“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
– EDWARD BERNAYS, AUTHOR OF Propaganda
Noah had excused himself suddenly and then stumbled his way into the elegant stall in the corner of his father’s private restroom. You know you’re sick when you’re still vomiting ten minutes after the last thing was expelled from your stomach. He was still hugging the porcelain bowl, drained and wretched, feeling like he’d just capped off a marathon with four hundred sit-ups.
Once he was fairly sure the nausea had passed, he pushed himself to his feet, walked to the sink, and turned on the water as hot as he could stand. He let the basin fill and then bent and washed his face, let the heat try to revive him until he felt whatever flicker of energy he still possessed begin to gather. He stood then, dried himself with a hanging towel, re-buttoned and tucked in his shirt, and then used his sleeve to clear the steam from the ornate mirror over the lavatory.
His skin was as pale as a Newark Bay oyster, but while he was certainly beat he wasn’t quite out of commission yet.
The doctor had said these aftereffects could linger for up to a day, but would ease as the hours went by. He took another of the pills from his pocket and told himself that the worst of it was behind him now. He needed it to be, because in addition to coming to grips with what he’d just heard from his father, there was also a score he needed to settle before a certain young woman’s trail became too cold to follow.
As Noah hurried down the stairwell toward the mailroom he lost his shaky footing and nearly tumbled down the last half flight. The people he passed in the hallway stood back and gave him a wide berth; whether they sensed his illness or his anger, they obviously didn’t want to catch whatever he was carrying. He was breathing hard as he made the last corner, feeling chilled and damp under his clothes.
It’s not that he expected her to be at work that day, innocently sorting the mail as though nothing were wrong. But he was going to find her one way or the other, and this was the closest stop on the tour.
“Frank!” Noah called.
The department manager popped his head out from behind the sorting shelves. “Yes, sir.”
“Have you heard from Molly today?”
“No, sir. She was on the schedule but she ain’t been in. I called her agency about an hour ago and they haven’t got back to me yet.”
“Okay, thanks. Does she have, I don’t know, some emergency contact numbers down here, from her application?”
Frank looked a little surprised to be asked such a thing. “Maybe that’d be up in Human Resources, Mr. Gardner. All I could give you is the number of the place we hired her from.”
“You’re talking about that temp girl, Molly?” Another of the mail-room staff had apparently overheard the conversation, and he came nearer. “Somebody called here for her over the weekend. I picked up the voice mail when I opened up this morning.”
“Do you have that message?” Noah asked. “It’s important.”
“I deleted it, and I didn’t write anything down, since it was a personal thing. The fellow who called must have just tried all the numbers he had for her. He said her mama was in the hospital.”
Noah stood there and let that bit of news sink into his empty stomach. As it gripped him there he remembered what Warren Landers had said, up in his father’s office. It had passed in one ear and straight out his other, because, as usual, he was immersed in his own significance, as though the only bad things that existed were the ones that had happened to him.
We’ll make them sorry. That’s how Mr. Landers had put it.
“Which hospital?”
“Uptown, Lenox Hill,” the man said, and then he leaned in and offered a quiet addendum. “None of my business, Mr. Gardner. But it didn’t sound so good.”
In the cab on the way uptown Noah had made two phone calls, one to the hospital’s automated system to find the patient’s floor and room, and the other to an old and trusted acquaintance who was now on her way to meet up with him at Lenox Hill.
Over a long-ago summer Ellen Davenport, of the East Hampton Davenports, had become his first real friend who was a girl. It was a new thing for him, because though they’d hit it off immediately, they both also seemed to realize that dating each other was the last thing they should ever do. They’d actually tried it once just to be sure, and the discomfort of that terrible evening was matched only by its comic potential when the story was retold by the two of them in later years.
Now Ellen was a second-year neurology resident at Mount Sinai Hospital across town. His call had caught her at the end of a twenty-six-hour shift, but, true to form, she’d told him that she’d be right over without even asking why.
As he walked down the hallway of the ward he saw three things: the crowd of people overflowing from the double doorway of the floor’s small chapel, a smaller knot of visitors waiting outside a single room down near the end, and Dr. Ellen Davenport, still in her wrinkled scrubs, waving to him from an alcove near the elevators.
Ellen gave him a hug when he reached her, and then held him away at arm’s length and frowned. “You look like hell, Gardner.”
“Thanks.” He was preoccupied, looking over the people milling through the hall, every bit as afraid that he might see Molly as that he might never see her again. Some of these people were looking back at him, too, and by their manner it seemed they knew who he was.
“Hey.” Ellen snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “I mean it. You look like you need to lie down.”
“I need for you to do me a favor,” Noah said. There was a slight tremor in his hands as he retrieved the medicine from his pocket, shook out a pill into his palm, and swallowed it dry.
Ellen took the vial from him, rattled it, and held it close to her eyes. She looked at him again with a little more concern than before. “If you’re going to ask me to score you some methadone, I left my prescription pad in my other pants.”
“That woman in the room down the hall there,” he said. “I need for you to help me-I don’t know, line up a specialist, make sure everything’s being done. I just want her to be taken care of.”
“They’re pretty good at that sort of thing here, Noah.”
“Ellen, listen to me-”
Whatever Noah had been about to confess, he was interrupted by the approach of a stranger. It was an older woman, frail and thin as dry reeds, and from the corner of his eye he’d seen her come from the direction of that room near the end of the hall. The woman nodded her respect to Ellen, turned to him, and then spoke with a gentle gravity in her voice that said more than the words themselves would convey.
“She’s awake now. Somebody told her you were here, and she says she wants to talk to you.”
He stood just inside the open doorway, watching the remaining visitors say their good-byes before they quietly walked past him, one by one. Flowers were arranged all around the room, in baskets and vases and water pitchers, on extra rolling tables that seemed to have been brought in just to accommodate the overflow of gifts from well-wishers.
The door was closed by the last man who’d left, but still Noah stood where he was until Beverly Emerson looked over and smiled as best she could, inviting him to her bedside with a weak motion of her bandaged hand.
“We meet again,” she said. It was barely more than a whisper, spoken as though her lungs might hold the space for only a thimbleful of air.
There were bruises on her face and arms, dark, uneven spots within yellowing patches, and a bandage on her neck with a soak of crusted brown near its center. She was withered, already a shadow of the person he’d last seen on Friday night. The only thing that remained undimmed was that unforgettable spark in her light green eyes.
He had no idea what to say, but he said it anyway.
“You’re going to be all right.”
That brought a smile again, but she shook her head slowly and touched his hand that was nearest hers.
“We shouldn’t deceive ourselves,” she said. “I’m afraid there isn’t time.” She was measuring her breath as she spoke, managing only a few words of each phrase between shallow inhalations. “I don’t expect you to understand why Molly did what I asked her to do.” The grip on his hand tightened, as though all the strength she had was centering there. “You should blame me, and not her. But I hold the privilege of a dying woman now, and I want you to put everything aside except what I’m about to say.”
“Okay”
“My daughter is in danger. I need for you to promise me you’ll see her to safety.”
There were so many conflicting things hammering at his mind, but despite all that mental noise and everything that had happened, for once in his life he could see it all arranged in its true order of significance, and so he knew for certain there was only one thing to be said.
“I will.”
Her grip relaxed somewhat, her head rested back onto the pillow, and she closed her eyes. Soon a private little smile drifted into her features, as though she might have just then put the finish on a silent prayer.
“Thank you,” Beverly whispered.
He didn’t respond, but only because he didn’t want to presume to be the one she was addressing.
“I sent Molly away, but she isn’t safe yet,” she said. “She’s waiting now, near the airport. Look in the top drawer of the nightstand. She called and told one of the nurses where she’d be and they wrote it down for me.”
“Okay,” he said. “I think I’d better get started, then.” He moved to place her hand down on the bed at her side, but she didn’t let him go.
“Do you know what we’re fighting against, son?”
“Yeah, I think so. Some pretty evil people.”
She offered a look that seemed to suggest his naïvete was something she longed for. “Ephesians 6:12-look it up when you get a chance.”
“I will,” he said.
“There’s more to you, Noah. More than you might be ready to believe. I knew of your mother many years ago, and the good she wanted to do. That’s what Molly saw in you: she told me. Not your father, but what your mother’s given you. And I see it, too.”
“I guess I’m glad somebody does.”
“Noah…”
“Yes.”
There was that tiny glint of a smile again. “Noah, from the Bible, you know?”
He nodded, and despite everything, he smiled a bit himself. “Old Testament.”
The weak hold on his hand tightened once again.
“He wasn’t chosen because he was the best man who ever lived,” she said softly. “He was chosen because he was the best man available.”
Out in the hallway he hadn’t made it five steps before Ellen Davenport caught up to him. She took him firmly by the sleeve, pulled him behind her into a nearby storeroom, and closed the door.
“I need to go, Ellen.”
“You need to listen to me first. I learned some things while you were in there just now. Who is that woman to you?”
“She’s the mother of a friend of mine.”
Ellen nodded. “Sit down.”
He could tell by her tone that he shouldn’t argue, and he pulled over a nearby stool and sat.
“What is it?”
“She’s going to die, you know.”
“How can you say that? She just took a bad beating, right? She’s not that old. They can fix anything with enough-”
“Shh. Now listen. There are some things we can’t fix, Noah. Whoever did this to her did something they knew we couldn’t fix.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t tell anyone I’m talking to you about this, understand? And not just because I could lose my ticket.”
“Okay.”
“They gave her a beating, yeah, probably just for the fun of it. And then they poisoned her.”
A chill passed over him.
“What kind of poison was it?”
“Paraquat,” she said. She seemed to watch his eyes for signs of recognition but there were none. “Do you see now, the point they were trying to make? The animals who got to this woman? Paraquat is a pesticide. A weed killer.”
“A pesticide.” He’d heard what she said but he repeated it aloud, just to make sure he understood.
“It starts an irreversible fibrosis in the lungs-a scarring that progresses until you finally can’t breathe anymore. If that doesn’t kill you first, all the other organ systems begin to shut down, and then it’s over. There’s nothing we can do about it; we can’t even give her oxygen. That just makes it worse. She might have another day, or another week, but it’s obvious that they wanted her to suffer.”
“How do the doctors here know that’s what was used?”
“Well, it’s easy enough for the lab to pick it up, but in this case it was even easier than that. The people who did this, they left a veterinary syringe in her neck. It was still there when EMS responded to the call.”
Noah stood up, but too quickly, and he could feel the stubborn light-headedness threatening to return. “Where are those pills, the ones you took from me?”
She went to her pocket and handed him the bottle. “I wrote you some instructions for that stuff. Just go easy on it, okay? In fact, whatever you’re coming down from I’d recommend you just ride it out and stop self-medicating.”
“Good-bye, doctor. Thanks for everything.”
“I don’t know how you’re involved in all this,” Ellen said, “but you’d better know something, Noah. There are a million kinds of murder, but anyone who would do to a person what they did to her? It only means there’s nothing at all they wouldn’t do.”
The street address that had been scrawled on the hospital’s notepaper didn’t lead him to another of the so-called safe houses that Molly had described. When Noah looked up as the cab pulled to a stop he found he was outside what looked like a quaint family-style eatery, the Buccaneer Diner on Astoria Boulevard in Queens, about a mile from La Guardia Airport.
Inside the restaurant the lunchtime rush was winding down, with most of the tables emptying out and the floor staff busy doing cleanup and taking care of departing patrons at the register. But sitting alone in a booth near the back, in the nearest thing to a dark corner that was available in such a place on a sunny Monday afternoon, was the young woman he’d come to see.
When Molly looked over and saw him walking up the aisle she stood and was suddenly overcome by a flood of tears she must have been barely holding at bay. She ran to him and threw herself into his arms.
In the cab on the way he’d given a great deal of thought to what he might say to her if he actually found her waiting at the end of the ride. Now that he was facing her all of the mental dialogue he’d rehearsed had winked right out of his mind. Nothing in his long history of skin-deep relationships provided any clue as to where to begin.
Not only did you break my heart, but you and your friends could have killed me with an overdose, all in the name of a hopeless cause.
I care about you, I was starting to believe in you, and now I don’t know if a single thing between us was real.
And of course, there was this one:
I think my father must have ordered your mother to be murdered, just as easily as he’d ordered his breakfast that morning.
There was too much, so Noah said nothing. Neither forgiving nor forgetting, he put it all aside for the time being and just held her for a while.
She’d asked about her mom in a voice that said his answer should be limited to any hopeful news. Noah told her that her mother was awake and speaking when he’d seen her, and that, despite her concerns for the welfare of her precious daughter, her spirits seemed good.
Molly took that in with a solemn nod, and then she laid out her situation.
Her traveling companions had gone on ahead to test the waters at La Guardia in preparation for their flight west toward less hostile environs. According to the news the DHS had taken the nation to high alert over the weekend, and that put the airports at the very highest level; this was obviously cause for concern. Sure enough, word had reached her that the first of her friends to pass through the TSA checkpoint had been singled out and pulled aside. They weren’t just searched and harassed, as had often been the case in recent years; this time they were arrested and detained.
Molly explained that she had to get out of town and make it to a rendezvous across the country as quickly as possible. Driving wouldn’t do; she had to fly in order to make it. The problem was how to get her safely onto a flight when her name might very well have made it to the top of the swelling watch lists of Homeland Security by now.
Noah was listening, and he was also studying her face as she spoke. The passing resemblance to that picture of his mother was almost gone now that she’d ceased to maintain it. That likeness had been subliminal at best, just enough to hook into his subconscious. But now, as they sat under the bright fluorescent lights of a Queens diner, he realized that there was absolutely no denying who Molly did look like.
And that gave him an absolutely brilliant idea.
Noah returned from the pay phone near the front door, sat down, and scooted halfway around the semicircular padded booth until he was near enough to her for privacy.
“Okay, we’re all ready.”
“What do you mean, we’re all ready? You made one call and shut down security at an international airport?”
“I did better than that.” He looked around a bit. “Did I see a carry-on bag?”
“Yeah…”
“Let me have it.”
Though she appeared to be totally flummoxed she reached to the floor by her feet, brought up her small duffel, and slid it onto the table in front of him.
Noah zipped the bag open and rummaged through, pulling out a baseball cap, a faded university jersey, and her small polka-dot makeup case.
“Do you have a pair of sunglasses? Wait, forget it, I’ve got mine.”
“Okay,” Molly said, “this is the part where you tell me what we’re going to do.”
“Have you ever wondered how celebrities and public figures avoid all the hassle the rest of us have to go through when they need to suck it up and fly commercial?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“They make a call like I just made. All the major airlines have a VIP liaison in the big cities, and there’s a service company we’ve used from the office, KTL, that’s going to grease the way even more. They’ll meet us at the curb and walk us right to the plane-”
“Hold it, hold it,” Molly said. “We aren’t celebrities, Noah.”
“No, you’re right. But I’m a rich kid from a powerful family, and it’s reasonable enough that they’d believe I could be dating a celebrity.”
“What are you talking about?”
He smiled. “I’m now dating Natalie Portman.”
She looked at him as though his head had just turned into a pumpkin.
“Wait, what?”
“It’s perfect,” Noah said. “She’s an A-lister but she’s done mostly art-house films, so the average Joe probably couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. She’s about your size-”
“I don’t look like Natalie Portman.”
“You kind of do, actually, and we’ve got time to make a few tweaks before the limo arrives.” He reached over to smooth one of her eyebrows with the pad of his thumb but she ducked it and swatted his hand away. “Relax,” he said. “This is going to work.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s not going to work at all.”
He put his hand on hers, and though she still looked completely unconvinced, she didn’t pull away.
“Trust me,” Noah said.
• • •
Molly came back from the bathroom after ten minutes in there with her kit and a few instructions from Noah. She was in her Vanderbilt sweatshirt, her hair was up in a casual bun at the nape of her neck, and she’d done just enough to her lips and brows and lashes to suggest a layman’s conception of a movie star who was wearing no makeup at all. The great advantage of this whole thing was that when celebrities are out in public trying to avoid a mob of fans and paparazzi, the last thing they want to resemble is who they really are.
She sat and looked over, with one of her newly perfected eyebrows slightly upraised in a regal but skeptical arch. Noah gave her the baseball cap and his sunglasses to complete the disguise. She put them on, pulled up her hood, and checked her reflection in the silver side of the napkin holder.
“Perfect,” he said. “Absolutely perfect. Oh, wait.” He took her makeup kit and searched through its contents until he’d found a small dark pencil with a dull tip. “Lean your face over here.” Molly did, and he carefully and gently went to work. “Natalie has got two little tiny beauty marks, one here… and one… over here.” He leaned back, squinted, and studied his masterpiece. “That’s it. We can put a bit of powder on those on the way and they’ll be fine. Come on now, the car’s already outside.”
On the short ride to the airport he told her the backstory he’d given to Kyle, the executive service agent from KTL: Noah and young Ms. Portman had spent a wild weekend together painting the town, and things had gotten a little out of hand toward the end. She’d had her purse stolen, she wasn’t feeling well at all, and some nasty aggressive photographers had begun to bird-dog them. Now the mission was to spirit her out of the city while keeping her off Page Six of the New York Post.
As Noah had anticipated, this wasn’t an uncommon thing at all for KTL, and once they’d established who he was they accepted the rest of his story immediately. For a little less than two thousand dollars charged to his expense account-plus the cost of a full row in first class, to be billed separately-the plan was off and rolling with no further questions asked.
With the terminal in sight Noah took in a deep breath and then let it out on a slow count of ten. He looked over at Molly and she seemed to be meditating, or praying, hard to tell which, but any port was welcome in this storm.
“Now remember,” he said, “the whole idea is that you don’t have to deal with anybody. You don’t have to talk to anyone and you don’t have to make eye contact with anyone, which is good because your eyes are the wrong color. I told them you’ve lost your ID so no one’s going to expect you to show it. You’re in the big club now, you’re a hotshot movie star who’s had a few rough days of partying, and you’re in no mood for any inconvenience. That’s what we’re paying all this money to avoid. But just keep thinking all that in your head; our guy and I will do all the talking.”
True to his word, there ahead at the curb stood Kyle in his dapper suit, waiting with open arms at the appointed meeting place. The limo pulled to a stop, their host opened the door, and with a practiced sweep of his manicured hand he invited them into his care.
“Mr. Gardner, Miss Portman,” Kyle said. “Right this way.”
And right that way they went.
Most people know there’s a whole hidden part of Disney World the tourists never get to see. Underneath the sidewalks and behind the scenes, in a vast complex every bit as big as the park itself, this insider network of tunnels, workshops, machinery, and control rooms is where the magic really happens. Likewise, a major airport has its own sublevel of secrets, and our man Kyle held all the skeleton keys to this particular enchanted kingdom.
The trip through the public areas had been a breeze. The two men walked purposefully in front with Molly close behind them. For the most part they went unnoticed, though two or three random people did seem to sense that an incognito starlet might be moving in their midst. At every point along the way where the average passenger would have had to stop and deal with some slow, invasive procedure, there was a special someone stationed nearby to give the three of them a knowing wink, lift up the velvet rope, and wave them on through.
Halfway into the terminal Kyle stopped along the wall, looked furtively both ways, and then keyed open a featureless gray door. Like some portal from rural Kansas into the Land of Oz, inside this door was a large VIP room with elegant furnishings and sitting areas, a bar and some bistro tables, and down the center, a privately staffed setup for dignified, one-on-one security screenings.
“And now, my troopers,” Kyle chirped, “just a quick run through the metal detector and then we’re on to preboarding for a nice, cool glass of champagne. Are we holding up all right?”
“I think we’re fine,” Noah said. Molly breathed an Oscar-worthy sigh of impatience and leaned her head against his arm.
As they approached the area with the X-ray conveyor a TSA employee got up from his chair, put down his magazine, and sidled up to his security post.
When he saw this man Noah stopped in his tracks so suddenly that Molly bumped into him from behind.
“Is something wrong?” Kyle asked, frowning.
“Excuse us for a minute,” Noah said. “I just remembered, we need to make a quick phone call.”
He walked Molly over to the telephone kiosk near the door they’d come in, well out of earshot of Kyle and the others.
“Damn it,” he whispered.
“What is it?” Molly asked. “They’re all over there looking at us.”
“Pretend you’re calling someone on the phone. I’ve got to think for a minute.”
Molly picked up the receiver, put it to her ear, punched a few buttons, and pulled him a little closer. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
“Check out the guy in the TSA outfit.”
She did. “So?”
“Are you kidding me? That’s a Star Wars geek if I ever saw one.”
Maybe it was the Luke Skywalker blow-cut, his mismatched socks below the nerdish cut of his high-riding uniform trousers, or the soul patch and horn-rimmed glasses, but everything about this man was screaming king of the fanboys, and that was really bad news.
“I don’t understand-”
Noah lowered his voice even more. “Natalie Portman is in all three of the Star Wars prequels.”
“You’re remembering this now?”
“I guess I hated those movies so much I’d blocked them out of my mind. But I’d bet my last dollar that dweeb knows Portman’s face like the back of his hand. You don’t understand these guys; he’s probably got a candlelit altar in front of her picture down in his mother’s basement.”
Molly leaned around him to take another stealthy look, and swallowed hard. “What do we do?”
“I vote we get out of here and think of something else.”
“No,” she said, and it sounded like the word was final. “We don’t have time. This is it. We’re here, let’s just do it.”
After a last few seconds to find his nerve, he nodded, fixed her hood and eased the brim of Molly’s baseball cap down a little lower, hung up the phone for her, and then turned around to face the music.
Noah went first, and he passed through the arch of the metal detector without a single blip. Kyle had stationed himself next to the X-ray tech at the luggage conveyor, no doubt ready to smoothly rationalize any oddities that might show up in his clients’ carry-on. Their one item, her duffel bag, went into the long machine and came out the other side with no objection raised.
But the TSA man gave Noah a careful, steady look, as if he were toying with the idea of a wand-sweep and a pat-down, just for good measure.
Along with the recent change in alert status, an official DHS directive would have come around to remind all stations, even this special-purpose one, of the key markers for suspicious activity-last-minute ticket purchases for one-way travel, no checked luggage, nervous or flustered behavior, identification papers not in order-and this little party matched every warning sign.
Kyle cleared his throat meaningfully from where he was standing. This subtle, perfectly pitched intervention was sent to remind the room that this trip had already been preapproved from positions much higher than their own, and these two very important people weren’t to be unnecessarily troubled by the rigors of the standard inquisition.
With some visible reluctance, the stern young officer nodded and gave a jut of his chin to let the first subject know he’d been provisionally cleared for boarding.
So far, so good.
Noah retrieved his belt and his pocket items from the gray utility tub, and prepared to put on his shoes. He’d just begun to let himself believe that they were soon to be home free when the piercing tweet of the metal detector sounded off behind him.
“Could you remove any metallic items and step back through for me, ma’am.”
Polite and professional though it sounded, it was a command and not a request.
Kyle hurried over to escort Molly back to the far side of the electronic gauntlet again, then he looked her up and down in search of whatever offending metal might have set off the alert. In all the rush she’d forgotten about the cell phone in her pocket. Kyle took that and then delicately helped her remove her necklace, bracelet, and the ring on her finger. He placed those items in a tray held out by the officer, and then nodded to her to indicate that all was ready for another try.
Molly walked slowly through the arch again. The vertical line of indicator lights twitched upward from dark green to barely yellow-maybe in reaction to the tiny hinges in her sunglasses-but this time there was no audible alarm.
Noah was the only one in a position to notice a touch of private relief on Molly’s face. She was nearly to the end of the exit track of the detector when she was stopped by the officer’s voice.
“Miss… Portman?”
When Molly turned around she must have seen exactly what Noah was seeing. The TSA man wasn’t focused on her at all. He was staring down at her possessions in his plastic tray.
“Yes?” she said softly.
Now he looked up at her, and raised his hand slowly above the tray. Molly’s silver necklace with its little silver cross was dangling from the knuckle of his thumb.
“I thought,” the officer said, “that you were Jewish.”
It felt like the temperature in the room suddenly dropped by fifty degrees. Noah’s mouth went totally dry, his skin tingling as though all the moisture had flash-frozen out of the atmosphere, settling into a thin layer of frost on everything exposed, suspending those six words on the air.
Cops know liars like plumbers know leaks. They encounter them every day, all day; they know all the little signs and symptoms, and they’re trained to understand that where there’s even a little whiff of smoke, one should always assume there’s a fire. As they challenge a person they study their reactions, pick apart the little telltale movements, listen to the timbre of the voice, and more than anything else, they watch the eyes. Most suspects have already made a full confession by the time they begin their denial.
This was one of the topics of light conversation in the wee hours of that first night when he and Molly had met. Noah had been so fascinated by the woman that he hadn’t stopped to wonder why she seemed to know so much about the art of deception.
Don’t be afraid, she’d said; that’s the key, no matter how bad it gets. If locked in a car that’s speeding toward a gap in the bridge and it’s clearly too late to stop, most people would still waste their last mortal seconds stepping on the brakes. But what you really want to do is say a little prayer, and then floor it. If you’re going down anyway, go all in, go down with courage-because hey, there’s always that one slim chance that you’ll make it to the other side.
From behind her Noah saw Molly’s head tilt slightly, and this movement was accompanied by a subtle hip shift. There was a convex security mirror on a bracket above the metal detector, and in that reflection he saw a patient but serious expression on her face that meant, You didn’t really just say what I think I heard, did you?
The officer appeared unfazed.
“Would you take off your sunglasses for me, please,” he said.
That’s all, folks. Curtains, checkmate, game over.
Noah hoped only that his upcoming visit to prison would be more enjoyable than his first. He’d already begun to gauge the running distance to the door when Molly looked back at him. She appeared to be perfectly serene, and she mouthed something to him. He wasn’t much of a lip reader and it took his panic-stricken mind a few seconds to recognize her message. It had been the short phrase that’s always at the top of any good list of famous last words.
Watch this.
She turned to the officer, pulled back her hood and let it settle onto her shoulders, removed the baseball cap and let it fall to the floor at her feet, and then slow and sure, began to walk toward him.
“The Force is strong with this one,” Molly said, as calm and smooth as a Jedi master. Her accent was gone, and her voice was just breathy enough to obscure any other identifying qualities of the real McCoy.
The TSA man’s cheeks began to redden slightly. A power shift was under way, and as Noah had learned firsthand, when this girl turned it on you never knew what was about to hit you.
She continued nearer, put a finger to the frames and lowered her sunglasses partway down her nose, tipping her chin so she could look at the officer directly, eye to eye, just over the top of the darkened lenses. As she stopped barely a foot away she subtly passed an open hand between their faces, and spoke again.
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” Molly said. After waiting a moment she gave him a little nod, as though it had come time in their close-up scene for his own line of dialogue.
There was an eternal pause, and then before his eyes Noah saw this big, intimidating young man begin his grinning transformation from the TSA’s most vigilant watchdog into Natalie Portman’s biggest fan.
“These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” The officer repeated her words, just as that spellbound storm trooper had said them at the Imperial checkpoint in Episode 4.
After holding his rapt gaze for a few more seconds Molly pulled out the secret weapon more fearsome than any light-saber-that sweet, wicked smile that made your knees feel like they could bend in all directions. She slipped the pen from his pocket protector, clicked it, took the hand that still held her necklace, and autographed his palm with an artful flourish.
“Bravo!” Kyle said, and his light applause was picked up by all the other employees who had turned their attention that way. That put a button at the end of the crisis; before any further delay could threaten his schedule he bustled around and retrieved her duffel bag, along with her cap, phone, and jewelry. Then with a cheerful, over-the-shoulder “Thank you, everyone,” he gathered his clients back under his wing and hurried them to the exit door.
They were to board the plane from the flight crew’s side stairway out on the tarmac. When they got outside Noah motioned to Kyle that he needed just a minute with his girl. Their escort nodded and moved off to a discreet distance, pausing only to tap the face of his watch as a reminder to be quick before he turned away to wait.
“How did I do?” Molly asked, obviously fully aware of exactly how she’d done.
“You quoted two different male characters from the wrong trilogy, but other than that, you nailed it.”
“I wrote a midterm paper on the first two movies in college. Never saw any of the others.”
“Film class?”
“Political science.”
He had to wait for a noisy vehicle to pass before he could speak again.
“I need to ask you something,” Noah said.
“Sure.” It seemed she could see that he’d become more somber.
“When we were there in Times Square, when we kissed that time…”
She took off the sunglasses and hooked them on her pocket, moved a little closer to him, brushed a windblown lock of hair from his eyes. “I remember.”
“Is that when you pickpocketed my BlackBerry?”
Molly smiled, and pulled him willingly into her embrace. It was no real surprise, but this kiss was every bit as stirring as that first one had been, and as he realized then for certain, as good as every single one would be thereafter.
She stood back a step, her face as innocent as a newborn lamb, and held up his wallet between them.
“I love you,” Noah said.
Molly looked up at him with all the courageous resolve of the doomed Han Solo at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
“I know,” she replied.
By the time the jet reached its cruising altitude Molly had fallen sound asleep in his arms. They had the entire row to themselves and the crew had taken excellent care of them so far. Now it was quiet, and in the remains of this day a little peace and stillness were more than welcome.
Molly had taken only one thing from her bag to keep with her during the four-hour flight. He recognized the book as the hand-bound journal she’d shown him back in her apartment downtown.
It would be nice to have something to read, he thought, and after a brief consideration he decided that she wouldn’t be likely to object if he took a look through her little book as she slept.
Folded just inside the front cover he found the pencil drawing that had been pinned to her bedroom wall, that idyllic sketch of her someday cabin in the woods.
On the next page was the beginning of the texts she’d been given by the Founders’ Keepers, that portion of the writings from early American history she was meant to preserve and memorize on their behalf.
Thomas Jefferson
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
What followed didn’t really seem to comprise the most famous or succinct of Jefferson’s writings. Rather, it was as though a great deal of his written legacy, maybe all of it, had been distributed among quite a number of people, and Molly’s was only a small, random part placed in her care. Accordingly, the first section consisted of Jefferson’s Second Inaugural Address. Noah read through a portion of it.
I fear not that any motives of interest may lead me astray; I am sensible of no passion which could seduce me knowingly from the path of justice, but the weaknesses of human nature and the limits of my own understanding will produce errors of judgment sometimes injurious to your interests.
I shall need, therefore, all the indulgence which I have heretofore experienced from my constituents; the want of it will certainly not lessen with increasing years.
What struck Noah as he read these words was a fundamental difference in tone from the political discourse of later times. Here was one of the founders of the nation, maybe the greatest thinker among them, and yet he spoke with a quality that was so rare today as to be almost extinct among modern public servants. It was a profound humility, as though nothing were more important to express than the honor he felt in being chosen again as a guardian of the people’s precious liberties.
There was a great deal more to read. Noah held his place, looked down at Molly, and found her still sleeping. He adjusted the light above him so it was less likely to disturb her rest.
Then he remembered something else that he’d been meaning to ask her, if they’d only had a moment to breathe. Nothing important, but he was curious.
Of all the remote destinations Molly could have picked for her flight to safety-anywhere in the world, really-he wondered why she’d chosen Las Vegas.
Danny Bailey and Agent Kearns had been on the road in their bomb-laden van for nearly five hours straight, and they were past due for a fuel stop and a stretch.
After taking his turn in the gas station’s cramped restroom Danny picked up a diet soda and a candy bar and brought them to the counter. As the cashier was ringing him up he scanned the visible stories on a bundled stack of newspapers off to the side. Two headlines stood out, and he read them over again.
NATIONWIDE TERROR ALERT STATUS ELEVATED ONCE MORE
DHS CHIEF: INTEL CONFIRMS ‘CREDIBLE THREAT’ FOR WESTERN U.S.
He looked up into the corner and saw a dusty security camera looking back down at him. Even out here, he thought, on the outskirts of civilization, some backward distant cousin of Big Brother is still watching. From that odd camera angle Danny’s fuzzy, jerky image was displayed on a small black-and-white TV on the side shelf, wedged between the cigarettes and a rack of dog-eared porno magazines.
“I’ll take one of these, too,” he said, holding up the paper.
Stuart Kearns walked past him toward the door, still rubbing his hands dry. “Let’s go, kid, we’re burning daylight.”
Danny nodded an acknowledgment but the words and their urgency had barely intruded on his running thoughts. A few seconds later the cashier had to nudge his hand to snap him out of it, and he picked up his bagged purchases and his change and headed for the van.
As the trip progressed southward the Nevada roads had gradually become more and more rustic and empty of traffic. From the first wide interstate, to four-lane turnpikes, down to the aging two-lane desert highway they’d now been on for a good while-in a sense it felt as though they were traveling further back in time with every passing mile. At this rate they’d be bumping down a mule trail before sunset.
Danny still had the newspaper he’d bought draped across his lap, though he’d stopped reading it several minutes before.
“Can I run something up the flagpole, Stuart?”
“Sure.”
“The terrorism alert is elevated. I take that back-it was already elevated two days ago, and now it’s been raised again.”
“Right.”
“They’re talking here”-he tapped the paper-“about what they call a specific credible threat, maybe two, that they’re tracking somewhere in the western United States. They’re already stopping and searching cars at all the bridges in San Francisco.”
Kearns looked over, then put his attention back on the road. “What are you getting at?”
“Put on your tinfoil hat for a minute and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay, okay, go.”
“You remember the 7/7 bombings in 2005?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know that a security company, with a former Scotland Yard guy in charge, was running a terrorism drill in London that very morning? And this random drill involving a thousand people was planned out months in advance to simulate the same kind of bombing incidents, on the same targets, on the same day, and at the same times?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“And then it really happened. While they were running the drill, the exact, actual thing they were practicing for actually fricking happened. What are the odds of that being a coincidence?”
“If any of that were true,” Kearns said, “I’d know about it. So what does that tell you, Oliver Stone?”
“Well, then,” Danny went on, undaunted, “do you know that the guy your old friends in the U.S. government believe was the actual mastermind of those bombings-his name is Haroon Rashid Aswat-was also some sort of protected double agent who was on the payroll of some obscure faction of MI6? The CIA knew all about him but they weren’t allowed to touch him; he even lived over here for a few years. Hell, he tried to organize an al-Qaeda training camp in Oregon-”
“You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
“One more thing. The guy that we haven’t seen yet, his name is Elmer, right?”
“Right.”
“The guy in charge on September eleventh was Mohamed Atta. He had a lot of aliases, and that’s the one he started using after 2000 when he got into the United States. He was born Mohamed Elamir awad al-Sayed Atta Karadogan. But the name on his work visa, the one he showed when he enrolled in flight school in Florida, was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir.”
“And el-Amir sounds like Elmer” Kearns said. “Do you take a nap during the day? Because you must stay up all night thinking about this crap.”
“In English, el-Amir translates to ‘the general.’ It could be a code word. Atta used el-Amir back then in 2001, and this guy’s using it now. If this whole thing is part of some false-flag operation-if they’re really trying to bring this war back home-they need a new boogeyman right here on U.S. soil, and they need to connect him to past events and to the patriot movement so they can demonize the resistance.”
“Mohamed Atta is dead.”
“Yeah? So is Osama bin Laden, but that doesn’t stop him from putting out a tape every six months. And I’m not even saying it’s a real live Islamo-fascist behind any of this, but making it look that way will make the story that much scarier when something happens.”
“Look,” Kearns said, “I’ll tell you one thing I do know. There’s an election coming up, and fear has been a swing factor in party politics for as long as I can remember. The timing of this whole thing, the terror alert, and all the rest of it-it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find out after all this is over that we’re just playing a bit part in somebody else’s political ambitions. Technically, I guess you could call that a conspiracy, if it makes you happy.”
It didn’t make him happy, but Danny decided to let it lie.
“How much farther now?” he asked.
Kearns checked his watch and then glanced at the screen of the GPS. “About a half hour, maybe less.”
As the ride went on in silence Danny looked across occasionally at the older man, hoping that he’d at least planted a seed of warning. In that small way it seemed he’d been successful. You can’t see another man’s thoughts, but you can sure see him thinking.
The fasten-seatbelt light had just blinked on above Noah’s head, accompanied by an intercom announcement that the flight would soon begin its on-time descent into McCarran International.
He rubbed his eyes and they felt as though he hadn’t blinked in quite a while. The time had apparently flown by as he’d been occupied reading and rereading the many quoted passages that filled the pages of Molly’s book.
In the course of his supposedly top-shelf schooling he must have already been exposed to much of this, and if so, it shouldn’t have seemed as new to him as it did. And in a strange, unsettling way-like reading a horoscope so accurate that its author must surely have been watching you for months through the living-room window-it seemed that each of these writings was addressed to this current time, and this very place, for the sole, specific benefit of Noah Gardner. There’d been many examples, but this was one that stood out:
The phrase “too big to fail” had been reborn for propaganda purposes during a brainstorming session at the office last year. This was in the run-up to the country’s massive financial meltdown, the multiphase disaster that was only now gathering its full head of steam.
The original purpose of the phrase in business was to describe an entity that was literally too large and successful to possibly go under- think of the Titanic, only before the iceberg. But this newly minted meaning, it was decided, would be a threat, rather than a promise.
While the crisis had in truth, of course, been nothing less than a blatant, sweeping consolidation of wealth and power-perpetrated by some of Doyle & Merchant’s most prestigious Wall Street clients-it wouldn’t do to allow the press and the public to perceive it that way. So the government’s bailout of these billionaire speculators and their legion of cronies and accomplices was instead presented as a bold rescue, undertaken for the good of the American people themselves.
We have no choice-that was the sad, helpless tone of both the givers and the receivers of those hundreds of billions of dollars, monies to be deducted directly from the dreams of a brighter future for coming generations. AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citi, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Fannie and Freddie, and the all-powerful puppetmaster behind it all, Goldman Sachs-these companies are the only underpinnings of our whole way of life, so the breathless story went, and if they go down, we all do.
It was a fresh way of presenting the public with a familiar choice: the lesser among evils. There was talk of a death-spiral drop in the stock market, a wildfire of bank runs and wholesale foreclosures; even martial law was threatened, from the floor of Congress, if the bailout failed to pass. These were the alibis repeated by the PR pundits and the complicit men and women in our supposedly representative government when they were asked, Why did you do it?
The choice they made was to reward the corruption, but all of them knew the better answer, or should have. It didn’t take a thousand-page bill to get it across.
“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!’
In Molly’s book this quote was unattributed but the ideal it conveyed was ancient, and the central pillar of the rule of law. Thomas Paine, quoted on the same page, had put it a different way, in Common Sense: “In America, the law is king.” Even the most powerful can’t place themselves above it, the weakest are never beneath its protection, and no corrupt institution is too big to fail.
So that’s what a principle is, Noah thought, as though he were pondering the word for the very first time.
It’s not a guideline, or a suggestion, or one of many weighty factors to be parsed in a complex intellectual song-and-dance. It’s a cornerstone in the foundation, the bedrock that a great structure is built upon. Everything else can come crashing down around us-because those fleeting things can always be rebuilt even better than they were before-but if we hold to it, the principle will still be standing, so we can start again.
Next down this page was John Adams’s take on something Noah’s father had told him only that morning:
The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves…
In short, governments have proven that they always go bad, because they’re made up of imperfect people. But unlike Arthur Gardner, Adams believed that that impossible puzzle had been solved by the ingenious separation of powers at the heart of his new country’s design. Or rather, it was given to the people to solve it every single day, at every election, in the ever-wary supervision of their dangerous servants.
On the facing page was a quote from another Adams, a cousin of John, and it had been written much larger and bolder than the surrounding text. It was a challenge that Samuel Adams had laid down as the nascent revolution was nearing its point of no return, a gut check for all those who would call themselves Americans:
If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
Put up or shut up, in other words; go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception, he was saying, not the rule, and if you want it you’ve got to do your part to keep it.
The plane touched down on the runway with barely a jolt and soon began to slow for its turn toward the arrival gate. Something touched Noah’s leg and he looked up from his reading. Molly was finally awakening from her nap; as she finished a languid stretch he passed her a bottle of water.
“Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sleep this whole time.”
“You must have needed it.”
Molly noticed the book in his hands. He closed it and handed it to her. “I hope you don’t mind that I was reading this.”
“No, not at all.” She pulled her bag from under the seat, zipped it open, and returned the book to a sleeve inside.
“Hey, Molly?”
“Yes?”
He touched her hand. “I think I get it now,” Noah said.
“You get what?”
“I really didn’t before, but I understand what you’re doing now, you and your people.”
“Oh.” She nodded, and continued to check over her things.
“I mean it.”
“I know you do,” she said, in the way you might address an overly needy child in recognition of some minor accomplishment. “Good. I’m glad.”
He didn’t know what response he’d expected when he told her of his newfound understanding, but it wasn’t this. There’d hardly been enough of a reaction to qualify as one.
Before long the plane had reached the gate, and the door nearest them was the first to be opened. She was walking ahead of him in the exit tunnel, as though with some purpose that she hadn’t paused to share. He caught up to her as she stopped to scan an informational display with a backlit map of airport services.
“I say we grab a meal,” Noah said, “spend the night, and then try to figure something out tomorrow.”
His suggestion was overlooked as if he hadn’t spoken it at all.
“I need for you to help me rent a car,” Molly said.
“This must be the place,” Danny said. He folded the printout of directions and slipped them into a side pocket of the door.
According to the map and the van’s odometer, the rendezvous location for the final exchange was right here, somewhere off to the side of the faded gravel road. Out his passenger window there was nothing much to see but a flat expanse of desert and some faraway mountains at the horizon.
Kearns tapped him on the leg. “Over here.”
The stark landscape had begun to take on warmer hues as the sun got low, but there was still enough daylight to see things clearly, provided you were shown where to look. Way off to the driver’s side, maybe three hundred yards distant, Danny saw what looked like the only man-made thing for miles around. Whatever it was, it wasn’t much.
No trail led out there and this vehicle wasn’t made to go off-road. Kearns seemed to know what he was doing, though. He made a careful turn toward their final destination, nursing the van over the lip of the road and out across the hard-packed ground.
As they got close the scene became clearer. Danny saw the rear ends of two vehicles, a car and a midsize, unmarked yellow cargo truck, both of which were parked behind a square, gray, one-story building.
“Building” was an overstatement, actually; the simple ten-foot-high enclosure appeared to be made of nothing but cinder blocks and dark mortar. There was an open arched doorway but no roof overhead. About a stone’s throw away from the main structure, in a perfectly spaced circle surrounding the building on all sides, were a number of bizarre, freestanding walls and angled edifices jutting up out of the sand. Some looked like backstops from a playground handball court, one like the black alien monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The layout reminded him a little of Stonehenge, but only if Stonehenge had been built over one hurried weekend by an amateur bricklayer on acid.
“What the hell is this place?” Danny asked.
“Out here you never know. This part of Nevada’s full of surprises.” Agent Kearns stopped the van well away from the other vehicles and put the shifter into park. “It could be something the military threw together for part of a nuclear test, could be a target for a bombing range that used to run through here.” He clapped Danny lightly on the shoulder. “What do you think: Are you ready for this?”
“I already told you what I think.”
“Don’t worry so much,” Kearns said, “or you’re going to look nervous. Listen, this is a milk run. We’ll be in and out of here in five minutes, and then we’ll go get us a hot dog and a cold beer before I drop you off at the airport-”
He’d stopped talking because something had caught his attention out the front windshield. One of the men they were meeting had appeared by the corner of the main cinder-block building, and with a broad gesture he beckoned them to come on over. Another of the men was behind the first, standing there with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Okay, then,” Danny sighed, “let’s rock.” He opened the door, stepped out, and waved back to the guy who’d greeted them, then put on the light jacket Kearns had loaned him. It was a size too large, but that was fine for his purposes. He reached in and slipped Kearns’s satellite phone from its charger on the console and put it in the left-hand pocket, then flipped open the glove box and removed the pistol. “Do you have an extra clip for this?”
“No, I don’t. What are you doing?”
The pistol went snugly into Danny’s belt in back, not in the middle but closer to the right side; the long jacket hid it completely. “I’m getting ready for this whole thing to go to hell in a handbasket. If everything’s fine you can say I told you so. But in the meantime, if I can make a suggestion, why don’t you take that.38 out of your ankle holster and put it where you can get it if you need it.”
Thankfully, the older man was listening, and even if he wasn’t quite convinced that there was going to be trouble he was at least open-minded enough to move his small revolver to the right-hand pocket of his bomber jacket.
“I thought you said you didn’t know much about guns,” Kearns said.
“That’s not what I said. I said I wasn’t an expert.”
Expert wasn’t a term to be bandied about among Danny’s gun-savvy friends. An expert might be someone who could call their shot from ten yards and then, from a cold start, draw their pistol from concealment and put a bullet right where they said it would go, all in seven-tenths of a second or less. Molly Ross was one of those, and a few years back over one hot and memorable Tennessee summer, she’d taught him everything he knew. He’d been getting even more death threats than usual that year, and she’d wanted him to be safe. So, while he wasn’t an expert, his draw was pretty fast-it was the part about hitting what he shot at that still left a lot to be desired.
“Okay,” Kearns said. His demeanor was a bit more grim than it had been a few minutes before. “Let’s do it.”
Their model bomb wasn’t that heavy, maybe eighty or one hundred pounds, but it was unwieldy to carry between them. When they came within sight of the men they were here to meet-and like last time, there were only four of them, not the expected five-one of them motioned to a spot on the ground to show where they should leave their burden. When they got to that spot, they put it down.
One of the other men had a brand-new-looking satchel at his feet, a bag of the sort that might be holding their twenty thousand dollars for the exchange. The last two men were the ones with the automatic rifles.
The weapons these guys were sporting appeared to be some knocked-together variant of an AR-15, but with a very short barrel, stock target sights, custom noise suppression, and a nonstandard magazine. Good luck trying to buy something like that off the shelf. Not the most versatile choice for all-purpose combat, obviously laughable for hunting or target practice, but flip it to full auto and it would do every bit as well as a sawed-off shotgun for antipersonnel work at close quarters.
Situations like this one, for example.
The armed man to the left held his gun like he’d been born with it in his hands. The other one didn’t seem at all at ease, either with his weapon or his assigned enforcer’s role. His hands were deep in his pockets and his rifle hung haphazardly by its sling over his shoulder, as though it had been put there against his will and he had no desire to deal with it.
Upon their arrival Kearns had made a bit of small talk with each member of the group, and soon all agreed it was time to do the deal they’d come to do.
“Here’s your money,” said the man on the end. He’d introduced himself as Randy at their meeting the previous night. As Kearns walked over to retrieve the satchel Randy motioned to his men to pick up their merchandise and stow it in the back of the cargo truck.
The rear door was opened and two of them carefully carried the bomb up the mover’s ramp, set it down, and flipped on a hanging work light in the compartment to check over their purchase. Meanwhile, Kearns had come back with the satchel to stand at Danny’s side.
“Ain’t you gonna count it?”
This deadpan question came from one of the guys with the guns, the one doing his level best to come off like a natural-born bad-ass.
Kearns shrugged. “If we’re short, at least I know where to find you guys tomorrow morning, am I right?”
That brought a little chuckle from everyone-everyone except the man who’d spoken up.
Danny’s attention was on the other contents that were now visible in the truck’s rear compartment.
Down the center, on a welded-together, waist-high metal rack, was what appeared to be a long, silvery torpedo. Not really, though; the nose was too blunt and flat and its far end was tapered and ringed by large aerodynamic fins. It looked like something from a war museum, an overbuilt piece of heavy-duty air-dropped ordnance from a bygone era of the Cold War.
That wasn’t all. Tucked back in the corner, away from the light, some thing was wrapped up and bound in a black plastic tarp on the floor. It could have been a lot of things, but to Danny’s current frame of mind, what it looked like most was an occupied body bag.
He glanced at Kearns, and by all appearances he was seeing the same thing.
A loud ringtone from the phone on the belt of the man named Randy broke the silence. He held up a polite index finger, as if to say, Sorry, I’ve got to take this, turned, took a half step away, and answered.
And that, Danny thought, would be a call from el-Amir.
Kearns bent and put the satchel down between them, shivered a bit, breathed some warm air through his hands, and then put them into his jacket pockets. When he looked at Danny, just for a second or two, there was such a crystal-clear communication between them that he almost heard the words form in his head.
You were right. Now we’re going to let these guys give us just one more bad sign, the tiniest sign, and then we put their lights out. No “freeze, FBI!,” no warning shots; we shoot to kill until they’re all down, or we are. And you and I both know who gets it first.
Danny took his right hand from his pocket, casually scratched the side of his nose, feigned a leisurely yawn, and then let his arm hang back down by his side.
Randy, the one still on the phone, looked back over his shoulder.
He was listening intently, not talking; his eyes went first to Stuart Kearns, and then over to Danny, and then he turned back around, with his back to them, as he’d been before. A few more seconds passed, and still facing away, Randy’s free hand came up slowly and touched the shoulder of the man to his right, the mouthy guy who looked like he just couldn’t wait for the lead to start flying.
And that was it.
When you’ve practiced enough it gets to look like one fluid motion, but there are four distinct parts to a quick draw, at least to the one that
Molly had taught him. In the beginning the count is slow and you stop between the steps so your teacher can make sure you’ve got them right. After a few months and several thousand repeats, though, it starts to go so fast that if you blink, you might miss it.
Danny’s right hand swept back to clear his clothing and found the pistol grip just where he’d left it; he pulled the weapon free and brought it forward, the barrel coming parallel to the ground and his left hand joining the solid grasp; he extended toward center-mass of his target with the iron sight rising level to his eye; and at the end of the forward movement, as it all came together at his ideal firing position, without a pause he squeezed the trigger to its stop.
The boom of their first two shots was almost simultaneous, though Kearns had a much easier draw from his pocket. They’d chosen the same primary target, the man to whom Randy had given his too-obvious go-ahead, the guy who would have cut them in half with a hail of bullets if they’d given him half a chance to shoot first. As Kearns took off to his left, still firing, their designated executioner was crumpling backward, likely dead on his feet, but surely out of commission.
Danny broke right, aiming by the seat of his pants and squeezing off another shot as soon as any one of the scattering men appeared in his line of fire. He was a below-average marksman on a static range, but now he and his targets were moving and they were starting to return fire, so he was shooting a lot but not hitting much of anything.
But at least he’d gotten their full attention. In the next moment he ran out of ammo and good ideas at the very same time as the second man with the heavy artillery had finally found his wits and started shooting. A jagged line of bullet impacts stitched across the sand toward him, and as Danny dropped to the ground in a shallow gully he heard a tire explode and the windows shatter in their van just behind him. He saw Stuart Kearns step from behind the cover of one of the random concrete walls, and the FBI man made his next four rounds count. As the last gunshots echoed back from the mountains, three of the men were lying motionless on the ground, and one was unaccounted for, but only for the moment.
The silence was broken by the sound of a diesel engine turning over and starting. Danny watched Kearns limping toward the back of the truck, then grabbing on and hoisting himself up into the open compartment.
As the truck dropped into gear and started to roll Danny got to his feet and ran for it. The faster he ran the faster it went, and it had nearly accelerated to the point of no return when he caught up to the tailgate, stumbled forward to get a grasp on to Stuart Kearns’ extended hand, and felt himself pulled up and in.
Noah had shaken his one remaining pill out of the prescription bottle halfway through the flight, and now as the last of the medicine was wearing off, a nasty withdrawal was setting in with a vengeance. By the time they reached the car rental counter he could feel himself starting to fade. Headache, chills, dizziness, a general sickening malaise-it was already bad, and he could tell it was going to get much worse over the next few hours.
Molly was driving, since he clearly wasn’t fit to sit behind the wheel, and to put it delicately, she drove with a purpose. If he’d been feeling good and in the right sort of daredevil mood her driving might have been easier to take in stride. As it was, though, between his worsening physical condition and being jostled around the front seat by all the surging and braking and swerving through traffic, he wasn’t having any fun at all.
Plus, she wasn’t talking. Since they’d started out in the car all he was getting were one-word answers, along with clear unspoken signals that there was nothing so important that it needed to be discussed at the moment.
They’d left the city limits of Las Vegas over half an hour ago, so his hope of a good night’s recovery in a five-star bed was more than thirty miles behind them and fading fast. According to the speedometer, wherever she was taking them she was trying to get there in way too much of a hurry.
“We’re going to get stopped,” Noah said.
She didn’t answer, and she didn’t slow down.
“Where are we going, Molly?”
“To help a friend,” she said curtly. “Now would you please just let me drive?”
“Fine.”
“Thank you.”
Before long they’d left the main highway and were barreling down some narrow desert road that was only a thin single line on the GPS screen. Before they’d gotten started she’d spent quite a bit of time and frustration entering their destination into the device. It was hard, she’d said, because it wasn’t a street address that she’d been given, only a latitude and longitude.
The sheet of paper from which she’d read those coordinates was still tucked into one of the cup holders.
Okay, then.
If she didn’t want to take a few seconds to tell him what was going on, he could damn well figure it out for himself. Before she could stop him Noah picked up the sheet and opened it up, tapped on the overhead map light, and held the paper near his eyes.
What was printed there appeared to be two cut-and-pasted text messages or e-mails, he couldn’t tell which. Maybe it was because his mind was working only at half capacity, but he had to read it all over twice. The first time through he couldn’t accept what he was seeing.
molly -
spread the word -- stay away from las vegas monday
FBI sting op -› * exigent *
be safe
xoxo
db
* 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 ‹
db
* I wish I was kidding
“Unbelievable.”
She glanced over at him, but only for a second before she got her eyes back on the road. When he looked down he found he’d crumpled the paper in his hand so hard that it might never come unfolded.
“I can’t believe it,” Noah said. “You people got me again.”
“Nine-one-one, this call is recorded, what’s your emergency?”
Wherever they were going, the ride was awfully rough. Danny was holding on tight to a cargo strap near the open door at the rear of the moving truck, the only place in the metal compartment with a signal solid enough to make a call on Kearns’s satellite phone.
“My name is Danny Bailey, I’m out in the desert somewhere northwest of Las Vegas, and I’m with FBI Special Agent Stuart Kearns. I’m in the back of a truck that’s on the move, and this truck belongs to a terrorist organization that might have their hands on a nuclear weapon.”
“What’s your location, sir?”
“Listen, I know what you people can do. You already know where I am better than I do, you know whose phone I’m calling from, you know the route I’m on, and in about ten seconds you’ll be sure who I am because you’ll have verified my voiceprint, so stop wasting my time.”
Some odd noise broke onto the line for a time; not interference, but a series of electronic clicks, tones, and dropouts.
“Okay, good deal, is everybody on now? Everybody listening? This is about an operation code-named Exigent. Did you get that? Exigent. So now you know who I am, who I’m with, why I’m here, and where to send the cavalry, and you’d by-God better know this is real. Just follow this signal down and get here, understand?”
He left the phone switched on and placed it in a niche on the bed of the cargo compartment.
Kearns was near the front wall, kneeling next to the tarp-wrapped bundle they’d both seen earlier, before the shooting had started.
It was a body, of course, and the face of the dead man had been uncovered. When Kearns turned to look at him, Danny didn’t have to ask who it was that was lying there. He’d already known who it would be.
Agent Kearns had said that after these last few years of working this operation undercover-all the while doing his best to appear to be a raving militant agitator who’d turned against his government and was openly calling for a violent revolution-he really had only one remaining contact in the FBI. His frightening online persona was well-known to tens of thousands of fringe-group wackos and law enforcement personnel alike, but only one person alive could have credibly testified that Stuart Kearns was actually a loyal American doing his duty to protect and defend the United States. And here was that person, dead.
“Did you call 911?” Kearns asked.
“Yeah, I did. And now they’ll either come or they won’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Danny touched the metal gantry next to him, the frame that held the thing that at first glance he’d thought might be a torpedo. “Take a look at this thing with me, and tell me what you think.”
As Kearns moved to stand, he winced and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall of the compartment. Below the knee his right pants leg was stained with blood.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Just help me up.”
They stood on either side of the framework, bracing themselves on its crossbars as the truck moved over the rough road they were traveling.
“This looks like an old Mark 8 atomic bomb,” Kearns said, “from the early 1950s.” He pulled the light down closer and ran his hands over the surface, stopping at a series of seals and stickers that carried dates and the initials of inspectors. “It’s been maintained all these years.”
“So this is a live one, then?”
“Sure looks that way to me.” A line of heavy metal conduit ran from the rear of the thing and Kearns followed it with a finger, pointing. The tubing went across the floor and through the wall to the driver’s compartment. “And it looks like they’ve jury-rigged it to be set off from the front seat.”
“So your guy over there on the floor: he brought them this one, and you brought yours. You both got managed so you didn’t know what the other was doing, and we all got set up at once.”
“But why,” Kearns said. He wasn’t really asking; he was thinking it through.
“It’s like I told you before. Whoever’s behind this needed a patsy for a false-flag domestic attack, Stuart, and that’s you. And they needed to make my people the enemy, and that’s why I’m here.”
“Based on your file, they could have had you picked up anytime they wanted, but they picked you up Friday night, to make you a part of this. And me, they’ve just kept me in cold storage-”
“Waiting for the right time, when they needed a couple of fall guys,” Danny said. “The crazy Internet conspiracy theorist who incited these thugs into violence, and the lone nut ex-FBI man who helped them pull it off.”
“Well, whoever’s behind this, we’ve screwed up their plans for now.”
“But not for too much longer. This guy’s driving somewhere like he means to get where he’s going, but if he calms down long enough to stop and come back here to check his load, we’re toast. We’re unarmed, and he’ll just stand back and shoot us like fish in a barrel. Then he’ll go on to Vegas tonight and do what he’s going to do. We can’t wait for him to do that.”
Kearns looked up at him. “So what do we do?”
The truck slowed briefly, made a turn onto what felt like a much smoother roadway, and then began to pick up speed again.
“I’ve got an idea,” Danny said, “but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”
He walked toward the tailgate, where the package they’d brought was strapped against the side of the compartment, and motioned for his partner to follow. When Kearns had sat and situated his injured leg, Danny crouched down and pulled off the tarp that was covering the device. He peeled off the keys that were taped near the arming panel and handed them to Kearns.
If one of these bombs was real, then it stood to reason that they both were real. And there was really only one way to find out.
“Here we go,” Kearns said.
He inserted the two keys into the control panel, twisted them a quarter-turn, and pressed the button labeled ARM. The line of yellow bulbs illuminated, winked to green one by one as the soft whine from the charging electronics ascended up the scale.
Once the device had gotten its bearings, it was simple enough to reset the final destination on the touchscreen of the GPS detonator. It wasn’t an address they selected, of course, just an empty point on the deserted road they were traveling, a little less than three miles ahead and counting down.
The older man lit up a cigarette, and he shook another one up from the pack and offered it across.
“Nah, I told you,” Danny said. “I quit five years ago.”
“Aw, come on. Special occasion.”
“I took an oath to an old friend, Stuart, and if you met this woman, you’d know why I can’t break it.”
“When you put it that way, I guess I see what you mean.” Kearns winced and straightened his leg, leaned his head back against the corrugated wall of the compartment, eyes closed.
“Hey,” Danny said, and he waited until his partner looked over. “The other night when you were telling me about your career with the FBI, you said that after all they’d put you through, you wondered sometimes why you stuck it out.”
“Yeah.”
“This is why, man. Tonight is why you stayed on. What was it they had you say, when you put your hand on the Bible and they swore you in?”
“It’s been so long, let’s see if I even remember…‘I do solemnly swear,’” Kearns said quietly, “ ‘that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’”
“Damn right.”
“And how about you?”
“Me? Oh, this is the perfect way for me to go out, really. The more I think about it, the more I realize I must have outstayed my welcome in my own movement. I take that back; it’s not even mine anymore. If guys like these can agree with anything I say, then I’ve been saying something wrong. And you know what, Stuart? A long time ago I pledged my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to this country, and now I get to give all three of them at once.”
Kearns took a last drag and stubbed out his smoke on the metal floor. “Does it matter that nobody will ever know what we did out here?”
“Oh, somebody’ll figure it out. Somebody like me. Not that anybody else will ever believe them.”
The device next to them issued a loud tone. A bright red light illuminated on the panel, under the word Proximity.
“Nice working with you, kid,” Kearns said.
He reached out a hand and Danny Bailey took it in a firm clasp of solidarity, and just a moment later, they were gone.
We got you?” Molly shouted. “We got you? Are you really selfcentered enough to believe that any of this is about you?”
“It’s only about me because you keep putting me in the middle of it,” Noah said. “You people could have killed me, for God’s sake, so maybe you can forgive me for taking this personally.”
“Hollis stayed with you every minute until they came for you; he made sure you were okay. I’m so sorry you’ve got a headache now, but nobody tried to kill you.”
“That’s just great to hear. You know, you people are really incredible. My father told me this morning that something is going to happen that’s going to change everything, and I’m thinking, okay, a big stock market correction, or another war going hot in South Asia or the Middle East, or a couple of planes crashing into buildings like the last time everything changed forever. And your mother asked me to help you get away to somewhere safe”-he held up the paper in his hand-“and idiot that I am, I let you lead me right to the last place on earth we should go.”
“I’m here to stop this thing if I can.”
“Well, you can’t!” he shouted over her. “Open your eyes, for God’s sake. They’ve got everything, and you’ve got nothing. All you’re going to do is get us both arrested or killed or put into an unmarked hole in the middle of the desert.”
“I have to try.”
“You don’t have to try. I told you, we can both ride this thing out. I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say this, but I still want to help you, Molly. That cabin in the woods that you talked about, wherever you want to go until this blows over, I can still make that happen.”
“How dare you dangle that in front of me again! What do you think, that I don’t want it? That I don’t want you? Don’t you think I’m scared, and I dream some nights about getting away and never having another worry about the people like your father and what they’re trying to turn this world into?”
“As bad as it would be to let me take care of you, it’s better than dying for nothing, isn’t it?”
Molly’s expression changed. She took a deep breath and then spoke in a much more measured tone. “Before we got off the plane you told me that you got it; you said you finally understood what I was about.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t, Noah. You have no idea. You think knowing the truth is enough? A lot of people know the truth, and nothing changes. So today, after twenty-eight years of drifting through life and taking everything from this country and never giving anything back, today you tell me you’ve finally seen the light and that’s supposed to mean something to me?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Once you know the truth,” Molly said, “then you’ve got to live it. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
He saw her look up at the rearview mirror, and something froze in her.
Noah turned to look through the back window. The visibility must have stretched for miles and miles, and way back at the edge of what the eye could see, a tiny line of strobing police lights had appeared.
She was driving as hard and fast as she had before, but there was something in her face, in her eyes, that he hadn’t seen before. Molly was afraid. And he knew then that she wasn’t afraid of the police, or of going to prison; she wasn’t afraid of getting killed in her cause; she wasn’t even afraid of Arthur Gardner. She was afraid only that her fight was over.
There’d been turning points in his life that he’d seen coming months away, but this one appeared in an instant. He was safely on one side of it a second before, just being who he’d always thought he was, and then he blinked and he was on the other, waking up to realize who he was going to be.
Up ahead he could see that the road narrowed onto a short bridge over a shallow chasm, which ran across the terrain for several hundred yards.
You see the truth, and then you have to live it, she’d said. It was too late, maybe, and too little, but he knew what he needed to do.
“Slow down,” Noah said. “I’m getting out.”
“What?”
“Don’t stop, just let me out.” He cracked the door and the wind whipped inside, and she let her foot off the gas and braked until the car had slowed to the point where he might just survive if he stepped out onto the road whizzing by under them. There was no way to be sure if she understood what he was doing; no time to explain. Maybe he’d never know, but like she’d said, none of this was really about Noah Gardner.
He took a last look at Molly. There were tears in her eyes but she kept them firmly fixed on the way ahead.
“Good-bye,” Noah said.
She answered, but so quietly and privately that the words clearly weren’t intended to reach him. If they were never to see each other again, it seemed, this was just something that she must have wanted read into the record. Wishful thinking, maybe, but he felt he knew in his heart exactly what she’d said.
I love you, too.
He opened the door and dropped to the pavement, rolling and bouncing and banging along for what seemed like the length of a soccer field. At last he stopped, and he watched for a few seconds as the car he’d left picked up speed again and began to recede toward the horizon.
He tried to stand but the pain prevented it, so he crawled to the center line and knelt there in the middle of the narrow bridge, hands up and out so he’d be more visible, watching the line of cars with flashing lights fast approaching.
Maybe they’ll stop in time, and maybe they won’t, Noah thought, but either way he’d slow them down. Other than that, he knew only two things: Molly Ross was still fighting, and that despite what was bearing down on him ahead, he wasn’t afraid.
By the time the lead car had skidded to a stop he could feel the heat on his face from its headlights. Some of the vehicles behind were backing up and their drivers were trying to find a way around the bottleneck, but off the road the sand was too soft for traction and those who’d gone into the gully were stuck, their tires spinning uselessly.
He looked up and saw five uniformed men approaching, their guns drawn. They were all shouting orders he couldn’t really understand.
And then they disappeared, as did the rest of the world, in a silent split-second flash of bright white light from behind him. It was so bright that it crossed the senses. He could feel it on his back, he could hear the light and smell it. When his vision returned Noah saw the officers standing in the road where they’d been, some covering their eyes, but most looking past him, blank-faced, their hands hanging down at their sides.
He turned to look back over his shoulder, in the direction Molly had gone, and miles away he saw the rising mushroom cloud, a massive, roiling ball of fire ascending slowly into the evening sky. The expanding circle of a shock wave was tearing across the desert toward them, toward everything in all directions, and a few seconds later it arrived with a crack of thunder and the sudden gust of a hot summer wind.
It could have been most of the night that they worked him over. It could have been days for all he knew. All sense of time had left him while he was still out there on the road.
The questioning had started in one place, and at some point they’d satisfied themselves that the worst they could do wasn’t going to be good enough. There’d been a dark ride in a car, and then a flight somewhere. At the new place they’d started in on him again.
They knew a lot already. They knew that calls had been made from Noah’s apartment to a long list of accomplices of a known agitator who’d conspired to destroy an American city or two. They knew that Noah helped one of the central figures in this conspiracy gain access to classified files and information. They knew that he’d helped her evade security and fly across the country to play her part in the failed attack. They knew that two nuclear weapons had fallen into the hands of these terrorists, and that one of them had detonated but the other was still unaccounted for.
This second group of interrogators was more organized and clinical in their methods, and far more creative. It wasn’t only pain they inflicted, but terror; the most effective torture happens in the mind. After many hours and methods they’d eventually settled on using a reliable old standby that seemed to have the most immediate and positive effect for their purposes.
Strapped flat to a cold metal table, head immobilized and inclined to be lower than the feet, a wet cloth over the face to restrict his breathing- and then just a slight dripping of water, maybe half a glass, just enough to begin to run down the nostrils and into the throat. Some primitive part of the mind simply comes unhinged when it knows it’s drowning and knows it can’t get away. Try to be as strong as you want; it doesn’t matter. If he’d actually known anything at all that they wanted to learn, before ten seconds had passed he would have told them, and they would have known he was telling the truth.
In the course of their work they told him a lot of things to encourage him to break his silence. They told him that Molly’s mother, under similar questioning, had revealed the entire plot, including the depth of Noah’s involvement. They said that Molly herself had been apprehended and they described in excruciating detail the particular techniques they had employed on her. She’d given him up almost immediately, they’d claimed, along with all of her co-conspirators.
After all they’d put him through, Noah would have gladly believed almost anything they’d said, but even to his clouded, brutalized mind these last two assertions didn’t ring true-those two would never betray their cause. If Molly was going down, she would go down swinging and silent. Knowing that gave Noah the first bit of hope that he’d had in a long time.
It went on that way, though, again and again, as if they had nothing but time and nothing to lose by confirming over and over that he didn’t know anything that could help them. They seemed to take his complete lack of useful knowledge as a sign of stubborn resistance to their questioning. And, after all, you never know when a valuable little nugget of intel might surface.
And then they stopped.
They spent a few minutes cleaning him up as well as they could, unstrapped one of his hands, adjusted the table to a more natural recline, and even slipped a couple of flat pillows beneath his head. They never addressed him directly, but Noah was able to gather from what they said that a special visitor was coming, someone special enough to put a hold on the most critical interrogation since they’d captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed two years after 9/11.
As they prepared to leave, they put their things in order, like a team of seasoned mechanics might tend to the tools of their trade. These actions made it clear that they’d be back if necessary after this brief interlude, to take up their work right where they’d left it off.
A number of dark plastic surveillance domes were distributed across the ceiling. The chief interrogator looked up at one of the cameras and made a gesture to those watching to indicate that the subject was now ready to receive his guest. On that cue, the tiny red lights of the surveillance cameras winked out in sequence.
A few seconds later, a figure appeared in the open doorway.
Noah had been savaged for many hours, of course, brought to the brink mentally and physically in his interrogation. No one would blame him if he didn’t immediately recognize his visitor-the man was so rarely seen outside of his natural, elegant habitat. Yet despite all of these mitigating factors, Noah knew instantly whom he was staring at because it was his own flesh and blood: the legendary Arthur Gardner.
The old man came in and walked to the middle of the room, discharged his bodyguard and the others with a slight dismissive wave, and he and Noah were left alone.
His father pulled over a high stool instead of the rolling office chair that had been arranged for him. He was taking the high ground, as usual; seated in this way the old man towered above his son, who was still bound securely to the metal bed.
For a time they only regarded each other in silence. It might have been a bit of his father’s mano a mano gamesmanship, often employed in business interactions: in hostile negotiations it’s often the first one to speak who loses. After a while, though, the quiet must have outlasted his patience.
“This woman you became involved with,” Arthur Gardner began, “do you have any idea what she has cost us?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said. His voice was hoarse from lack of moisture, and from the suffering they’d already put him through. “Billions?”
The old man’s fist came down on edge of the table, hard enough to break a bone.
“She cost us impact!” he shouted. “It was to be a clean and spectacular event, a thing to be leveraged into a leap forward toward our new beginning. Instead it’s become a complete debacle. We were left with an almost unnoticed explosion out in the empty desert that barely rattled a teacup in the nearest town. There aren’t even any pictures-we’ve had to resort to artists’ conceptions and special effects. We’ll be up all night trying to make a credible story of it all, to salvage the greatest effect we can. After all the years of preparation it was rushed forward, against my advice, due to the actions of this meaningless resistance. Which my son was somehow a part of.”
By all appearances his father must have been thinking that some form of apology would be appropriate at this point. Noah chose his words carefully.
“I didn’t set out to be, Dad.”
The old man muttered something poisonous under his breath and then seemed to make an effort to gather his dignity again. He straightened the already-perfect knot of his Persian silk tie, and when he spoke again his voice was under somewhat tighter control.
“Not that it’s been a total failure. Your friends lost before the fight even began. We’ve spent years painting them as a fringe group of dangerous heirs to the likes of Timothy McVeigh, and of course they’ll be revealed as the villains behind this failed attack.” He stared off into the distance as if he were talking to no one in particular. “It’s too bad that these friends of yours have been so transparent in their desire for violence. They wave signs with slogans about ‘reloading’ and watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. They wear shirts that endorse the ‘targeting’ of politicians, and, Noah, let’s not forget about that unfortunate incident you got yourself caught up in at that downtown bar. These people never wanted to give peace a chance-and now they’ve shown just how far they are willing to go to send their message.” He was actually smiling, clearly enjoying a sadistic satisfaction with it all.
“Thankfully, there’s already talk of suspending the presidential election. Though either candidate would have been equally useful in the aftermath, it will be a powerful bit of symbolism nevertheless. Many sweeping pieces of helpful legislation will be rushed through in the coming days with little or no debate, and those will be used to clamp down further on what remains of this Ross woman’s pitiful movement. And naturally, a wholesale roundup is under way to ferret out all those connected with these backward revolutionaries, with full support of the media and the cowering public.
“Saul Alinsky was right, Noah-the ends do justify the means. I can’t imagine how any thinking person could believe otherwise. Which do you really think the huddled masses would prefer if they knew what I know-that they have only two choices: a quick if somewhat painful transformation, or yet another century of slow progress and suffering toward the same inevitable end, only this time with all of the country’s wealth and potential stolen away from them before the decay even begins.
“And yet these selfish and ignorant meddlers-patriots, they have the gall to call themselves-they would stand in the path of destiny. What do they think they’ve accomplished? The lives of how many were saved tonight? Thirty thousand? Five times that many people die around the globe every day. They die in obscurity at the end of an aimless existence, and they disappear to dust as though they’d never been. But those thirty thousand, they would have died for a cause greater than any other, their names would have been etched in monuments in the new world, on the granite markers heralding mankind’s new beginning. One world, ruled by the wise and the fittest and the strong, with no naïve illusions of equality or the squandered promises of freedom for all.
“How many times must we learn the same lessons? Leave the useless eaters to their pursuit of happiness, and the result is always slaughter and chaos and poverty and despair. What your new friends fail to see is that this country was nothing more than a brief anomaly, a mere passing second in the march of time. People often ask how slavery could’ve happened, but that just shows their ignorance. Slavery and tyranny have been the rule for thousands of years; freedom is the short-lived exception.
“The United States should never have survived as long as it has, but all good things must come to an end. The system is broken beyond repair. It costs a billion dollars to run for president these days; Abraham Lincoln would never have lasted past the Iowa caucuses. And if the occasional visionaries actually make it into office, their corruption begins immediately. They’re overcome by the problems they inherit. But the majority of politicians are only prostitutes and puppets, and they always will be. Their simple-minded lusts for money, and sex, and power make them controllable, but they disgust me. When they’ve served their purpose, they’ll learn what real power is, along with everyone else.
“Whatever chance we have to take control of this world is in controlling who pulls the strings. Presidents, senators, governors-all of these come and go, but I and my peers have been here all along, raising them up and tearing them down. The real enduring powers in this world are older than any modern government, and it’s past time that we put an end to these empty dreams of liberty. Now, we openly take the reins. Now, we’ll give the people the government they’ve shown themselves to deserve. No one knows the people better than I do, and I know what they need. We’ll give them a purpose: a simple, regimented, peaceful life with all the reasonable comforts, in service of something greater than any single, selfish nation.”
The old man stood, walked to the door, rapped on the frame three times, and then came back and took his seat again. After a moment, others entered the room, a different group of professionals than Noah had seen before.
“Your mother,” Noah’s father began, “meant a great deal to me. I saw in her my last hopes for humanity. She had her weaknesses, but in thinking back on it now, those weaknesses may have been what drew me to her. She believed in people, for one, that the good in them could outweigh the bad. For the brief time I was with her, a touch of those weaknesses even spread to me. We had a child together, though I’d sworn I’d never bring another human being into this world. But she poured all of her innocent dreams into her son.
“And as she lay dying, your mother told me that I should expect to see wonderful things from you, Noah. I’ve held on to that hope. But as I stood out there just now, watching outside this room for the preceding hour, I had to wonder if this was to be the end of my ambitions for you.”
“Your ambitions… for me?”
“Believe it or not, my boy, I won’t live forever. There’s much to do before I die; the outcome of my life’s work is still very much in doubt, and I need help to see it through. I need your help.
“My wish has been that you would someday stand beside me as we bring forth this new world together. You have great gifts, Noah, but those gifts have been kept dormant by a trick of heredity. I know you’ve felt this conflict, and it must have been quite painful at times. You have your father’s mind, but your mother’s heart. Neither will permit the other to come to the fore.
“But it seems you may have been exposed to a disease in your thinking over the last few days. I’m familiar with this infection, and once it takes hold in a person I’m afraid it’s shown itself to be quite incurable. It will be with you until you die, in other words. And so, before you can help me, Noah, before I can trust you to do so, we must be certain that this woman and her friends haven’t passed you a sickness that cannot be permitted to spread.”
The technicians had already begun their preparations. Now some brought heavy copper cables and electrodes and fastened these to various points on Noah’s body with wraps of white tape. A cold dab of conductive gel was applied to his temple on one side, and then on the other.
“Tm here to save you, Noah,” his father said, “one way or the other, and to preserve my legacy. One of two young men will leave this room with me. The first was taken hostage by this Ross woman and her terrorist militia, but he managed to escape and then bravely risked his life by standing in the road to prevent a group of policemen and federal agents from being killed in that terrible explosion in the desert. This man is a hero, and will carry on my work and be my eyes and ears in the field as our plans proceed.
“The other man played a part in a similar story, with one sad exception: This other man is dead.”
Arthur Gardner nodded to one of the seated technicians.
“And now,” he said, “let’s find out together, once and for all, if Noah Gardner is really his father’s son.”
They’d refashioned his bonds in a manner that would still restrain him, but with less likelihood of causing him to injure himself in the course of the coming ordeal. He was instructed to bite down on a length of hard rubber hose they’d placed between his teeth.
What they did, they’d learned from decades of trial-and-error and thousands of prisoners who’d been down this last road before him. Even in a clinical setting, electroconvulsive therapy was far more an art than a science; the results were never fully known until the procedure was finished. The goals were different here, but their main purpose was plain: to destroy any remaining will to resist or evade, so the truth would be the only thing he’d be left capable of speaking.
For a long while his father sat silently next to the metal table as the technicians administered the voltage with a jeweler’s precision. Noah could hear the screams, and he knew they were his, but a small part of him was detached enough to simply observe the suffering.
His mind, once his greatest, if least used, asset, was no longer under his control. He couldn’t focus on the technicians or the pain and he’d long ago stopped wondering how much longer it would go on. All that was left were random snapshots of the past that flashed uninvited into his head.
All his defenses had left him hours before. In this state if he’d had any information to reveal he would have gladly offered it, but they were now probing for something much deeper than mere intelligence. Each time he thought there was nothing left, they found another fragile layer of his soul to peel away. In the end, when all he could see was darkness, whatever was left of him finally gave in and tried its best to surrender.
As if sensing it was finished, the old man stood from the rickety wooden stool and stood over his son. “Now, now, Noah, I think we are both finding out what kind of man you are, and I have to tell you, it’s quite disappointing.” He referred briefly to a sheet of notes he’d been handed. “Inconclusive. I’m sure you know, that’s a word I hate more than any other. And doesn’t it place a sad little period at the end of the story of a rather aimless and forgettable young life?
“While you’ve given us nothing that implicates you in the treachery of the preceding days, you’ve also said nothing to exonerate yourself to my side of the conflict. A true believer or a traitor to the cause, either one of those I could at least respect. But you’re weak, aren’t you? And fatally so.”
Neither of Noah’s eyes would open fully, and what vision he had was dim and watery. His father looked like a giant silhouette, a featureless shadow. Fragments of memories intruded, a flash from the office break room when he’d first seen Molly, but her image was replaced in his mind with the outline of seven light strokes from a felt-tip pen.
“Continue,” his father said to the technicians.
The lines that had once represented Molly’s exquisite form dissolved into a pool of blackness and pain.
“Noah, I last told you this when you were only a boy, so I doubt you’ll remember.” His father had retaken his position at the side of the table. “It’s a rhyme I made up for you, in answer to some childish question you’d posed. I think it fitting in our present situation.”
When he spoke again the old man’s voice had taken on a softer, more fatherly tone.
“‘There are men who are weak and few who are strong / There are men who are right and more who are wrong / But of all the men huddled in all the world’s hives / There’s but one thing that’s true: It’s the fit who’ll survive.’
“Noah, the meek will not inherit the earth. A faint heart is as great a weakness as a feeble mind. It pains me to say it, but I’m afraid we’ve reached a parting of the ways.”
It was then that Noah felt something beneath him, and behind him, all around him-something outside himself that he couldn’t quite identify.
His father’s mind, his mother’s heart. What the old man had given him was all that these men could tear away, but it was her heart that they couldn’t quite reach. His mother had passed it on to him, and even after her strength had lain unused and scarcely remembered for all these wasted years, it seemed that Molly Ross had somehow awakened it again.
The idea of dying wasn’t nearly as frightening as he would have thought it would be. But somewhere he also knew that this wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Molly had taught him the importance of living to fight another day. She hadn’t been captured, she hadn’t been killed. A spirit like that doesn’t die so easily. He had no facts whatsoever to assure him of this, but he knew it. Maybe it was a bit of that faith that she’d spoken of.
The old man pulled away with a stoic finality and picked up his suit jacket, which had been folded neatly over the back of the office chair. As he put it on, he turned to the man who was clearly in charge of things. “Finish the job and then craft a story to ensure my son is remembered in a way that will bring dignity and honor to our family.”
There was a way out of this, but Noah didn’t know what it was until he heard the answer whispered at his ear, as though Molly were there right beside him. The fight would go on, she’d said, with her on the outside and him on the inside, where she’d already shown him that the deepest kind of damage could be done. And then she added one thing more:
Don’t be afraid.
As the old man turned away, Noah tried to speak the words she’d given him, but his mouth and lips were so dry that the words were barely audible. “As it will be in the future,” he whispered, “it was at the birth of Man.”
He didn’t even know if he was saying the words aloud or reciting them only in his mind. “There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.” His father’s hand was on the doorknob when he suddenly froze and looked back.
“What did you say?” the old man asked.
Noah continued, his voice becoming stronger. “That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire.” His father had taken a few steps closer to him now. “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Arthur Gardner’s usually dispassionate face, so long accustomed to the denial of emotion, could not contain his surprise. He resumed his seat next to the table and motioned the others from the room.
The old man leaned close and squeezed his son’s hand. Noah smiled as best he could and let his father believe what he surely thought he was seeing. “I knew it was in there somewhere,” Arthur Gardner said. “We had to strip all of the other nonsense away, but there it is, from the root of your being; the essence of what I’ve taught you. I knew you couldn’t forget, though I must admit that you had me concerned.”
Noah looked directly into his father’s keen, discerning eyes and nodded.
“Those people you were with,” the old man continued, “they somehow believe that we can have a brighter future by resurrecting the failed ideas of the past. They’re wrong, and their ideas would lead to untold misery for millions. The answer is a new vision, my vision, and together we can make it a reality.”
Noah realized something else then, another thing that Molly had taught him: When you lie for a living, you sometimes can’t see the truth even when it’s staring you right in the face. That’s a weakness that could clearly be exploited.
It was a matter of pride with Arthur Gardner that his heir should be involved in the transformation that was coming. His son, then, would do his best to prove the adage that pride comes before the fall.
The old man smiled. The ordeal was finished, and though he clearly felt he’d won the day, what Arthur Gardner couldn’t know was that the battle lines had only just been drawn.
Noah felt himself fading, and he spoke again, but scarcely at a whisper. These words were meant for different ears, and wherever Molly was, he knew for certain she would hear them.
“We have it in our power,” Noah said, “to begin the world over again.”