The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 49

Most American citizens wouldn’t believe how difficult it had become to travel freely—untracked, unrecorded, and unidentified—within the borders of their own home country. What was once the norm had become all but impossible, and that had made Hollis’s transcontinental trip to Pennsylvania not only dangerous but also very expensive.

He’d caught barely an hour of troubled sleep and felt achy and lightheaded as he awoke. He was hurting, and it wasn’t getting better. First he’d taken a glancing blast from a sawed-off shotgun at the start of that vicious gunfight at the Merrick ranch, then he’d been hit twice again as they made their escape from California.

These latest wounds had bled a lot but the bullets had passed right through without hitting anything vital. Noah’s doctor friend had stitched him up and dug some day-old birdshot from his shoulder and the side of his neck. She’d strongly advised him to go to the hospital—sound advice that he’d obviously ignored—and then she’d given him a course of strong antibiotics, which he’d promptly left behind as he and the advance team left in a rush the night before.

He was still determined to grit his way through these injuries, but he could tell he was weakening. The fever was real now, he could almost feel an aggressive infection spreading under his skin, and his left arm was growing more swollen and inflamed as time went on.

Hollis was semi-reclined in the passenger seat of an eighteen-wheeler that had picked them up for the final leg of their overnight journey. Lana Somin and Cathy and Tyler Merrick were in the sleeper compartment behind him. When he turned to check on them, mother and son were resting peacefully, but the young lady was not. Her gaze was far away and serene, but there were traces of tears on her cheeks that she hadn’t bothered to wipe away.

They’d just passed through a commercial area of the town and soon their driver slowed and made his wide turn onto a rough service road.

The orange and black signage along this private thoroughfare carried the distinctive logo of HomeWorx, as did the tractor-trailer they were riding in. This company was a family-owned, mid-Atlantic chain of big-box home improvement stores, and up ahead stood one of its original locations, now converted to a regional distribution center. In recent years they’d had to close a number of locations and move their base of operations farther east, rendering this particular warehouse nearly obsolete for its original purpose.

“Take us around back, if you would,” Hollis said.

He alerted young Lana and she woke the others. As the truck pulled to a stop at a loading bay in the rear of the warehouse, Hollis said his thanks to the driver and went inside to meet their contact. When he was assured that all was well he waved the all-clear to the other three.

The head of this chain had been a longtime supporter of Molly’s mother and he’d been happy to help when he’d gotten the call. Ask anything, he’d said, and Hollis had asked for a lot.

So they could blend in as much as possible, the four of them were issued light orange coveralls like those worn by the staff. After they’d changed, Hollis called them together in a cavernous vehicle bay, along with a small group of carefully screened employees who’d been put at his disposal for the day.

“Let me make something clear,” Hollis said. “If this goes bad today, if we get cornered by the cops—I mean actual law enforcement—we won’t put up a fight. We don’t fire a shot or raise a hand to the police. If it comes down to that I’ll go out and give myself up, alone, and all of you will swear on a Bible that I forced you here at gunpoint. They’ll believe that right off, things being as they are. We’ll send word to Molly beforehand so they won’t get her, too, and then I’ll take the fall for all this. Everybody understand?”

No one looked happy at the prospect, but they all agreed.

“Now,” Hollis continued, “the clock’s running, and I’d say we’ve got a good morning’s work ahead of us. I’ve radioed the others that we’re all clear so far but we don’t know exactly when they’re coming, so we’ve got to be ready ASAP. First, we need security. You”—he pointed to the heftiest of the local men and read his nameplate—“Hector, you pick your own partner, and then you two boys keep watch for anyone who doesn’t belong here. Don’t confront anybody.” He slid a pair of in-store handheld radios across the table. “Just call me and tell me what you see. Keep that walkie-talkie on channel 14. Okay?”

“Okay,” Hector said, and he nodded to the fellow next to him. “Him and me, we’ll keep watch.”

“Good. Check in with me every quarter hour.” The two men left for their stations, and Hollis turned back to the other employees. “This place has got just about everything we could need but we’d waste a lot of time trying to find it all ourselves. Whatever these two ladies here ask you for, if you could jump on it and fetch their supplies, that’ll be a great help. They may need some extra hands, too, so please, just be at their service. Now, Ms. Somin, Noah Gardner told me you’re good with computers.”

“I am,” she said.

“We’ll need some IDs. I’ll show you examples when you’re ready to start on them. They just need to be good enough to flash; no one’s going to have time to look at them too close. And then there’s this.” He handed across a thick spiral-bound book that had been left for him in a locker there. “That’s the system layout and the network administrator’s manual from the place we’re going after today. Take good care of that; it took a lot of doing to get it copied and slipped out of there for us. Now if you could get a head start on looking into the guts of what we’ll be up against—”

She’d had a chance to read only the cover before she interrupted him. “I can tell you right now, there’s no fricking way. A facility like this? It’s not like in the movies. There’s no way I could break into this system in one day, not in a month, nobody could, not from outside.”

“Well, that’s okay,” Hollis said, “because we’re going to be inside. If we all do our jobs right we’re going to drive up to the front gate, big as life, and they’re going to open up the doors and let us in.”

With that bit of news delivered, Hollis saw the first shade of a smile forming.

“Cool,” Lana said.

“Now, I want you all to assume that this is going to go off without a hitch. You don’t have time for worries along with everything else. But Tyler and I will be making preparations in case things should go awry.”

“I thought you said if we got caught we were going to give up,” Tyler said.

“I said if we got caught by law enforcement. But if I see the kind of scum roll up here like those that came for you and your folks on the ranch, son, there’s going to be some hell to pay.”

“And what am I supposed to do?” Cathy Merrick asked.

“You’re my graphic artist.”

“I don’t understand. What kind of art do you need?”

“Well, ma’am, near as you can manage, we need for that thing over there”—he pointed to a sun-faded and road-worn HomeWorx rental truck parked across the bay—“to look just like this right here.”

Hollis opened a folder and passed it across the table to her. On top of the papers inside was a series of detailed color photos showing every angle of a hazmat emergency vehicle from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Safety.