The Eye of Moloch (16 page)
They were down to one choice, now: hunker down, keep watch, pack and prepare, and then at the first safe opportunity, sneak out and run for their lives into hiding.
A
s sunrise touched the spires of the man-made paradise of Dubai City, Aaron Doyle awoke in his palatial bedroom among the clouds to a gentle pattering against the windows. It was the quiet, comforting sound of the desert rain he had summoned the night before.
He let sleep depart him slowly; morning was the worst time of day for the discomforts of his age. Over the years every organ, joint, and tissue that medical science could improve had been surgically repaired or replaced—some more than once—but wherever the decaying original parts were still in service the pain in them was constant and every movement scraped nerve against bone.
He wasn’t quite ready to face the physical punishments of a new day; the dawn could wait. Instead, as his dreams of the preceding night were still lingering he would close his eyes and hang on to the memories for a little while longer. There in his mind he’d be young again, in a place where time itself had not yet turned against him.
In those olden days, youth was a near-terminal condition that only the strong survived. After fleeing to America to escape the Czar’s persecutions, he settled into the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side.
From a family of ten he’d seen his younger brothers and sisters taken one by one by the pestilence that arose amid the squalor of the breeding poor—smallpox, dysentery, influenza, pneumonia, and scarlet fever.
He’d somehow cheated death by epidemic only to be rounded up in quarantine, locked far away from the privileged classes, fenced off with the untended sick and dying as cholera stalked the fetid slums. It was there that his parents had passed away, but again, he’d somehow lived on.
Where disease had failed, starvation and exposure nearly killed him. Barely an adolescent, he was all alone in the cold gray city, a scrawny urchin from a despised minority living on whatever he could beg or steal.
Between the cops and the hoodlums there was nowhere safe to hide. He ran errands and grifted and panhandled until one day a local boss took a shine to him and he was brought under the wing of the Eastman Gang. Those street boys could have schooled the modern Crips and Bloods about thug life, and they showed their new mascot the simple laws of survival in the depths of that cruel metropolis.
They changed his name to one less likely to invite harassment and discrimination—Ilya Reinier became Aaron Doyle. As he rose through their ranks and learned to live by his wits, he also taught himself to read and write and speak in English like an educated native son.
In a few years’ time Aaron Doyle felt the limits of a life of petty larceny. Though he’d found his first taste of success as a thief and a confidence man, the triumph over his childhood trials had convinced him that he must have been chosen for something much higher.
Through the gang’s connections with the Sons of St. Tammany he’d already seen that the true, gold-paved path to riches led down the very thin line between politics and organized crime. While his cohorts were mostly called upon for strong-arm tactics and intimidation at the polls, young Aaron spent his time in the smoke-filled rooms, forging friendships among those who greased the wheels of the corrupt New York machine.
In the course of his candlelight studies, as he sought to find his way to the next milestone of achievement, he’d discovered something fundamental. A moment before it had been invisible, but once perceived it was so obvious that he couldn’t imagine how it had ever eluded his grasp. Through this single, sudden insight his true life’s work began.
While guns and knives could strike fear and level threats, leaders rarely rose to greatness through violence alone. No, he’d already seen the most fearsome weapons ever conceived, and he’d seen them in his books. They’d been wielded throughout man’s brutal history by despots and saviors alike. The ones who built and brought down nations, amassed fortunes, murdered millions, and founded dynasties, at the core their mighty war machines were built of nothing more than words.
When he was nineteen and the
New York Times
had just marked forty-six years in business, he left his gangland years behind, donned a suit and tie, and walked into the newspaper offices to seek an entry-level job. He had no credentials, no references, no experience, and no degree; all he brought to recommend him was a clever pitch and a masthead slogan he’d written, which they quickly purloined:
All the News That’s Fit to Print.
From copy boy to typesetter to cub reporter to columnist, his roles soon brought him into contact with the captains of thriving empires of their own invention: Ford, Woolworth, Carnegie, Bell, Hilton, Lehman, Warburg, Westinghouse, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Edison, and more. He wrote their stories when they would allow the exposure, elbowed his way into inner circles, and learned from everyone. Along the way he saw elections swung, wars ignited, genocides launched, great men created and destroyed, kings enthroned and deposed, all through the awesome, subtle persuasion of the printed and spoken word.
As his skills improved he grew to prominence in the most powerful medium of its day. Then quite by chance he happened to meet a grudging admirer named William Merchant. Their first fiery discussion had
nearly been their last, but after much correspondence over the ensuing months a permanent bond had formed between them. Neither would ever call it a friendship; their differences were far too profound. From background to worldview, in fact, they had only one thing in common. For as long as they could remember, they’d both had a recurring vision that they would one day change the world.
Their ambitions were diametrically opposed: one dreamed to tame and rule mankind, the other to free it. While they never stopped battling over which had conceived the most fitting destiny for the species, they each had a keen understanding of the dark magic they would use to pursue their aims. They each knew they would need a vast fortune to fund their efforts, and they also knew that, despite their rivalry, they could amass that wealth far better together than alone.
And so, hand in hateful hand, Doyle & Merchant would build a business empire and found a secretive industry of public influence, media control, and mind manipulation. Their century-defining science wouldn’t even have a name until it was later brought to unwelcome prominence by a brash young protégé named Edward Bernays.
In the late 1960s their company was left in the able care of Arthur Gardner, a devoted colleague Doyle had come to love like the son he’d never had. But despite his announced retirement, the globe-spanning work of Aaron Doyle had continued without pause. His philosophical rivalry with William Merchant still raged to the present moment—such is the nature of a fight to the death—even though the two men had long since parted ways.
They’d last seen one another in the flesh in late November 1941, and it was the first time they had ever come to blows. This had been the culmination of their most vicious and personal contest so far, concerning the question of whether the United States would intervene against the Axis powers in World War II.
The incitement of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had been a brilliant move by his opponent to be sure, but the resulting reversal of
fortunes created a rift between the partners from which their strange, contentious relationship would never again recover.
He remembered feeling much younger then, but on that day that would live in infamy, Aaron Doyle was sixty-three.
This coming November—the gods and doctors willing and barring anything unforeseen—three most significant things would come to pass: his plans to unite this miserable world under the iron fist of a new social order would finally come to their fruition; he would at last declare a decisive win against the libertarian delusions of his old nemesis, William Merchant; and he would become only the third man in recorded human history to turn 132 years old.
• • •
A bevy of nurses on constant call would aid him if required but he’d vowed to himself that he would stand and walk on his own through all but the most trying days.
After swallowing the line of pills and arcane tinctures arranged as always on his bedside table, he set his jaw, took up his cane, and readied himself to rise again. With some effort he sat upright, endured a wave of dizziness and let it pass on through, and then left his bed and stood upon the smooth, cool floor.
As was his custom, while still in pajamas he took his morning inventory of the most treasured things in his surroundings. All were priceless and quite irreplaceable, but more important, they were reminders.
The veined white marble beneath his feet was harvested from the towering halls once walked by the pharaohs of Egypt. For a period far longer than the upstart reign of Christendom their subjects believed these earthbound rulers to be divine, and they might as well have been; their unbroken dominion spanned forty centuries.
The Great Pyramid had been as old and mysterious to Cleopatra as her own time is to the present day; the very apex of its long-lost capstone, nearly half a ton of inlaid gold and alabaster, was now the cornerstone of his décor in the grand foyer.
An Irish temple nestled near a bend on the River Boyne was older still, older than Stonehenge by a millennium and once a place of pagan worship in the cult of Baal. Its stolen altar now graced his western balcony, where he often sat to reflect with his afternoon tea.
A heavy faceted orb of purest emerald, whose aspect suggested a great unblinking eye, was set above the granite hearth in his study. This priceless, cursed stone had been taken in the spoils of some ancient war, chipped from the face of a great graven image of Moloch once worshiped by the high priests of Sidon. It was a symbol now of an awesome power that technology was fast delivering into his waiting hands. The myriad human sacrifices this eye had overseen would be dwarfed by those in the terrible, cleansing carnage soon to come.
Even the wood in his walking stick spoke an encouraging whisper from the ages. It was turned from the trunk of a precious Norway spruce that had lived and grown on the side of a mountain in Sweden for nearly ten thousand years. When this oldest of trees was only a seedling, the polished stone ax was still the pinnacle of human invention.
In the presence of such things his own age seemed less daunting, his enemies less formidable, and the completion of his lifelong project somehow nearer at hand. These things helped him remember that on the long timeline of history, the United States of America had managed to survive for barely an instant. And its last days were numbered; that failing experiment was the only remaining barrier that stood between Aaron Doyle and the realization of his dream.
And then, in his private study he came to the centerpiece of his home. This, a twelfth-century chessboard with pieces carved from walrus ivory, was the arena where he had once spent many an hour matching wits with his philosophical rival, William Merchant. Those early bitter contests had often ended in a draw, but now the real-world game was finally about to be won.
Though the two men had been estranged for many years, once this was all over Doyle had always hoped they might meet again. To that end,
two comfortable chairs were placed on either side and the old board was set up for a last match, should the day of their reunion ever come.
• • •
When he returned to the bedroom he dressed himself in simple clothes; years before he’d chosen comfort over style when there was no one left above him to impress. A fetching young lady in a plain uniform appeared to do his zippers, clasps, and buttons. She left a tray of fresh juices for his breakfast, her pretty eyes averted all the while, and promptly vanished again.
With his morning pains eased somewhat after the walk, now dressed, fed, and medicated he felt ready for the day’s agenda to begin.
His lingering storm would be causing havoc with the rush-hour commuters scuttling far below; it was still much easier for science to make it rain than to make it stop again. Despite the snarled traffic, however, he was pleased to see that his first appointment had already arrived and was waiting in the sunroom. He was standing by the windows, taking in his first view of the Persian Gulf from the dizzying heights of the Burj Khalifa.
His guest turned to face him as he walked up close beside. He seemed utterly tongue-tied at the sudden sight of his reclusive host, a man he’d no doubt heard described only in the folklore of his cutthroat profession. At length it fell to the elder man to break the reverent silence that hung between them.
“At last we meet in person,” he said, extending his fragile hand. “Mr. Warren Landers, I’m Aaron Doyle.”
• • •
Landers reported that the muscle was now in place for the upcoming structured chaos to be unleashed on American soil. The decaying European Union, the ever-volatile Middle East, the chaos pillaging Africa, the powder kegs of central and southern Asia—in those regions the downward spirals Aaron Doyle had also fostered were already building momentum past the point of no return. Soon, as their own nations fell
toward ruin all eyes would turn to the United States, and they would see then that the mythic soul of this last citadel of hope and freedom was as empty and diseased as all the rest.