“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies… is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
– PROFESSOR CARROLL QUIGLEY, AUTHOR OF Tragedy & Hope
“The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created.”
– HERBERT CROLY, AUTHOR OF The Promise of American Life
Stuart Kearns flipped his black ID folder closed when it seemed his credentials had been sufficiently absorbed by the desk sergeant. The man’s face was a classic deadpan, but when he looked up a faint glimmer of engagement had finally dawned there.
Kearns passed across a manila envelope that carried authorization forms for the interview and a conditional catch-and-release waiver for the prisoner in question. The papers were curtly received and slid into the queue with all the care and attention of a career man on the assembly line. Then, as he was directed with a wordless tic of the head, Agent Kearns took a short walk to a seat in a small side office to wait his turn, just like everybody else.
It was just another privilege of the badge, he supposed. Civilians have to go all the way to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get this kind of white-glove treatment.
It was a power thing, really, petty but always in-your-face in every bureaucratic exchange. A yardstick of rank and importance gets held up to a person, a pecking order is established with each interaction, and in this case the FBI is taken down a peg or two by a mere drone from the NYPD. To be fair, maybe it wasn’t the whole Bureau that had received the brunt of the disrespect, just this one road-worn and burnt-out representative.
The fact that such people and their passive-aggressive infighting were a big part of his professional life bothered him less than it used to. After thirty-one years of beating his head against the wall in law enforcement, a man shouldn’t be surprised to find his brains bashed in and the wall still standing. But you can know a thing like that and go on acting like you don’t. His first wife had said it best, on her way out the door. It’s not other people, it’s not your boss or your enemies or the kid at the supermarket. It’s you. You ask for it, Stuart, and all they do is give it to you.
Thanks again, Sunshine, for all your support. You were the best of your breed; spouse number two didn’t even bother to leave a note.
The little space where he’d been seated was broom-clean but musty, windowless and bare, roller-painted a dreary shade of leftover beige, its furniture decades old, stained and mismatched. The scarred wooden desk might well have dated from the days when Herman Melville had written of this jail before the Civil War. Whatever range of guest accommodations might exist in the huge expanse of the Manhattan Detention Complex, this waiting room must have rated somewhere near the bottom of the scale.
A picture frame stood on the desk, still displaying the yellowing promotional family photo inserted at the factory. Overlaid on that warm, staged scene of rural togetherness was the dim reflection of an unexpectedly older man, jowly and gray, looking back at him from the surface of the glass. The years do go by.
The sergeant from the triage desk knocked and entered, then passed him his carbonless copy of the necessary forms, all signed and authorized. “They’re getting your man now,” he said. “Be out in a minute.”
“Fine.”
“You should have told me,” the sergeant added, suddenly a great deal more civil than he’d been before.
Stuart Kearns straightened his glasses but didn’t look up from the papers in his hands.
“Either that,” he said, “or you should have asked.”
The sergeant correctly sensed he’d been dismissed, and left the room.
The man’s sudden snap to attention was no doubt due to the source of Kearns’s assignment, which, to be honest, would have become evident only after a look through the sealed paperwork he’d provided. A desk cop with a bad attitude might get a chuckle out of sending the average federal agent to cool his heels for half a morning just because he can, but when the orders come down from the D.C. headquarters of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, well, nobody at that low level wants to be fingered as a bottleneck in the War on Terror.
He checked his watch. Half-past seven on Saturday morning, and by the noise outside, the Tombs were officially awakening.
These places had a sound all their own. Back there among the inmates it would be drowned out by the hue and cry of those right around you, but from a distance those troubled voices all intermingled into a sound something like an ill wind-an airy, echoing howl that drifted up from the cell blocks at certain times of the day and night.
While he was waiting he pulled a hefty folder from his briefcase and opened it flat. This was an abridged version of the FBI file for the young man he was about to see. The guy was a marshmallow, he’d been assured, and by a covert order he’d just spent a long hard night in a cage full of the worst serial offenders this venue had to offer, so he would certainly be softened up even more by this morning. With luck, once a deal was on the table there wouldn’t be too much time wasted in negotiation.
It was an unusually thick file for someone who’d never been arrested for anything more serious than fairly minor narcotics offenses. Cocaine mostly, some party drugs, and he’d been busted with a modest grow operation and a trash bag full of premium bud at one point, years ago. He’d plea-bargained his way out of that last one, in exchange for testimony against his accomplices. That fact was worth an underscore.
A halfhearted suicide attempt when he was in his twenties, just a cry for help most likely, but then another one, a real one, during a ninety-day stint in a county lockup in Louisiana-this page was dog-eared, as was his psych evaluation from the time.
There were also some tax problems and other run-ins with the law dating back to his teens, but the latest entries concerned evidence gathered through recent home and business surveillance warrants, highlighted transcripts of a monitored ham-radio show, and a list of some videos he’d produced that were now circulating through the Patriot culture on the Internet. Hate speech/counterterrorism was the box that was checked on his first wiretap request, but the latest such authorization had been requisitioned by three cooperating divisions, as abbreviated in the margin: DC-JTTF, NM-DTWG, NM-WMDWG.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Domestic Terrorism Working Group, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Working Group. The last two offices were based in New Mexico.
Based on this file and, more important, based on Stuart Kearns’s own long experience in the field, this little guy didn’t seem like he’d ever been much for the government to worry about. It was almost as though they decided years ago that they were going to get him, but they hadn’t yet known exactly how. He didn’t seem dangerous, only outspoken and troublesome. But, heaven knows, stranger things have happened.
In these times, the tug-of-war between national security and personal freedom was becoming a losing battle for civil libertarians. It had happened bit by bit, with each slight loss of liberty or privacy sounding like a reasonable protection when viewed on its own. The effect was cumulative, however. Today even the most liberal of politicians were openly floating the idea of preventive detention for terrorism suspects: basically, indefinite incarceration without charges or trial, all for what sometimes amounted to little more than thought crimes.
The presumption of innocence was an admirable doctrine in simpler days, though at best it had always been unevenly applied in practice- more an ideal to strive toward than a true and present cornerstone of American justice. In recent years an increasingly frightened public had approved of that hallowed concept being systematically replaced with another, especially when it came to certain groups and offenses: When in doubt, lock them up.
Clipped to the file was an eight-by-ten photo taken of his man only last night, when he’d appeared at a far-right-wing protest rally of some kind. He’d run afoul of the cops, and that’s when Stuart’s midnight call had come; a necessary piece of an important puzzle was about to drop into his lap. The hope was that this fellow would be interested in helping his country, but in case he wasn’t, the fallback was to make sure he’d be pretty desperate to help himself.
Three corrections officers approached the open door with a heavily shackled prisoner in their charge. He could barely walk on his own, either from the effects of heavy fatigue, the abuse he’d obviously taken from his cellmates overnight, or both.
They brought him in, sat him down across the desk, cuffed him to the chair, dropped a Baggie of belongings on the filing cabinet, and with a nod and a signature from his new custodian, left without a word being spoken.
The guy’s head was hanging, chin to his chest. Without the arms of the chair holding him upright he’d probably have slumped right to the floor.
“Daniel Carroll Bailey?”
He flinched at the sound of his name like he’d been roused cold from a nightmare. The chain at his wrist snapped taut; he squinted and hunched down as though expecting another boot to the side of the head. He looked pretty bad, but with some cleaning up maybe not unable to travel, and that was good for the schedule. Beyond the cuts and bruises, if lack of sleep was his main problem then they were in good shape; he could rest on the plane.
“Are you my lawyer?” Bailey asked.
His words were weak and not formed very well. Swollen jaw, eyes trying hard to focus, one ear freshly torn ragged at the lobe from an earring theft, or maybe a bite. Before they’d brought him in someone had done a half-assed job of swabbing the blood that had dried around his nose and mouth, but a bit of real doctoring might be needed before they could get on the road for the airport.
“No, I’m not a lawyer.”
“I want my phone call, they won’t let me have my phone call-”
“You can make your call now if you want, and line up an attorney. That’s your right. But if you decide to go that route I want to warn you. This is from a high authority, the highest; in fact with your past record, your charges from last night, and especially”-he patted the folder in front of him-“the evidence from an ongoing federal investigation, the best any lawyer’s going to get you is fifteen to twenty years in a place much worse than this. That’s a fact. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Danny.”
Slowly, the other man seemed to be recovering his wits, or at least enough of them to understand what he was facing.
“Who are you?”
Stuart Kearns showed his ID, then took out his card and slid it across to the very edge of the desk.
“I’ve got nine words for you that I’ll bet you never thought you’d be so glad to hear,” he said. “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Over the intercom came an announcement that they’d just reached cruising altitude at 44,000 feet, and to punctuate that bit of news the no smoking light went off with a quiet ting.
It was a nice touch, but on a jet this size the copilot could just as easily have leaned around his seat and shouted down the aisle to update his two lone passengers on the progress of the flight.
Stuart Kearns took a pack of Dunhills from one jacket pocket, his lighter from another, then reclined his seat a notch and lit up. He inhaled deeply, then blew a thin white ring of smoke and watched it drift up toward the rounded cabin ceiling.
“What are you doing?”
Danny Bailey had awakened from his nap and was staring at the lit cigarette across the narrow aisle as though he were watching a bank robbery in progress.
“You can still smoke on a charter. On this one, anyway.” Kearns extended the pack to him, shook a filter tip halfway out. “Come on, you know you want to.”
“I quit five years ago.”
“Last chance. It’s not every day you get a free pass to break the rules.” Bailey didn’t budge, so Kearns returned the cigarettes to his pocket. “Hey, remind me, how old are you?”
“I’m thirty-four.”
“In the decade you were born a man could still smoke a cigar on any flight across this country. Can you believe that?”
“Listen,” Bailey said, “what’s your name again?”
“Kearns. Stuart Kearns.”
“That’s right-Special Agent Kearns. Well listen, Stuart, I’m glad to be out of jail, but it doesn’t exactly feel like I’m free.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“Right. So no offense, but there’s no reason to strain yourself pretending you’re my friend. Let’s stick to business. What do you say you just enjoy your smoke and then tell me what the hell I need to do to go home.”
It wasn’t an elaborate scheme; it couldn’t be when success relied on the performance of an informant under duress. In undercover work, if anything can go wrong it generally does. The more straightforward the plan, the better. Keep it simple, and you keep it safe.
The targets for the operation were low-level militia types with a desire to graduate to a full-blown act of domestic terrorism. They were in the market for funding, logistical support, and some serious weapons. If all went well then the only thing they’d be getting at the final handoff was arrested.
Danny Bailey would be brought along to the first in-person meet-up, to lend a crowning bit of credibility to the proceedings; he was currently the closest thing the Patriot underground had to a national spokesperson. In essence, Bailey would play the Oprah to Kearns’s Dr. Phil.
The operation itself would be quick, in and out, but the lead-up to it had required a long and careful preparation.
A few years earlier a website had been set up by the IT guys at the Bureau: www.stuartkearns.com. The backstory on the site went like this: A former federal agent had been run out of his job when he’d tried to blow the whistle on some dangerous truths. After repeated death threats, this ousted agent had gotten angry and gone public on the Web in an effort to protect himself from retribution, and to continue his crusade to expose the dark forces intent on causing a global financial collapse and ushering in a one-world government.
The global villains named on the site were a grab bag pulled from the latest full-color catalog of extremist paranoia: the Zionists, the Royals, the IMF and World Bankers, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, the Masons, the Grovers, the Vatican, you name it. It was a big tent, and that was the point. Search engines had soon begun to present Stuart’s site as a top-twenty destination for all manner of curious like-minded wackos, and traffic became fairly brisk.
It was evident from the home page that this wasn’t a place for the no-guts armchair militiaman. The rants, posts, links, videos, documents, and forums hosted by this fictional ex-fed-turned-Patriot made it pretty clear that he believed a violent uprising, a shooting war, was the only route remaining to set things right again in America.
This site and its inflammatory content formed what’s known as a troll in the parlance of the Internet culture. Trolling is a fishing term; you toss your lure over the side and forget about it, letting it drag behind the boat in hopes that something you want to catch will eventually take the bait.
With 200 million websites out there no one really expected this obscure destination would make Stuart Kearns a household name among the diverse followers of all the competing hate groups. The FBI and many other agencies maintained thousands of such baited traps; sometimes they paid off, most times they didn’t.
But then one day the troll hooked a fish, and from the first tug it felt like a big catch.
A new discussion group had formed in a private chat room on the site, under the heading of “Direct Action.” The members began to kick around the logistics of the Oklahoma City bombing, Tim McVeigh’s attack on the Murrah Federal Building in 1995: what had gone right, what had gone wrong, and the various conspiracy theories still swirling around the event and its aftermath. With some encouragement from the forum leader the discussion evolved-some half-baked plans that would’ve gotten the job done better, other vulnerable targets, men, methods, and materials. Many dropped out of the conversation as things got more serious, but eight stayed on.
This remaining group progressed to tentative voice chats and then to encrypted e-mail exchanges, all the while inching their way from what had started as a mere discussion toward a solid plot that could actually be executed. Three more anonymous participants eventually got cold feet and dropped out, leaving five people ready, willing, and able to commit a grotesque act of domestic terrorism.
And now it was time to reel them in.
“These aren’t my people,” Bailey said. “You’ve gotta be kidding me, man, I’ve never told anybody to do any violence-”
“I’ve watched your videos, son, and you don’t exactly tell them not to, either.”
“Aw, come on.” Bailey sat back in his seat, shaking his head. “I’ve got to go over the top just to get people up off the couch. Have any of you guys ever actually read the First Amendment? Tom Clancy wrote two books about how terrorists could use airliners as weapons before 9/11. Did you arrest him for that?”
“No, but I’ll tell you what, we sure as hell brought him in for questioning.”
“I’m not the right guy for this.”
“Well, you’re the one I’ve got. You’re a big name to these people. Trust me, they’ll believe what you say, and that’s all we need. You’re just going to come in and stroke them a little bit, tell them you know me and that I’m concerned there might be an agent among them-”
“You’re concerned that one of them might be a mole. That’s a nice touch.”
“Thanks,” Kearns said. “And I asked you to come with me and check them out before I’d agree to see them in person. It’ll be fine, believe me. Just that first meeting, and maybe a little follow-up afterward. That’s all you’ve got to do.”
“And then I’m out of this, and you’ll leave me alone?”
“Stay out of trouble, and there’s no reason you’ll ever have to deal with someone like me again.”
“I’m going to need to get that in writing.”
“You’ll get it.” Kearns put out his cigarette in the armrest ashtray. “Have you done any acting, like in high school?”
“Why?”
“Some people get nervous when they have to lie, that’s all. This isn’t much of a performance, but I want to know you can handle the pressure. You can’t flake out on me.”
“Oh, you want to know if I can fool a handful of small-time desperadoes role-playing Red Dawn in their living room?” Bailey nodded, took off his dark glasses, picked up his surveillance file from Kearns’s lap, and went through the stack until he found a series of photos about a third of the way down. “Did you miss these?” he asked.
The photos, time-stamped from earlier in the year, all featured a man dressed and made up in a convincing impersonation of Colonel Sanders, complete with goatee, white suit, and black-string bow tie. In the top picture he was shaking hands with a distinguished-looking gentleman under a huge United Nations seal.
“Is that you?” Kearns asked.
“That’s me.” Bailey pointed to the man standing next to him in the photo. “And that’s Mr. Ali Treki, the president of the UN General Assembly, receiving an official state visit from the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, who’d been dead for almost thirty years at the time. Look.” He flipped to the next picture. “He even let me sit in his chair and bang the gavel.”
“You did this when, last year?”
“Those pictures made the Daily News that week. It was a publicity stunt for my DVD on UN corruption, United AbomiNations. It’s sold out, but I’ll see if I can get you a copy.”
“I’ll add it to my Netflix queue. How did you get past security?”
“What security? Security walked me all the way up to the president’s office.” Bailey smiled. “Everybody loves the Colonel.”
“That’s good,” Kearns said.
“Oh, Stuart, that’s not just good. That’s finger-lickin’ good.”
Despite the circumstances, it was clear to see what people connected with in Danny Bailey. He had an easy charm about him, a certain smoothness that could draw you in like a great salesman does as he effortlessly talks you right down to the bottom line. When it comes to undercover work that kind of skill is more valuable than it might sound at first. If things start sliding sideways your wits can sometimes get you out of a situation where your gun might just get you killed.
Kearns nodded and took the file back, with a thought to himself that he should find the time to go through it all more thoroughly. There was clearly quite a bit more to this young fellow than initially met the eye.
Bacon.
Scent appeals to the most primitive of the five basic senses. Unlike a sight or sound or even a touch, an aroma can rocket straight to the untamed emotions with no stops required at the smarter parts of the brain. You like it or you hate it; that’s the designed-in depth of raw stimulation the nose is built to deliver. So amid all the other deeper thoughts that should have come to Noah’s mind upon awakening, it was bacon that crowded them out to come in first across the finish line.
Other wonderful smells of a home-cooked breakfast, recalling the finest mornings from his early childhood, were wafting in from a couple of rooms away. Molly was nowhere to be seen, though an alluring girl-shaped indentation was still evident in the gathering of covers beside him.
He pushed back the quilt and squinted to read the clock on the far wall: 4:35 it said, with no clue whether that made it early the following morning or late that same afternoon. It might take all weekend to get his body clock reset to normal again.
He slipped on his robe and pulled open the bedroom curtains. It was cloudy again and the sun was low; still Saturday, then.
“Are you up, finally?” He heard her voice from the doorway.
“Yeah.” When he turned he saw she was already dressed for the day. “Looks like you found the laundry room.”
“I went out and got some groceries, too. Your refrigerator was freakishly clean and really empty.”
“I eat out a lot.”
“Well, I made you something.” She smiled. “Late birthday breakfast. Come and get it while it’s hot.”
As they sat together at the sunroom table he focused on his food while she returned to chipping away at her half-finished crossword puzzle in the next day’s Sunday Times.
“You like word games?” Noah asked.
“I love word games.”
“Well, if you get stumped over there let me know. Not that I’m so brilliant, but I was on the spelling bee circuit when I was a kid.”
“Wow. Nerdy.”
“Yeah. I was a late bloomer.”
“Here’s a long one I need to get. Twelve down: One deeply devoted to wine.”
He thought for a moment. “Sommelier.”
She counted down with a fingertip, shook her head. “Not enough letters; you need eleven.”
“I wish you would have told me that.”
“Sorry.”
“Try… connoisseur.”
“Nope. There’s a gimmick this week: the answers all start with the first letter of the clue. So ‘one deeply devoted to wine,’ it has to start with an o.”
“Again, that would have been really useful information about twenty seconds ago. You’re making it hard for me to help you, Molly.”
“Just trying to keep you humble.”
He finished his coffee and put down the cup. “It’s oenophilist.” She gave him a skeptical frown, so he spelled it out. “O-e-n-o-p-h-i-l-i-s-t. Oenophilist. Wine lover. The o in the beginning is silent.”
She filled in the letters one by one, her lips pronouncing them soundlessly and precisely as she wrote, eyes darting to follow the hints provided by each new entry. It occurred to him that he could have happily watched her do that simple thing all day long.
“I would have gotten that,” she said quietly.
“You know, if you like word games so much I might have a better job for you down at the office.”
She put down her pencil, but kept her eyes on the paper in front of her.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” Molly said. She got up and took his empty plate and silverware to the sink.
“Okay. Let’s talk about it.”
“I’m not going to be in town very much longer.”
“Why?”
“I’m just not. There were some things I wanted to do here, and I’ve done them now, so I’ll be leaving.”
He sat back. “When are you thinking of leaving?”
“Soon.” Her attitude had changed abruptly, as though she was steeling herself for a discussion she didn’t want to prolong.
“Look, I didn’t mean anything when I mentioned a job, I know how you feel about that place-”
“You didn’t say anything wrong. This is just the way it is, okay?”
“Okay.”
She’d busied herself in silence in the kitchen for a little while, rehanging pans and tidying up briefly, but soon she sat down across from him again, reached over, and put her hand on his.
“Cheer up,” Molly said. “Go get ready, and loan me a jacket. I think we should take a walk.”
When he came back dressed from the bedroom he found her at the table again with a framed sheet of his childhood schoolwork in her hands, reading it over.
“What is this?” she asked.
“That was a penmanship exercise, from the fifth grade.” He pulled up a chair and sat beside her. “I don’t even think they teach that anymore, do they? Penmanship?” She tilted the frame a bit so they could both see it clearly. “They asked us to write down something we liked, obviously as neatly as we could, and that was my dad’s favorite poem, the last bit of it anyway.”
In the upper corner was the first gold star he’d received at his new school, near his new home, in the year that everything had changed. One of his nannies had framed the paper to commemorate the occasion. The movers placed it on a vacant desk in the study when he got this place, but he was certain he hadn’t looked at it a second time within those years. And it wasn’t quite right to say it was his father’s favorite poem; more like the old man’s justification of his life set in verse. He’d directed his young son to study it so he’d always know the way things really worked in this world.
Noah picked it up, let his thumb brush the dust from the corner of the glass, and read each metered line aloud.
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled,
and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled
and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up
to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back
to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and
no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror
and slaughter return!
When Noah had finished they sat in silence. Seeing these words again seemed to have taken something out of him. Molly must’ve sensed the change as well. She took the frame from his hands and laid it on the table.
“Who wrote that?” she asked.
“Rudyard Kipling, in 1919. Not one of his better-known pieces. He’d lost his son in the war and his daughter a few years earlier, and I guess he wasn’t so happy with the way things were starting to go in the world. This is only the last few stanzas of the poem; that’s all I could fit on the page.”
“Pretty heavy stuff for a ten-year-old.”
“Yeah,” he said. “The Jungle Book, it’s not.”
“And what do you think he was telling you with this, your father?”
“He told me the poem meant that history always repeats itself, that the same mistakes are made over and over, only bigger each time. The wise man knows that if you can’t change that, you might as well take full advantage of it. But to me it meant something else.”
“And what’s that?”
“It’s a warning, I guess, about what happens when you forget common sense. You have to read the whole thing to get it. I think it means that there really is such a thing as the truth, the real objective truth, and people can see it if they’ll just look hard enough, and remember who they really are. But most of the time they choose to give in and believe all the lies instead.”
“I’ll bet your father was disappointed to hear that coming from his own little boy.”
“You know,” Noah said, “if I’d ever had the guts to say it to him, I’m sure he would have been.”
Getting outside turned out to be a good idea. Noah was still aching from the thumps he’d taken the previous night, like the random pains you feel only in the days after a rear-end collision, but the cold city air and exercise were relieving a good bit of that.
They’d talked some along the way, though for the most part it had been a quiet walk. But there was nothing tense or self-conscious in those wordless stretches. He found himself at ease in her company, as if a conversation was always in progress, only spoken in other forms. She stayed close to him, at times with an unexpected gesture of casual intimacy: an arm around his waist for half a block, a finger hooked in his belt loop as they crossed a busy street against the light, a palm to his cheek as she spoke close to his ear to be heard over the din of the traffic.
At Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue she gradually slowed her pace and then stopped just outside the bustling flow of midtown pedestrians.
People say you never forget your first kiss, but that wasn’t the case in Noah’s life. Superficial things don’t carry enough weight to make a lasting memory. For him the first kiss had faded gradually into the hundredth, the faces and names and situations long ago blending together into a vague, pleasant, collective event. A little thrill, a tentative awkwardness, those sweet few seconds of breathless discovery shared with another, and a momentary sense of what the immediate future together could hold, however brief that time would likely be.
This wasn’t like that.
Molly looked into his eyes, and what he saw in her was a perfect reflection of a wanting that he also felt, so there was no delay of invitation and acceptance. It was a different sort of desire than he’d known before, an understanding that something now needed to be said that no language but the very oldest could possibly convey. He bent to her, closed his eyes, and her lips touched his, gently, and again more urgently as he responded. He felt her arms around him, her body yearning against his in the embrace, a knot like hunger inside, heart quickening, cool hands at his back under the warmth of his jacket, searching, pressing him closer still.
With everything to see and hear around them there at the very crossroads of the world, soaring billboards, scrolling news crawlers, bright digital Jumbotrons that lined the tall buildings and blotted out the whole evening sky, it all disappeared to its rightful insignificance, flat as a postcard. That place was left outside their small circle, and if asked right then he might have stayed there within it forever. But he felt her smile against his lips as they were brought back to where they stood by the brusque voice of a passing man, who advised in his native Brooklynese that maybe they should go and get a room.
A light drizzle had begun to fall, and down the block they found a coffee shop with two seats by the window where they could wait out the patch of rain. When he returned from the counter with their cups he found her sitting with a folded newspaper, not reading it but lost somewhere in her thoughts. It was a while before she spoke.
“Noah?”
“I was starting to worry you’d forgotten I was here.”
Molly took a deep breath and seemed to collect herself for a moment. “I need to ask you something.”
“Okay”
“If we hired you, your company, what would you tell us to do?”
He frowned a bit. “You mean if you and your mom hired us?”
“It’s more than just the two of us, you know that. A lot more.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What is it you want to accomplish again?”
“We want to save the country.”
“Oh. Okay. Is that all?”
“That’s where we start, isn’t it? With a clear objective.”
“That’s right.”
“So?”
“Okay. Let me think for a minute.”
Molly had become deadly serious; this wasn’t party talk. She didn’t take her eyes from his as she waited.
“I guess,” he said, “I’d begin by sitting down with all these different groups and trying to focus everyone on the things they agree on-the fundamentals. A platform, you know? Make it easy for people to understand what you’re about. Propose some real answers.”
“Give me an example.”
“I don’t know-start with the tax code, since your mom is so passionate about that. How about a set of specific spending cuts and a thirteen percent flat tax to start with? Get that ridiculous sixty-seven-thousand-page tax code down to four or five bullet points, and show exactly what effects it’ll have on trade, and employment, and the debt, and the future of the country. And I’m winging it here, but how about real immigration reform? The kind of policies that welcome people who want to come here for the right reasons, and succeed.
“Get the fear out of those big questions, and talk about a brighter future, you know? In our business we call it the elevator pitch: how you’d explain your whole outlook, features, and benefits if you had only a ten-floor elevator ride during which to get it across to a stranger. So start with a platform. At least that way they can start to speak with one voice occasionally. You have no political power otherwise.”
“And what next?”
He held up his hands. “Slow down for a minute.”
“No. What next?”
“Do you see that you’re maybe putting me on the spot a little here?” Noah tried to take a sip of his coffee, but it burned him. It was still much too hot to drink. “And what did you mean, save the country, by the way? Save it from what?”
She looked at him evenly. “You know what.”
“Oh, come on now, Molly. Please tell me you’re not really one of those people, I know you’re not-”
“I know there was a meeting at the office yesterday afternoon,” she said, lowering her voice but not her intensity. “I saw the guest list on the catering order. I know who was there. I know you were in it. And I think I know what it was about.”
“Okay, yes, big surprise, there was a meeting, but I wasn’t there for all of it. And do you want to know something else? I don’t even know what it was all about, so how could you?”
“Then let’s both find out.”
“What?”
“Prove me wrong. Let’s go right now and find out.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can. We’ll go to the office right now, and you’ll show me that I’ve got nothing to worry about. If that’s the case then that’ll be the end of it.”
“You’re not listening to me, I said I can’t-”
“You would if you knew how important it was.”
“No, I wouldn’t. There are a lot of things I’d do for you, but I can’t do that.”
“When are you going to grow up, Noah? I know you’re not who your father is, but then the next question is, Who are you? It sounds to me like you knew the answer to that when you were in the fifth grade, but you’ve forgotten now that it’s time to be a man.”
“I am a man, Molly, but I’m not going to risk everything for nothing.”
“Do you want me to leave?” Her voice was tight and there were sudden tears in her eyes. “Do you never want to see me again? Because that’s what this means.”
Now they were starting to attract the attention of those nearby.
“That is so incredibly unfair. Did you even hear what you just said? I can’t believe you’d put me in a position like that.”
But he’d lost her already. She got up as he was speaking, turned from him without a word, and walked straight out the door.
Noah watched her through the glass and let himself hope for a few seconds that she’d have a change of heart and turn back into his waiting arms so all could be forgiven. But, just like falling in love with someone you’ve known only for a single day, those things really happened only in the movies.
She was going to leave him sitting there. She wasn’t coming back. By the time he’d decided what he had to do, Molly had all but disappeared into the river of weekend tourists and theatergoers flowing through the heart of Times Square.
“You must be out of your mind,” Noah said, under his breath. He was addressing himself directly.
Molly was right behind him, holding tight to his hand as he led her through the aisles and racks of designer skirts and blouses toward the store’s back rooms.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she whispered.
He’d elected to avoid the main lobby entrance at 500 Fifth Avenue; too many cameras there, not to mention the sign-in desk that would make a record of the weekend visit. A private elevator led to Arthur Gardner’s suite of offices on the twenty-first floor, and that was the way they’d be going in.
The elevator had originally been an auxiliary freight lift, largely unused until its luxury conversion when Doyle & Merchant established their New York offices here in the 1960s. There was only one wrinkle in the layout: the ground-floor entrance to this elevator had to be located on the next-door tenant’s property, which was currently a multilevel, tourist-trendy clothing store.
The employees of this shop were aware that well-dressed strangers might occasionally be seen entering and leaving through their employees-only swinging doors in the back. D &M paid the tenant a monthly fee for the easement, and executive assistants occasionally escorted the firm’s more reclusive clients into the agency by this odd, private route. The idea of a semisecret entrance added an extra bit of intrigue to the visit for some.
During normal business hours the protocol was simply to raise your company ID above your head and quietly proceed to the rear of the store, as the floor manager knowingly waved you on. Since an encoded swipe card and a restricted key were required to operate the elevator, no further checks were really necessary.
This was Saturday night, however, and the two of them were dressed more like college students than business executives. Consequently they received a good deal of extra scrutiny as they passed through, and the store’s rent-a-cop tracked their progress from a discreet distance, all the way down the back hallway and inside the elevator car. So much for keeping a low profile.
Noah swiped his card and the doors closed, then he inserted the stubby cylindrical key and turned the elevator’s panel switch to Enable. There was no vertical line of buttons to choose the floor with; this thing went only two places: all the way up and back down again. With the click of relays and a deep ascending hum the car set into motion.
He was silently watching the wall above the doors where the advancing floor numbers should have been when Molly stepped up to him, close.
“Thank you, Noah.”
“I’m not really speaking to you right now.”
She touched his chest and put a hand on his shoulder; he looked down into her eyes.
“I hope I’m wrong,” she said. “I want to be wrong; you should know that. Now please just decide to forgive me, at least until we’re out of here again.”
He looked away, but after a time he nodded.
“Okay.”
There was only one way to warrant a blatant breach of business ethics such as this, and that was to attribute his actions to a higher cause. If Molly was right, then a cute but quirky mailroom temp had identified a grand, unified, liberty-crushing conspiracy that had been hatched in the conference room of a PR agency. The benefits of learning that would easily outweigh the consequences: forsaking his father’s trust and violating the ironclad, career-ending nondisclosure clause of his employment contract. After all, with the fate of the free world in the balance, the prospect of getting fired, disowned, and probably sued into debtor’s prison should be among the least of his worries.
If Molly was wrong-and no ifs about it, she was wrong-then he’d be vindicated, she’d be deeply apologetic and sworn to secrecy about this whole fiasco, and there might still be a chance to salvage what remained of the weekend.
A flimsy rationale, maybe, but for the moment it helped him avoid the more troubling thought that after all he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, deep down he needed to know the truth every bit as much as she did.
The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.
The old man’s office was never dark. Night or day it was always the same: warmly lit and immaculately kept, smelling faintly of pipe smoke, black tea, and silver polish, furnished with all his fine, precious things. From the art on the walls and pedestals to the antiques and small collections of rarities interspersed among the bookshelves, everywhere you turned there was something priceless. For him it was less a place of business than an inner sanctum of quiet meditation and a shrine to the very real forms of happiness that money could actually buy.
Few employees ever had occasion to set foot in these rooms and see these sights, but Molly paused only at the sight of one thing.
“What is this?” she asked.
She was looking at a marble sculpture on a pedestal in the corner. Noah’s father had commissioned it years ago. The figure depicted was a strange amalgamation of two other works of art: the Statue of Liberty and the Colossus of Rhodes. Molly would have known that much by looking; what she’d meant to ask was, What does this mean?
“It’s the way my father looks at things… at people, I mean: societies. The law may serve some superficial purpose, but it only goes so far,” Noah said, touching the spear in the statue’s left hand. “At some point the law needs to be taken away and replaced with force. That’s what really gets things done. People ultimately want it that way; they’re like sheep, lost without a threat of force to guide them. That’s what it means.”
Molly silently took in the statue for a while longer, like she was memorizing it. After a few more seconds she drew in a deep breath, walked to the door, peeked around the corner to make sure the coast was clear, and then turned and motioned for Noah to follow.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said.
Weekend work was one of the many things his father frowned upon, which led nearly all of the up-and-coming employees to maintain second offices at home. This allowed them to put in the expected seventy-plus hours per week while appearing to comply with company policy. It also meant that, with luck, Noah and Molly would have the place to themselves for the duration of their espionage.
Down the central hall and adjacent to the conference room they keyed themselves into the locked AV booth, where the presentation files were stored. Molly stood by him as he found the coded folders on the computer, entered their passwords, and prepared the show to be launched from a remote controller at the podium inside.
When they entered the conference room the programmed lights had already dimmed and wide white screens were descending around the walls. Digital projectors hummed and glowed as they received their data, and soon the screens lit up with an introductory slide.
In the beginning he clicked through the content fairly rapidly; this was the section he’d already seen. He paused only when Molly asked him to stop while she absorbed the content of some particular display.
Without the benefit of a speaker to explain them, many of the slides and visuals were difficult to understand. Animated graphs illustrated various social and political trends, time lines ticked off progress toward unnamed goals, maps with highlighted regions expanded or contracted to show unidentified changes over months, years, or decades.
“Stop,” Molly said. “Go back one.”
They were deeper into the presentation now, past the point at which Noah had left the meeting, but nothing had seemed particularly shocking or frightening to him. He’d breezed right past the screen she’d asked to see again. It was an introductory agenda for the group of very important people who’d come to attend the final half of the meeting.
The heading was “Framework and Foundation: Toward a New Constitution.” No names accompanied the headings that followed, only the areas of government that each new attendee supposedly represented.
• Finance / Treasury / Fed/Wall Street / Corporate Axis
• Energy / Environment / Social Services
• Labor / Transportation / Commerce / Regulatory Affairs
• Education / Media Management / Clergy / COINTELPRO
• FCC / Internet / Public Media Transition
• Control and Preservation of Critical Infrastructure
• Emergency Management / Rapid Response / Contingencies
• Law Enforcement / Homeland Security / USNORTHCOM / NORAD / STRATCOM / Contract Military / Allied Forces
• Continuity of Government
• Casus Belli: Reichstag / Susannah/Unit 131 / Gladio / Northwoods / EXIGENT
“Who was in this meeting, do you know?” Molly asked.
“The people I saw were mostly from some advance-planning division of the DHS; domestic war-gamers, like the international kind at the Pentagon. There’s a stack of tent cards here somewhere with their names. I don’t know about the ones who came later; I only had their phone numbers.”
“Do you still have that list?”
“No, I don’t. I was told to burn it, and that’s what I did.” He walked toward the screen and pointed to the last entry. “What does this term mean? My Latin’s a little rusty.”
She glanced up from her notes only for a moment. “Casus Belli. It means an incident that’s used to justify a war. Come on, let’s keep going.”
The slides thereafter made continual references to pages in some briefing document that must have been handed out to the meeting’s participants. Without those pages it seemed there was little use in continuing further.
“That’s it,” Noah said. “I don’t think there’s any more to see.”
“It’s not over yet. We’re not to the end.”
He held his thumb down on the advance button and the screens ticked by more and more rapidly. “I’m telling you, look at it, this is nothing but page numbers-”
The walls went black, leaving the room in almost total darkness.
One by one the screens faded in again, encircling the room with new content they hadn’t seen before. Each screen contained a linear diagram that was a trademark of the company’s strategic plans. These diagrams were used to show the firm’s clients a step-by-step layout of what to do, and how and when to do it.
The headings mirrored the disciplines of the attendees shown earlier: Finance, Energy, Labor, Education, Infrastructure, Media, Emergency Management, Law Enforcement, and Continuity of Government.
A security dialog popped up, and with a vocal sigh Noah entered his override password. If anyone ever checked to see who’d accessed these files and when, this would be another nail in his coffin. An hourglass indicator appeared, along with the message: Please Wait… Content Loading from Remote Storage.
“It’ll be a few minutes while this downloads,” Noah said. “We keep some of the more sensitive stuff off-site, to guard against the kind of thing we’re doing right now.”
Molly had left her seat and walked a complete circuit of the round room, looking over the various headings on the screens. She stopped by his side, pointing out a bracketed rectangle that enclosed part of the illustration on the slide in front of them.
“What’s that box?” she asked.
“It’s called the Overton Window. My father stole the concept from a think tank in the Midwest; it’s a way of describing what the public is currently ready to accept on any issue, so you can decide how best to move them toward what you want.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. She was looking at the screen related to national security and law enforcement. Except for the heading and the long thick line with an open box near its center, the slide was mostly blank. “How does it work?”
“The ends of this long line”-Noah walked up to indicate the starting point-“represent the extreme possibilities. At this end of the scale is the unthinkable, and all the way over at the other end is something else you can’t imagine ever happening, but in the opposite way. Too much good here, too much evil over there. If we were talking about government, it would be too much liberty at this end-which would be anarchy-and a complete top-down Orwellian tyranny at the other, so no liberty at all. Those in-between points are milestones along the way.”
Molly still looked a little lost in the concept, and she motioned for him to go on.
“Use airline security as an example,” Noah said. “Forty years ago people could pull up to the airport a few minutes before their flight, be treated with courtesy and respect, present no ID, just a ticket, and then get on the plane with just about anything in their pockets and their bags. There was some security, but it was almost invisible. Today that’s unthinkable, right? It seems like we could never go back to those days.”
She nodded.
“Now at the other end of the spectrum, let’s make the passengers arrive four hours early for the security line, allow no carry-ons, enforce a mandatory strip search, full-body X-ray, a cavity probe for everyone, and you have to stay in your seat the entire flight with a stun bracelet on your wrist in case you try to get up to go to the bathroom-which, of course, no longer exists.”
“They’re actually talking about doing some of those things,” she said.
“That’s getting to my point. If you suddenly had to go through everything I just mentioned you’d give up flying, correct? And with no security at all, you’d also never set foot on an airplane. So your Overton Window is somewhere in the middle, within this box. But my goal is to get you to accept more of those radical things over there, one step at a time.
“Let’s say tomorrow some idiot makes his way onto a flight with a little tiny homemade explosive of some kind. It’d be all over the news for weeks, whether the guy actually did any damage or not. You get scared, and the TV is telling you that all we have to do is buy some more expensive screening machines, hire some more of the same people who let that nut on the plane in the first place, and give up a little more dignity at the checkpoints, and we’ll be safe. That, of course, is a lie, but it has the desired effect.”
“It moves the window,” she said.
“Right. We put a false extreme at both ends to make the choices in the middle look moderate by comparison. And then, with a little nudge, you can be made to agree to something you would never have swallowed last week.”
“Why, though? Why would they want to do that?”
“The airline thing was just a random example, but I can think of a few reasons. If my client sold those X-ray machines, or had a contract for those extra security people, there’s quite a bit of money to be made there. It makes the government bigger and more involved in our lives, and that can justify higher taxes and fees, more bureaucracy, bigger budgets; it can build support for an unpopular military action, on and on. And who knows? Some of your friends last night might say that it’s all part of a program to condition the American people to put up their hands and submit to anyone in a uniform.”
“And this Overton Window, it’s used all the time?”
“All the time, everywhere you look. We never let a good crisis go to waste, and if no crisis exists, it’s easy enough to make one.
“Saddam’s on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland. If we don’t hand AIG a seventy-billion-dollar bailout there’ll be a depression and martial law by Monday. If we don’t all get vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pandemic. And how about fuel prices? Once you’ve paid five dollars for a gallon of gas, three-fifty suddenly sounds like a real bargain. Now they’re telling us that if we don’t pass this worldwide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater.
“And understand, I’m not talking about the right or wrong of those underlying issues. I care about the environment more than most, I want clean energy, I want this country to recover and be great again, people should get their shots if they need them, and Saddam Hussein was a legitimate monster. I’m saying opportunists can attach themselves to our hopes and fears about those things, for profit, and this is one of the tools they use to do that. The question to ask is, if they’ve got a legitimate case for these things, then why all the lying and fabrication?”
“So even if they can’t get us to accept everything at once,” Molly said, studying the diagrams, “they’re satisfied to move us a little closer toward the end.”
“Exactly. In fact, without some big earthshaking event, like a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11, that’s the only way it can work. Just little nudges in the right direction, and before you know it you’ve progressed yourself right into their agenda. It’s evolution they’re after, not revolution. And when I say ‘they’ I don’t mean some secret society out there. There’s always a prime mover behind these things, and it’s easy enough to figure out who it is. Just do a little research to see who stands to benefit; follow the money and power. You know who was one of the biggest lobbyists for this cap-and-trade business, right?”
“Greenpeace?” Molly said.
“Nope. Enron. A lot of powerful people are lining up to cash in on the deal if it happens, but back then it was a huge push at Enron right before the whole company blew up in America’s face. Carbon trading was going to be their biggest scam since they shut off the lights in California and held the whole state for ransom. They’d already started trading futures on the weather, if you can believe that, but this heist was going to be a thousand times bolder. Back then everybody thought they were joking.”
“Not quite everybody, I guess.”
“You’re right about that,” Noah said. “In fact, Enron was really just a huge diversion, like a Bernie Madoff, a patsy to throw to the wolves. Carbon trading moved forward anyway. The Chicago Climate Exchange is probably the best example, especially since it’s basically founded or fronted or funded by a Who’s Who list of environmental luminaries, like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs. But I can see why no one really cares-the Exchange’s founder thinks it’s probably only a ten-trillion-dollar-a-year market.”
Molly stared at him in astonishment. “Did you say ten trillion a year?”
“Uh-huh. And the backing for it goes right up to the top, internationally. So here’s a little pop quiz: What do you get when you combine corporate greed with political corruption and sprinkle a few trillion on top?”
“I don’t know… fascism?”
Noah shook his head. “You get Doyle & Merchant’s newest client.”
The hourglass on the screen had disappeared moments before, and was replaced by a dialog box with two buttons, one labeled HALT and the other PROCEED.
“Now I know what I’m looking at,” Molly said. “So let’s see what’s next.”
Noah clicked the remote, and the screens all began to change. The slides that had been incomplete filled in with callouts, numbers, names, legends, and dates to illustrate the long-term agendas within each area of American government and society at large. Some of these agendas spanned only a few years, others more than a century.
Pointers along the time lines began to move; text formed and then faded as significant events in recent history were reached and passed by. Milestones appeared, enclosed in the Overton Window of each screen as it moved slowly from left to right.
It was far too much ever-changing information to absorb, like watching all the movies in a multiplex simultaneously. But as they turned and took it all in at the center of the circle of screens, Molly suddenly touched his hand, and gripped it. It seemed the same realization had come over them both, at the same instant: This wasn’t eight separate agendas at all. It was only one.
Along the bottom, the steady advance of time. Through the middle, the slow, sporadic movement of the Overton Window-usually pushing forward, but sometimes pulling back, as though the public might have rebelled briefly against the relentless pressure before giving in to it again.
To the far right of each screen a final goal was listed. As Noah looked to each of them he realized something else that all these endpoints had in common. They weren’t written and presented as though they were unthinkable extremes, but rather as achievable goals in some new, unified framework of command and control, ready to come forth on the day the old existing structure failed.
• Consolidate all media assets behind core concepts of a new internationalism
• Gather and centralize powers in the Executive Branch
• Education: Deemphasize the individual, reinforce dependence and collectivism, social justice, and “the common good”
• Set beneficial globalization against isolationism/sovereignty: climate change, debt crises, finance/currency, free trade, immigration, food/water/energy, security/terrorism, human rights vs. property rights, UN Agenda 21
• Associate resistance and “constitutional” advocacy with a backward, extremist worldview: gun rights a key
• Quell debate and force consensus: Identify, isolate, surveil opposition leadership/threaten with sedition-criminalize dissent
• Expand malleable voter base and agenda support by granting voting rights to prison inmates, undocumented migrants, and select U.S. territories, e.g., Puerto Rico. Image as a civil rights issue; label dissenters as racist-invoke reliable analogies: slavery, Nazism, segregation, isolationism.
• Thrust national security to the forefront of the public consciousness
• Finalize the decline and abandonment of the dollar: new international reserve currency
• Synchronize and fully integrate local law enforcement with state, federal, and contract military forces, prepare collection/relocation/internment contingencies, systems, and personnel
According to the progress shown, many of these initiatives were already well under way. The slide devoted to Finance showed a time line beginning in 1913, and its Window had moved nearly to the end. The screen for Education began at a point even earlier and was also well along. Advances in one, concerning surveillance, security, and the militarization of law enforcement, had accelerated radically in the years since 9/11.
There’s a difference between suspecting a thing and finally knowing it for certain. Noah felt that difference twisting into his stomach. You can hold on to the smallest doubt and take comfort in it, stay in denial and go on with your carefree life, until one day you’re finally cornered by a truth that can no longer be ignored.
“Look over there,” Molly said.
But he’d already seen it. While every other slide had shown advancement and slow progress over its individual time span, one hadn’t moved at all, as though its role in all this was simply to be ready and awaiting activation. Also unlike the others, its time line didn’t measure years or decades, but only three final days.
Unlike the others, this slide had no Overton Window. EXIGENT was the legend at the far end of the line, and it seemed there would be no question of public acceptance, no need to rally opinion on this front. Whatever it was, it would bring its own consensus.
“Casus Belli,” the heading said, and Molly’s translation was still fresh in his mind.
An incident used to justify a war.
Outside the skies were still threatening, and to accompany the frigid light rain a wicked crosstown breeze had begun to blow. In that sort of weather almost everyone on the street is looking for a ride, so it took a few blocks of trying before Noah and Molly were able to hail an empty cab headed downtown.
When they’d closed the door the driver turned and asked where they were going.
“Ninth Street and Avenue B, by Tompkins Square Park,” Noah said. “And do us a favor,” he added, passing through enough of a tip to make his point. “We’re not in a rush, so just take it really, really easy, understand?”
The man in front took the money, gave a nod in the rearview mirror, and then signaled and pulled away from the curb with exaggerated care, hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, driving as if an inspector from the Taxi & Limousine Commission were watching from the shotgun seat.
Molly kept to her side of the car, looking out the window in silence as the ride got under way, but after a minute she reached across and found Noah’s hand to hold.
“There were no dates on those screens at the end,” Noah said. “There’s nothing to say that this thing is happening tomorrow, or next week, or next year.”
She shook her head. “It’s happening now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can see it. The economy is crashing, Noah. There’s no net underneath it this time. That’s why they’re rushing through all this stimulus nonsense, both parties. All the cockroaches are coming out of the woodwork to grab what they still can. It’s a heist in broad daylight, and they don’t care who sees it anymore. That’s how I know.
“They’ve doubled the national debt since 2000, and now with these bailouts, all those trillions of dollars more-that’s our future they just stole, right in front of our eyes. They didn’t even pretend to use that money to pay for anything real, most of it went offshore. They didn’t help any real people; they just paid themselves and covered their gambling debts on Wall Street.” She looked at him. “You asked how I know it’s happening now? Because the last official act of any government is to loot their own treasury.”
He couldn’t think of a thing to counter that, at least nothing that either one of them would believe.
“We’ll be okay,” Noah said.
“Who’ll be okay?”
“The two of us. And look, I’m not talking about any commitment you have to make, or a relationship, or whatever, I know we just met so let’s take all that out of the picture and not worry about it right now. I’m just telling you that I’ll help you, you and your mom, no strings attached.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Just give it some thought. I know, it would probably feel like some pact with the devil. I feel the same thing, but it’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?
“Whatever happens, it isn’t going to hit everyone equally. A lot of people I know probably won’t feel a thing, and I’m set up to be okay through just about anything. So I’m just saying that we can fix it so you and your mother are okay, too.”
“You’re wrong-you won’t be okay. No one will. If they accomplish half of what we saw on those screens then money won’t protect you. Nothing will.”
She turned her attention back to the window and the dark, blustery night beyond the glass.
After a time her clasp on his hand tightened for a few seconds, but it didn’t really feel like affection. It was more like the grip a person might take on the arm of the dentist’s chair, or the gesture of unspoken things an old love might extend at the end of a long good-bye.
When the cab pulled to a stop Molly opened the door and turned back to him as he paid the fare.
“Come on up,” she said. “See how the other half lives.”
The path to the entrance began with a forbidding metal gate at the sidewalk. The lock took quite a bit of finesse to operate. It looked as though it had been jimmied open more often than unlocked with a key. A dismal courtyard lay beyond the gate, and at the entrance a triple-bolted fire door opened to a sad little front hall lit by a single hanging lightbulb.
He followed as she started up three narrow, creaking flights; he took her occasional cues to avoid a splintery patch on the railing or a weak spot in the stairs. On the second floor the entrance from the landing was secured with a heavy chain and padlock. His first thought was that the door was blocked to discourage squatters, but considering the run-down, gray-market condition of the place, it was probably as much for the safety of the trespassers as a protection for the property itself.
Though the walls and windows showed signs of spotty maintenance the construction was haphazard and incomplete. None of the repair work seemed up to code, but little of the older, existing carpentry did, either. As they continued up the stairs, he saw sheets of plywood over broken windows, and bare studs without plaster here and there. Long, jagged cracks in the remaining walls warned of some structural weakness that might run all the way to the foundation. Random drafts swept up the dim stairwell, accompanied by ominous settling sounds and the distant clank and hiss of old steam heat.
When they arrived at the third floor Molly had her keys ready, and she set about unlocking several dead bolts on the unnumbered apartment door.
“How long have you lived here?” Noah asked.
“Not that long.” She tried the door, and had to put a shoulder to it to bump it free from its swollen frame. “It’s a little nicer inside.”
And she was right. In fact, across that threshold it seemed like they’d entered a whole different world. As she relocked the door he took a few steps in, stood there, and looked around.
Great effort had obviously been taken to transform this space into a sort of self-contained hideaway, far removed from the city outside. What had probably once been a huge, cold industrial floor had been renovated and brought alive with simple ingenuity and hard work. The result was one large area divided with movable partitions to form an impressively cool, livable loft. From where he was he could see a spacious multipurpose room off the entryway, a kitchen and laundry to the side, and what seemed to be a series of guest rooms toward the back.
Molly hung her keys on a hook by the door. “What do you think?”
“How many people live here?” Noah asked.
“I don’t know, eight or ten, so don’t be surprised if you see someone. They come and go; none of us lives here permanently. We have places like this all around the country so we can have somewhere safe to stay when we have to travel. That’s my room over there for now, but hardly any of this stuff is mine.” She stepped into the kitchen, still talking to him. “Have a seat. I’ll make us some iced tea. Or would you rather have a beer?”
“The tea sounds good.”
“We make it pretty sweet where I come from.”
“Bring it on, Ellie Mae. The sweeter the better.”
He walked about midway into the front room and found a slightly elevated platform enclosed in Japanese screens of thin dark wood and rice paper panels. There were a lot of bookshelves, a dresser, a rolltop desk, and a vanity. But the space was dominated by a large rope hammock, its webbing covered by a nest of comfy blankets and pillows, suspended waist-high between the red shutoff wheels of two heavy metal pipes that extended up from the floor through the ceiling. This room within a room was lit softly by small lamps and pastel paper lanterns. The total effect of the enclosure was that of a mellow, relaxing Zen paradise.
A glance through the nearest bookcase revealed a strange assortment of reading material. Some old and modern classics were segregated on a shelf by themselves, but the collection consisted mostly of works that leaned toward the eccentric, maybe even the forbidden. There didn’t seem to be a clear ideological thread to connect them; Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals was right next to None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Down the way The Blue Book of the John Birch Society was sandwiched between Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, Orson Scott Card’s Empire, and a translated copy of The Coming Insurrection. Below was an entire section devoted to a series of books from a specialty publisher, all by a single author named Ragnar Benson. Noah touched the weathered spines and read the titles of these, one by one:
The Modern Survival Retreat
Guerrilla Gunsmithing
Homemade Grenade Launchers: Constructing the Ultimate Hobby Weapon
Ragnar’s Homemade Detonators
Survivalist’s Medicine Chest
Live Off the Land in the City and Country
And a last worn hardcover, titled simply Mantrapping.
“Those are some pretty good books she’s got there, huh?”
It was only the tranquil atmosphere and a slight familiarity to the odd voice from close behind that kept him from jumping right out of his skin. He turned, and there was Molly’s large friend from the bar, nearly at eye level because of the elevated platform on which Noah was standing.
“Hollis,” Noah said, stepping down to the main floor, “how is it that I never hear you coming?”
The big man gave him a warm guy-hug with an extra pat on the shoulder at the end. “I guess I tend to move about kinda quiet.”
“I might need to hang a bell around your neck, just for my nerves.”
“Come on,” Hollis said. “Let me show you around some.”
The loft had more living spaces in back than Noah had first imagined. Some were for sleeping, others for working and meeting. In the room that Hollis identified as his own there was a low army cot, several neatly organized project tables, and a large red cabinet on wheels, presumably full of tools. All these things were arranged as though bed rest wasn’t even in the top ten of this man’s nighttime priorities.
“What is all this stuff?” Noah asked. One table was covered with parts and test equipment for working on small electronics, another was a mass of disassembled communications equipment, and a third was devoted to cleaning supplies and the neatly disassembled pieces of a scary-looking black rifle and a handgun. More weapons were visible in an open gun safe to the side, but his focus had settled on the nearest of the workbenches. “Are you making bullets there?”
“Making ammunition.” Hollis picked up a finished example and pointed to a spot near the grayish tip. “The bullet’s just this last little bit on her business end. That right there’s a.44 jacketed hollow-cavity; got a lot of stopping power.”
Arrayed around this bench were a number of labeled bins and jars, black powders of varying grades and grinds, a pharmacist’s scale, a tray of brass casings, and a hand-operated machine that looked something like a precision orange squeezer, attached to the tabletop by a vise.
“Why on earth would you want to make your own ammunition?”
Hollis sat, put on his spectacles, picked up the components of an unfinished cartridge, started working with the pieces, and then spoke. “Noah, do you like cookies?”
“Why yes, Hollis. We were talking about firearms, but yes, I do like cookies.”
“And which do you like better?” He’d placed the open powder-filled casing in the lower part of his hand-operated machine, fitted a bullet on top, tweaked an adjustment ring with the deft touch of a safecracker, and then rotated a long feed lever until the two parts mated together into a single, snug assembly. “Do you prefer those dry, dusty little nuggets you get in a box from one of them drive-through restaurants?” He removed the finished cartridge from the mechanism and held it up so Noah could admire its perfection. “Or would you rather have a nice, warm cookie fresh out of the oven, that your sweetheart cooked up just for you?”
“I see what you mean, I guess.”
“Oh hell, anything’ll do for target shooting, I suppose, but if I know what I’m hunting I can make up something that’s just exactly right, and she’ll fly straighter and hit harder than anything I could buy in a box from a store.”
“I’m not a gun guy, but it’s hard to believe it could make that much difference.”
“I’d say it makes all the difference.” After consulting his calipers Hollis made an infinitesimal adjustment to the press and returned to his work. “Go out sometime and wing a bull moose with a rifle you loaded for a little whitetail deer, and see what happens. Might as well just whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.”
“I see.”
“You better see. Nothing quite like a pissed-off wounded moose chasin’ you across an open field to teach a man the value of the proper ammunition.”
Noah looked over the table again. In a stack near the other end a number of clear acrylic boxes were already filled with finished ammo. “How many of those things can you do in an hour?”
“With a one-stage press? I’d reckon somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred rounds.” Hollis looked up at him over the rims of his thin safety glasses, and smiled. “It all depends on my motivation.”
“Hey, boys,” Molly said. She’d brought a glass of tea for Hollis. “Catching up?”
“Yeah, we are. Hollis here was just making some helpful suggestions for the next time I need to shoot a moose.”
She patted her seated friend on the back. “I’m going to steal him for a little while, okay?”
“You two kids be good,” Hollis said.
There were other voices nearby, and Molly led him down the line of doorways and partitioned spaces toward the sound. At the end of this hall they came to a large room with a diverse group of men and women sitting around a long conference table. On a second look Noah saw that this furniture consisted of a mismatched set of folding chairs and four card tables butted end to end.
The people inside had been listening to a speaker at the head of the table but the room became quiet when they saw the newcomers.
“Everybody,” Molly said, “this is Noah Gardner. And Noah, these are some of the regional leaders of the Founders’ Keepers. You said you were good with names, so let’s put you to the test.”
She started at the near end of the table and proceeded clockwise with introductions around the circle. Molly pointed out each person and gave the historic pseudonym that he or she had taken on when they joined the organization.
“Did you get all that?” she asked.
“Let’s see.” He began where she’d ended and went around the other way. “That’s Patrick, Ethan, George, Thomas, Benjamin, Samuel, John, Alexander, James, Nathaniel, another Benjamin-Franklin or Rush, you didn’t say which-Francis, William, and Stephen.”
“Very good.”
“I owe it all to Dale Carnegie.” Each of the attendees had a book open, and from what he could see they all appeared to be similar in every way but their visible contents. “What did we interrupt?” Noah asked. “Is this a strategy session or something?”
“Not tonight,” Molly said. She motioned for the speaker at the head of the table to continue from where she’d left off. This woman, maybe ten years Noah’s senior, had been introduced as “Thomas.”
“Cherish therefore the spirit of our people,” the woman said, “and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and assemblies, judges, and governors shall all become wolves.”
These words were from the writings of Thomas Jefferson; though Noah hadn’t recognized them as such he could see the heading in the open book of the one sitting next to her as she spoke. This man was following along carefully, tracking the memorized text with a moving fingertip. She was delivering the passage with feeling and energy, not as the rote recitation of a centuries-old letter, but as if for the time being, she’d made Jefferson’s thoughts her own.
“It seems to be the law of our general nature,” she continued, “in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
There was an empty chair at the table with one of those little books in front of it. Molly picked up this book and waved a good-bye to the others as they prepared for the next speaker in line. She took Noah’s hand and led him from the room and back up the hall again.
“Aren’t they going to need that book?” Noah asked.
“No, this one’s mine.” She handed it to him. “I’m not like they are, though. They’ve each memorized a whole person, and I’ve just got little pieces of a lot of them. Mostly Thomas Paine, though.”
“So what’s the meaning of all this?” The book was clearly hand-bound and not mass-manufactured. It looked old but well cared for, and there was a number on the inside front cover, suggesting that this one and the others were part of a large series.
“It’s one of the things the Founders’ Keepers do,” Molly said. “We remember.”
“You remember speeches and letters and things?”
“We remember how the country was founded. You never know, we might have to do it again someday.”
“So you keep it in your heads? Why, in case all the history books get burned?”
“It’s already happening, Noah, if you haven’t noticed. Not burning, but changing. Ask an elementary school kid what they know about George Washington and it’s more likely you’ll hear the lies about him, like the cherry-tree story or that he had wooden dentures, than about anything that really made him the father of our country. Ask a kid in high school about Ronald Reagan and they’ll probably tell you that he was a B-list-actor-turned-politician, or that he was the guy who happened to be in office when Gorbachev ended the Cold War. Ask a college kid about Social Security and they’ll probably tell you that it was intended to provide guaranteed retirement income for all Americans. Ask a thirty-year-old about World War II and they’ll recite what they remember from Saving Private Ryan. Do you see? No one really needs to rewrite history; they just have to make sure that no one remembers it.”
He closed the book carefully and gave it back to her. “Molly?”
“Yes?”
“Hit me with a little Thomas Paine.”
She took his hand, and spoke quietly as they walked.
“ ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’” Molly said. “‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
“ ‘What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.’”
Back in Molly’s section of the loft she gave Noah his iced tea and took a seat on the edge of her hammock. He sat on a nearby divan made from crates, a simple frame, and random cushions. The tea turned out to be as sweet as she’d warned it would be, but it was good.
“That looked like a small arsenal Hollis had back there,” Noah said. “Are all those guns legal?”
“Two of them are registered. The rest are just passing through. He’s on his way to a gun show upstate.”
“So the answer’s no, they’re not legal.”
“Do you know what it took to make those two guns legal in this city?”
“I can imagine.”
“It took over a year, and the guy who owns them had to get fingerprinted, interviewed, and charged about a thousand dollars to exercise a constitutional right.”
“Welcome to New York. There’s a lot you’ve got to live with when you live here.”
“Wait, didn’t you say you were pre-law in college? I would have thought they’d have spent a few minutes on the Second Amendment.”
“Yeah, they did,” Noah said. “The experts differ quite a bit on its interpretation.”
She spoke the words thoughtfully. “‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’-that seems pretty clear to me.”
“You left out the part that causes all the arguments.”
“The word militia meant something different back then, Noah. Ben Franklin started the first one here. The militia was every citizen who was ready and able to protect their community, whatever the threat. It was as natural as having a lock on your front door.
“Today the police are there to protect society, but they’re not obligated to protect you and me as individuals. The Supreme Court’s ruled on that quite a few times. And they certainly won’t protect us from the government, God forbid it would ever come to that. So the way I read it, the Second Amendment simply says we have the right to be ready to defend ourselves and our neighbors if we have to.”
“Speaking of the way you read it,” he said, “why don’t you tell me about your bookshelf there.”
She looked over at it briefly. “What about it?”
“I was noticing some of the titles. That’s quite a subversive library.”
“People use some of those books to smear us, and some of them were written by our enemies. I read everything so I’ll know what I’m up against, and how to talk about them. You don’t see any harm in that, do you?”
“Who’s this Ragnar Benson lunatic?”
She smiled. “He’s not a lunatic. That’s a pen name, by the way; hardly anyone knows who he really is. He writes about a lot of useful things, though.”
“Like how to make a grenade launcher in your rumpus room?”
“That one was from his mercenary days. He’s mellowed out some since then. Now he’s more about independence, and readiness, and self-sufficiency, you know? The joys of living off the grid.”
“It almost sounds like you know this guy.”
She considered him for a moment and then leaned a little closer. “Can you keep a secret?”
“This is probably the wrong day to ask me that.”
“It’s Hollis’s uncle,” Molly whispered. “And guess who took up the family business and wrote a few of those books himself.”
“Hollis?” He pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. “My Hollis?”
She nodded, smiling a little. “You shouldn’t judge a person by appearances, you know. He’s a very smart man.”
“Yeah, so was the Unabomber. Top of his class, I hear.”
“You make little jokes when you’re nervous,” Molly said. “That’s kinda cute.”
“Thanks.”
“Now finish your tea or I’ll think you don’t like it.”
He did, in one long drink, and Molly patted a place beside her on the hammock with one hand.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve lived twenty-eight years without trying to get into one of those. You sit over here with me.”
“Come on, it’s easy, chicken.”
“It’ll flip over.”
“No, it won’t.” She held out her hands to him, beckoning. “I just want to forget about everything else for a little while, okay? Come here, now. Don’t make me ask you again.”
It would have been hard to say no to that, and he didn’t try. With her guidance he sat next to her on the precarious edge of the hammock.
“Now we just hold on,” Molly said. “Let your feet come off the floor and lie down, and try not to roll off the other side.”
He followed her lead as she leaned back, and from there it was a touch-and-go fun-house ride for quite a few wobbly seconds. Amid the swinging and shifting and overbalancing and a great deal of welcome laughter, things gradually settled down into a fragile stability. In the end they found themselves pleasantly entwined with one another, held close in the pocket of the hammock in a comfortable, gentle sway.
There was no ceiling to the enclosure of her room, and high overhead among the distant steel beams someone had arrayed several dim strings of white Christmas lights in a pattern reminiscent of a starry evening sky.
“Hey, Molly,” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“What do you say we just stay here like this, for a really long time.”
She held him a little closer. “I wish we could.”
He’d noticed her silver bracelet before but now it was close enough to see the marks of its worn engraving. “What does this say?”
She brought her wrist closer to his eyes. “It’s been through a lot, and I’m afraid it’s getting a little hard to read.”
Noah held her hand and found the right distance and the proper angle in the dim light to allow him to make out the faded lettering. When he was sure of what they said he read the words aloud.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
“That’s right,” Molly said.
“Whose quote is that? I’ve heard it before.”
“Thomas Paine.”
He laid his head back down next to hers. “But how do you think you can do that, Molly? I’m not saying you can’t, but I don’t see how.”
“There’s more,” she said. With her other hand she carefully twisted the bracelet so the inner face of it turned out, and there was another inscription on that side.
Faith Hope Charity
“That’s “nice?”
Nice.”
“I guess I don’t really understand,” Noah said. “I mean, I understand those words, but that’s not really a battle plan, is it? Do you know what you’re up against?”
“Yes,” Molly said. “But I doubt that our enemies do.”
“So tell me.”
“Okay,” Molly said. “Pop quiz: Who fired the first shot in the American Revolution?”
“That’s a trick question. Nobody knows who fired the first shot.”
“Is that your final answer?”
“Yep.”
She worked herself up onto an elbow so she could look at him. “It wasn’t fired from a gun. The first shot was a sermon, delivered by Jonathan Mayhew, years before Lexington and Concord. It wasn’t a politician who first said ‘no taxation without representation.’ It was a preacher.”
“Ah. So that’s the faith part.”
“It’s more than that. Our rights come from a higher power, Noah. Men can’t grant them, and men can’t take them away. That’s the difference, I think, between what happened in the French Revolution and what we achieved in ours. We believed we had the will of God behind us, and they believed in the words of Godwin. One endures, and the other fell to human weakness.”
He touched the second word engraved in her silver bracelet. “And what about hope?”
“That means we believe in the strongest part of the human spirit. Hope and truth are tied together; if everything we know is a lie, we don’t have a chance. When a doctor tells you you’re sick, you don’t blame her for the diagnosis. You have the truth, then, no matter how bad it is, and you can make a plan to get better. That’s hope. To know that even when things look darkest, there can be a better day tomorrow.”
Molly pointed out the last word of the three. “And charity is simple. We believe that it’s up to each of us to help one another get to that better tomorrow. Ben Franklin explained my whole bracelet when the president of Yale asked him to sum up the American religion. He answered: that there is a God, that there is life after this one and He will hold us accountable for our actions in this life, and that the best way to serve Him is to serve our fellow man. That’s faith, hope, and charity.”
“It sounds good.” Noah adjusted a pillow and laid his head back onto it. “I hate to say it, though; I just don’t think it’s enough.”
“Maybe it’s not something you get right away,” Molly said. “It didn’t come to any of us overnight. When you’re ready to understand, you’ll understand.”
A sketch on white paper was attached to the wall at their side, placed so it would be easily visible to someone lying where they were.
“Who drew that, over there?” Noah asked.
She turned her head that way, rolled over slightly, reached out to tug the paper free from its pushpin, and then held it so they both could see. “I did.”
It was a drawing of a small log cabin in a valley in wintertime, near a stream within a secluded patch of woods. The details of the place were carefully rendered; a porch swing, a spot for a garden to the side within a low split-rail fence, a path of flat stones to the front steps, puffs of drifted snow on the eaves and windowsills. It was only simple lines and shades from the edge of a pencil, but the scene was fondly captured there in the artist’s sensitive hand.
“It’s really beautiful,” Noah said. “Where is this?”
“Only in my head, I guess.” She looked at him. “And do you want to know something?”
“Sure.”
“This is all I want, really, this little place. I imagine that makes me sound pretty simple to someone like you.”
“No, it doesn’t. It sounds good.”
“Just a place like this to share with someone, and the freedom to live our lives there. The pursuit of happiness, you know? That means a different thing to everybody, and that’s the way it should be. But this is mine; this is what I dream about.”
“I hope you get there someday.”
“I hope we all do.”
He thought for a moment. “Why don’t you just go out right now, and find that place?”
“You mean, why don’t I just grab mine while I can, and to hell with everybody else?”
“That’s not exactly what I meant-”
“There’s a cancer in our country, Noah. We’ve both seen the X-rays now. If we don’t stop it, it’ll spread wherever we try to hide. And I want you to know something. I need for you to know something.”
“Okay.”
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t give up to defend my country. No matter how hard it might be, there’s nothing that’s in my power that I wouldn’t do.”
“I understand,” Noah said. “I admire that a lot.”
“But I don’t want this on my shoulders. I don’t want to be right. I wish things were different. If I could I’d stay here just like this, like you said.”
“I just wish I felt that strongly about anything.”
Quiet minutes passed, and as he lay there gazing up at those imitation stars, feeling her close to him, he tried without much success to remember exactly what it was he’d been pursuing for all these years, if it wasn’t a simple togetherness just like this.
Then he noticed a subtle blur that had crept into his vision. A little shimmer had formed around sources of light, and though he blinked it away the strange haze returned after a moment more, this time accompanied by an odd discomfort, like a passing wave of vertigo.
“Whoa.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I think I got the whirlies there for a second.”
No sooner had the feeling left than it came over him again, but stronger this time, and he stiffened, tried to shake it off. Molly raised herself on an elbow beside him, concern in her eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he breathed out. “I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. There’d been a time in college after a stupid drinking game when he’d downed far too much of the spiked punch too quickly, and all that alcohol had hit his bloodstream at once. It had been the worst feeling of helplessness, because by the time he realized his mistake there was nothing he could do to stop what was coming.
“I need to get up,” he said. His own words were slow to reach his ears, and they didn’t sound right. A flutter of panic was beginning to take hold inside, and he felt her cool hand on his forehead, comforting.
“Be still now,” she said.
But it had almost all drained away by then, first the strength and then the will to move, all replaced by this building sensation of a slow-motion, backward swoon at the sheer edge of a bottomless ravine.
As the cloudy room began to swim and fade he saw that three strangers were standing nearby, young men dressed in business suits and ties.
“It’s time to go, Molly,” one of them said, the voice far away and unreal.
“Just give us a minute. Wait for me downstairs.”
And they were gone, and another, taller figure appeared.
“You’ll stay with him, Hollis, won’t you?”
“I’ll stay just as long as I can.”
He felt her arms around him tight, her tears on his cheek, her lips near his ear as the blackness finally, fully descended. Almost gone, but the three simple words she’d whispered to him then would stay clear in his mind even after everything else had faded away into the dark.
“I’m so sorry.”
Agent Kearns had retired to the kitchenette of his double-wide mobile home to make breakfast. This left Danny Bailey sitting by himself in the parlor in his borrowed pajamas with a wicked sleep hangover, an ugly off-white cat, and a full-scale model of a small atomic bomb.
The Sunday news from some distant city lay folded at the far end of the couch. It would have been nice to see some headlines but the paper was a little too close to the cat to be safely retrieved.
“So you’ve never been to Winnemucca, you said?” Kearns called through the narrow doorway.
Again with the frickin small talk.
“No, can you believe that?” Danny said. He was looking over the elaborate cylindrical device in its heavy wooden cradle on the coffee table. “Never knew what I was missing.”
“If you think this burg is dead, wait until you see where we’re going to meet these guys tonight. This whole part of Nevada was voted the official armpit of America by the Washington Post a couple of years ago.”
“Sounds like a hoot. Hey, Stuart?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to come off like a puss, but is this bomb-looking thing, like, radioactive?”
“Nah, not too much.” Kearns returned with their coffee and sat in a nearby chair. “The core’s inert; it’s just a big ball of lead. There’s some depleted uranium under the lining, so it’ll set off a Geiger counter in case anybody checks. Here, look.” He flipped a switch on a boxy yellow gadget on the table and brought its wand closer to an open access panel at the fore end of the model. The meter on the instrument twitched and a rapid clicking from its speaker ramped up to a loud, raspy buzz as the tip of the wand touched an inner metal housing. “Sure sounds hot enough though, doesn’t it?”
“But it’s not dangerous.”
“No, but I wouldn’t keep it under my bed at night.”
“And these dudes we’re going to see, the boys who want to buy this thing, why would they ever believe that a private citizen could get his hands on a working nuclear weapon?”
“Okay, good, we should talk about this. Do you remember about a year ago, there was a story in the news about a live cruise missile that went missing?”
“Of course I do. The Barksdale thing-I did a whole week of shows on that. Somebody screwed up and loaded real warheads instead of dummies onto a B-52 in North Dakota. Six nukes left the base, but only five showed up in Louisiana.”
“Right,” Kearns said. “Now we both know that something like that can’t just happen, not as an accident anyway. It’s like the Secret Service accidentally putting the president into the wrong car and then nobody missing him until noon the next day. It’s impossible; there are way too many safeguards in place. Unless, of course, it was an inside job.
“So my online personality is a guy with tons of deep connections from my years with the FBI. About seven years ago I finally got disgusted with the whole crooked government, slipped off the reservation, and disappeared into my own version of the Witness Protection Program. My cover story was that, to get this bomb, I made friends with the right two people on those munitions crews through my website, one at Minot Air Force Base and one at the destination. They fudged the orders and arranged that flight, then helped me get the guts of one of those warheads onto a truck and on its way out of Barksdale half a day before anybody even knew it was missing.”
“So you’re not trying to claim you built this from scratch, like in your backyard workshop.”
“No, hell no, of course not. Just the mount and the housing, and I hooked up some of the electronics; that’s all I had to put together here. The warhead itself was intact.”
Danny leaned forward and ran a fingertip along one of the smoother welds. “I’ve gotta hand it to you. It looks pretty bad-ass.”
“Yeah, it does,” Kearns said, as he stowed the Geiger counter in a gym bag next to the couch, “if I do say so myself.”
“And how much of that’s actually true?”
“How much of what is actually true?”
“What you just said. That whole Barksdale story.”
Kearns didn’t answer right away. He zipped up the bag on the floor and then sat back in his chair, frowning. “What is this, 60 Minutes all of a sudden?”
“No, man, we’re just talking-”
“I’m not here to fill in the blanks for your next conspiracy video.”
“I’m just trying to get our story straight.”
“Okay,” Kearns said. “But what’s true or not true about what I just said isn’t part of the story you’ve got to get straight.”
“Fine, okay, sorry. It just sounded so believable. This is all pretty new to me, you know, and I’m still a little groggy this morning. I haven’t slept for twelve hours like that in twenty years.”
The other man continued to study him, as if he felt he might have made a slip and was still assessing its severity. But after a few seconds he nodded, seemed to ease down a bit, and pulled the reluctant, rumpled cat a little closer and rubbed its head.
“Yeah, okay,” Kearns said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get my dander up. Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid in my old age. I’ve been told in the past I’ve got some issues.”
“Hey, pal, who doesn’t, right?”
“You said it.”
The microwave in the other room beeped at the end of its heating cycle.
“So,” Danny said, rubbing his hands together, “what’s to eat?”
Agent Kearns brought in some toast and a crusty tub of margarine along with some scrambled eggs and ham from a can. The meat was spongy and slick and the eggs tasted like survival food, but with enough salt and pepper it all became passable enough.
“I only asked what I asked before,” Danny said, “because I would have thought you guys had all kinds of labs and engineers back at headquarters that would have built a model like this for an undercover operation. You know, so someone like you wouldn’t have to bother with any of it yourself.”
“Yeah, they do, but these last few years I’ve gotten accustomed to working alone. The less contact you make when you’re undercover, the safer it is. Hell, I’ve been out in the cold so long on this one, as far as I know only one guy inside even knows I’m still on the payroll.”
“Wow, you must really trust that guy.”
Kearns bent and slipped a snubnose revolver from his ankle holster, matter-of-factly, as if it had been just a pebble stuck in his shoe. He swung out the cylinder and spun it with the flat of his hand, flicked it back into place, laid the gun on his side of the table, and then picked up his plate to resume his breakfast. You’d almost think all this had nothing to do with the subject at hand.
“Sure, kid,” Kearns said. “I trust everybody.”
Sunday afternoon was spent with each of them going over the other’s public background. If they were to appear to be old acquaintances, they couldn’t hesitate on some obvious detail that might come up in the conversation. Then, before loading up the van, they’d made a telephone call to finalize the evening’s meet-up with the targets of the sting operation.
Kearns had used a hacker gizmo called an orange box to fake the caller ID display the recipients would see. It would appear to them as though the call had come directly from Danny Bailey’s private number; his actual cell phone was apparently still stuck in the bowels of some evidence warehouse back in New York.
The man who’d answered had been suitably impressed to be talking to one of his longtime media heroes in the war against tyranny. The time and address of the meeting were confirmed and Stuart Kearns was heartily endorsed as a verified patriot who could absolutely deliver the goods. Before sign-off, the man on the other end had handed the phone around so everyone could have a moment to speak with their celebrity caller.
Under Kearns’s watchful eye, Danny had played along with it all quite easily, but something began to nag at him after they’d hung up. The troubling thing was that, though each of those men had laid claim to being his biggest fan, and had seen every video he’d ever produced and read every word he’d ever posted online, they’d all apparently seen and heard and read things that Danny Bailey was pretty sure he’d never actually said:
That the only way left to rally the people was to rip aside the curtain and force the enemy out into the light of day.
That the globalist oligarchs and their puppets in Washington had been spoiling for a fight for sixty years, and now they were going to get the war that was coming to them.
That the souls of the Founders were crying out for true patriots to step up and set things right with the Republic.
And that the time had finally come for a twenty-first-century shot heard ’round the world, the final trumpet to signal the start of the second American Revolution.
But even if not in precisely those words, those sentiments did sound awfully familiar. Maybe he had said those things, and it was only the current context that put them into such a stark new light. After all, things can sound different when echoed back by men who’ve decided to deliver their message with a fifteen-kiloton city killer instead of with a bullhorn.
They’d been rolling down a desolate, moonless stretch of Interstate 80 for a number of miles. The road was so dark that the world out front seemed to end at the reach of the headlights, and there was nothing to see at all out the window behind.
“Hey, Stuart?”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I agreed with these hoodlums, even one percent. I’m not a terrorist, and I’m not a turncoat.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Kearns said, his eyes on the road.
“Like I said before, these aren’t my people, and what they want to do isn’t the way to change things, and I’ve never said it was.”
“I believe you.”
For once a little mindless conversation would have been welcome, but since no chitchat was forthcoming from the driver’s seat Danny had to occupy himself with his own thoughts, listening to the sound of the road beneath the wheels.
“What kind of a phone is that?” Danny asked. He’d noticed the device before, held in its charger near the center console. It was too big to be a cell phone; it looked more like a smaller, thinner version of a walkie-talkie, but with a standard keypad.
“Satellite phone,” Kearns said. “Works anywhere. Cell phone coverage in a place like this is pretty spotty.”
“I guess it would be.”
After a while Kearns let his foot off the gas, and the van began to coast and slow down as he reached forward and shut off the headlights.
“What are you doing?”
“Roll down your window, stick out your head, and look up,” Kearns said.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Just trust me. I want you to see something. You live in the city, right?”
“Yeah, downtown Chicago,” Danny said. “Just about all my life.” He cranked the glass down, leaned his head out into the cold wind, and looked up as he’d been directed.
“Well, there’s only about three things to see out here in the middle of nowhere,” Kearns said, “but this is one of them.”
“Oh. My. God.”
The air was perfectly clear, it seemed, from the barren ground all the way out to the edge of space. From horizon to horizon there was no man-made light to obscure the view up above. Thousands of stars, maybe tens of thousands of them, were shining up there like backlit jewels in a dark velvet dome. Sprays of tiny pinpoints in subtle colors, blazing white suns in orderly constellations arrayed across the heavens, ageless by the measure of a human lifetime, all light-years away but seeming to be almost near enough to reach out and touch.
Danny pulled his head back in, sat back, and rolled up the window as Kearns flipped the headlights back on and turned up the heater to warm up the van again.
“Thanks, man, really. I was sitting over here in dire need of some perspective.”
“Sort of puts a guy in his place, doesn’t it?” Kearns said. “That’s where we all came from, out there, and someday that’s where we’re all going back.”
“You know? I saw it on your business card, but now I understand why they call you a special agent.”
“Well, son, whether you want me to or not, I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
A few miles farther on Kearns exited and soon after turned onto a dirt road. The road meandered for a mile or so between barbed-wire fences on either side until they came to an even narrower gravel path. Halfway down that driveway they saw the yellowish lights of a ranch house.
“This is it,” Kearns said. “You all set?”
Danny took in a deep breath, and let it relax the tension out of him as he exhaled.
“Yeah. Let’s do this thing.”
The garage door was up, and from their parking spot Danny could clearly see the men seated around a couple of card tables, surrounded by stacks of stored junk, auto parts, and red tool cases. They’d all turned when the headlights swung across the wide-open doorway and upon recognizing the vehicle they motioned for their guests to come on in.
Kearns stayed in the van as Danny got out and walked up the paved incline toward the house, his hands clearly open at his sides in an effort to let everyone know that he wasn’t armed. Evidently these guys had no such concern. They met him halfway up the sidewalk to the garage and greeted him like he was a long-lost friend.
There was only one thing amiss. He and Kearns had come expecting to see all five men at this meeting, and one of them wasn’t there.
The gathering got right down to business. It had been all talk up to this point, Danny told them, but now this thing had gotten real. Stuart Kearns had what they wanted, so the only question that remained was whether he’d truly found the right men for the job. There would be only one shot at this, a strike that had been years in the planning, so a lot was riding on the proper makeup of this team.
Danny took a printout from his pocket, a transcript of the most recent chat room conversation, and matched up the four men with their screen names. The fifth, he was told, a guy named Elmer, had taken an unexpected trip to Kingman, Arizona, on a related matter and wouldn’t return until well after midnight Monday morning.
At his request they’d each given a bit of background on themselves, sticking to first names only. The one interesting thing about this part was the seamless transition each managed to place between the sane and the insane things they’d said. I’m Ron, I grew up down near Laughlin and worked out here in the mines since I was a teenager. Married at one time, two beautiful kids, and I’ve been wise to those Zionist bankers and the good-for-nothing queen of England ever since I saw what they did to us on 9/11.
The four who were present had known one another for years, and they’d first met this man Elmer, the one who was missing tonight, through the chat room on Stuart Kearns’s website. All of them agreed, though, that Elmer was a serious player and absolutely a man to be trusted.
One of them had asked about the bruises and other battle damage on Danny’s face, and that gave him an opening to explain his own recent part in all this. He’d been picked up by the cops after a patriot meeting in New York City, he told them, and then they’d beaten him within an inch of his life while he was in custody. Everyone has their breaking point, and this had been his. He knew then that there wasn’t going to be any peaceful end to this conflict; the enemy had finally made that clear. So he’d called his old friend Stuart Kearns to come and bail him out so he could be a part of this plan. He was here now to help with whatever he could, and then to get the story out to true believers around the world when all of this was over.
When Danny gave him the all-clear sign, Kearns opened his door and motioned for them to come out to the van. As they gathered around he opened up the sliding side panel, hung a work light by a hook in the ceiling, clicked it on, and showed the men the weapon he’d brought for their mission.
As the men looked on with a mix of awe and anticipation, Kearns began to provide a guided tour of the device. The yield would be about on par with the Hiroshima bomb, he explained, though the pattern of destruction would be different with a ground-level explosion. The device was sophisticated but easy to use, employing an idiotproof suicide detonator tied to an off-the-shelf GPS unit mounted on top of the housing. With the bomb hidden in their vehicle and armed, all they’d have to do is drive to the target. No codes to remember, no James Bond BS, no Hollywoodesque countdown timers-just set it and forget it. The instant they reached any point within a hundred yards of the preset destination the detonator would fire, and the blast would level everything for a mile in all directions.
Kearns took two small keys from his pocket, inserted them in the sheet-metal control panel, twisted them both at once a quarter turn, and pressed the square red central button labeled arm. A line of tiny yellow bulbs illuminated, winking to green one by one as a soft whine from the charging electronics ascended up the scale.
The GPS soon found its satellites and its wide-screen display split into halves, one showing their current position and the other showing the ground-zero objective they’d all decided on: the home-state office of the current U.S. Senate majority leader, the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse, 333 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada.
On the face of it the meeting had been civil, even friendly, but it had ended with an uneasy good-bye, and the tension was still lingering.
Neither Bailey nor Kearns spoke until they’d driven almost a mile down the rutted dirt road, away from that house and toward the relative safety of the interstate.
“Tell me what was wrong back there,” Danny said.
“A lot of things were wrong.” Kearns’s attention was split about evenly between the road ahead and the darkness in the rearview mirror.
The plan, plainly agreed upon, had been to leave the dummy bomb with their five co-conspirators in exchange for twenty thousand dollars the men had agreed to pay to cover Kearns’s expenses. Tomorrow the men would make the eight-hour drive to Las Vegas and pull up to the target address. Instead of achieving martyrdom they’d be met by a SWAT team and a dragnet of federal agents who’d be waiting there to arrest them. None of these guys seemed the type to allow themselves to be taken alive, so FEMA would be running a local terror drill at the same time. With the area evacuated for blocks around there’d be less chance of any innocent bystanders being caught in the anticipated cross fire.
But tonight’s meeting hadn’t ended as expected and that could mean a lot of things-none of them ideal.
At best, the problem had been an innocent misunderstanding that would simply lead to a day’s delay in getting this over with. At worst, the would-be domestic terrorists had smelled a rat, and were huddling back there now deciding what to do about it. If that was the case-and Danny assumed this to be the source of his companion’s fixation on the road behind them-a set of fast-moving headlights might suddenly appear in a surprise hostile pursuit that this old van was in no shape to participate in. If that happened, the odds would be excellent that he and Agent Kearns would end their evening buried together in a shallow, sandy grave.
“Can you handle a gun?” Kearns asked.
“I’m no expert, but yeah.”
“If things go bad, there’s a pistol in the glove box. The safety’s off but there’s a long twelve-pound pull on that first round. After the first shot the trigger’s really light.”
“I’ll be okay with the gun. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”
Kearns took the ramp onto I-80 and visibly began to relax as the van picked up speed. “First,” he said, “we still have their bomb, because they didn’t have our money. It might be that they just couldn’t get it together until tomorrow, like they said, or it might have been a test of some kind.”
“A test of what?”
“Of us. Maybe they wanted to see if we’d leave the goods with them anyway, without the payment. If we are who we say we are they’d know we wouldn’t stand for that. But if we were a couple of feds trying to set them up then we might, just so they’d be in possession of the evidence for a bust tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Second, how would you describe the intellectual level of those four guys we just left?”
“I don’t know.” Danny thought for a moment. “More like sheep than shepherds.”
“Right. And do you know who’d established himself all along as the brains on their side of this operation?”
“Let me guess,” Danny sighed. “The one who wasn’t there tonight.”
“Exactly. I’m not saying those boys we just met are harmless, but they’re followers, and this guy Elmer is their leader. If they were lying about his whereabouts then he was probably back there somewhere checking us out, maybe through the scope of a deer rifle. And if he’s really up in Arizona like they said then I’ve gotta wonder what he’s doing there.”
“So what’s next?” Danny asked. “Am I done? Can you cut me loose now?”
“Not yet. I told them to e-mail me when our friend Elmer gets back in town later tonight, and we’ll have to arrange another meet-up tomorrow. Meanwhile I’ll check in with my contact, and we’ll have to play it by ear from there.”
They drove on, and as the quiet minutes passed, the glances to the rear became less frequent until finally it seemed the immediate threat of trouble was left behind. Kearns tapped on the radio and worked the dial until he found some golden oldies. He settled back into his seat, just listening to the words and music from his past, as though the particular song that was playing might somehow be a final sign that his worries were over, at least for tonight.
When the chorus arrived Kearns chimed in softly, singing to himself in a private, off-key falsetto.
Danny looked across the seat to him.
“Hey, Stuart?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure. You can ask, but I don’t have to answer.”
“A career in the FBI is what, twenty or twenty-five years?”
“Usually, yeah. About that.”
“So don’t take this the wrong way, but shouldn’t a man your age be retired by now?”
Kearns glanced over at him, turned down the radio, and then returned his attention to his driving. “You mean, why is a sixty-three-year-old man still doing street duty, instead of running a field office or enjoying his government pension.”
“I was just wondering.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Well,” Danny said, “it’s a long drive.”
Stuart Kearns, it turned out, had been in quite a different position a decade before. He’d worked in the top levels of counterterrorism with a man named John O’Neill, the agent who’d been one of the most persistent voices of concern over the grave danger posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s. Rather than being rewarded for his foresight, however, it was thought by many that his warnings, and his way of delivering them, had eventually cost O’Neill his career.
John O’Neill had seen a woeful lack of preparation for the twenty-first-century threat of stateside terrorism, and he hadn’t been shy about expressing his opinions. The people upstairs, meanwhile, didn’t appreciate all the vocal criticisms of the Bureau specifically and the government in general, especially coming from one of their own.
O’Neill had finally seen the writing on the wall after several missed promotions and a few not-so-subtle smear campaigns directed at him, and he’d left the Bureau in the late summer of his twenty-fifth year on the job. That’s when he’d taken his new position as head of security at the World Trade Center in New York City. His first day on the job was about three weeks before the day he died a hero: September 11, 2001.
Stuart Kearns’s FBI career had likewise been derailed by his outspokenness and his association with O’Neill, but he’d stubbornly chosen to try to ride out the storm rather than quitting. A bureaucracy never forgets, though, and they’d kept pushing him further and further out toward the pasture until finally, for the last several years, he’d been banished so far undercover that he sometimes wondered if anyone even remembered he was still an agent at all.
“Slow down, slow down,” Danny said.
Kearns let his foot off the gas and looked over. “What is it?”
“Do me a favor and take this exit here, right up ahead.”
At the top of the off-ramp there was little indication of anything of interest beyond advertisements for nearby food, gas, and lodging. Oh, and an eye-catching billboard for the Pussycat Ranch.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kearns said.
“We’ve had a rough night, Stuart, and I’d like to have a beer.”
“I’ve got beer at home.”
“A beer in a can in a house trailer with another dude and a beer in a Nevada brothel are two totally different things, and right now I need the second one.”
Surprisingly enough, Kearns didn’t put up a fight. He followed the signs along the circuitous route to the place without complaining, and pulled up into a parking spot near the end of the lot in front.
Danny got out of the van, straightened his clothes, and looked back. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“No, I don’t think so. Fake or not, I’m not going to leave an atomic bomb unattended in the parking lot of a roadhouse.”
“Okay, your loss. Can you spot me a hundred until payday?”
“I don’t have a hundred.” Kearns took out his wallet, removed a bill, and handed it to Danny through the open door. “I’ve got twenty. I’m going to try to make a phone call while I’m waiting out here, but don’t take all night. We’re getting up early in the morning.”
“With twenty dollars I doubt if I’ll be ten minutes.”
“And I know I don’t have to tell you to watch what you say and who you say it to,” Kearns said. “Just have your drink and come back out. Don’t make me come in there after you.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Inside, he’d barely taken a seat at the bar and placed his order when one of the more fetching young ladies of the evening caught his eye and invited herself over.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“That’s a loaded question in a place like this, isn’t it?”
She frowned a bit and looked at him a little closer. “Do I know you, mister?”
The bartender had returned with his beer, taken his twenty, and left a ten-dollar bill in its place. Danny picked up his glass and his change and took the woman’s hand.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“My name’s Tiffany.” Her eyes lit up suddenly. “You’re that guy,” she whispered, “on the Internet, in that video.”
“I am indeed,” Danny said. He leaned in a little closer. “And Tiffany, I need for you to do me a little favor.”
In her room in back he gave his new friend an autograph and his last ten dollars, and that bought him five minutes alone with her cell phone.
As he composed the text message to Molly Ross he began to realize how little intelligence he actually had to pass along. He knew the code name of this operation he’d become involved in; he’d seen it on the paperwork they’d made him sign upon his release from jail. He knew when it was going down, and where. And he knew something was going wrong, and that the downward slide might be just beginning.
Outside at the bar the television had been showing the news, and in the crawl along the bottom he’d seen that over the weekend the national terrorism threat level had been raised to orange, the last step before the highest. Maybe that was related to this thing with Kearns, maybe not. All he could do was tell her to try to keep everyone in their movement well clear of the area, and hope for the best.
He checked the message one last time, and hit send.
molly -
spread the word -- stay away from las vegas monday
FBI sting op -› * exigent *
be safe
xoxo
db
A small fragment of his awareness saw everything clearly from a mute corner of his mind, but that part had given up trying to rouse the rest of him. Noah still lay where Molly had left him, not exactly asleep but a long way from consciousness.
He heard a faraway pounding and muffled shouts coming from somewhere outside the churning darkness in his head. These sounds didn’t raise an alarm; they only blended themselves smoothly into his bad dream.
His nightmares had grown infrequent as he’d gotten older, but they’d always been the same. No slow-motion chases, shambling zombies, or yellow eyes peering from an open closet door; the running theme of his nocturnal terrors was nothing so elaborate. In every one he was simply trapped, always held by something crushing and inescapable as his life slowly drained away. Buried alive in a tight pine coffin, pinned and smothering beneath a pillow pressed to his face by powerful hands, caught under the crush of an avalanche, terrified and helpless and knowing he’d already begun to die.
This time it was deep water. He could see daylight glinting off the waves high above; all the air he needed was there, but it was much too far away. As he tried to swim up every stroke of his arms only sent him farther downward, until at last some primitive instinct took over and demanded that he inhale. Salt water rushed into his straining lungs, heaved out, and poured in again, burning like acid.
This was the part where he knew he had to wake up, because if he didn’t he was sure the dream would kill him. But it wouldn’t let him go.
There was a boom, a clattering much louder than the earlier sounds, then a grip on his shoulders, someone shaking him. He struggled against the pressure and somehow forced his eyes open.
Black things were crawling across the floor and up the walls, across his arms, and over the face of the man above him. He flailed at them and lost his balance, rolling to the floor and hitting it hard. People ran past, guns drawn and shouting. One older woman knelt next to him and opened the bag she’d set down beside her. She touched his face, said his name as though it was a question, and held open one of his eyes with the pad of her thumb. A hot white light shone in, so bright it stung, and he tried to pull away.
“Easy,” the woman said, and she made a motion to someone behind him.
Others came, and Noah felt the buttons of his shirt being undone, hands moving over him as though they were feeling for something, and then a pain and a tearing sound, like a patch of carpet tape had been ripped from his upper chest near the shoulder. One of his sleeves was pulled up and something cold and wet rubbed against the vein at the bend of his elbow.
“You might feel a little pinch,” the woman said.
He looked down and watched the gradual pierce of a hypodermic needle, but felt only a distant pressure and then a chill trickling up the vessel as the plunger was pushed to its stop. The room had begun a slow spin with him at its center.
The doctor snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Noah? Can you tell me what year it is?”
“Where am I?”
“You’re safe. What’s your mother’s maiden name, do you know that?” She had a stethoscope to his chest, and her attention was on the face of her wristwatch.
“Wilson. Jaime Wilson.” He felt his head beginning to clear. A gradual, unnatural onset of wide-awakeness was taking hold, likely brought on by whatever had been in that injection. A pounding set in at his temple, and he pushed away the hands that were supporting him as he sat up on his own.
“And what day is today?”
“I got here on Saturday night.” A few others had gathered around and he noticed them exchanging a look when they heard this answer. “What happened? How long have I been out?”
“It’s Monday, about noon,” the woman said. She snapped off her gloves and returned her things to the medical kit, then stood and turned to one of the men. “I’ll take him now. Three of you come with me and the rest should finish up here, then be sure to call in.”
Monday, about noon; he’d been dead to the world for forty hours. Noah tried his best to let that sink in as two of the men helped him to his feet. They stayed close, as though half expecting him to collapse immediately if he tried to walk on his own.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
The woman looked at him, and her demeanor had noticeably chilled. It’s a thing with some doctors; the instant you’re well they don’t see much use in courtesy.
“Your father wants to see you,” she said.
“What time zone is Nevada?” Danny called out toward the trailer’s kitchenette. His watch was a Rolex knockoff and it wasn’t easy to reset, so whenever he was traveling he always put off messing with it for as long as possible. This, however, was shaping up to be a day when he’d need to know the time.
“Pacific Standard, same as L.A.,” Agent Kearns shouted back. “It’s about twenty-five after eight.”
They’d both overslept a bit and now there was a rush to get on the road. To add to the tension Kearns had said he’d been unable to reach his FBI contact the night before, and this morning he’d received a rather cryptic e-mail from their new terrorist brethren.
The message had been from the missing man, the one named Elmer. There was to be another meeting this afternoon, the real meeting this time, at which the weapon would be exchanged for the money, and some final brainstorming would take place on the eve of tomorrow’s planned bombing in downtown Las Vegas. The rendezvous was set for 5 p.m., out somewhere in the desert so far from civilization that only a latitude and longitude were provided as a guide to get there.
Between the two of them Danny was more capable on the computer, so it had been entrusted to him to plan the route to this remote location through a visit to MapQuest. While Kearns was in the bathroom Danny had logged on to his favorite anonymous e-mailing site and fired off a quick text update to his staff in Chicago, with a copy to Molly and a short list of other trusted compatriots:
* FYI ONLY DO NOT FORWARD DELETE AFTER READING *
Big mtg today, Monday PM, southern
Nevada. If you don’t hear from me by
Wednesday I’m probably dead*, and this is
where to hunt for the body:
Lat 37°39’54.35”N Long 116°56’31.48“W
› S T A Y A W A Y from Nevada TFN ‹
* I wish I was kidding
The message was safely gone, the browser history deleted, and the map to the meeting location printed out and ready by the time Kearns returned to the room.
When the artificial bomb was loaded into the van again Danny sat in the shotgun seat and waited, warming his hands around a cup of instant coffee as the engine idled. An eight-hour drive was ahead, with an unknown outcome waiting at the end of it, but all things considered, he felt unusually calm.
Kearns appeared a minute or so later, but when he was halfway out to the vehicle he stopped and lightly smacked himself on the forehead as though something important had almost slipped his mind. He turned back and hurried to the front door of the trailer, unlocked it and held it open, called inside, and gestured for half a minute until that moth-eaten cat appeared and scampered past him out into the barren yard. Then Agent Kearns knelt and filled an inverted hubcap with water from the hose and set it carefully near the stairs, in a spot where it would stay cool in the shade for most of the day.
This was a thing any person might do if they owned a pet and knew they’d be away on a trip until late tomorrow. But, and it was hard just then to put his finger on precisely why, it certainly seemed to Danny like this man thought he might be going away for an awful lot longer than that.
After they’d delivered him to 500 Fifth Avenue Noah’s escorts waited outside his suite as he took a quick shower and then changed into the neatly folded set of fresh clothes his secretary had arranged for him. The entourage then proceeded with him across the twenty-first floor to the far corner office.
Arthur Gardner was there behind his desk, looking thoughtful and sober as a judge, long fingers knit together, slightly reclined and contemplating in his favorite leather chair.
Charlie Nelan was standing by the window. He looked over, then shook his head almost imperceptibly as Noah met his eyes. Charlie seemed worn-out and wired at the same time, his wrinkled shirt undone at the collar, sleeves rolled up to the forearms, no necktie. This was far from the lawyer’s polished public face; it was the look of a man who’d been awakened from a sound sleep to help fight a five-alarm fire.
The doctor had given Noah an unlabeled prescription bottle that contained a number of small white pills. It was a low-dose oral variation of the drug in the shot he’d received earlier, meant to counteract the lingering effects of that anesthetic patch she’d peeled off his chest when they found him. He’d taken one of the pills already, and it helped, but even with the aid of the drug he still felt like he’d just stepped off the Tilt-A-Whirl. The bottle rattled in his pocket as he sat in a chair that was pulled up for him, across the wide desk from his father.
The boss of the firm’s security service, an ex-mercenary hard guy named Warren Landers, consulted for a few moments with his four employees who’d brought Noah in. There’d been only a few occasions in the past when Noah had come in close contact with this man but it hadn’t taken very long to get the intended impression. Landers was the bully in the schoolyard who’d grown up and found himself an executive job where he could dress up and get paid for doing what he still loved to do. There was always an undertone when he spoke, a smirk in his eyes as if something about you was the punch line of a running joke he was telling in his head.
At a slight wave from Arthur Gardner the four underlings left the room and Mr. Landers walked over and stood next to the desk. With everyone facing his chair Noah got the feeling it was his turn to say something, but he was lost as to what it should be.
“Dad-”
“I’m happy to see that you weren’t hurt,” the old man said. He certainly didn’t look happy, but the words seemed sincere enough considering their source.
“How did you find me?”
“The same way I found you last Friday night, at the police station,” Charlie said. “We found your cell phone. They’d taken out the battery, but someone put it back in and turned the phone on about an hour ago.”
Noah thought about that for a moment. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand-you tracked my cell phone? How did you do that?”
Landers finessed right past that question. “The first piece,” he said, “was that we figured out who leaked that government document to the press last week.”
“Who was it?”
“It was scanned and sent out from right here. About two hours after it came into the mailroom.”
“I don’t believe it,” Noah said.
Landers picked up a manila folder from the desk and put it in Noah’s hands. “Take a look for yourself,” he said.
The tab on the folder wasn’t labeled and the paper inside was still warm from the copier. The top document was the cover page of a dossier, and the bold heading was just a name: Molly Ross.
He flipped the page to find a breadcrumb trail of computer activity sent up from the IT department. There was her log-in and some fairly cagey attempts to hide the suspicious actions through a proxy mask, along with the e-mail message in question, addressed to a list of a few hundred recipients outside the company firewall. And there was the attachment that contained a digitized version of the formerly secret DHS memorandum.
No question that she’d done it; no question that she’d tried to hide what she’d done.
Charlie brought him some water from the pitcher on the sideboard, and he needed it. His hands were unsteady as he retrieved another of the little pills from his pocket. He swallowed it along with the remaining water in the glass.
“Keep going,” Landers said. “It gets better.”
The next page was a photo of her in some academic environment, and it took Noah a few seconds to recognize all the things that were different. She wore glasses, thin half-rim frames and subtly tinted lenses. Her hair was longer and lighter, almost blond. But the changes went beyond her appearance. There was a sophistication about her in this photo, a style and a seriousness that he’d either overlooked or that she’d somehow hidden in their short time together.
In another shot she appeared to be at a rally of some kind, with her mother on one side and the ubiquitous Danny Bailey on the other, his arm around her waist and hers around his as they all pressed together for the camera.
The next picture seemed more recent. Molly was alone, wearing aviator sunglasses, a backward baseball cap, cut-off Daisy Dukes, and a camouflage tank top. In her hands was what looked like a military-grade automatic rifle with a drum magazine, held as if it were the most natural accessory a pretty young woman could be sporting on a bright summer day at the gunnery range. For whatever reason he was reminded of that famous shot of Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard, holding his radical newspapers in one hand and his murder weapon in the other, just a few months before his appointment with JFK at Dealey Plaza.
“The way we figure it,” Landers said, “these people wanted to get some dirt on the government, our new clients, specifically, and they identified our company as a weak spot in the security chain. So they sent this girl to a temp agency we use, and you can see right there”-he tapped one of the papers in the open folder-“she wrote up a résumé that made her look like a perfect fit for a job here, and talked her way in. This Ross girl, she can be a charmer, I understand.”
Noah felt his face getting hot.
“But it wasn’t enough just to get into the mailroom,” Landers said. “Oh, it gave her some limited access, but to do the kind of damage they wanted to, they needed some inside help.”
“Just say what you’re trying to say,” Noah said. “Do you really think I set out to help these people? I met her on Friday, totally at random, and then I brought her here on Saturday night, and that was a terrible mistake and I know it and I deserve whatever happens to me for that. But don’t stand there and insinuate that I was in on this whole thing.”
Landers took another folder from the desk, and at a nod from the old man he handed it to Noah. “What I’m saying is, there was nothing random about how you met her, and this all started a long time before Friday.”
When he opened the new folder the picture clipped to the left inside cover was an enlargement of Molly’s company ID. It featured the same photo he’d admired so much when it was pinned to that flattering sweater she’d worn-the one that was knit in his favorite shades of blue. She was beautiful, of course, with a look that seemed put together to conform precisely to his personal checklist of attractive feminine qualities. But he’d missed something important the first time he’d seen this picture: she also looked awfully clever.
In the right-hand pocket was a sheaf of printouts, and these pages weren’t about Molly, but from their markings they belonged to her. It was everything anyone could ever want to know about Noah Gardner, much of it unwittingly supplied by the subject himself. His Facebook profile, his Twitter history, his full set of responses from a variety of questionnaires at his online dating sites, the rambling, soul-searching posts from his personal blog, even his browser history from a number of recent consecutive weeks-much of this was openly available, but some of it would have required some minor identity theft or targeted hacking skills to obtain.
He had a brief impulse to ask how Landers had managed to gather all of this, presumably from Molly’s home computer, but then he remembered where he worked. Noah had seen the same sort of digital thievery performed many, many times in the course of corporate espionage and political dirty-tricks campaigns. The pages were stamped with evidence registers, as though they’d been sent over from Molly’s Internet service provider through some shady collusion with law enforcement. As fast and loose as everyone was playing with privacy regulations these days it was probably as simple as knowing the right person to call and paying the standard fee.
Noah turned over another page, and the next item hit him like a blow to the midsection. He’d thought for the first second that it was another picture of Molly, and it seemed that was exactly the point.
It was a photo of Noah’s mother that he’d posted on his blog a while back on some anniversary of hers. It might have been her birthday, or the date she’d died, or just one of the many late nights when he was missing her more than usual. She’d been in her mid-twenties in the picture, about Molly’s age, a carefree young rebel with a smile that would almost break your heart. She was dressed in faded jeans, sandals, and a powder-blue knit sweater, and she wore a little flower in her dark, curly hair.
“You didn’t stand a chance, Noah,” Charlie said. “She came here specifically to get close to you and then make the most of it. This Ross girl was so far into your head you never would have seen her coming. Nobody would have.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Now why don’t you tell us what happened with this woman. Start from the beginning. We’re in full damage control mode now, so don’t leave anything out.”
So he told them. In hindsight it was all painfully clear, but Mr. Landers still occasionally chimed in to underscore the more subtle features of the betrayal in case anyone might have missed them.
He’d first met Molly in the break room-this was obviously meant to seem like an accidental encounter but it was nothing of the kind; he visited the snack machine like clockwork practically every day at that time. Her look was subtly put together to hook him in the defenseless depths of his unconscious mind. Then she’d acted completely uninterested, which served only to put him instantly under her spell.
He went downtown after work to see her again at her meeting; Charlie had already supplied the other two men with those details. He took her home to his place, and she’d gone out while he was sleeping-that’s when she’d duplicated his keys, Landers said, and she’d also paused to whisper to the doorman that she might be coming back later with some of Noah’s friends for a surprise.
Then Noah brought her to the office and showed her that presentation-and in doing so he also showed her how to access those protected files when she returned with her accomplices to try to steal them that same night.
Shortly after this point his recollection ended, of course, so Landers took up the reconstructed story. At her apartment she’d evidently given him some kind of short-acting drug to knock him out, and then they’d applied a fentanyl patch in hopes of keeping him unconscious for the duration of the weekend. The doctor had made it clear that this was quite a dangerous thing to do to a person, and it showed a callous disregard for Noah’s safety.
On Saturday night Molly had come back to the office with three men and used her prior experience and Noah’s keycard to get access to the floor. They’d tried to copy the electronic files from the conference room, but the network’s security system was alerted and the servers locked themselves down before everything had been compromised. What they’d managed to steal was significant, though, and it was still unclear how much of the damage could be contained.
“They cleaned out that squatter’s apartment where we found you,” Charlie said, “but they left some conspicuous incriminating evidence behind: some radical wing-nut literature, a couple of weapons, and some other assorted contraband. They were probably going to call the police to the place with an anonymous tip.”
“Why would they do that?”
“We think they wanted you to be found there with that stuff, so you’d be implicated as an accomplice in this whole thing. That way we’d want to keep it quiet to protect you, and we’d be less likely to make a federal case out of it. We know they went back to your apartment that night. We’ll know pretty soon if they planted something there, but it doesn’t look like they took anything.”
The pounding in his head was worsening, and reliving the weekend’s ordeal wasn’t helping him feel any better. “So what are you going to do?” Noah asked.
“We won’t involve the authorities.” It was the first time the old man had spoken in a while. “But there have already been… repercussions… for the people who’ve done this. And there are many more to come.”
“Yeah, don’t worry, kid, we’ll make ’em sorry,” Landers said, and he clapped Noah on the shoulder a little harder than required for a simple friendly gesture. “Hey, at least somebody got laid out of the deal, am I right?”
At that moment Noah had never felt any more like punching another man in the face, nor any less physically capable of doing so. So he only sat there, eyes down, thinking how good that might feel.
“Gentlemen,” the old man said, “could you leave my son and me alone?”
Landers gathered his things and on his way out he paused to whisper for a few seconds at Arthur Gardner’s ear. Charlie Nelan stayed where he was, in the chair next to Noah.
“You too, Charlie, if you would.”
“I’d like to stay.”
The old man had been cleaning his pipe and was now refilling it, and he let his silence provide his answer. Charlie got up, put a hand on Noah’s shoulder and squeezed, then left the room and closed the door behind him.
Arthur Gardner’s office suite was rumored to be the quietest place on the island of Manhattan. It had been designed that way, as an environment of uninterrupted solitude, completely free of unwanted outside sounds. There was no street or city noise, not a whisper from the heating or cooling vents, no intrusion on the ears from the bustling office floor outside.
The reading rooms of the New York Public Library just across the street were as loud as a bus engine by comparison. This place immersed you in a deep-space quiet you might imagine to exist within the thick steel walls of a bank vault or the inside crypt of a sealed mausoleum. All that echo-dampened stillness made any interior sound seem exaggerated and unnaturally distinct-the scritch of the flint in his father’s lighter, the hiss of the glowing tobacco in the bowl of his pipe, the steady metal workings of the ancient mantel clock on the corner shelf.
Most people missed the meaning of this peculiarity. It wasn’t simply the quiet that was important to Arthur Gardner. His own sounds were probably music to his ears. It was the noise of other human beings-the reminders of their existence-that was what he wanted to avoid. He’d said it more than once: if he stepped out of the house one morning and by some miracle all the people were gone, that would be his fondest wish come true. That’s how much he loved to be alone.
The two of them had been sitting for over a minute in that dead, cottony silence when Noah finally mustered the courage to speak.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“There’s no need to apologize to me.”
“Really, I’m sorry-”
“No need, I said.” His father set his pipe in its rest and leaned back in his chair. “It was more an insult than an injury, the idea that they managed to use you in an attempt to damage our company and our clients. We’ve known of these people, of course, and we’d thought we were adequately prepared, but they surprised all of us, didn’t they? And I must say”-now there was a strange little smile on his face-“this avenue they chose, the seductive infiltration by this girl, it shows a great deal more ingenuity than I would have expected, given the source. It was inspired, really. Ruthless though it was.”
“I should have known better.”
“Nonsense. Wiser men than you have fallen, and to far less able enemies. Monarchs, captains of industry, senators, sitting presidents, very nearly.” He picked up his pipe, tapped it on the desk, and set about the ritual motions of lighting it again. “Let’s put it behind us. I’m afraid we have other pressing matters to discuss.”
In a quick look back over the years Noah was certain he could have counted the number of actual, heart-to-heart conversations with his father on the digits of a single hand. Now it looked like another one was coming, and frankly, he wasn’t in the mood. The shock of it all was fading and now he was angry, and hurt, and sick, and in dire need of a meal and a long rest to try to wash this giant mess away.
“I’m not a hundred percent right now, Dad. What is it that we need to discuss?” His father had made threats of retirement many times in the past, but somehow this didn’t feel like one of those.
“Something is going to happen tomorrow morning, Noah. Something that will be the beginning of quite a change in the way things are. This weekend’s developments, this theft and the accompanying threat of exposure, have served only to further convince the parties involved that now is the time for this-this course correction.”
“What’s going to happen?”
For a few seconds the old man seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
“This young woman-this Molly Ross and her people. Do you understand the difference between the world as they see it and the world as it really is?”
“I’m not sure I understand very much right now.”
“If they spoke with you at all then I’m sure you received the full picture from their warped point of view. Their proud ethos is generally the first thing to pop out of their mouths, or some variation on the theme.” The following words were delivered in a deep tone of mocking reverence. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal-that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights-life, liberty,’ and so on. That is the rallying cry of the modern-day American armchair patriot, and it’s a stirring turn of phrase, I must admit.
“But I came to understand at an early age that Thomas Jefferson himself couldn’t really have believed what he’d written in his Declaration. No slave owner could. Nor could any man with his intelligence, and his great knowledge of history, believe himself to be equal in any way to the ignorant masses of his time. He was preparing to do battle with an empire, making his case against the divine right of kings, so he brazenly invoked the Creator on his own behalf. He proposed that God was the source of these inborn rights of man, and that, contrary to the popular mythology of the times, the Almighty would not be on the side of the British royalty if the conflict came to war.
“That these rights were granted by God, it wasn’t the truth, you see, it was what Jefferson needed to say to give his revolution the moral authority to proceed. But he also must have known he was putting far more faith in the common people than they’ve ever shown the courage to deserve.”
Noah was trying to imagine what possible urgency this subject could have right now, though he didn’t see a choice but to sit there and stay with it. “You think Jefferson was wrong, then.”
“Oh, I think he was right to try. There’s a tale from those days, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, in which someone asked Benjamin Franklin what form of government the people would be given, a republic or a monarchy. Do you remember what Franklin replied?”
“ ‘A republic,’” Noah said, “‘if you can keep it.’”
The old man nodded. “If they could keep it, yes. Such a thing had never been attempted before, not on the scale these men proposed. It was a bold experiment whose outcome was far from certain, and it could have worked. But its founding premise was also its great weakness: that these common people of the United States, for the first time among all the people in recorded history, could somehow prove capable of ruling themselves-to hold on to the fragile gift they’d been given. And time and again they’ve proven they’re not equal to the task.”
“So what are you telling me, Dad?”
“Let me ask you, Noah. Put their complete incompetence in self-government aside for the moment. Do you believe that people, human beings, are basically good? That-as your loyal friend Molly would no doubt preach to us-all they must do is awaken and embrace liberty and the highest potentials of mankind will be realized?”
“I want to believe that.”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted,” the old man said, his words carrying a sharp enunciation that made it clear he would accept no such avoidance. “I asked what you believe.”
“Then yes. I do believe that people are basically good.”
“Easy enough to say, though history sadly proves otherwise. In the face of the worldwide collapse that’s soon to be upon us, we’ll be lost if we place our faith in wishes and hopes for the best.” He picked up a folded newspaper near his hand and passed it across the desk. “This is the essence of human nature, left to its own devices.”
Noah took the newspaper, expecting to see a run-of-the-mill story of a faraway genocide or massacre, widespread child abuse by some august religious institution, or maybe a retrospective of Nazi atrocities or the horrors of the killing fields. But it’s too easy to indict a powerful regime and its leaders while giving a pass to the followers themselves-they, the people who took the orders without question or stood by, silent, and watched the nightmare come to pass. The example his father had chosen was smaller, and cut deeper, and was a much harder thing to simply chalk up to some vague blanket notion of man’s inhumanity to man.
The headline of the story was TURKISH GIRL, 16, BURIED ALIVE FOR TALKING TO BOYS.
The text below went on to explain that a young girl had been the victim of an honor killing, not an uncommon thing in many cultures, allegedly at the hands of her own father and grandfather. They’d buried her alive under a chicken pen in the backyard behind the house. And this was no crime of passion; it takes a long, thoughtful time to do such a thing. In fact, a family council meeting had determined what her punishment should be for the crime of hanging out with her friends.
Noah put the paper down. “This doesn’t mean that all of humanity is evil,” he said. “There are always extremists.”
“I was a social anthropologist, you’ll recall, before I became a pitchman, so with all due respect let me assure you that it’s much closer to everyone than you might be willing to believe. People are made of the same stuff around the world. If that girl had been born in South Africa she’d have been as likely to be raped by the time she was sixteen as to learn how to read. Slavery in one form or another is more widespread today than ever before in history. The fact that one in a million of us may have evolved beyond those lower instincts is of no great comfort to me.
“It’s getting worse, Noah, not better. There have always been only four kinds of people in the world: the visionaries who choose the course, and we are the fewest; the greedy and corruptible-they’re useful, because they’ll do anything for a short-term gain; the revolutionaries, a handful of violent, backward thinkers whose only mission is to stand in the way of progress-we’ll deal with them in short order; and then there are the masses, the lemmings who can scarcely muster the intelligence to blindly follow along.
“There are far more of them than there are of us, and more are coming every day. When I was born there were two billion people in the world; now that number has more than tripled, all in a single lifetime. And it isn’t the Mozarts, or the Einsteins, or the Pascals, or Salks, or Shakespeares, or the George Washingtons who are swelling the population beyond the breaking point. It’s the useless eaters on the savage side of the bell curve who are outbreeding the planet’s ability to support them.
“A billion people around the world are slowly starving to death right now. Twenty thousand children will die of hunger today. That’s the decaying state of the human condition. And when the real hard times come-and they’re coming soon-you can multiply all the horrors by a thousand. In the vacuum created by fear and ignorance and hunger and want, it’s evil, not good, that rushes in to fill the void.”
It sounded like there was no answer, but he knew his father too well for that to be the case. You didn’t have to like it, but the old man always had a solution.
“What we’ve finally come to understand, Noah, is that the people can’t be trusted to control themselves. Even the brightest of them are still barbarians at heart. We’ve only just bailed out my friends on Wall Street from under the devastation of the last financial bubble they created, and I guarantee they’re already hard at work pumping up the next one, even as they know full well that it will be fatal. It’s like a death wish of the species: it’s in our genes, this appetite for destruction. And if we’re to survive, those urges must be brought under control.
“The riddle today is the same one faced by the Founding Fathers when they began their experiment. Societies need government. Governments elevate men into power, and men who seek power are prone to corruption. It spreads like a disease, then, corruption on corruption, and sooner or later the end result is always a slide into tyranny. That’s the way it’s always been. And so this government of the United States was brilliantly designed to keep that weakness of human nature in check, but it required the people to participate daily, to be vigilant, and they have not. It demanded that they behave as though their government was their servant, but they have not. In their silence the people of the United States have spoken. While they slept the servant has become their master.
“The American experiment has failed, and now it’s time for the next one to begin. One world, one government-not of the people this time, but of the right people: the competent, the wise, and the strong.”
The dope-induced haze was still hanging there before Noah’s eyes, and his stomach had begun to churn. Between the remains of the opiates swirling through his brain and the drugs he’d been given to counter those effects, he could feel himself starting to lose the metabolic tug-of-war. All these words his father was saying, all the things he’d seen in that presentation, what he’d learned from Molly in the hours they were together, and what he’d learned of her since-something was trying to come together in his mind but he wasn’t fit to think it all the way through.
“You’re saying there’s no hope for this country,” Noah said.
“I’m saying, Noah, that my clients came to me with a problem,” the old man said, “and I gave them a solution. We start tomorrow morning. I’ve stood by and watched the glacial pace of this decline for too many years. Now the remnants of the past will be swept away in a single stroke, and I’ll see my vision realized before I die. Order from chaos, control, and pacification of the flawed human spirit. Call that hope if you like, but it’s coming regardless. The experiment that begins tomorrow will not fail.”