The Overton Window Read online

  Fortunately, Noah was blessed with a blind spot for rejection; she’d winged him, sure, but he wasn’t nearly shot down. He smiled and, even at a distance, imagined he could see just a hint of dry amusement in her profile as well.

  Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory. Without a doubt all the goodies were in all the right places, but no mere scale of one to ten was going to do the job this time. It was an entirely new experience for him. Though he’d been in her presence for less than a minute, her soul had locked itself onto his senses, far more than her substance had.

  She hardly wore any makeup, it seemed, nothing needed concealment or embellishment. Simple silver jewelry, tight weathered jeans on the threadbare outer limits of the company’s casual-Friday dress code, everything obviously chosen and worn for no one’s approval but her own. A lush abundance of dark auburn hair pulled back in a loose French twist and held in place by two crisscrossed number-two pencils. The style was probably the work of only a few seconds but it couldn’t have been more becoming if she’d spent hours at a salon.

  A number of unruly strands had escaped confinement in the course of the workday. These liberated chestnut curls framed a handsome face made twice as radiant by the mysteries surely waiting just behind those light green eyes.

  He walked nearer, reading over her flier as she pressed a final pushpin into its upper corner. It was an amateurish layout job but someone had taken the time to hand-letter the text in a passable calligraphy. The heading was a pasted-on strip of tattered, scorched parchment that looked like it had been ripped from the original draft of the U.S. Constitution.

  We the People

  If you love your country but fear for its future,

  join us for an evening of truth that will open your eyes!

  Guest speakers include:

  Earl Matthew Thomas-1976 U.S. Presidential candidate (L) and bestselling author of Divided We Fall

  Joyce McDevitt-New York regional community liaison, Liberty Belles

  Maj. Gen. Francis N. Klein-former INSCOM commanding general (ret. 1984), cofounder of GuardiansOfLiberty.com

  Kurt Bilger-Tri-state coordinator, Sons of the American Revolution

  Beverly Emerson-Director emeritus, Founders’ Keepers

  Danny Bailey-The man behind the YouTube phenomenon Overthrow , with 35,000,000 views and counting!

  Bring a friend, come lift a glass, and raise your voice for liberty!

  www.FoundersKeepers.com

  The date, time, and location of the meeting were printed underneath.

  “This event, it’s happening tonight?” Noah asked.

  “Congratulations, you can read.” She was moving some other bulletins and notices, repinning them elsewhere to give her announcement a bit more prominence.

  “Maybe you should have posted that last week. People make plans—”

  “Actually,” she said, finishing her rearrangement, “this was just an afterthought. I don’t really expect anyone here to be all that interested.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She turned, a little taller than eye level from the summit of her step-stool. Close-up now and face-on, she had a forthrightness that was every bit as intriguing as it was disquieting.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes, I really want to know.”

  “All you PR people do is lie for a living,” she said. “The truth is just another story to you.”

  He felt an automatic impulse to mount a defense, but then swallowed it before he could speak. In a way she was absolutely right. In fact, what she’d just said was an almost perfect layman’s translation of the company’s mission statement, all weasel words aside.

  Seemed like an excellent time to change the subject.

  “I’m Noah,” he said.

  “I know. I sort your mail.” The following details were blithely enumerated, thumb to fingertips, summing him up neatly on the digits of a single hand. “Noah Gardner. Twenty-first floor, northwest corner office. Vice president as of last Thursday. And a son of a … big shot.”

  “Wow. For a second I wasn’t sure where you were going with that last one.”

  “Your dad owns the place, doesn’t he?”

  “He owns a lot of it, I guess. Hey, I have to confess something.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  “You haven’t told me your name yet,” Noah said, “and I’ve been trying to read it off your name tag, but I’m worried that you’ll get the wrong idea about where I’m looking.”

  “Go for it. I’m not shy.”

  On their way down, his eyes wandered only twice, and only briefly. He caught a glimpse of a small tattoo, finely drawn and not quite hidden by the neckline of her top. All that was visible was an edge of the outstretched wing of a bird, or maybe it was an angel. And a necklace lay against her smooth pale skin, a little silver cross threaded on a delicate wheat chain.

  Her ID was clipped low along the V of her pullover sweater, which fit as though it had been lovingly crocheted in place that very morning. The badge itself was a temporary worker’s tag, only one notch above a guest pass. She was smiling in the photo, but a real smile, the kind that made you want to do something worthy just so you could see it again.

  “Molly Ross,” he said.

  She tipped his chin back up with a knuckle.

  “This is fascinating and all, Mr. Gardner, but I need to go and service the postage meter.”

  “Just wait a second. Will you be at this meeting tonight?”

  “Yeah, I sure will.”

  “Good. Because I’m going to try to make it there myself”.

  She looked at him evenly. “Why?”

  “Why do you think? I’m very patriotic.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, I am. Very patriotic.”

  “That reminds me of a joke,” Molly said. “Noah comes home—Noah from the Bible, you know?”

  He nodded.

  “So Noah comes home after he finally got all the animals into the ark, and his wife asks him what he’s been doing all week. Do you know what he said to her?”

  “No, tell me.”

  Molly patted him on the cheek, pulled his face a little closer.

  “He said, ‘Honey, now I herd everything.’”

  She stepped down to the floor, scooted the stool back to where it had been, and headed for the hallway.

  “Don’t forget your candy bar,” she added, over a shoulder.

  Despite his normally ready wit, the door to the break room had hissed closed and clicked behind her long before a single sparkling comeback came to mind.

  CHAPTER 3

  Classified: TS-CCO//ORCON

  “Constitutionalists,” Extremism, the Militia Movement, and the Growing Threat of Domestic Terrorism

  Executive Summary

  As the Administration continues to be tested by economic, social, and political challenges unprecedented in our country’s history, the rise of radical/reactionary organizations and the accompanying dangers of “patriotic rebellion,” virulent hate-speech, and homegrown terrorism must now be acknowledged as a major threat to national security.

  With this clear and present danger in mind, it is our recommendation that contingency plans be developed (using data from previous exploratory actions [e.g., Ops. REX-84] and in accordance with HSPD-20 / NSPD-51) with the following objectives:

  1. Identification

  Educate law enforcement and enlist the populace in a program designed to profile, identify, and report individuals and groups engaging in suspect behaviors, protests/advocacy, distribution of inciting literature, and/or evidencing support of issues that are known “red flags” :*

  —Militant anti-abortion or “pro-life” organizers / “Army of God” / home-schoolers

  —Anti-immigration / “border defenders” / NAU alarmists / Minutemen / “Tea Parties”

  —Militia organizations / military reenactors /
disenfranchised veterans / survivalists

  —Earth First / Earth Liberation Front / “green anarchists” / seed-bankers

  —Tax resisters / “End the Fed” proponents / IRS/WTO/IMF/ World Bank protesters

  —Anti-Semitic rhetoric: Bilderberg Group / CFR / Trilateral Comm. / “New World Order”

  —Third-party political campaigns / secessionists / state sovereignty proponents

  —Libertarian Party / Constitution Party / “patriot movement” / gun rights activists

  —“9/11 Truth” / conspiracy theorists / Holocaust deniers / hate radio/TV/Web/print

  —Christian Identity / White Nationalists / American Nazi Party / “free speech” umbrella

  2. Classification / isolation / aggressive watchlisting

  Classify identified individuals and groups based on updated DHS threat-level criteria.† Aggressively deploy surveillance, law enforcement tactics (e.g., “knock-and-talk” “sneak & peek,” checkpoints, exigent search & seizure), and other available preventive and punitive measures / resources (e.g., No-Fly / No-Buy list) as appropriate to scale.

  3. Detention / rendition / interrogation / prosecution

  The extralegal practice of indefinite preventive detention / enhanced interrogation / rendition of nonmilitary enemy combatants has been normalized in the public perception, at least to a serviceable extent. The precedent has been established and remains supported by a neutral-to-positive portrayal in the mainstream media. However, with U.S. citizens suddenly in the news in the place of al-Qaeda terrorists, some level of psychological resistance must be anticipated and then defused when it arises. It is the opinion of the committee that such a reflexive populist reaction would prove to be a major obstacle to progress. In fact, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event (on the order of a Pearl Harbor / 9/11 attack), there is a potential that the government’s reasonable actions in this critical area may be met with significant public outrage and even active sympathy and misguided support for these treasonous/seditious elements and their hate-based objectives.

  * This list is provided as a representative sample, and is far from comprehensive. See

  Appendix R, pp. a321.

  † See Appendix N, subsection 10.3.

  cont’d

  “I think I’ve read quite enough.”

  Arthur Isaiah Gardner closed his copy of the new client’s binder, placed it carefully on the conference room table, and then slid it a precise few inches forward, to a spot just outside his circle of things that mattered.

  Noah had grown up with a healthy dread of this gesture but, in more recent years, he’d come to appreciate its versatility. As an all-purpose expression of deep fatherly disappointment it worked just as well for a prep-school report card as it did for a disastrously leaked presidential briefing document set to splash on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post.

  The old man breathed a shallow, weary sigh and stood at his place, looking every bit as elder-statesmanly as he did in the portrait that loomed over the main lobby downstairs. That oil painting was the closest that most of D&M’s four-hundred-odd employees ever got to their company’s patriarch. When he wasn’t traveling he kept to his office, and his office had an elevator all its own.

  “Actually, Mr. Gardner, I think the team would be well served by reviewing—”

  “Who spoke?”

  Noah’s father hardly ever expressed his anger directly anymore. Not like the olden days; his legendary temper had refined with age and in the past ten years it was a rare thing to hear him even raise his voice. The venom was all still there, but it had been distilled and purified to the point that its victims often failed to notice the sting of the lethal injection. “Who spoke?” was uttered with genuine wonder, as though the old man had been addressing a cage full of laboratory rats when suddenly one in the back had raised his little pink paw with a question.

  The room fell dead silent.

  “I did.” It was an older man at the far side of the long table, positioned in the power seat on the client side. Nice suit and a fresh, careful haircut, a touch of a rosy blush now rising in his cheeks.

  “Stand up.”

  The man leaned back a bit in his chair, grinned sheepishly, and then let it fade away. He glanced around, seeking moral support from the others in his party, but no one met his eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said feebly.

  Arthur Gardner answered only with a slight upward motion of his open hand, reminding the man that he’d been clearly directed to get up onto his feet. A few long seconds crawled by before he complied.

  “To put your busy mind at ease,” the old man said, “let me assure you that the trifling problem you brought us today is already put safely to bed. The story in the Post has been spiked, an eager team of computer sleuths is tracking down the source of your leak, and the memorandum itself is now being thoroughly and plausibly denied by its authors and blamed on an overzealous local bureaucracy somewhere in the barren Midwest. Who will be the culprit again, Noah?”

  “Illinois National Guard,” Noah said.

  “There. Crisis averted. All neatly handled before ten a.m. this morning by my son. Noah is a brilliant boy, if I do say so myself, though I’m sure he would agree that he hasn’t yet inherited his father’s taste for blood. Even so, he’s more than a match for such a minor predicament.”

  In the midst of a sip of coffee, Noah raised his cup in mock acknowledgment of the faint praise. From the corner of his eye he saw the standing man over on the client side raise a curt index finger for attention.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Gardner, that may very well be, but—”

  “Enough!”

  With surprising vigor for a man of seventy-four, Arthur Gardner suddenly swept the heavy binder from the table and sent it crashing into the wall. The government man stopped talking, his eyes a little wider, the rest of his face suspended in mid-syllable. Before the released papers finished fluttering to the carpet, a set of interns quietly scurried from the shadows like Wimbledon ball boys to spirit the wreckage away.

  “A columnist in the Wall Street Journal once wrote”—Noah’s father straightened his cuffs from the preceding exertion as he spoke—” that I had more money than God. I can’t attest to that. I don’t believe in God, and like a growing number of the world’s other major economies, I no longer believe in the dollar, either. Only two things are sacred to me now. One is my time, and I’ll caution all of you not to waste another second of it. The other is my legacy. It had been my wish today to present you with an opportunity to share in that, but these interruptions are making that nearly impossible. Now, if there are no further objections to deviating from your faxed agenda, I would love to continue.”

  No one said a word, and he nodded.

  “Very well, then. In my review of that unfortunate document, along with your wider state of affairs, I was reminded of two significant events in my life. The first occurred in early 1989, when a coalition of businessmen came to me with a challenge.

  “Their predecessors had sweated out a tidy little hundred-million-dollar market over the preceding century or so, and these men were happy with the success they’d inherited, but they wanted a tiny bit more. Maybe just three to five percent domestic expansion on an annual basis. So they came to me, hats in hands, and asked if I thought such a heady level of growth might somehow be within their reach. And they brought a binder with them, much like yours, full of their fears and worries and their modest little hopes and dreams.”

  He turned to directly address the other man still standing across the room. “Mr. Purcell, isn’t it? A very slowly rising star, I understand, in our mighty Department of Homeland Security?”

  A tight little nod, nothing more.

  “You were so eager to guide me along earlier. A virgin whiteboard awaits there along the wall, freshly erased, with a new set of colorful markers all at your disposal. I believe we can even muster a laser pointer to help you direct our rapt attention aro
und your fascinating illustrations. So, would you like to lead this meeting now, or will you indulge me to continue?”

  A muscle tensed in Purcell’s jaw but he didn’t speak. After a moment he moved to return to his chair but was stopped by the slightest tic of the old man’s hand. It was the sort of unspoken cue that a dog trainer might give to a spirited bitch on her first session off the choke chain.

  “Stay another moment, Mr. Purcell. Help me. Ask me what it was that these men were selling, and I’ll show you the path to a whole new world in which everything you want is laid out before you, ripe for the bountiful harvest.” The old man walked around to the other side of the table, until the two were nearly toe-to-toe. He nodded, encouraging. “Go ahead, ask me.”

  When Purcell finally spoke his voice was weak and low. “What was it?”

  Arthur Gardner let a smile touch the corners of his eyes.

  “Oh, nothing of any value. Only water.” The old man put his hand on Purcell’s shoulder, gripped it warmly, and then motioned for the bewildered man to resume his seat, which he did. “Forgive me, everyone. Our colleague Mr. Purcell has graciously assisted me in a demonstration, the point of which we will return to shortly.”

  Projection screens began to hum down from the ceiling, gradually covering the paneled walls of the wide, round room. As the screens clicked to their stops in unison the lights dimmed to half brightness. All that remained was a circle of soft illumination that dutifully followed Arthur Gardner as he made his way back to his place.

  “I’ll tell you all what I told those bottled-water men, twenty years ago in this very room. If that binder is the limit of your ambitions, then you’ve come to the wrong place. Both sides of Madison Avenue are lined with hucksters and admen, the most backward of which can deliver such a minor achievement for an insignificant fee. Go in peace if that’s all you want. But they stayed, as I hope you will, and I led them to where they stand today, with their goals not only realized, or doubled, or quadrupled, but in fact multiplied a thousandfold. And I can do the same for yours.”