The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 51

The eastern region headquarters of the Talion Corporation, their showcase facility, was located just outside Philadelphia.

This ultratech command center in which Warren Landers now sat was the equal of anything the traditional U.S. military had to offer. It was the war room where potential Talion clients—including governmental and UN decision-makers—were shown the many expanded options offered by a covert army of mercenaries. Contract soldiers were clearly the wave of the future and Talion was at the forefront of that trend. This was evidenced by the river of public wealth that had already been flowing in their direction for more than a decade.

The company’s founders and their insider cronies had gotten their corporate foot in the door with sweetheart contracts for wildly overpriced support services and limited security functions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These clever men were now poised to ramp up their operations into a nearly full-fledged branch of the armed forces—one with no oath or pledge to protect and defend anything but their sacred bottom line.

For the most part Talion had long since achieved this quasi-official status in various conflicts overseas, but that was only second prize. A success on this day could open a new and highly profitable front: a widespread domestic deployment, a standing army on U.S. soil that would dwarf the power and reach of the bumbling DHS and TSA.

Talion would soon be stationed on every corner, patrolling every street, acting as the unified enforcer of the coming surveillance state. All that was missing was a well-timed nudge over the finish line, another reawakening of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the American people of the type that had been so effectively leveraged since September 2001.

Now there wasn’t much left to block the way.

It had been Warren Landers’s job to identify those remaining barriers and then remove them with extreme prejudice. The last of these had proven quite elusive—it wasn’t a particular person or an organization, but rather a quaint, patriotic ethos that had so far stubbornly refused to die. Molly Ross—just a common person—had for many become its unlikely torchbearer. Now, finally, as those outdated American ideals and their pitiful spokesperson were barely clinging to life, he would have the singular pleasure of pulling the plug and burying their remains forever.

• • •

The computer equipment salvaged from what was left of the Merrick ranch hadn’t yielded much of value at all. These days, though, it’s not really what’s kept on your computer that can reveal all your secrets; it’s the little trail of breadcrumbs you’ve left behind you out in the cloud.

Anonymity is an illusion in the digital age and all attempts to hide behind it are only further acts of self-incrimination. All day long people obsessively write their own confessions: every search, every click, every comment, every poll, every Like, every chat, every status update, every friend, every call, every e-mail, every photo, every purchase, every connection—everything everyone does on their computer, phone, or tablet is in some way captured and filed and cross-referenced, to be sold or shared however its true owners desire.

Each fragment may reveal only a tiny glimpse of their most private selves, but these tech-blinded people never stop to think that someone could be out there reassembling their full, explicit picture in every revealing detail.

In this case, that someone was Warren Landers, and when the full picture was assembled, it revealed a very interesting new lead.

A man named Lawrence Cole, often mocked as “Liberty Larry” by the many clever quipsters on the left, had long shown support for a wide range of causes in the so-called freedom movement. This Mr. Cole was quite a character: a sportsman, a collector, an aviator, an inventor, a philanthropist, an entrepreneur—and an outspoken blowhard for the founding principles of an America that had only ever existed in his cockeyed dreams. He was also the chief executive officer of a regional chain of home improvement stores.

And there it was: a single message sent from one of Cole’s poorly disguised private e-mail accounts was the only relevant thing so far that had been retrieved from fire-damaged hard drives brought in from the Merrick raid.

The retrieved message simply said:

Everything is set. The entire shop will be at your disposal. Godspeed, LC

No physical address had yet been found for this “shop”; details must have been transmitted through another message or another medium, but this was more than enough to get the ball rolling.

Whether the fugitives were caught in transit, cornered in this new hideout, or trapped in the midst of whatever ridiculous act of valor they were planning, the outcome would be the same.

There would soon be a brave intervention by the U.S. government’s new security partners, a daring shoot-out with those flag-waving, violent domestic terrorists, the homeland would be made temporarily safe again, and a new kind of hero would step forward to receive the thanks of a grateful, trembling nation.

Landers made two calls. The first was to deploy a pair of security men to each retail location owned and operated by Lawrence Cole. His home and his other residences were also to be put under total surveillance—the full monty, warrant-free wiretaps and all. Based on his outspoken and nearly seditious public profile it was a major oversight that he wasn’t being watched this closely already.

His second call was to a friendly link in the command chain of the Department of Homeland Security.

The course of action that Landers recommended to this useful idiot had been ordered only once before. But there was credible information from a high-level unnamed source—or so he claimed—that a hostile group called the Founders’ Keepers, known to have recently been in possession of a weapon of mass destruction, could now be in the execution phase of a major operation.

Their plot was not yet clear, he told her, but it could very well involve an airborne attack against a high-value target in a major metropolitan area on the East Coast of the United States.