The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 30

By their second cup of coffee he’d composed and deleted several messages; none of them felt quite right. Though she was an ace at deception herself, Molly Ross was also a very difficult person to lie to.

“Clear out your mind for a minute,” Virginia said. “Just talk to her. Like I said, just relax and communicate. Think about your relationship.”

“I wish I had more to think about. We didn’t have much of a chance to get to know one another. There wasn’t a lot of time involved, not in the way you’d normally think of a relationship.”

“But you seem to have gotten so close.”

“I got close. I don’t know, maybe she did, too.”

“What did you talk about while you were together?”

“I spent most of my time saying stupid things, if I remember correctly. And I guess a lot of the things she told me weren’t true.”

“And yet you say that you trust her.”

“I know, it doesn’t seem to make sense. She tricked me, it was as simple as that in the beginning, but I don’t blame her. Whatever I got from them I deserved; that’s how I see it. What they were trying to do in those few days was better than anything I’d ever done with my whole life. Can you understand that?”

“I can.” She sat back, considering. “Let’s keep this simple.” She leaned over him and clicked open a new message. “You’re just trying to open a line of communication. We need to break through the clutter and establish that it’s really you who’s writing to her. Ideally it should be something that only the two of you would know about.”

He thought for a moment, and nodded as he began typing. “I think I’ve got something like that.”

The subject line he wrote was As a fellow oenophilist, let me B Frank.

“What’s that word mean?” Virginia asked, pointing it out on the screen.

“Oenophilist. It’s a wine word, and I only knew it because I was a spelling-bee geek. It was in a crossword puzzle we were doing in my apartment.”

“And B Frank, as in . . .”

“As in Barney Frank. That’s from a story I told her the night before.”

“When you slept together.”

“Right, when we literally slept together. She woke up at one point, and then she woke me up and asked me to help her get back to sleep. I asked her how I was supposed to do that, and she wanted me to tell her a story.”

“That sounds like something she’d remember.”

“She was very interested in anything about my father,” Noah said, “so I told her one of his tall tales. It’s the only kind of a bedtime story I ever got from him as a kid. No dragons or knights in shining armor, it was always about his work, and the one I told her involved Barney Frank.”

“Did it work?”

“Like a charm.” He cracked his knuckles. “Let me finish this up. You said to keep it simple, right?”

In the body of the message he typed a single line.

Molly, it’s Noah. Write back to me. I promise you I can help.

After waiting for Virginia’s approval he checked over the text once again and hit SEND.

With the message to Molly finally away, the fatigue of their separate days seemed to hit them both at once. Virginia asked if the couch was available for the night, and of course that was fine; he had the room and she wanted to stay close in case there was a reply. He brought out some sheets, a pillow, and a blanket as she changed in the bathroom, and then by the time he’d brushed his teeth and returned to say good night she’d made up the couch as tight as an army cot and had already tucked herself in.

Noah turned off the last lamp and there was just enough moonlight coming through the window so they could see one another clearly in the dark.

“I’m worried she won’t answer,” Noah said. He didn’t say so, but he was also every bit as worried that she would.

“If she doesn’t write back we’ll just keep trying.”

He nodded. “Last chance,” Noah said. “You can take the bed if you want.”

“No, this is better than I’m used to. I’ll be fine. I’m feeling a little overstimulated, though; too much caffeine, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I might have to hear that Barney Frank bedtime story.”

“All right, if you think it’ll help. It’s going to sound kind of odd.”

“That’s the one thing I’m sure of right now. Just tell it to me exactly like you told it to her.”

“Okay,” Noah said, and when he spoke next he’d taken on the soft and calming tones of a bedside storyteller. “Once upon a time, in a faraway land called Washington, in the United States House of Representatives, two powerful trolls named Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich wrote a memo at the direction of their party’s masters. With this memo they started a rumor that the new Speaker of the House, Mr. Tom Foley, was a homosexual, and possibly even a pedophile. Now, politics had always been a dirty business and always would be, but to many people on both sides of the aisle this was several giant steps over the line.

“And so a kindly elf named Barney Frank went to these two trolls, Lee and Newt, and he said, ‘That’s fine, you guys. You go ahead and keep on mudslinging. Knock yourselves out. But here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go all scorched-earth on your hypocritical asses. Unless you take it back and apologize to my friend Mr. Foley immediately, I will march myself down to the floor of the House, and I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow six of your secretly gay Republican congressmen right out of the closet, live on C-SPAN.’ And then all hell started to break loose in the back rooms of the castle where the real rulers lived.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Virginia said. Her eyes were closed and her voice was already drowsy.

“Yes, oh, my goodness indeed. And when King Arthur Gardner heard about this, he flew to Washington in the middle of the night and was so monumentally pissed that he almost didn’t even need an airplane. When he was finished restoring peace and putting things right, the two trolls had publicly apologized, the President himself had denounced their actions, and more than a few heads had rolled.

“And the moral of the story is,” Noah concluded, “in a government that’s been systematically weakened by lies and corruption, secrets are the most valuable currency. They’re the fuel that runs the machine and the leverage that keeps the greedy ruling class in power and under control, and my father wasn’t going to stand by and see all those secrets wasted.”

With the story finished, the room was still for a little while. By all appearances Virginia Ward had fallen asleep already, but as he moved to get to his feet she spoke to him quietly.

“Noah?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Molly would do that, if she could?”

“Do what?”

“That scorched-earth idea,” Virginia said. “I’m just trying to understand her mind-set. Do you think she’d try something like that if she had the chance? Just tell all the secrets to the people at once, to wake them up so they could have a last chance to see the truth and try to take their country back.”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah, that sounds just like Molly.”

Noah sat there for a few moments longer but she didn’t say anything more. Soon it was clear that Virginia was out for the night, this time for sure.