The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 63

Noah stood off to the side as their now-empty truck was backed up and parked with its bumper jammed hard against the closed, inward-opening doors. It wasn’t until he heard that solid crunch of metal on metal that he allowed himself to accept it:

They were in.

With the fearless exuberance of youth, Lana Somin had already set to work in the abandoned guards’ booth by the front gate. A cloned keycard and PIN number of the night-shift supervisor were among the items they’d been passed by their insider. Using these, within a minute she’d reset all other access codes to random numbers and done what she could to lock out further changes.

Such measures obviously wouldn’t hold forever. The entrance to this place was built like a giant bank vault and was probably strong enough to withstand the assault of a small tactical nuke. All that strength wasn’t much comfort, though. Somewhere in an engineer’s notebook there was a contingency plan for this very scenario and that engineer’s phone would be ringing very soon. Once the people outside fully realized they’d been scammed they would bring whatever it took to force their way back in.

There was no time to waste and the clock was already running.

A number of low-slung electric people-movers were parked near the entrance. All six members of the group piled into one and set off down the main two-lane corridor with Cathy Merrick at the wheel. Despite the ordeal of their journey, all were in good shape, with the exception of Hollis. He was clearly weakening, his neglected fever was spiking, and those were only symptoms of something underneath that was probably growing worse by the minute.

The look of the place was an odd visual hybrid, part cave and part corporate. Twelve feet above the smooth pavement of the indoor road there were heavy cables, conduit, air and water ducts, and periodic amber lighting running along the rocky ceiling. The offices and workrooms they passed were like those you might find in any upscale high-rise, but the pitted walls of the tunnels leading between them appeared to have been carved out with tools no more subtle than dynamite and jackhammers.

After a half mile of dim, descending straightaways they began to realize that their hand-drawn map was far from perfect. Its errors and omissions led to some maddening backtracking and wrong turns. Valid routes looked the same as dark unfinished passages dwindling off toward dead ends. There was a great deal of new construction and very little signage to guide them. Apparently, if anyone got this far into the place without an escort it was assumed that they should know exactly where they were going.

Just as it seemed they were hopelessly lost, they rounded a bend and happened onto the very room they were looking for. It was a huge space filled end to end with identical desks and computer stations. The label INFORMATION SERVICES: CLOUD 79 was displayed above the entrance.

As they pulled over and parked they were met by a young woman with a Garrison ID pinned to her shirt. She introduced herself as Claire; she was the mailroom intern who’d helped them get this far. Once the rush for the exit had begun she’d slipped away in the confusion and hidden herself until the rest of the employees were gone. Now that they had a knowledgeable guide with a key to nearly every door, the real work could begin.

Molly’s aim seemed simple enough: to find the most frightening truths buried here in these vast archives of above-top-secret data, and then to release it all into the sunlight. It was her feeling that if the people finally saw the authentic documentation, if they could follow the actual tracks of the conspirators who were bent on destroying her country, then the good citizens of the United States of America would wake up all at once and be moved to act to save their nation.

It was a noble idea but Noah’s doubts were still lingering. Many, many damning truths had already been told in the past and most were soon forgotten. Often in those cases it was only the whistle-blowers themselves who’d been punished for the crime of speaking out.

Still, it was Molly’s hope that this time would be different. If the facts could be brought out in this definitive way—with all the evidence, all the connections, all the answers to that key question, who benefits?—then the resulting shock to the system might finally be too powerful to ignore.

The seven of them split up onto three tasks. Molly and Noah would prioritize a list of evidence they wished to find hidden within these nearly limitless memory banks. Lana Somin would worm her way into the front end of the master database with Tyler Merrick standing by to assist as he could. Lastly, Hollis, Cathy Merrick, and the new girl, Claire, would take a set of site blueprints and try to find an alternate way out of the place for when the time came to cut and run.

Faced with such little time, but free access to all the answers she’d ever wanted, Molly seemed to struggle at first to narrow her scope to the most important things. Just as a starting point the two of them came up with a list of keywords to be searched once Lana had gained access to the computer system. These topics came to them in no particular order of validity or priority as Noah wrote them down:

Frederic Whitehurst, Sibel Edmonds, and the FBI

Gary Webb and Nicaragua

Kathryn Bolkovac and DynCorp

Katharine Gun, Karen Kwiatkowski, and Iraq

Julia Davis and DHS: Google, Facebook, NSA, CIA

Trapwire, Abraxas, Stingray, RIOT, and TIA

Trailblazer, NSA, Stellar Wind, Wiebe, Roark, Binney, and Loomis

AT&T, Mark Klein, and Room 641A

LIBOR, rate-fixing, derivatives, the Tower of Basel, BIS, and worldwide central banks

Anything to do with the shadowy foundations, conglomerates, investments, and under-the-table political funding linked to a man named Aaron Doyle

Molly stopped and asked him to read back this partial list. As Noah did so he saw in her face that she was feeling exactly as he did.

They’d just scratched the surface and it was way too much already. And at the same time, it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

The truth behind nearly all these individual revelations—the secret partnerships, the hidden influence, the lies and corruptions and scandals, the high crimes against the American people perpetrated by their supposed leaders—it was already out there on the open Internet for anyone to uncover for themselves.

The problem wasn’t a lack of evidence but a basic human bias: we see only what we’re prepared to believe. After all, Molly and her mother and Danny Bailey had each spoken out on most of these things in the past, and where had it gotten them? Nowhere, except that two of them were dead and the other was about to play her last remaining card.

“It’s no good,” Molly said, and the expression on her face was desolate. “It’s not going to work.”

“We’re here,” he replied. “There’s no use giving up now. Come on, let’s do what we came to do.”

Tyler Merrick walked up then and said, “Lana’s ready for you now.”

The three of them hurried over to where the young woman was immersed in the database system. Several employees had left themselves logged in when they’d fled their desks and that had saved her some work cracking passwords.

As requested, she and Tyler had also set up for the video portion of the project.

A large TV monitor was mounted above the desk where Lana sat. Other monitors like this were all over the place. Its screen displayed insets of live feeds from several security cameras around the facility, including views from the front entrance and various rooms and key intersections. In the center there was a larger rectangular picture that currently showed an empty chair next to the desk.

“Molly should sit there,” Lana said.

Noah helped Molly to the seat as Tyler adjusted the Webcam to center her image. He repositioned some floor lamps to perfect the lighting until the picture looked as good as it ever would, given the circumstances.

“Where’s this video going?” Noah asked.

“No place yet. We’re all set to feed it to her website and to some other video hosts when she says go. I’ve got a backup stream running through a modem that’s older than I am and a dial-up connection on one of their secure phone lines. Even if they cut the Internet fiber optics, they probably won’t think to also cut those phones. The quality may be pretty bad but it should stay live. When I flip the switch this feed will take over all the security monitors in the place, so everybody here will see the broadcast, too.”

“And you’re into the data system already?”

“I am. You should know, that layout I got is just a part of what’s here. The old part.”

“But all the dirt we’re looking for, it’s still in there?”

“Oh yeah, it’s in here.” She leaned and glanced at Molly’s list, chose the LIBOR rate-fixing heist, and keyed in some entries. Her screen filled with lists of private correspondence, phone records and transcripts, names and places and minutes from illegal meetings that had planned the recent theft of tens of trillions—enough hard evidence to convict a hundred insanely powerful people if it should ever be exposed.

Throughout all this Noah stayed at Molly’s ear, describing everything he saw. “What you’ve got on the screen there,” he said to Lana, “what can you do with that?”

“This little piece? I can print it, I can save it locally, I can zip it up and send it to a place on the Net where we can pick it up later and do whatever we want with it. If you really want to spread it around I can make a torrent and put it up on the Pirate Bay. But if we’re going to do anything online we need to do it soon.”

“Why?”

“They could catch on to what we’re doing any minute and when they do they’ll shut off our high-bandwidth access to the outside—like I said, everything but this old modem carrying the video over the red-phone line.”

“Why didn’t they shut it down immediately?”

“It’s a last resort,” Lana said, “going dark is like doomsday for a place like this. They’ve got a ton of redundant high-speed connections, massive pipes for all the data flowing in and out, and it’s all automated so their clients can have access 24/7. These people live and die by their service record. If they take themselves down, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do. My guess is that they’d prefer to keep this little incident a secret as long as they can. We know they’re pretty good at keeping secrets.

“But once they really realize we’re in here with our hands in the cookie jar? Yeah, they can kill all those links from the edge-routers upstream. I’m working on some half-assed solutions for that—like the dial-up connection for the video—but what I come up with will be slow as hell by comparison, like 1990s slow. Anything big that you want to send from here, we’d better get on with it.”

“Why don’t we just send it all?” Tyler asked. “To hell with it, just do a mass release, while we still can.”

“No,” Molly said. “We don’t have any idea what’s in there. The corporate and diplomatic and financial and military intelligence secrets—the way the world works now, they’re all entwined. We could help our enemies and murder our allies. We could expose every American undercover agent everywhere. We could get a lot of people killed and start a few wars in the process. Letting it all loose without a filter is not an option.”

“So what do we do?” Lana asked.

Molly didn’t answer, so Noah handed over their handwritten list. “Start with those things while we’re thinking this through. Do what you said, find everything related, package it up, and burn what you can to a DVD or something. If the high-speed lines stay up, hide it outside somewhere so we can get it and use it later on.”

“Okay.” As Lana spoke this word the lights overhead flickered briefly. She frowned, did a quick diagnostic on her machine, and then looked over at Noah again. “That’s it,” she said. “We’re already screwed. They’ve done it; we’re cut off.” She typed and clicked to verify this, and then quickly checked the modem line for a carrier. The distinctive screech was still there on the speakerphone. “Yep. Every outgoing connection except the one for the video is down.”

That news was bad, but the picture on the security monitor brought even worse tidings.

Outside, many hundreds of evacuated employees were being pushed back far away from the entrance. A convoy of black SUVs rolled up; the familiar Talion yellow crest adorned their side doors. In the distance, a long line of heavy equipment and weaponry was pulling into a ready position.

The work had barely begun and their grand plot was already uncovered. Now they were trapped in the vault they’d risked everything to get into, with no way to get back out.

“So you’re sure that dial-up video link is still streaming out,” Noah said.

“Yeah,” Lana replied, “but it’s not going to be anything like a hires broadcast. The stream’s just hooked up to one obscure old node in Michigan—”

“Okay, then. Molly, it’s your decision. In the time we’ve got left we can sit right here in front of that camera and you can say what you want, and I’ll read off some of these things we’ve found so far, and we’ll keep going until those guys break in here and do whatever they’re going to do to us. Nobody may ever see it, but at least it’s something after all this. Or, I can go now and find Hollis and the others and see if they’ve found an escape route, and if they have then we can still try to run. Either way, I’m with you.”

He could see her thinking for long seconds, and at last she seemed to come to a very hard and final decision.

“Go and find Hollis,” Molly said. “I guess we’ve got to run.”