The Eye of Moloch ow-2 Page 7

  “You wouldn’t trust your best friend with what that phone knows about you, and yet you trust all those strangers lurking out there in the cloud, who’ve all said time and again that privacy is a relic of the past and a man’s wish for it is a cause for suspicion. If you’re dumb enough to believe that way, then go right on ahead. But you will not imperil me or mine with your foolishness.”

  The boy sat silent, and when he worked himself up to speak again his voice was timid. “Are you going to tell my mom?”

  “No, I’m not. You’re going to tell her, all about it, and then I’ll be having a talk with both of you after dinner. Now get on back home.”

  Hollis turned away to look out across the water.

  When the boy had left him alone Hollis stayed and thought and waited, but no trace of the serenity he’d felt just before would be returning. The unsullied vastness of this sovereign land shrank before his eyes, retreating to within its fragile, unprotected borders. This ranch was an island of peace and personal liberty, he’d allowed himself to think, a place of safety, and maybe even a glimmer of hope for a better future. But an island is another thing he’d failed until then to consider.

  Surrounded.

  Chapter 11

  Upon his return to the main farmhouse Hollis stopped by to ask a favor of the fellow he’d been told was in charge of security and technological matters. Then, without identifying a specific offender, he made it clear that some strict remedial instruction should be given to all residents right away, particularly regarding the safe use of electronic communications during this sensitive time.

  On his way to see Molly he took a shortcut through the kitchen. As the evening meal was being prepared the large bright room was a gauntlet of elbows, steaming pans, and jovial clatter, and few took much notice as he edged his way by. Near the swinging doors to the dining room, though, he did catch the eye of Cathy Merrick. By the carefree wink she gave him it seemed she hadn’t yet heard the latest news from her wayward son.

  Hollis arrived at Molly’s room to find her alone, kneeling at the foot of her bed in prayer, hands clasped beneath her chin.

  From his watchtower on an overstuffed easy chair in the corner, the dog whuffed to announce to his mistress that she had a visitor.

  Molly breathed a few more earnest phrases and finished, then turned her head toward the door and got to her feet. “That’s you, isn’t it, Hollis?”

  “It is.” How exactly she’d known that, he didn’t pause right then to wonder.

  She took a small step and beckoned to him with open arms. There was a sweet, brittle smile on her face that seemed burdened underneath by some awful sadness. She caught her breath as though a flood of tears were on their way, and he went to her and hugged her close against his chest. There was nothing to be said or done for the moment; whatever grief it was that had overtaken her, he let her cry it out.

  This was so unlike the old Molly Ross. In earlier times she’d kept her emotions well guarded and such displays of vulnerability were rare.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, after the worst of it had passed. “I know I need to be stronger.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself now. I’d say you’ve been plenty strong enough.”

  They sat for a while, then, and caught up with one another. The Merrick family, he learned, were longtime friends of the Founders’ Keepers—true dyed-in-the-wool libertarians and covert financial supporters of Molly’s late mother and her cause. They’d volunteered their home as a shelter for the group more than a year before. Unlike some fair-weather patriots who scarcely dared to dip a toe into the shallows of the movement, these folks had stood by their offer to help even as the crisis in the country grew worse and worse. Until now, for their protection Molly had kept almost every detail of the family’s involvement to herself.

  Next she filled him in on the status of their companions, her brief time in the clutches of George Pierce, and some details of the past day that Hollis had nearly slept through. At length it seemed only a single topic remained to be raised. Throughout the conversation he could almost see her avoiding it; the answer would stay safely unreal if the question went unasked. But in the end she did ask about him.

  “Have you heard anything about Noah Gardner?”

  This was somewhat telling, the way she used his full name, as though to hold that rare, painful brush with intimacy at a more formal and comfortable distance.

  In her role as her mother’s civilian intelligence agent, Molly had worked her way into the lives of any number of gullible marks in the loftiest realms of the country’s plutocracy. Most of them had been privileged young men of high position—political aides to corrupted candidates, media insiders, union apparatchiks, rising stars in nongovernmental organizations, sons of crony capitalists, Wall Street prodigies—all heirs to the unelected thrones of power bent on subverting the American way of life to their own selfish ends. Through one deception or another they’d each been charmed into revealing whatever small part of the enemy agenda had been entrusted to them. Once the prize was in hand and put to good use, she’d vanished and moved on to the next unsuspecting target without ever looking back.

  Noah Gardner had once been just another of these brief, dispassionate assignments, but for a number of unexpected reasons her time with him had become a different story altogether.

  “I haven’t heard much of anything about anybody yet,” Hollis said. “The last we knew for sure they were going to send him out with those so-called government peacekeepers that are hunting us now, I guess as some sort of a slap in the face to both of you.” He hesitated to say more, but there seemed little use in pretending things were any better than they were. He couldn’t lie to her, and only a lie would put her mind at ease. “I thought I saw him through the scope, in fact, the other morning up at Gannett Peak.”

  “You saw him there?”

  “It sure looked like him to me. They’d put a rifle into his hands and by the way he held it I doubt he’d ever touched a loaded gun before. They might as well have hung a bull’s-eye on his back to go along with it.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I sent a bullet past his ear to remind him to keep his head down at least, but I lost track of him once things lit off.” He patted her knee, and she put her hand on his. “We know people that might be near to him, at least near enough to know. I’ll try to find out later if he’s—if he’s all right, and where they’ve taken him next.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now come on, let’s eat. They’ve got enough glazed ham, and roast chicken, and salt potatoes in there to feed an army.”

  Chapter 12

  The spread looked like four Thanksgivings, every homemade morsel of it mounded in steaming dishes around a long banquet table set with polished silver, cloth napkins, and company china. When everyone had taken their seats, the patriarch of the family stood at his place and spoke his welcome, introducing each of the guests by name and background as though he’d known them all his life.

  Hollis had, in fact, known most of these ten people for as long as he could remember. Of late he’d known them chiefly as a disheveled band of tired, filthy, and cantankerous vagabonds who could neither run fast enough nor shoot straight enough to be of much use as legitimate fugitives. But looking around the table now as each one was called out in turn he began to see them differently again, through the admiring eyes of another.

  As the name of their organization suggested, these ten had sworn an oath to be keepers of the words and thoughts of their nation’s Founding Fathers. It was really as harmless as that, and not at all a political movement in its beginnings. They’d started out as nothing more than a quaint conservation society, a counterpoint to what they perceived as the subversive, progressive rewriting of mainstream U.S. history.

  Each of the group’s members had responsibility to preserve a single Founder’s written wisdom. This wasn’t a simple matter of rote memorization, though that’s where each apprentice always started. Someth
ing odd would always happen then: after a few weeks of total immersion a peculiar transformation would begin to manifest in these people, as if the vital spirit captured on the page might be coming alive again to take up partial residence in a new incarnation.

  He took a look around the table and paused a moment on each of his people as they sat interspersed among the Merricks. Day to day, to Hollis these ten were Doris, and Mae, and Paul, and Miles, and Grace, and Jeremiah; twin brothers Bill and Ronald; their father, Gene; and then Molly. Seeing them now, well dressed, upstanding, and largely recovered from their latest ordeal, he could also detect in them the faint but unmistakable presence of their alter egos: Hancock, Adams, Allen, Rush, Paine, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. As Jefferson had proved to be too much for any single vessel to contain, his essence was divided evenly between the two brothers.

  They’d never found a decent George Washington, and now with the death of Ben Church the group had lost their Benjamin Franklin as well. There had been others, too, who’d disappeared, defected, or otherwise fallen away in the past year as the going got tough. But as of tonight these core survivors were alive and well, and after a hot bath and a good day’s rest they appeared to have once again begun to take on the distinguished mantle of their namesakes.

  Hollis was seated next to Molly’s place of honor at the foot of the table. When his time came he was briefly introduced, with only a few kind words to gild the lily, and thus his role in the group was left appropriately vague. Then, with the opening toast complete, one of the grandchildren was asked to step up and say grace.

  As the child began to speak every head was bowed to partake in her sweet, simple prayer, with only three exceptions. Hollis himself was one of these outliers; he generally used such ritual pauses to attend to his own private thoughts and observations. The second was young Tyler Merrick, whose gaze seemed downcast mainly to avoid eye contact with the big mean man on the end who’d taken away his phone earlier in the day.

  The last of these nonparticipants was seated at the head of the table, down at the far end almost directly opposite him. She was an old woman, very old it seemed, who appeared to be composed of little more than ghost-white hair, barbed wire, vinegar, and whit-leather. She wasn’t concerning herself with the prayer or the piety of the other dinner guests; her attention was fixed on only one person.

  Old age can etch a sour expression onto a person’s face, but that alone couldn’t account for the ire he saw burning behind those sharp, watery eyes. As this frail, withered woman stared across the table at Thom Hollis, she looked for all the world as though she knew him, and loathed him with every ancient fiber of her being.

  • • •

  He’d suddenly found his appetite wasn’t what it should have been, and just as soon as good manners allowed, Hollis had quietly excused himself. He wandered to the great room, perused the shelves, selected a Faulkner novel he’d always hoped to tackle, and took a seat alone to read by the light of the fire.

  Later, when dinner was finished and the others began to filter in to have their coffee, he closed his book and retired to his suite. There he found the laptop computer he’d requested earlier, opened on his desk and ready to run. It had been several weeks since he’d had even brief online access so there was a great deal of catching up to be done.

  The machine was configured for maximum stealth in its internet connection, bouncing all masked requests and responses through heavy firewalls, virtual private networks, and shadow servers scattered around the world. The performance was slow and spotty due to all this security, but the trade-offs were necessary and the setup would be more than adequate for his needs.

  He’d just finished tapping into the group’s many e-mail accounts to begin the long download of messages when Cathy Merrick and her son came to his door. She apologized profusely for the boy’s confessed behavior, and this time when Tyler said he was sorry it was clear that he spoke from the heart. He’d obviously been read the riot act from multiple directions already, but Hollis felt the need to make the central point once again.

  “There are lives on the line here, son,” he said, “and my people and your folks believe there’s a great deal more at stake than only that. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Good. Let’s not speak of it again. Now, I’ll be out in your uncle’s workshop tomorrow morning at seven. I want you to come by then, seven sharp, and I’ll give back what I took from you.” Before the mother could raise an objection he continued on. “The people hunting us are looking for a trail to follow. There isn’t much friendly shelter out here that we could have reached by this time, and one thing they’ll be looking for is a place that’s gone quiet, where something’s changed in the past couple of days. We have to assume they’re watching everyone and everything, and that means all of you here need to behave just like you did before, like nothing’s any different. Okay?”

  Tyler didn’t respond until his mom gave a mild thump to the back of his head, and then he said, “Okay.”

  Hollis stood and walked over to them. “I regret I’ll have to say good night to you both now. Ma’am, I hope you have a pleasant rest, and I thank you again for your kindness today. And Tyler, I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  When they’d gone he closed the door and returned his attention to the scrolling computer screen. Though the massive influx of messages was far from complete he began to scan the subject lines and summaries to gauge their general tone.

  From the old public boxes it was all-caps hate mail mostly, rife with the sort of empty threats, vulgar slurs, and general ugliness that anonymity promotes in the lowest class of mind. Already it was obvious that only a tiny fraction of what came in here would prove worthy to be passed along to the group for reading and response.

  Next he opened a Web browser and clicked to one major news site after another to check the headlines.

  He couldn’t say what he’d expected to see being reported about Molly and her righteous struggle of good versus evil, but he had to sit for a while to fully comprehend what he actually found there.

  Not a solitary word.

  After these many grueling months and the sweat and toil they’d spent at the front lines of a battle for the very future of their country, according to the obedient, complicit mainstream media it had all apparently happened only in their fevered minds.

  Instead the top-line “news” was filled with the vain antics of celebrities, breathless details of the scandal of the week, sports highlights, puff pieces, PR plants, and the opulent wedding plans of some royal offspring overseas. The rest was rounded out by name-calling and grandstanding from politicians and pundits embroiled in the upcoming national elections.

  When any hint of the looming worldwide meltdown got a mention at all, it was there only to be spun toward someone’s cynical agenda: the Fed chairman declaring that his next money-printing spree was all that could save us from ruin, the DHS head fear-mongering in her pitch for even more draconian search-and-seizure tactics to be aimed at ordinary Americans, and the incumbent President leading by deflection, still spouting vague and empty campaign promises while laying all blame at every doorstep but his own.

  But the free press was still alive out there. Despite all attempts to tame the fourth estate, the Internet had spawned a million independent sources of real news, from amateurs and professionals alike. The best of them owed no allegiance to anything but the truth. They were doing their job as reporters, in other words. And as one might expect, their work was either being ridiculed by the old guard, attacked with blunt force, or marginalized, buried several levels deep under a never-ending flood of manufactured propaganda and infotainment.

  As he gradually found and read these reliable sources he saw a chilling picture emerging—and it was all unfolding just as Molly’s mother had predicted years before.

  The lit fuse on $1.5 quadrillion in bogus financial derivatives had now burned down to within a hair’s-breadth of the powder. Spain and Portugal were a
t the brink of fiscal and social catastrophe. Greece was already on fire, its economy destroyed and teetering like the first domino in a fragile line poised to tear across Europe and then on around the globe. And sure enough, sponsored revolutions igniting from North Africa to western Asia were revealing themselves to be only a foot in the door for the region-spanning rise of a virulent hard-line radical theocracy.

  Domestically the stage was set for a plunge into total economic destruction with nobody’s hands on the wheel. The price of oil was skyrocketing again. True inflation was well into double digits, dragging the middle class toward poverty and the poor into violence and desperation. True unemployment would soon blow through 25 percent, and all those Made-in-the-USA jobs weren’t just temporarily lost, they were gone from these shores forever. Almost fifty million Americans, one in seven, were now hand-to-mouth dependent on monthly aid from their bloated and bankrupt federal government, with almost twelve thousand more joining them every day.

  The United States had soldiers deployed to seven active fronts overseas, and inside sources revealed many more covert ops under way in hot zones from the Middle East to central and southern Asia and Africa. Old enemies were rising again; an axis of dark alliances seemed to be forming, testing their limits and preparing to surge forth and seize power amid the spreading global unrest. Meanwhile, the undeclared and unspoken war along our own southern border was advancing steadily northward, having already claimed almost fifty thousand lives in just a few short years.

  There was more. While on the road he’d heard rumblings of this next bold stroke of fascistic audacity, but he hadn’t really believed it. The latest National Defense Authorization Act had passed both the House and Senate before arriving at the Oval Office on New Year’s Eve. This legislation finally made it official: anyone, anywhere, citizen or not, was now subject to arrest without charges and imprisonment without trial—and according to some, even outright assassination—based solely on being named as a suspect by the Chief Executive.