The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 45

With the exception of some perky young servers and the top-shelf call girls brought in by the busload to service these old reprobates, women were strictly forbidden from the main property. As a result the female members of Noah’s group were escorted to one of the more remote and comfortable cabins to wait.

Ira chose to stay behind with the women and their guards as Noah left unescorted for the gathering by the lakeside.

There were world leaders in the crowd, past, present, and future, and many faces known from their regular presence in the news. There were also men familiar to Noah only because of his past work on their behalf. They didn’t wish to be known but many of them were far more influential than those who craved the limelight. Though much of their scheming was focused on the United States, the majority of them lived elsewhere, being citizens only to the extent that such status could benefit their portfolio.

His father’s body wasn’t present, just a gilded vessel containing his ashes. These were to be scattered later in accordance with a provision in his will. The urn had been placed center stage on a pedestal beside an amplified speaker’s podium, and a number of distinguished-looking gentlemen were assembled on the dais to deliver a final send-off. The mood seemed to be light, even jovial, like the prelude to a roast at the Friars Club.

An usher took Noah to a row near the front and pointed toward a seat that had a place card bearing his name. In the chair next to this one sat an elderly man he vaguely recognized. Their eyes met and after a moment’s thought he remembered that face, though it had been a number of years since he’d seen it. Noah walked over to where this man was cheerfully tapping the cushion of the empty chair by his side.

Unlike the others nearby, who were dressed to the nines, this old fellow wore plain, loose, pale clothing more suited to a backyard barbecue than the funeral of a friend. And old was hardly an adequate word; he looked absolutely ancient, thin-skinned and dry as parchment, as if his fragile substance might begin to flake off and blow away in the slightest breeze.

“You can’t be,” Noah said.

“But I am,” replied Aaron Doyle. “The one and only.”

• • •

The speeches proceeded, with the crowd engaged and enjoying every one. Noah had heard all the various tall tales and anecdotes many times before, but he listened to them again as they were told with the new perspective of a last tribute. During a refreshment break before the concluding speaker, Mr. Doyle turned to him again.

“They’d asked me to stand up last and close things with a final word,” he said, “but I told them it would be more fitting if that honor was passed to you.”

“I’d rather not,” Noah said. “I haven’t prepared anything.”

“I know you’ll be fine. You’ve never been shy in front of a crowd, have you?”

“This isn’t just any crowd.”

“No, no it isn’t, but I think your father would have wanted it this way. Just remember that you’re among friends. My friends.” Doyle sat back in his chair and patted Noah on the knee. There were skintight and nearly transparent gloves on those old hands, like something a clean-freak might wear to fend off the germs. “I’ve watched you for many years, Noah, as many years as you’ve been alive. We all had such high hopes.”

“Well. Sorry if I let you all down.”

“Oh, don’t think of it that way. You’ve served a purpose, and you may yet live to serve another.” Aaron Doyle considered him for a while, and then he spoke again. “Do you know why your father died, Noah?”

He was caught off guard by the question, and thought at first that the man had misspoken. “I was told that he had a fall.”

“That’s how he died, yes. I was referring to why.”

For a few seconds Noah tried hard to reject the meaning of what he seemed to be hearing, but he didn’t quite succeed.

“It was the same reason that your mother died,” Doyle continued. “Even to the most insignificant degree in your mother’s case, and in your father’s only at the very end, they both had dared to try to stand in my way.” The old man leaned in close. “And these trailer-trash rebels you became involved with last year? We’d hoped to push them into another futile act of desperation so we could permanently put their sad little patriotic cause into the dustbin of history. But I’m told their young leader, this special friend of yours, Molly Ross, she’s now dead as well. No matter; terror isn’t so difficult to create, and she’ll still take the blame. We’ll find another way.”

Noah felt no fear and hardly any anger as all this sank in. The only thing he felt was a rising level of strength that seemed like it might be finding a permanent home in him where there’d been only emptiness before.

“Who do you think you are?” Noah said.

“Ask anyone here,” Doyle replied. “For all intents and purposes, young man, I’m the king of the world.”

The event had reconvened and the man standing at the podium had already introduced Noah by name a few seconds earlier. But he didn’t move. He continued to sit, eyes locked with Aaron Doyle. A scattering of applause and clinking glasses began to urge the last speaker to the stage.

“If I learned one thing from Molly,” Noah said, “it’s that this is one country that doesn’t need a king.”

“Oh, it will,” Doyle replied, “soon enough.”

There was only a tepid ovation as Noah stepped up to the speaker’s platform. His situation would be well-known to most of them, and these were people who had no great love or respect for the disowned and disinherited.

“My father was a great planner,” Noah said into the microphone, “but I don’t believe he ever planned to die. And yet here we are.

“He appreciated all kinds of poetry, and if you’d all join me in a toast I’d like to share a bit of verse that he liked, from Guiterman. Dear old Dad once said this should be etched onto his tombstone and that may tell you something about him that you didn’t know. It’s called ‘On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness.’ ”

Going from memory, he recited the short poem.

The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls

of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear, whose potent hug

was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf,

and I don’t feel so well myself.

There was some good-natured laughter from the audience at this, and Noah picked up and then tipped his water glass toward the urn beside him. “Here’s to my father, Arthur Isaiah Gardner, the man who elevated the art of lying into a weapon of mass destruction.”

As to whether this had been an insult or a compliment, from the looks on their faces the crowd seemed almost evenly divided. When they’d all taken their seats again, he went on.

“I had very little time to prepare these remarks, but I think you’ll all appreciate this story because I’m sure you haven’t heard it before. I’d like to tell you about the only time that my father ever hit me. Now understand, he paid others to hit me a number of times, and not so long ago, but this was a blow from his own hand, and that makes it special.

“When I was a child, after my mother’s death, my father and I lived alone. At the dinner table Dad would often present me with questions that he knew a kid my age couldn’t answer, which is to say, I couldn’t answer them to his satisfaction. This was what passed for light conversation between the two of us. I suppose if you want to be kind about it you could say it was his way of mentoring.

“These questions were hypotheticals mostly, on all sorts of subjects that were far beyond the grasp of an average middle schooler, and I failed miserably every time. It wasn’t fair but I tried my best. And then one night, after he’d had a particularly hard day at the office”—Noah glanced briefly over at Aaron Doyle—“probably due to some trouble with the boss, he posed one of these questions to me and for once it seemed like its answer was totally obvious.

“ ‘If you had a time machine,’ he’d asked, ‘and you could take a gun and go back to 1930, would you track down and kill Adolf Hitler?’ Now, the answer to that is clear, isn’t it? Of course you would. If you could somehow stop his evil before it ever got started, who wouldn’t? So that was my quick answer, yes I would, and when I said that he smacked me across the face good and hard. He wanted me to remember why I was wrong, I guess because he thought it might be important to me someday.”

Through the tall speakers on either side his voice was reaching them all, and by then all attending had grown somber and very still.

“Sure, Hitler murdered millions and he caused unimaginable suffering. If he’d had his way he would have reshaped the whole world into a living hell straight out of his sick and twisted imagination. But we have to take care not to give that one man all the credit for bringing the world to the brink. It was all planned out, you see; the crisis in that country was years in the making—not unlike the one we find ourselves in right now—and that’s what opened the door for him. The times themselves finally demanded the rise of someone like him.

“The next world war was already inevitable, the Third Reich was coming regardless, and if it hadn’t been Adolf Hitler at the helm on the side of evil it would have been someone else. Maybe someone more accomplished at hiding and executing his final solution, maybe a far superior general, maybe a more cunning diplomat who could have strung the Allies along until his scientists had won the race to split the atom. Maybe a craftier politician who would have listened to his advisors and allied with the Soviet Union instead of invading them. If it hadn’t been Hitler, it very likely would have been someone even worse.

“So, no, you don’t go back and kill him, that was my father’s strong opinion.” Noah looked over at Aaron Doyle again. This time the old man didn’t meet his eyes. “Hitler was weak, and flawed, he wasn’t sane, and he also wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was. So, as much as you’d like to wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him, you have to let him live. Because Hitler, we could beat.”

The audience was absolutely quiet, with the only things audible being the gentle movements of the lake and the sounds of the surrounding forest.

“I’ll close on a personal note. I’m fairly sure our paths will never cross again. In fact after this performance and a conversation I just had, I’ve got a feeling I’m not too long for this life myself. That knowledge seems to have infused me with some freedom of speech that I’d forgotten I had, so I do hope you’ll indulge me for just another minute.

“I was a part of your alternate universe for a long time, though granted, only a small cog in the machine. While I was among you I learned where all the bodies are buried, and a lot of them are buried all around us, right here. I know almost everything my father knew, and that’s probably enough to send most of you to Leavenworth for the rest of your lives, assuming, of course, that justice really is blind. But let’s face it, we all know that’s never going to happen.

“There were a lot of rewards for keeping your secrets, and I enjoyed every one of them. And then last year I spent just a bit of time in another world—the real one, I now believe—and after that, as comfortable as I’d been before, I didn’t ever want to come back.

“My father and I then found ourselves on opposite sides of a very important battle, but I was no match for him at the time. I was late to that fight and I may be out of it completely now, but despite what I’ve just been told by Mr. Doyle over there, I don’t believe it’s over.

“I may no longer matter, but if this is to be my last appeal before such an august and influential audience, let me leave you with this: You don’t belong here. This isn’t the country for you. Go find a place where the people welcome the idea of a permanent ruling class; there must be plenty of them out there, but it’s not here. Take your secret meetings, and your backroom politics, and your toadies in the press. Take your paranoid surveillance state, and your drones over the cities, and your warrantless wiretaps, and your kill-lists, all your socialist pipe dreams and your fascist puppeteering. Take your self-serving transhumanist vision of one borderless world, united under your thumb. That might be fine for others, I don’t know, but it’s not for us. Get out and take all your damned lies with you, including the ones I helped you tell, and go loot somebody else if they’ll have you. There’s no place for your kind here. And now, gentlemen, good night, and God bless America.”

He left the stage and walked up the aisle toward the path to the cabin, carried along by a swelling chorus of boos and hisses from the crowd that somehow felt better to him than any standing ovation ever could.