to himself, but the smug look coming from the guy onstage had already gotten under his skin.
“… if you speak out against abortion,” Bailey continued, reading from the memo, “are a returning veteran, are a defender of the Second Amendment, oppose illegal immigration, are a homeschooler, if you’ve got a bumper sticker on your car that says ‘Chuck Baldwin for President’ or, heaven help us, if you’re found to be in possession of a copy of the U.S. Constitution, then you good American patriots, you moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, you guardians of liberty are to be approached with extreme caution and guns at the ready, because you may be a terrorist!”
The overall tone of the crowd’s response had been taking a decided turn for the worse. It wasn’t everybody who was into this line of rhetoric, maybe only a vocal ten percent or so. And while this minority wasn’t quite to the torches-and-pitchforks line yet, they didn’t have too much farther to go.
“But wait now, just wait. So they’ve got us all on a list, but it’s not like they’re gonna pick us up and send us to a concentration camp out of the blue, right? That could happen only if there’s something they can blame on us, some sort of a big emergency. So who decides if and when we’re in that kind of a crisis? The Congress, maybe? The same toothless Congress that hasn’t actually declared a war on any of the seventy countries where we’ve sent our young men and women to fight and die since 1945? The same Congress that hasn’t even been allowed to read most of the Orwellian continuity-of-government provisions put in place since the 1980s?
“No, the Congress doesn’t decide.” Bailey held up another document. “It’s much worse than that. Since Presidential Decision Directive number fifty-one, it’s official. The president decides. The duly selected president takes control of the whole enchilada, what they call in Presidential Decision Directive number sixty-seven ‘the Enduring Constitutional Government.’ On his command the U.S.A. becomes the ECG, and it stays that way until our new benevolent emperor decides the coast is clear again. The truth is that it could happen anytime they want. In case you don’t know it, the powers that be have kept this country in an official, continuous state of national emergency almost every day since 1933.
“Do you realize that if you live within a hundred miles of a coastline or a U.S. border you’re in what they call a ‘Constitution Free Zone,’ where the entire Bill of Rights can disappear in a heartbeat? That’s not me talking, that’s the ACLU. Two-thirds of us live in that zone; that’s two hundred million American citizens. Do you know that tonight, in this very city, our kind leaders have set up what they call a ‘Free Speech Zone’ where we’re allowed to exercise our First Amendment rights, but it’s way uptown in a fenced-off parking lot where our rulers and the media don’t have to be distracted by what we have to say.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hereby declare this spot where I’m standing now, and every single square inch of this great land from sea to shining sea, according to the unalienable rights and powers endowed to me by my Creator, to be a Free Speech Zone!”
Noah had to catch his beer glass before it tipped over as his table was jostled by the nearby revelers. They were already clapping as loudly as they could and were now on the verge of getting physical in their reactions. From the stage, Danny Bailey indicated that he wanted to be heard again.
“It looks bad, I know it does,” Bailey began. “But do you know why we’re going to beat them? We’re going to beat them because once the truth gets out there’ll be no stopping it. When enough people wake up they’ll have no choice but to come out of the shadows and fight, and then we’ve got them. Remember what a great man once told us: First they ignore you-then they ridicule you-then they fight you-”
“And then they win,” Noah said.
It was one of those nightmare moments, like when you dream about showing up to ninth-grade homeroom without your pants. Just as he’d spoken those four words, out loud but only to himself, the entire room had gone dead quiet in anticipation of Bailey’s big triumphant finish. And by some cruel trick of acoustics, Noah’s sarcastic twist of that Gandhi quote seemed to have carried to every ear in the room.
For an eternal few seconds, Noah held out hope that Danny Bailey would blow right past the interruption, but it just wasn’t that kind of a night. Noah stole a glance upward and found himself the sole focus of attention from the man onstage.
“Well, well, well.” Bailey moved to the edge of the platform so they were facing each other. “Looks like we’ve got a junior ambassador from the Ivy League among us.”
Noah kept his eyes fixed squarely on his beer glass, but Bailey wasn’t going to let it rest.
“Come on up here, Harvard, don’t keep us hanging. If you’ve got so much to say, just dumb it down so all of us hicks can understand it, and then have the guts to say it loud enough so everybody can hear. I doubt if you can tell us much about the Constitution or the Founding Fathers, but maybe you can enlighten us with a little racist, communist wisdom from a real hero… like Che Guevara.”
Noah looked up at him. “No thanks.”
“Oh, but I won’t take no for an answer.” Bailey turned to the crowd. “You folks won’t either, will you?”
Angry applause filled the room along with taunts and chants. It finally became too much to sit and take.
“Fine,” Noah said. He finished off what remained of his latest beer, stood, and allowed himself to be fairly manhandled up onto the platform and under the lights. Bailey moved aside from the floor mike with a be-my-guest sweep of the arm.
“I want to start off by saying,” Noah began, adjusting his voice to make the most of the sound system, “that because of my job I’m in a unique position to know for certain that most of what’s been said here tonight is absolutely true.”
The crowd quieted down considerably upon hearing this, as he’d assumed they would.
“Let me see if I can confirm some of the speculation from earlier speakers… The Federal Reserve isn’t federal at all: you’re right, it’s basically a privately owned bank, a cartel that loans you your own money at interest, and its creation was the beginning of the end of the free-market system.
“The United States was built to run on individual freedom, that’s true, but because you’ve let these control freaks have their way with it for almost a hundred years, your country now runs on debt. Today Goldman Sachs is the engine, and in case you haven’t realized it yet, the American people are nothing but the fuel.
“The Committee of Three Hundred exists. And the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome-they all exist. And they are globalists; they’re wealthy and powerful beyond anything you can imagine. There are predators among them, absolutely ruthless people, but all of them together really do run things in this world, just like you say they do. There’s nothing secret about those societies, though. No hidden conspiracies: they do what they do right out in the open.
“See, the place where I work is where all the secrets get told, because they have to tell us their secrets before we can hide them. But here’s the interesting thing: Do you know why I’m not worried about sharing any of this with you? Because they’re not afraid of the American people anymore, and especially not you people. All they’ve got to do is keep you bickering among yourselves, overwhelmed with conflicting information, or fretting about conspiracies or hypnotized in front of the TV and the computer, or standing around here thinking you’re fighting back, and you’ll never even get close to doing them any harm.
“There really is a New World Order on the way, but it isn’t new. It’s been coming for a long, long time. You let yourselves get distracted with a thousand conspiracy theories, but there’s only one truth at the heart of them all. George Carlin said it better than I can: Up at the very top, it’s a big club, and you’re not in it. They’ve got all the power, and you’ve got none of it.”
“Like hell we don’t!” shouted a man in back.
“Okay, okay, I think I know what you’re trying to say. If you could ever get enough voters together to do anything significant, you might have a shot. But that’s easy enough to deal with. Let me show you how.”
Noah pointed out a particularly hefty man near the bar.
“Can everybody read what it says on this guy’s T-shirt? You know, a shirt that was probably sewn in Bangladesh by a ten-year-old girl who worked sixteen hours that day? Turn around so we can see it, big guy; be proud of it. It says, ‘Born in the Jew S A.’
“If he’s not already an infiltrator or an agent provocateur, then your enemies should hire him immediately. That guy is exactly why I’m not worried about telling you things that should be secrets: With him standing next to you, who’d ever believe a word you say? At every rally you hold, if you’re lucky enough to get the press to cover you at all, he’s the one guy who’ll get his picture on the front page. If you want to know why you can’t get any traction with the other ninety-seven percent of America, it’s because you let yourselves be lumped in with people like that.
“Name-calling also works like a charm.” He pointed to a different patron with every smear that followed. “There’s a Birther, and a Truther, two Paulites, a John Bircher, a Freeper, a white supremacist, a pothead, three tea-partiers, and that guy there is the jackpot: a Holocaust denier. From there it’s easy to roll you all up together so that no one in their right mind would want to join you. Why would they? According to the network news, you’re all borderline-insane, ignorant, paranoid, uneducated, hate-mongering, tinfoil-hat-wearing, racist conspiracy theorists.
“That’s how they keep your eyes off the big picture. All the while the gradual overthrow that you’re so passionate about exposing is happening right under your nose. Yet you stand around here preaching to the choir, as if that’s going to do anything at all to stop it.
“There’s no respect for you in Washington. They laugh at you. You say you want a revolution? That Constitution the lady was holding up a while ago? It gives you the power to revolt at every single election. Do you realize that in a couple of weeks every last seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs? And the presidency? And one-third of the Senate seats?
“The approval rating for Congress is somewhere around fifteen percent. You could turn the tables and put them all out of a job on that one day. But do you know what’s going to happen instead? I do. The presidency is going to change hands, but the corruption will accelerate. Over ninety percent of those people in Congress-people who are deeper into the pockets of the lobbyists every day they spend in Washington-over ninety percent of them are going to get reelected.”
The crowd was listening intently; it seemed they weren’t at all sure if this was just another part of the show.
“That’s all I’ve got,” Noah said. “I’ll be outside waiting for a car if anyone wants to take a swing at me. To tell you the truth, I think a fist-fight might just be the perfect way to end tonight’s festivities.”
There was a smattering of tentative applause and quite a bit of murmuring from the crowd as he stepped down from the stage, grabbed his bundle of wet clothes, left some cash on his table, and headed for the door. He heard Danny Bailey behind him back at the mike, picking up where he’d left off earlier and doing his best to get the crowd reengaged in his message, whatever the hell it was.
Noah was nearly to the exit when he felt a hand touch his arm. He stopped and turned to see the woman who’d spoken earlier, Molly’s mother, standing there.
“That was quite a speech you gave, and on such short notice,” she said.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “I’ve got a gift. Look, I didn’t mean any disrespect-”
“You don’t have to apologize to me.” Her face was kind, her eyes intelligent and alight with that same inscrutable glint that had hooked him so hopelessly during his brief time in her daughter’s company. “I think we might have more in common than you realize.”
Behind him, Bailey was already midway into a spirited, modern paraphrase of a well-worn Patrick Henry speech. By the sound of it, the audience had fully recovered from Noah’s double dose of reality and was working itself into quite a lather again. Maybe it was the late hour, the evening-long buildup of alcohol and anger, or the now-obvious scattering of outsiders around the room who seemed to be acting in concert to fan the flames of the mob mentality-but whatever it was, things were getting ugly.
Noah looked around for Molly but the audience was too thick to penetrate. Two men had stationed themselves in front of the door, in a stance that implied the way to the street was about to be closed.
“Have you seen your daughter?”
“I did a few minutes ago.”
“I think we need to get out of here,” Noah said, taking the older woman by the arm. “Right now.” There was a glowing fire-exit sign on the wall to the rear of the place, and though there were probably other ways out, that seemed to be the easiest.
It was slow going. Bailey’s booming speech and the occasional roar of the crowd in response drowned out all of Noah’s other thoughts except one: getting outside before whatever bad thing that was surely about to happen did happen.
“Let’s stop kidding ourselves,” Bailey said. “We’ve done everything that could be done to avoid the storm that’s coming. Our voices have not been heard! The time for simply hoping for change and praying for peace is gone. If our government won’t answer our appeals and do what’s right, if they’ve forsaken their oath to defend the Constitution, then an appeal to arms and to the grace of God Almighty is all they’ve left us!
“I ask you: If not now, when? When will we ever be stronger? Next week? Next year? Will we be stronger when they’ve taken our guns away, or when a cop or a paid government thug is standing on every corner enforcing the curfew? No! I say, if war is inevitable then let it come on our terms!”
The exit door was almost in reach but Noah stopped short; there was still no sign of Molly. He’d let go of her mother as the two of them had worked their way through the wall-to-wall people, and he’d lost track of her as well.
“There’s no longer any peace to be had!” Bailey shouted from the stage. “Whether you know it or not the war has already begun!”
To describe the next few seconds as a blur would make it seem as if the ensuing events were jumbled together or indistinct, and they were far from that. They passed in something like slow motion, like those graceful shots of a drop of milk splashing into a cereal bowl or a rifle bullet cutting edge-to-edge through a playing card at twenty thousand frames per second. But the trade-off for all that visual clarity was a complete inability to act; Noah could see everything, but do nothing.
A slate-gray pistol appeared in a man’s hand nearby-a man whom Molly had pointed out earlier as a newer member of her organization. The weapon was drawn down and level toward the stage. There was a flash, and the sonic pressure of a firecracker or the popping of a paper bag too near his ear, and then another, over and over as the crowd surged away from the gunman. The rising sounds of panic, a shower of glass and white sparks as a spotlight shattered in its mount above the stage, the back door banging open, the rush of black-suited officers storming in, a sudden stinging odor like a mist of Tabasco and bug spray, a loud commotion at the far end of the room as another squad in riot gear burst in.
Noah was caught up in the blind retreat of those around him, pushed back toward the center of the room. And there was Molly, maybe twenty feet away, held by her hair and crumpling to her knees, her left arm twisted high behind her by a roughneck the size of a linebacker. Noah heard a stifled cry and a repeating electric sound. He turned to see the big man he’d met earlier, Hollis was his name, stricken and helpless in a seizure on the floor, the barbs of a stun gun buzzing in his chest.
From behind his tinted visor a nearby man-in-black raised his riot club, ready to cave in the skull of the helpless man at his feet.
In this strange, slow procession of vivid snapshots, a random thought made its way back to him from earlier in the day. We stay mostly the same and then grow up suddenly, at the turning points. What came next would either go down as one of those dreaded defining moments, or as the final mistake of a bad night that would top any that had ever come before. It didn’t matter which; the die was already cast. Just because he spent his days strip-mining the vast gray zone between right and wrong didn’t mean he couldn’t tell the difference.
Time resumed its proper pace, and he felt his will unfreeze. As the black truncheon swung down Noah reached up and caught the uniformed man by the wrist, stopping him cold with an unexpectedly steely grip toned over years with his personal trainer at the Madison Square Club. It’s true what they say: you just never know when all those pull-ups are going to come in handy.
There was no struggle. The other man locked eyes with him, their faces a hand’s width apart. Perhaps the man was in the midst of a defining moment of his own. At first he looked surprised, and then incredulous, and then-despite the impressive array of armaments swinging from his belt and the three additional troopers already rushing to his rescue-he looked afraid.
A moment is only a moment, and just like that, it’s gone. Noah felt the first savage blow to the back of his head, and maybe another. And then he felt nothing at all.
He opened his eyes, and found her looking down at him.
It was the wide variety of aches and pains that told him for certain she wasn’t a figment of his imagination. His head was resting in her lap, and Molly held him steady as the crowded police van bumped and jostled along the patchy downtown streets.
Police van?
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi.”
The light glaring down was bright blue-white, fluorescent, and harsh. As he turned his head he winced at a sudden stitch in his neck, like a bee sting to the spinal cord. The rear compartment was filled to capacity and beyond, packed with people he vaguely recognized from the bar. Most were sitting up, but some were reclining, as he was, in various states of physical distress.
Noah looked up at her again. “What happened-”
She hushed him with a fingertip to his lips, and he saw that her wrists were bound with nylon ties.
The vehicle lurched and slid to a stop, the double doors in back swung open, and he was pulled away from her and out onto the street. Somehow the news crews had arrived and set up for on-scene reports even before the paddy wagons rolled in. Hot lights flicked on as local and network correspondents began shouting questions and their cameramen pushed in close to capture the scene. Noah’s legs would barely stay under him as he was herded into line along with the others.
Once the reporters were left behind, the remaining perp walk through the police station was a gauntlet of pat-downs, prodding, and barked orders, ending with a final, distinctive clang as the holding-cell door swung closed.
The pen he was locked in was one of several lining the hall; the total census must have been over three hundred. These were all men, of course; the women were taken elsewhere. Most of the guys nearby him seemed to be from the group at the tavern. Some others around the cell, clearly seasoned veterans of the penal system, appeared to have been brought in for day-to-day offenses ranging from vagrancy to prostitution to drunk-and-disorderliness.
The flood of detainees from the bar had filled the place far beyond its capacity. Most of the people seemed stunned into brooding silence but some inmates were belligerent: shouting, picking fights, taunting the guards, or calling out for their lawyers, their mothers, or any other savior within earshot.
Noah had been among the last to enter and he ended up pressed against the bars at the front of the cell. His head was still swimming and he needed to sit, but the cell felt like the 6 train at rush hour: there was barely enough room to turn around.
After a time he saw something that he couldn’t begin to understand; he must have been mistaken. The man from the back of the tavern, the one with the gun, was being escorted from an adjacent cell. He wasn’t in handcuffs or restraints of any kind. He was just walking along with the officers toward the exit.
“Gardner!”
Hearing his name shouted out from somewhere down the hall snapped him back to reality. A police sergeant with a clipboard soon appeared with two other officers behind him.
He reached out through the bars. “That’s me. I’m Noah Gardner.”
The three men gathered around and looked him over, comparing his physical details against whatever description they’d brought with them on the clipboard. It was his gold class ring from Riverdale Country School that seemed to cement the positive ID.
The sergeant double-checked his orders, rattled through his keys until he found the proper match, and unlocked the door. As Noah exited the cell a delirious man behind him made a weak attempt to follow and was firmly encouraged to resume his place among the crowded inmates.
“What’s going on?” Noah asked as they walked him out.
“Your attorney’s on his way,” the sergeant replied, in a tone meant to telegraph a palpable disgust for the entire fickle enterprise of American jurisprudence.
After a short walk through a maze of halls, Noah found himself sitting in a small side office across the desk from a person he presumed to be his arresting officer. The man was in plain clothes, unshaven, and rumpled, as though he was either near the end of a double shift or had been called out of a sound sleep for the beginning of a new one. It wasn’t the officer he’d confronted at the bar; that was a face he would have remembered.
The desk was stacked with dog-eared files and clerical debris, the bulletin board an untidy splash of sticky notes, memos, duty rosters, rap sheets, marked-up photographs, and one unfunny faxed cartoon. Overworked, short-staffed, and underpaid: that was the prevailing message in the cramped, stuffy space.
“Mr. Gardner, you have the right to remain silent,” the policeman said, his main attention on a printout of some sort in front of him, “and to refuse to answer questions. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during any questioning, now or in the future. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you without cost. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Now.” The cop looked up at him for the first time. “Before I ask you if you’re willing to talk to me, I want you to understand something else. This isn’t a parking ticket we’re talking about here. Somebody’s going to jail tonight.
“You and your friends are going to get on a big bus with some armed guards and take a ride to central booking at the Manhattan Detention Complex-most people call it the Tombs. Over there they’ll get your mug shots, your DNA and your fingerprints, and then you’ll be formally charged and arraigned in the criminal court and bound over for trial. Though to be honest with you, since it’s Friday night and I hear they’ve got a full house, it might be Sunday or Monday before they get all of you sorted out and ready to appear before the judge.
“If you’re not granted bail-and by the nature of these offenses in the prevailing climate, and with Homeland Security getting involved, I seriously doubt you will be-then you’ll all get on another bus, and that one’ll have shackles on the seats and bars on the windows, because it’ll be headed to Rikers Island.
“What you’re going to be charged with”-he paused to flip a set of reading glasses down onto his nose-“is inciting a riot, resisting arrest, and aggravated assault on a police officer. That last one carries a minimum sentence of three and a half years in the state penitentiary. And someone among you, I don’t know who, is going to be charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon. If that sounds more serious than the others, that’s because it is.”
He took a sip of coffee and flipped his glasses back up. Noah got the distinct impression that this cop had performed the routine he was witnessing once or twice before.
“Now, unless somebody comes forward and enlightens me on the circumstances-and by that I mean someone like you-well, I’m just as happy to let the officers from the scene separate the innocent bystanders from the perpetrators.
“So we can talk here and now, or you can keep on thinking about it while you’re making some new friends with the general population down in the Tombs. And I don’t know what you may have heard, but trust me”-he motioned to their gloomy surroundings-“it’s not nearly this nice down there.”
The policeman leaned forward in his creaky chair and lowered his voice as though a passing colleague in the hall might overhear him going soft on a suspect.
“Listen, you look like a good guy to me. This isn’t something you need to be involved in. But my hands are tied here; we’ve got an eyewitness in the other room who says you hit a cop with a nightstick. I don’t want to believe that, but you need to stand up for yourself or I can’t help you.
“I’m sure you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we can figure this out, Noah, but you’ve got to talk to me right now.” He opened his drawer, removed a small voice recorder, checked its display, pressed its thumb switch, and placed it on the blotter between them. “Now that I’ve advised you of your rights, are you willing to answer questions?”
Before Noah could respond there were three quick raps on the door frame and the Gardner family attorney, Charlie Nelan, walked in without waiting to be asked. He picked up the recorder from the desk, flicked it off, and slipped it into his pocket. An objection from the cop was swallowed before it fully escaped, stifled by a gesture from the counselor that assured him he would get all the attention he could handle in due time.
Charlie turned to Noah. “Have you said anything?”
“No-”
“Nothing at all?”
“I haven’t said anything, just that I understand my rights.”
“Good boy.” Charlie Nelan was one of those old-school, silver-haired überprofessionals who swore by the power of image. No matter where you happened to see him, he always looked as though he’d just stepped out of the “Awesome Lawyers” issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Fortunately, he was every bit as sharp as he looked.
Nelan touched Noah’s chin and turned his head to get a better view of the damage sustained in the arrest. Then he closed the door and turned back to the other man across the desk.
“Detective…”
“Halliday.”
“Detective Halliday, I want my client released, and his charges dropped, and I want that arrest report in the shredder.”
The policeman released a low snort, but his bravado wasn’t totally convincing.
“I put in a call to your captain on my way here,” Charlie said. “Right now this is between the four of us, and that is precisely where it will stay.”
“Now you listen to me,” Halliday said. “I don’t care what you want or who you called or how far you want anything to go-” His desk phone had begun to ring, and he did a double take when he read the caller ID.
“You should take that,” Charlie said. “We’ll be right across the hall in room G when you need us.”
Room G was another interview cube. When the door was closed Charlie sat Noah down, took a bottle of mineral water from his inside coat pocket, and handed it to him.
“How did you even know I was here?” Noah asked.
The look that came back said that young Mr. Gardner was worrying about something far beneath his concern, given the circumstances. Charlie was already punching more numbers on his cell, and as he put the phone to his ear he motioned to the water bottle, as though adequate hydration was the only substantive thing Noah could bring to the party at this stage.
From the sound of it, this new call was either to an assistant district attorney or the DA himself, but before he could pick up the gist of the conversation something grabbed Noah’s full attention through the thin window by the door frame.
Out in a common area, a dozen or so men were gathered together having coffee and a collegial chat with some uniformed police. He stood and stepped closer to the glass, trying hard to believe his eyes.
In this surreal gathering was every heckler, every troublemaker who had made himself apparent during the speeches at the bar. Every one of them was dressed similarly, the differences being confined to the inflammatory slogans on their clothing and their selection of cracker-chic accessories. When scattered among a larger group they’d been harder to spot as co-conspirators, but all together like this, with their guard down, their costumes were obvious and their mannerisms out of character. It looked like the after-party of a Larry the Cable Guy stunt-double audition at Central Casting.
One of them matched a picture in Noah’s memory to the very last detail. He was sure this time: the man was wearing a loud flannel shirt, a hunter’s vest, a do-rag torn from the corner of a Confederate battle flag, and a shoulder holster.
He heard the call end and the phone snap closed behind him.
“Okay,” Charlie sighed. “Let’s sit down and talk about this, Dillinger.”
“Charlie-”
“Correction. You stay quiet and let me talk to you.”
They sat, with Noah taking a chair that preserved his view to the
hall.
“I don’t know what you did or didn’t do,” Charlie said, “and I don’t want to know. What matters is what they could charge you with, which is putting your hands on a cop while he’s doing his duty, and that’s a first-degree felony in this state. Look at me. If you did that, in the eyes of the law it doesn’t matter why you did it-self-defense, heat of the moment, temporary insanity, doesn’t matter-conviction is a virtual certainty.
“Now, I called in some major favors, and they still wanted to charge you with something less egregious, simple assault, disorderly conduct, whatever. Then I called in some more favors and we worked that out, too. You’re going to walk out of here tonight like this never happened.”
“Listen to me for a second-”
“This is a big deal, Noah. And I’ll tell you something else: this is it. I spent all your get-out-of-jail-free cards tonight. Until further notice if you so much as jaywalk, miss a trash can with a gum wrapper, or play your car stereo too loud, and any of these guys get wind of it? Forget about it. Starting now, if you step out of line below Thirty-fourth Street there won’t be much I can do for you.”
“I understand, and thank you. Can I say something now?”
Charlie checked his watch. “Go ahead.”
“This whole thing was a setup.”
“I don’t care.”
“Those guys, right out there”-Noah pointed through the glass, and Charlie looked briefly in that direction-“they were at this meeting tonight, where all this happened, and they were there specifically to start something. When they got tired of waiting for the people to get violent they did it themselves.”
“Let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that you think an undercover New York City police officer discharged his weapon in a crowded bar to incite this whole incident?”
“Yes.”
“No way. Absolutely not.”
“Okay, not a cop, then. I didn’t see any badges on the men who burst into that place, maybe they were… I don’t know, contractors, hired security men who did the dirty work and then turned us all over to the NYPD-”
“Noah,” Charlie said. His voice was patient but firm. “Calm down. Whatever really happened, none of this matters to you.”
“How can you say that? That guy right there, the one with the visitor’s badge and the holster under his vest, that’s the guy who fired the shots that started all this! Then the men in riot gear came busting in immediately, there was no call to nine-one-one, no delay, they were right there waiting outside the door. And the press-all those reporters were already here outside the station; how would they have known-”
“Okay, so it was a setup. And what do you think we can do about that, you and I? Who are you now, Nelson Mandela? News flash, son: there’s no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and no Legal Fairy who cares about what you think you saw. Injustice exists in this world, and while you’re lucky enough to be insulated from the worst of it, most people aren’t.” He patted Noah on the arm. “Your righteous indignation is noted and filed. Now come on, let’s go count our blessings and get a slice of pie, somewhere uptown.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I’m sorry… what?”
“Not without everybody else who was brought in with me.”
Charlie didn’t respond right away.
“You’re sure about what you saw,” he said at last.
“Positive.”
“Because if I open this can of worms again and I come up empty-handed? There’s a good chance we’re going to blow this deal I just made.”
“Charlie, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said quietly. “Let me look into it and I’ll see what I can do. But I’ll tell you right now, whatever I find out, this is going to take a lot more chips than I’ve got in my pocket. That means I’ll have to call your dad.”
That wasn’t welcome news, but Noah took a deep breath and nodded his permission.
He’d kept calm as he walked down the last long hallway toward the exit of the First Precinct, but as Noah finally stepped out onto the sidewalk his heart began to work so hard he could nearly see it pounding beneath his borrowed shirt.
Injustice exists, Charlie had said, and for that fact his young client was now profoundly thankful. If it had been an abuse of power that put him in jail for most of the night, then it was surely a second abuse that had coerced the authorities to let him go. But, however it was won, it was still freedom, and maybe for the first time he fully understood the meaning of that word.
According to Charlie, after he’d started digging, a group of cops had eventually come forward to corroborate Noah’s version of the evening’s events: they’d apparently wanted to play no part in the railroading of this harmless group of like-minded citizens. Just as a minor rebellion was threatening to break out between the actual uniformed officers and the contract security forces who’d been working the scene, a phone call had come in from some high echelon, and right away everything was abruptly and quietly settled.
Noah stopped near the street, suddenly spent and unsteady, and leaned against a lamppost for support. He took in a deep breath of the cold, sobering night air, right through a thin dagger of pain that jabbed hard between his ribs. It hurt, but not as though anything was permanently damaged in there; bent for sure, but not broken.
All the others had begun filtering out behind him, checking their watches, counting and pocketing their returned personal effects, everyone looking thoroughly relieved and happy and hardly any the worse for wear. The out-of-towners were scanning the urban horizon for landmarks as though they’d been airdropped into the darkest corner of Borneo without a compass. But one by one they helped each other, and before long most of them seemed to have gone their separate ways to sleep off the evening’s adventure, safe and sound in their own rooms instead of a prison cell.
Noah was surprised by how different things appeared outside. Hours ago it had been stormy, bleak, and miserable, but now the sky was clearing with the soft lights of the predawn metropolis outshining all but the brightest stars.
Something lightly brushed his arm and the contact shook him out of his reflections. As he turned to see who’d touched him he found himself needing to look up to make eye contact.
“Just wanted to say my thank-you,” Hollis said. If he’d still had his hat he would have been clutching it shyly in his hands.
“Hey, don’t mention it.”
“No, no.” Hollis shook his head solemnly. “I’m in your debt.”
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Noah said. “Tell me what time it is and we’ll call it even.”
The big man looked up and seemed to take a bearing on a number of celestial bodies before ciphering a moment. “I’d say she’s nigh onto half-past four in the morning, give or take some.”
“Four-thirty. Should I assume that’s Mountain Time?”
Hollis smiled politely, as though a good friend had made a joke that wasn’t very funny. “Good night, now,” he said.
“Take care.”
Up the street a few blocks Noah saw his car round the corner. He raised a hand to make himself known to the driver and watched the Mercedes blink its brights and signal toward the curb.
Noah took a step toward the car, but stopped when he heard familiar voices behind him. He turned to see Molly and her mother saying goodbye to the last of their departing compatriots. The two of them had apparently stayed back to make sure everyone made it out to the street. When they saw him standing there Molly whispered something in her mom’s ear and they walked up to him together.
“We were never properly introduced,” the older woman said. “I’m Beverly Emerson.”
“Noah Gardner.” They shook hands. “It goes without saying, but I wish we could have met without all this trouble.”
“I understand we have you to thank for going to bat for all of us tonight.”
“That makes me sound a lot more noble than I feel.”
“I appreciate what you did, very much.” She gave her daughter a small motherly nudge with an elbow.
“So do I,” Molly said. There was something hard to place in the way she was looking at him; it wasn’t quite an apology in her eyes, but something like it.
For his part, he was feeling more and more uncomfortable with all the misplaced gratitude, as though he’d done any more than throw his father’s weight around.
“I’ll pass your regards along to my lawyer when I see him again. He’s still inside cleaning up after me.” The car arrived, eased up to a smooth stop, and its door locks clicked. Given the circumstances he would have preferred less of a showboat, but the dispatcher had sent one of the silver S600 Pullmans from the downtown garage, a vehicle only slightly less ostentatious than a Richie Rich stretch limousine. “Could I offer you two a ride somewhere?”
“Oh, that would be fantastic,” Beverly said.
Molly took the seat across from him, with her mother beside. The interior of this particular car was designed as a four-person conference room and workspace. Even so, its amenities were every bit as over-the-top as any limo devoted to simple luxury. Every point of contact was hand-worked leather and rare polished wood. Each of the four seats, arranged two-facing-two, was bordered by glowing flat panels ready to provide access to a dizzying array of information or entertainment. Touchscreens were embedded seamlessly in the armrests and consoles, poised to order up any conceivable human need. The entire vehicle was a rolling monument to the comforts of First World business royalty; for the cost of the custom work alone within these few cubic feet, you could easily buy a nice house almost anywhere in the world.
“I don’t always get to travel like this,” Noah apologized as the car got under way. “But just for perspective, my dad wouldn’t be caught dead in a Mercedes. He rides in an armored Maybach 62, or he walks.”
It turned out that their destinations were all in nearly opposite directions. When the driver asked “Where to?” over the intercom Noah guided him first to the nearest of the three, the Chelsea Hotel. Meanwhile, the two women were looking around at their lavish surroundings, seeming hesitant to touch anything for fear that if they broke it they might have to buy it.
“You’ll like this,” Noah said, as he opened a center compartment by his side. Behind the sliding door was a neat pyramid of Turkish hand towels, kept constantly warm and moist like fresh dinner rolls. With a set of tongs he passed one to each of them, and then unrolled his own and pressed the steaming cloth to his face, rubbed in the heat, leaned back, and breathed in the faint scents of citrus and therapeutic herbs. His riding companions did the same, and soon there were long sighs from across the compartment, the sounds of unrepentant indulgence, comfort, and relief.
He knew exactly what they were feeling, though he was managing to keep somewhat quieter about it. The physical sensation was nice enough, but a great mental weight had also been lifted, and that was just now sinking in. The bad night had officially run its course and all three of them were still standing.
For the next round of refreshment Noah opened the side bar and passed across a soft drink for each of them. Several blocks whispered past the long windows; despite the occasionally rugged pavement and the never-ending city noises outside, the car’s interior was pin-drop quiet and steady enough for major surgery.
“Molly tells me that you’re a creative writer.”
Noah had been in the midst of a sip, and nearly spit out his ginger ale.
“Oh, is that how she put it?”
“It’s such an interesting business you’re in,” Beverly said. “What’s a typical day like, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Typical day,” he said, considering. “Looking at Friday, yesterday now, let’s see… I can’t really discuss what I did early in the morning, same with the afternoon, but at midday I wrote some talking points for a man, a U.S. senator from out west who’s about to become the subject of an ethics investigation.”
“Did he do something wrong?”
“Absolutely yes, he did. He helped set up a former aide as an unregistered lobbyist, and then he sat in some questionable meetings in support of that business, and while he was at it he was also carrying on a hot-and-heavy love affair with the guy’s wife for almost a year.”
“Oh, my.”
“Yeah, it’s all connected in some pretty sick ways.”
“And what did you give him to say?”
“You’ve heard it before-there’s been no wrongdoing, the charges are baseless, a pledge of full cooperation, faith in the process, a little slam at the motivations of his accusers-short and sweet, because he’s so eager to get back to serving the needs of his constituents. Believe me, this sort of thing is routine. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow night; that’s why I can tell you about it.”
Noah had been through this introductory conversation many times and so he knew what the next question would be. He’d answered it often enough, at scores of cocktail parties and on hundreds of first dates, and his answer had become so smooth and automatic that he no longer had to worry much about it. Trouble was, though the words were basically the same, Beverly Emerson asked the question in a manner that no one else ever had.
“But doesn’t it bother you sometimes, Noah?”
It wasn’t asked in mock amazement, or as a high-handed moral judgment, not even as the (much more common) probe for good advice on how best to sidestep one’s conscience in a similarly shady career. Instead she asked the question with genuine compassion, as if she already knew what was in his heart. That gave him no real choice but to answer it honestly.
“Whenever I make the mistake of stopping to actually think about it? Yes, it really does bother me.”
The car had pulled up to its first stop, idling there.
“This is me,” Beverly said. As the driver opened the side door she hugged her daughter and whispered good night, then leaned forward to pat Noah on his knee. “My friend, it’s been an experience. I hope to see you again real soon.”
“Good night.” He raised his soda bottle. “Here’s to a quieter night next time.”
Molly watched her mother’s departure until she’d disappeared safely into the hotel lobby. Then the car was moving again; the driver would choose a scenic holding pattern while awaiting further directions. Oftentimes, he’d surely been instructed, his work was as much about the journey as the destination.
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Noah said.
“I guess I have.” There was a display screen on a swing arm that was partially between them, and Molly eased it aside. “Do you have any music in this car?”
“Sure.” He tapped a touchscreen near the door, and having no idea what she was into, let the vehicle decide on a playlist.
“It was my twenty-eighth birthday today,” Noah said. “Yesterday, I mean.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks. When I blew out the candle on my cupcake, I made a wish that we’d spend some time together tonight.”
She smiled a bit. “You probably should have been more specific.”
“You’re right. I should have said not behind bars.”
A song began to play low over the speakers, just a sweet, haunting voice and a quiet guitar.
“Noah?”
“Hmm?”
“I want to apologize.”
“For what?”
“I think I misjudged you.”
“I don’t know if you did or not.”
She looked out the window for a while. There was a scuff and a bruise on her cheek from the fight in the bar, but these marks did nothing to diminish the profile that he’d found so enchanting at first sight.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Nowhere right now. Do you want to go home?”
She shook her head. “I’m hungry.”
“Say no more.” Noah touched the intercom. “Eddie, could you take us up to Amy Ruth’s, on One-hundred-and-sixteenth? And call ahead, would you? I don’t think they’re open yet. Tell Robert we need some orange juice and two Al Sharptons at the curb.” Through the glass divider, he saw the driver nod his head and engage the Bluetooth phone system.
“What’s an Al Sharpton?” Molly asked.
“Fried chicken and waffles. You’re a Southern girl, right?”
She nodded. “But I think the South may be a little bigger than you New Yorkers think. I’ve never heard of chicken and waffles.”
“Then I guess you’re in for a treat, aren’t you?”
On the way to the restaurant he learned a little more about her life. Her family had moved around a great deal when she was young, following her father’s job as a journeyman engineer for Pratt & Whitney. They’d ended up living near Arnold Air Force Base outside Manchester, Tennessee. When her dad was killed in an accident at the testing facility there, that’s where they stayed. Her mother then reclaimed her maiden name and started the patriot group they were both still a part of, the Founders’ Keepers, a few years later.
“How old were you when you lost your father?” Noah asked.
“Nine.”
He sighed, and shook his head. “I was ten when my mom died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know what? New topic. Ask me anything.”
“Okay. Who’s the most fascinating person you’ve ever met?”
He didn’t hesitate. “President Clinton. Hands down.”
“Really?”
“All politics aside, you’ve never seen so much charisma stuffed into one human being. And you brought up the subject of lying earlier-this man could keep twenty elaborate, interlocking whoppers in his head at a time, improvising on the fly, and have you believing every word while you’re holding a stack of hard evidence to the contrary. His wife might be even smarter than he is, but she doesn’t have any of that skill at prevarication, and Gore was pretty helpless if he ever dropped his script. But Clinton? He’s like one of those plate spinners at the circus: he makes everything look completely effortless. And obviously, in a related skill, he’s a total Svengali with the chicks.”
“I never found him all that attractive.”
“Oh, but it’s a whole different thing when someone like that is right next to you, as opposed to on your TV. If he was sitting here now, where I’m sitting? I promise, you’d be helpless. He wouldn’t even have to try. You’d listen to him recite from the phone book for an hour and swear it was written by Oscar Wilde. Clinton could read you a fairy tale and you’d be down to your panties by the time Rapunzel let down her golden hair.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“That being said, he’s also one of the most ruthless sons of bitches who ever walked the earth, and we won’t see another one like him for generations.” He briefly checked their progress out the window. “And how about you?”
“Hmm?”
“Who’s your most fascinating person?”
“Oh.” Molly thought for a moment. “My mother, I guess. I don’t travel in the circles you do, but I’m a huge fan of integrity.” She took a last sip from her soda, leaned back, and put the bottle down. “Speaking of fascinating parents, your father would be a gripping subject.”
“That he would.”
“So?”
“Let me think about where to start… Rhodes Scholar, that’s a little-known fact. He was studying anthropology at Oxford when he met a man named Edward Bernays-Bernays was an admiring nephew of Sigmund Freud, if that explains any part of this messed-up business-and Mr. Bernays needed some new blood, someone with my father’s skill set, to give a shot in the arm to the industry he’d invented a few decades before.”
“Public relations.”
“Right. Bernays got his start in the big leagues helping Woodrow Wilson beat the drums to push the U.S. into World War I. And my father’s first project with him was a massive propaganda campaign for Howard Hunt and the CIA, along with the United Fruit Company, when they all got together to overthrow the president of Guatemala in 1954.”
“No.”
“Yes. And the rest is literally history.”
She frowned. “I just imagine armies and tanks in the streets when I think of a coup d’etat, not a bunch of posters and leaflets.”
“No, no, it’s so much more than that-politics and war, it’s all social psychology, and maybe it always has been. Look at the PR push that got the American people behind going back to war with Iraq in 2003. That wasn’t our company, it was the Rendon Group in Washington, but they do the same work we do. And we don’t take sides unless we’re paid to do so. If somebody comes to us and wants to drum up support for a war, for example, we don’t ask whether it’s right or wrong, any more than the ad agency for McDonald’s asks whether their client is really better than Burger King. But in our case it’s not just words and pictures; that makes it seem too simple. Public relations is the scientific engineering of consent.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Take a manufactured takeover, like Guatemala. We engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected president, and this guy was popular, he was going to take their land back from United Fruit and return it to the people. So he had to be demonized before he could be taken down. If you just march in one night, the people might rise up and resist, and you don’t want that. They have to be pacified, so their minds are the first thing you have to change.
“Use our own country as an example. Eighty million citizens own guns in America, you’d never win if they all started pushing back. You can’t take away the freedom of an aware, informed populace; they have to give it up themselves.
“So the soldiers come last, and if the PR job’s done right then there’s almost no fight left in the public at all. By the time the tanks roll in, the people welcome them. You know, the whole ‘hearts and minds’ thing. They submit to searches, give up all their rights, and forget about their neighbors that got taken away. Listen, the centerpiece on the bookshelf of Joseph Goebbels was a book by Edward Bernays, and I don’t have to tell you how effectively the Nazis used PR. Now, I know that’s a hideous example-”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“-but from the very beginning, all of the old guys in this business and their friends in the ruling class, they really saw themselves as the new founding fathers. Seriously, they thought of themselves as shepherds, and the great unwashed masses as their helpless flock. Bernays especially, he believed it was the responsibility of the elites in society to manipulate the general public into decisions they weren’t smart enough to make on their own, by whatever means necessary.
“His vision for this country, for the world, really, was a huge, benevolent nanny state, a plutocracy, where the people would be spoon-fed in every aspect of their simple, dreary lives. He’d show them how to vote, what to eat, what to love and hate, what to think, and when to think it. And, God help us all, my father took those lessons to heart and built on them. He does what he does better than anybody else ever has.”
He realized he’d been going on and on, and noticed only then the bleak expression that had settled into Molly’s eyes. She looked like a kid who’d just been told what happens to all the unwanted puppies at the pound.
“That whole subject was kind of a buzzkill, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. No more shop talk.”
The car pulled up to the curb outside the restaurant, the side window glided down, and a broadly smiling man in a white apron approached with a steaming serving tray.
“Young Mr. Gardner.”
“Good morning, Robert. Sorry if we got you out of bed.”
“No trouble, no trouble at all, I will happily itemize my inconvenience on your tab.”
“I’m sure you will. Robert, this is Molly. This is our first meal together, and I wanted to impress her.”
The chef passed through his covered plates, carafes, and rolled silverware. “Well, Molly, if nothing else, your new friend at least has some excellent taste in soul food.”
There was more eating than conversation as the car made its way south and east again. The chicken and waffles were always amazing, and Molly finished quite a while before he did.
“What was your mom like?” she asked.
“My dad met my mother in 1978, and I’ll tell you, I doubt if two people have ever been more different. Oh, this is interesting, my mom is actually in that documentary about Woodstock.”
“Which part?”
He waved a hand in front of his eyes. “I don’t know exactly, I can’t really watch it. She’s kind of making out with some hairy guy, and I’m not sure, I think she flashes the cameraman at one point-”
“You’re not sure? That’s something I’d remember pretty clearly.”
“Look, I’m blocking it out, it’s my mom, okay? So anyway, years later, late seventies, and she still had her causes that she marched for, but mostly she just loved life, you know? Never wanted much. She had a little apartment in upstate New York, and she was working as a waitress at a resort up there one summer.
“And my father, the man who would become my father, had this huge place down on the lake near there, still owns it, and he saw her in the restaurant, asked her out, and that was it. Kind of a whirlwind romance. I think she was his fourth wife, or maybe his fifth. But he never married again after she was gone.”
“So you all lived up there together?”
“Oh, God no. She wouldn’t move to the city, and of course he was too big for that little town, so I hardly ever saw him except on holidays. We weren’t what you’d call a traditional family unit; hell, I thought he was my grandfather until I was about six. He’s quite a bit older than she is. Was.” He lost himself for a few moments, and had to take a long look at his hands in order to stop remembering. “Anyway, she died, lung cancer, and I guess Dad didn’t know what else to do with me, so he moved me down here.”
It was quiet in the car for a minute or so.
“Hey.” She tapped him on the knee, and he looked up. “Would you mind if I sat over there with you?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
The seats were meant for one occupant only but she moved across, put their plates aside, and situated herself easily, sidesaddle across his lap, one arm around his back, a hand resting on his chest, her head against his shoulder.
“I think I’m going to like you,” Molly said.
“You sound so surprised.”
“I guess I am.”
He gently put his arm around her, hesitant lest he disturb the moment, but he needn’t have worried. She touched his hand, and curled a little closer.
“I think I like you, too,” he said. “But I’m warning you right now, if I let down all my defenses, and then you hurt me? Well, you saw what I did to those thugs tonight.”
“Oh, no. You’ll hit me in the knee with your face?”
“Just as hard as I can.”
The ride continued on. Their conversation was easy, just quiet thoughts and topics drifting between the two of them. At Ninetieth Street the driver turned into Central Park and then deftly talked his way past a mounted policeman and a blue barricade at Engineers’ Gate. Motor vehicles were strictly forbidden at that time on that day, but it’s hard to say no to a car like that, especially when you can’t be sure who’s riding in the back of it. They took the route slowly, and not just to give the joggers and dog walkers their weekend right of way. For whatever reason the park drive at sunrise on a Saturday had never looked quite so rare, and there was no hurry to leave it behind.
“Noah?”
She stretched dreamily, arched against him as she did so, and sighed and looked up into his eyes. “Would you take me home now?”
“Sure. Where did you say you lived, down by Tompkins Square Park?”
“No. I mean to your home.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Okay.”
“I just don’t feel safe yet, after last night.”
“I can understand that.”
“And I’m not talking about anything sexual.”
“I’m surprised you even mentioned that. Furthest thing from my mind.”
“Really.”
“No, not really, but it’s okay. So, like a sleepover, nothing sexual. That’s cool, I’ve got an extra room.” He touched the intercom and asked the driver to take them to his home at Seventy-ninth and Fifth for their last stop.
“I know it’s awkward to talk about it,” Molly said, “I just want you to know I wouldn’t sleep with someone I just met-”
“Sexually.”
“Right. I just wanted to be up front about it. That isn’t something I do.”
“Got it.”
“And I’m not saying I never have. Or that I might not want to.” She straightened his collar, which had apparently been turned under the entire time, and nestled her head against him again. “I’ve just made some bad mistakes in my life, and I’ve decided not to repeat them.”
“Okay, enough said. You don’t know what you’re missing in this case, but fine.”
They got out at the corner, and as Noah signed off with the driver, he saw Molly standing there on the sidewalk, looking all around as if she’d just stepped off the last bus from Poughkeepsie, taking in the ritzy sights of the Upper East Side.
“Is that where you live?” she asked, pointing.
“No, not there. See those flags? That’s the French Embassy.” He took her hand and walked her to the intersection. “And down the street there, that’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which we can walk through sometime if you ever want to get totally blown away. And that’s Central Park over there, which you’ve already seen.” He turned her around and pointed up the tower of dark masonry and glass that had been behind her. “And way up there on the twenty-third floor, that’s where I live.”
They walked inside and made their way across the ornate lobby to the elevator bank. As the double doors were closing a hand reached in to stop them. They reopened to reveal a lanky, fiftyish man in a blue jogging suit. He was flush from a morning run, a rakishly handsome fellow with dark, thinning hair and sharp blue eyes. He thumbed his numbered floor button and those blue eyes gave Molly a leisurely, detailed once-over, which she seemed just barely able to coolly ignore. When the elevator stopped and opened at his floor, the guy glanced to Noah with a subtle nod before he departed, a man-to-man stamp of approval indicating their shared good taste in fine feminine company.
The doors hissed closed again, leaving the two of them alone.
“Was that who I think it was?” Molly asked.
“Eliot Spitzer.”
“The governor. Of New York.”
“Former governor. And maybe you noticed just then, if you hadn’t already read about him in the papers, that he’s also a total horndog.”
“I did notice.”
“Yeah. With great power comes great friskiness. They’ve all got a lust for something.”
“He lives here?”
“That’s not all. This five-million-dollar co-op apartment that we’re going to stay in tonight? My father owns that. Spitzer’s father owns the whole building.”
“Gosh.”
“Yup.”
“He resigned, right?” Molly asked. “What was it that brought him down again?”
“The short answer is, he was caught on a federal wiretap hiring a hooker who makes more in one day than your buddies in the mailroom take home in a year.”
“Wow… And he fell pretty fast.”
“He’ll be back in politics before long, don’t worry. The public memory is pretty shallow, and like I said at the bar, up at the top in this world, it’s just a big club.”
“And we’re not in it,” she said. “At least, I know I’m not.”
The elevator dinged and the doors parted, revealing his apartment’s elegant entryway.
“Maybe not,” Noah said, “but you really shouldn’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”
The instant he’d keyed them inside, Molly took off to explore, marveling at the panoramic floor-to-ceiling view, running from room to room like a toy-starved moppet cut loose in FAO Schwarz.
“How big is this place?” he heard her call from somewhere in back.
“It’s just half the floor. If you’re impressed by this you should see the penthouse sometime.”
“And it cost how much again?”
“Five million, plus about sixty thousand a year for maintenance.”
She emerged from the guest suite, pointing back behind her. “The shower in that bathroom is bigger than my bedroom back home.”
“Speaking of which,” Noah said, “I’m going to get cleaned up and turn in. I feel like I’ve still got jail funk all over me.”
“Oh, I do, too.”
“Go ahead, then. Everything you need should be in there, and go through the drawers in the dresser, you’ll find something to sleep in.”
“Okay.” She smiled at him then, and it was the one he’d been waiting all these hours to see.
“Okay,” he said. “I realize it’s seven-thirty in the morning, but good night.”
Squeaky-clean at last and dressed for bed, blinds pulled closed, Noah chose a novel from the night table and reclined against a stack of pillows to try to read himself to sleep, within a pale circle of light from his bedside lamp.
In the middle of chapter two he heard a soft knock from the hallway, looked over, then sat up a little straighter when he saw her peeking in.
“Me again,” Molly said.
“Hi.” He laid his book beside him, holding his page.
“I used your phone. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s fine, anything you want.”
“I was calling about Danny. Remember him? Danny Bailey, from the bar?”
“Yeah. I wish I didn’t, but yeah.”
“Nobody remembers seeing him after the raid, and he wasn’t with the rest of us at the police station. I called around to see if anyone had heard from him.”
“And they hadn’t, I gather.”
She shook her head.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Noah said. “God knows he’s old enough to take care of himself. Go ahead, try to get some rest. We can check again later on.”
“Okay,” Molly said. But she made no move from the doorway.
“Do you need another blanket or something?”
“Could I come in?”
“Sure,” he said, and she did. “Hey, you found my lacrosse shirt. Ten years I’ve been looking for that thing.”
“You played lacrosse in school?” The faded jersey was much too big, of course, and she’d gathered the slack and tied it up, leaving a spellbinding glimpse of a taut, smooth waist above the northern border of a lucky pair of his own navy boxers.
“Rode the bench mostly,” he said. Her hair was down, towel-dry and glistening, dark and curly and caressing her shoulders as she walked. “It’s funny, that shirt looks a lot better now than I remember it.”
When she reached the edge of the bed she crawled up onto the far end of the tall king-size mattress, walked its length on her knees, and then flopped down next to him with an easy sigh, sharing his pillows. “What are you reading?” she asked.
He showed her the title briefly, and then put the book back down. “I thought you were going to sleep in the other room.”
“Do you mind?”
“No, not a bit. It’s just like that time my aunt Beth took me to the candy store and then wouldn’t let me eat anything. I didn’t mind that, either.”
“I’ll go if you want.”
“No, stay, stay. I’m kidding. Kind of. Just try not to do anything sexy.”
“Thanks.” She ran her hands through her hair and stretched again, wriggled herself under the covers, and rolled onto her side with one arm across him, the long, cool silkiness of her bare legs against his skin.
“Now see?” Noah said. “That’s what I just asked you not to do.”
“I’m only getting comfortable.” Her voice was already sleepy, and she shivered a bit. “My feet are cold.”
“Suit yourself, lady. I’m telling you right now, you made the rules, but you’re playing with fire here. I’ve got some rules, too, and rule number one is, don’t tease the panther.”
“Okay, I’ll be good.” She pulled herself up by the collar of his T-shirt, as if with the last ounce of strength remaining after her long day, and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Good night,” she whispered.
“Good night, Molly.”
Noah picked up his paperback and tried his best to rejoin the story there, but when he found he’d read the same paragraph at least twenty times over, he gave it up and put the book aside. In that author’s defense no arrangement of ink on a page could possibly hold a candle to the twists his actual day had taken, nor could any fiction likely lure his mind from this strange, beautiful character lying beside him, right there in real life. He was more than satisfied to simply listen to her quiet, steady breathing and watch her settle into a peaceful, deepening slumber. Before too long he’d joined her wherever she was traveling, having begun to dream quite a while before he finally drifted away.
<a l:href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> This list is provided as a representative sample, and is far from comprehensive. See Appendix R, pp. a321.
<a l:href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> See Appendix N, subsection 10.3.