The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 25

The leg that Virginia had worn to Arizona was a prototype and hadn’t really been intended for the rigorous shakedown it received. And if anyone was back in the lab wondering, it clearly wasn’t bulletproof, either.

She looked it over again, now nestled in its fitted recharging case against the wall, as she dressed herself in frayed denim cutoffs and a comfortable old T-shirt from her bag. They’d constructed this leg to be a photographic match of her natural limb, and as such it resembled the shapely and graceful lower-left appendage of a runway model. If David Beckham’s real legs were insured for $70 million, this single artificial one probably beat them both in its replacement value—especially since it had been made under a government contract. When she returned it to Cambridge the bionics engineers there would learn a lot from the data it had collected, but they’d also have a few hundred hours of repair work ahead.

By contrast, the piece she now put on was much like her first prosthetic ever, the leg she’d worn when taking those first unsteady steps in the months after the combat injuries that had nearly killed her. As a prosthetic it was a portrait of utility, just carbon fiber and stainless steel and plastic with a wool-padded sleeve, a wide black Velcro harness, and an old Converse high-top laced up to its unisex foot. This was the only spare she’d brought along and it fit her very well, in more ways than one. There were no pretenses about it, no apologies, and yet in its very lack of adornments it held a certain kind of beauty that not everyone might pause to appreciate.

When Virginia checked the clock after her guest had departed she found it was later than she’d thought. If the subject of her upcoming interview was already asleep she’d just catch him in the morning. Meanwhile, the short stroll might do some good for her fresh aches and pains.

In the middle of the night the hallway was perfectly still, as were the Marine sentries stationed outside her own private suite and one other nearby. A few steps farther down she paused and looked past the guards into the room where the members of the Dell family were safely housed. Cots had been rolled in and the space well prepared so mother and children could stay together in comfort.

The boy was the only one awake when she peeked inside. Ronny was his name, she’d later learned. He sat up a bit when he saw her, she gave him a small wave, and with very little movement he waved back, though he didn’t manage to smile. That was okay; we do these things one step at a time.

When she arrived at Noah Gardner’s room she found him reading by a solitary light at the side of the bed. Before she could knock he’d put aside his book and motioned her inside.

“You’re up,” Virginia said.

“Yeah. They’ve had me knocked out for so long I don’t know if I’ll ever need to sleep again.”

“I’m Virginia Ward.”

He nodded. “They told me you’d be coming by.”

“Do you feel like a chat now?”

“Sure,” he said.

Rather than pulling up one of the low chairs, she came to the foot of his hospital bed, lowered the railing, and hopped up to sit and face him from near that end. “Do you know what I’m here to talk to you about?”

“Yes. You want to talk about Molly.”

“Do you know why?”

“I was told there’s a chance she can be brought in safely, and that you might give her that chance.”

She nodded. “Where do you think we should start?”

“I think we should start with you telling me if that’s a fact.”

“If I get involved in this, Noah, I’m going to do what’s right, for my country first and then for everyone else after that. That’s what I do, and that’s all I can promise you at this point.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

“And I need to say, right now it doesn’t look so good for her.” She opened the background folder that Landers had given her. “She’s gotten mixed up with some very bad guys, militant white supremacists—”

“Oh, get serious, now.”

“. . . and one man you might have come in contact with. A big guy named Thom Hollis.”

“Hollis?” He laughed. “I never actually knew his first name, but you’re saying Thom Hollis is one of these very bad guys she’s mixed up with? The man’s a teddy bear; he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“He had seventy-seven confirmed kills as a sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She handed over a summary of the service record. “His longest shot was just over a mile.”

For almost a minute Noah studied the papers and looked through the old photos of the man. “So he was a soldier, and a good one. Surely you’re not saying that makes him some kind of a lunatic.”

“Of course not. It seemed like you were saying he was harmless, and I wanted to show you that maybe that was only an impression you’d been given. How long were you actually around these people?”

“A very short time. Just a few days.”

“And would you say that while you were with them, they were honest and open with you about what they were doing?”

He thought for a while before he answered quietly. “No. No, they weren’t.”

“Let me tell you what it says here,” Virginia began. “It says Molly Ross and her mother and these Founders’ Keepers descended on New York City late last year, in part to recruit new members and to stir up some trouble in lower Manhattan. They had a rally and they sponsored some counterprotests on Wall Street and a similar scuffle at an international financial summit. Things got out of hand at the rally, shots were fired, and they got arrested. Then you pulled some strings and managed to get Molly and the rest of them out of jail, and then you slept with her that night.

“The next day you brought Molly Ross into your firm’s corporate offices, gave illegal access to the place to her accomplices, and showed her how to retrieve some highly classified information concerning your father’s government-connected clients. Meanwhile, another associate of Ms. Ross, a well-known agitator named Danny Bailey, met with a veteran FBI agent who secretly ran a radical white-power website on the side. Both Bailey and this agent were already under federal investigation.

“While you and Molly Ross were getting to know each other better, these two men flew to Nevada and hooked up with some close friends of George Lincoln Rockwell Pierce, leader of the United Aryan Nations, and all these men entered into a real-life conspiracy to destroy downtown Las Vegas and another target in California. They weren’t just talking anymore, and they now had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to take action. Through this rogue FBI man and their own connections, Pierce’s clan had come into possession of two previously hijacked nuclear devices, and they intended to use them.

“They spent some time at a strip club the night before the planned attacks. A last celebration, I guess. That night, and then again later on when they were starting their suicide run, Danny Bailey is known to have been exchanging text messages with Molly Ross. We have images of these men and their rigged truck from several security cameras along their route.

“These people kept an apartment in Manhattan that was raided. The agents found bizarre literature, radical tracts and survivalist stuff, anarchist’s cookbooks, you name it. And there were traces of what appeared to be bomb-making materials there, too.

“That’s about when you were helping Molly evade airport security at LaGuardia, after which the two of you caught a flight west toward a rendezvous with the bombers. You rented a vehicle for her, and you accompanied her at least part of the way to where she was going. Something must have gone wrong with the plan, though. One or both of the weapons they were transporting detonated prematurely, out in the old testing grounds in the Nevada desert.” She closed the folder and looked up at him. “What do you have to say about all of that?”

“What do I have to say? Every word of it’s accurate, but none of it’s true.”

“That’s a little cryptic, Noah.”

“More than just a little, Virginia.”

“So none of this is true.”

“Quick example for you. It says there that Molly and I slept together? And that’s literally what happened. She was asleep, and I was asleep, and we were together in the same place at the same time. Look at the two of us here right now, you and me: we’re in bed together. That’s what I mean, this is what they do best, it’s a lie with just enough truth in it.”

“A lot of people would have to be deceived or complicit to put together a lie this elaborate.”

“A lot of people are deceived and complicit. That’s the name of the game.”

“And whose game is that?”

“The people who run things. People like my father and the men he does his work for.”

Warren Landers had said that young Mr. Gardner might sound a little paranoid, and whatever else she’d thought of Landers, at least that part of what he’d said was proving out.

“Let me ask you, then,” Virginia said. “What do you think is happening here?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course I do.”

“I think the people at the top were trying to use terrorism as a tool to frighten the American people,” Noah said. “Frighten them badly enough that they’d willingly give up all their power. And that power would then be used to fundamentally change this system of government, once and for all, to push it toward the one-world kind they can more easily control.

“I think they decided to entrap Molly and her mother and Danny Bailey and marginalize the people who believed in them. I think they wanted to paint them as the bad guys so that anyone who even talked about real freedom and the country’s founding principles could be labeled as a racist nut or a dangerous extremist.

“I think all the fear-mongering from Washington, and the dismantling of the Bill of Rights, and the prosecution of whistle-blowers, and the gun-grabbing and the rampant surveillance and the police-state actions they’re taking now, it’s all clear evidence of that agenda. I think they did the same sort of thing after Oklahoma City and after 9/11 but they couldn’t quite kill off the opposition from the liberty movement, so they tried to squash it once and for all last year. And you know what else I think?”

“No.”

“I think they’re about to try again.”

Virginia made some notes and checked over her previous ones to see if there was anything she’d forgotten. “Okay, then,” she said, “you’ve given me a lot to consider.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t just wrap it up that way.”

“What else do you want me to say, Noah?”

“I was honest with you, with the full knowledge that what I was telling you might sound completely off-the-wall. Now I’d like for you to tell me what you’re going to do.”

“Okay.” She moved a little closer and looked at him directly. “I believe that you believe that what you’ve told me is true. You’ve been through a series of traumas, the kind that could cloud the mind of the strongest person I know. You’re emotionally involved and that can add another layer that’s very hard to see past.

“But trust me, I’m going to find the truth. Whatever their reasons were for bringing me into this, whatever their agenda was, I do my own thinking and I know right from wrong. And if I can bring Molly in alive, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Thank you,” Noah said. “You know, my father—whom I don’t trust at all—he said that when I met you I’d know I could rely on you. I didn’t have much faith in that, but now I do.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Virginia gathered up her papers, returned them to the folder, and then edged to the side of the bed and lowered herself to a solid footing on the floor. “Now I’m going to need for you to reach out to Molly. Has she contacted you at all since you last saw her, or has she tried to?”

“I used to get notes from her, one of them had an e-mail address that I remember, but they always came through a third party.”

“What sort of notes?”

“Mostly appeals for help with her work. There wasn’t much I could do, just little breaches of security at the lockup where they were holding me before. Honestly, except for one or two of them in the beginning, I wasn’t sure the messages were even coming from her at all. It might have been some underling of my dad’s, testing my loyalty or whatever. Anyway, the notes stopped coming quite a while ago.”

“Well, use your imagination. Try to reestablish a connection with her. Don’t mention any of this, of course, and don’t apply any pressure. Just make contact so you’ll know for sure you can get a message to her when the time comes, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Great.” She shook his hand, a good solid clasp, and then she headed for the door.

“How are you and I going to stay in touch?”

“I’ll be around,” Virginia said. “In my briefing here it says they’ve arranged some light work for you during your rehab, is that right?”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“Someone will probably come by in the morning to tell you more about that. It should be good for you, though, to be around people. Anyway, I know where you’ll be and you’ll see me again soon. I’ll let you know how things are going.”

“Okay, but one last thing,” Noah said.

“What’s that?”

“Two things, really. First, I don’t think you or anyone else can stop what these men are trying to do. Molly thought she could, and I thought so, too, for a while. That part of what you said about me is right, I got caught up in it and I was fooling myself, but I’m not anymore. It’s too big, and the handful of people who actually know what’s coming are too weak. So, even when you see it for yourself, I don’t think you’ll be able to stop it, and for your sake I hope you don’t try. I don’t care about myself or anything else anymore; I just don’t want Molly to get hurt.”

“I understand,” Virginia said. “And what’s the other thing?”

“Do you play chess?”

“I do. I’m pretty good.”

“Then you know how this works. While you’re thinking about your next move, the other guy’s thinking, too. Against a superior opponent your moves are always enfolded in his.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“If you’re in this now, whether you believe it or not, you’re already being manipulated. So am I. And if I’m right, then whatever move you’re about to make they’ve already anticipated it and are three moves ahead of you. If you get into this game then you’d better win, and that means you’ve got to be ready to do something completely unexpected.”

• • •

When she returned to her room the message light on her phone was flashing. She had thirteen new voice mails, all on the same subject and left in the order of ascending power and rank.

It seemed that Warren Landers hadn’t been confident that he’d made the needed impression on her, so he’d kicked the matter upstairs as soon as he departed.

The undercurrent of these messages was all the same. The choice was still hers, naturally, but if she knew what was good for her, this Molly Ross business was a mission she should take on without delay.

Well, how about that.

These thirteen very important people had all taken the time to call Virginia Ward at 2 a.m. on a weeknight to express their strong support for what they put forth as a matter of unmatched importance. With oddly similar language they were calling for the immediate capture and incarceration of a blind girl who seemed to be nothing more than the last fading light in a patriot movement that had come too small and too late to make a difference.

Now you’ve got me interested, Virginia thought. So let’s see where this dark road leads.