The Eye of Moloch (19 page)
T
hough the day was done, there was something Arthur Gardner felt he needed to do before he left for the hotel.
As quietly as he could he eased open the door to Noah’s room for a last look inside. He found the boy already sleeping and was thankful for that. There was a nagging feeling that this could be their final parting; it would have been a shame to have it end in another angry tirade.
As he stood watching, it also occurred to him that there must have been thousands of other nights when he’d neglected to make this sort of simple fatherly gesture. So many moments, now long lost, when the normal things expected of a parent had been the very lowest of his daily priorities—why, after all these years, were such feelings arising to haunt him now?
There was a ready answer to that question, of course. This and other equally unsettling emotions had suddenly begun to rear their ugly heads in the wake of a recent meeting. This wasn’t a business conference, but a follow-up visit to a routine, company-mandated medical checkup.
The grim specialist had come in and clipped a single X-ray transparency to a glowing panel on the wall. He then sat down uncomfortably
close and delivered the prognosis without any adornment.
Stage 4 pancreatic cancer,
he’d said, with the sort of doctorly gravity that assured there was nothing to be done beyond getting one’s affairs in order.
Death awaits us all and Gardner always would have said he didn’t fear it. To see the certain schedule of its approach, though, to be told when it would come almost to the day, that knowledge had opened his eyes and altered him—it was still working on him now.
He’d told no one of his terminal condition and it would stay that way. He would neither wallow in regret nor beg repentance; it was worse than useless to bemoan the past. He’d brought about many terrible things in the course of his life’s work, that was true, and he owned those things. Still, there was no denying that these new and unfamiliar feelings had led him, step by step, to the sort of turning point that he’d experienced only one other time in his entire life.
Arthur Gardner had experienced a change of heart.
At first he’d fought it tooth and nail. Doubt was only a symptom of weakness, his mentor had always told him. Our way is hard but the rewards are unlimited. Good and evil, left and right, right and wrong, light and darkness—these are only childish illusions we create and maintain to confuse and control the feeble masses. There was only one fundamental conflict—no less than the struggle to decide man’s ultimate destiny—and throughout his career that battle had been embodied in the philosophical tug-of-war between the two senior partners of Doyle & Merchant.
One side envisioned a paradise of true liberty, divinely gifted. Blessed self-determination, the opportunity for each hearty soul to set forth and pursue his happiness upon the choppy and hazardous seas of commerce. Throughout all time this free-market fantasy had only once been realized in a society, and that one hadn’t survived for very long. The fatal weakness of the United States was a doomed reliance on goodness and faith and charity in the black hearts of the common people.
The other side would end the human condition in utopian slavery
to the almighty State. The built-in advantage of this solution was that it played to the lowest instincts of the corrupt and cynical leaders, their legion of obedient cronies, and their ever-more-dependent subjects. Vulnerability to the lures of wickedness, willful submission to sloth and avarice—without a guiding light from above these were the only reliable tendencies in every culture of human design. History had proved it over and over, worldwide; only an all-powerful government could ever hope to control a populace with no moral core.
Arthur Gardner had toiled for more than fifty years in service to the side he’d always assumed to be most likely to succeed. The one-world alternative might not end suffering—nothing ever could—but at least it would preserve the old fortunes and dynasties while spreading the inevitable misery evenly across the planet. Social justice indeed; the only righteous thing Aaron Doyle’s coming regime would ensure was a permanent, unbreakable wall between the elites and the great unwashed. All the wealth and power would be kept safe at the very top, with the masses scrabbling for their metered rations on a perfectly level playing field at the bottom. Far from ideal, it nevertheless seemed to be the best available answer to an age-old global problem.
But something had happened to him very late one night as he struggled to quiet the thoughts of his own mortality. He’d sought refuge in his work, poring over the dusty writings of his enemies as he tried to understand how his son Noah could have gone so far and so suddenly astray. After many hours, near his wit’s end, he remembered something that could hold an answer—something he’d long ago pushed safely to the back of his mind.
Before her own untimely death twenty years ago, his dear wife had written him a farewell note and asked him to promise to read it only after she was gone. He hadn’t broken that promise; he’d kept his word in his own way. In fear that it might only prolong his grief, he’d never read the note at all.
That night he went to find it, still sealed at the bottom of a small box
of keepsakes in the dresser drawer. After more than an hour of sitting with it unopened, he’d mustered his courage, cut the envelope across the flap, unfolded the paper within, and read.
My darling Arthur,
We’ll have said our goodbyes before now, so that isn’t my purpose here. Though you haven’t shared my faith, I haven’t any doubt that we’ll see each other again one day. When that time comes, I’ll be hoping that you’ll have taken what I write here to heart, and so there will be no place for anything but joy at our reunion.
When we met, you and I could not have been more different. I knew you were sent to try to change me. You must know, too, that in those first days together I also saw you as a project, nothing more. Even as we fell in love each of us still thought we could win over the other. Then for the sake of keeping the peace, you finally gave it up. But I confess, I never lost my hope for you.
If only I’d had enough time, I know you would have come around. Not because I’m so stubborn, Arthur, but because you’re so wise. With a little more time you would have seen my truth, and so I’m urging you now to continue to seek it after I’m gone.
This terrible man you’ve worked for has done everything he could to destroy our last, best chance at liberty. I won’t ask you again to join the fight against him; that’s the only thing we ever really argued about, and I don’t want to leave you that way.
I only ask this: just for a while, do nothing. Stop building his machine, stand away from the barriers, leave the door open, and give the good people of the United States their one true chance.
Do that, then witness the miracle I dreamed I’d live to see; watch freedom succeed where mere mankind has always failed to create a better world for us all.
It was a strange marriage we had, I know you’d smile and agree, but I wouldn’t have traded it; I have no regrets. Take care of yourself, Arthur, and take good care of our son. Don’t let Noah waste himself in that world that had nearly consumed you by the time we met. Like you, my love, he was born for greater things.
Until you come home to me again,
Jaime
When he looked up from those words, through the tears in his eyes it was as though everything had been transformed. The old documents he’d been studying, his hands, his face reflected in the window glass, the very room around him was suddenly painted in a different light. He took in a deep breath, and just for a moment he’d allowed himself to consider the impossible.
Perhaps he’d been mistaken.
That burning question—whether it was safer to wager the world’s destiny on the potential anarchy of human freedom, or to trust instead the steady, merciless hand of tyranny—perhaps it had already been answered.
Perhaps men even more astute than he had once wrestled with that same fundamental puzzle. They wrote and ratified their astounding solution in four simple pages—those pages were on the table in front of him—then they’d risked everything to establish a place—one single haven—where good people could come and prosper and live their lives free from the ceaseless meddling of the ruling class.
They hadn’t presumed that they could save the whole world, and they’d never intended to conquer it. But if this brash experiment could manage to banish the tyrants and succeed on its own shores, and if the wider world was then saved through its example, all the better.
Such thinking was backward, simple-minded, a laughably naïve concept completely unfit for modern governance—that’s what Arthur
Gardner had always believed. These were only more lies of a different flavor than the ones he created, aimed to be embraced mainly by flag-waving, gun-toting, Bible-thumping misfits.
But his earlier thought arose again, and it persisted: perhaps he’d been wrong.
And so, in accordance with his late wife’s final wishes, a few days ago he’d come to a decision. While he was far from a convert, as a social scientist he’d discovered an error in his method. There was an important hypothesis that had been neglected in his work, and that must be corrected. He would do nothing more in aid of either side, then, until the matter had been put to the test.
For this trial he would bring in a fair and impartial judge—a clear-eyed and apparently incorruptible pillar of virtue named Virginia Ward. If Jaime had been right, if these self-styled patriots truly had a cause worth fighting for, this woman would see it. And when she’d rendered her decision perhaps even Arthur Gardner might finally reconsider which side he should be on.
V
irginia Ward eased her Wrangler to a crawl, leaned right, and took her eyes off the rocky, pitted road just long enough for one last check of her face in the rearview mirror. Her features were lit warm in the last light of the day and she saw what she needed to see. There wasn’t a speck of vanity in the gesture; this was a field inspection, nothing more. Surviving the night was the main thing on her mind.
During the three-hour inbound flight she’d put herself together to make a mission-critical first impression, and yes, the woman in the mirror would deliver the needed effect. Dollar Store makeup with a hard working day’s wear; a sun-dried, honey-blond, no-nonsense hairdo, now mostly tucked up under a weathered bent-brim lady Stetson—she wore no wedding jewelry, and her Los Diablos sweatshirt was authentically faded from the decade or so since a woman of her age might have led the pep squad at Arizona State, back in her glory days. To the ruthless men she would soon be facing she’d look like a nonthreatening nobody, maybe the only neighbor willing and able to help her friends in need, the harmless and somewhat attractive single rancher-mom from the next spread up the interstate.
In a word, she looked disarming, and that should do.
The command post soon appeared ahead at the bleak descending end of a desert trail just barely fit for a rugged four-wheel drive. The post itself wasn’t much, and none of it had been there yesterday. A dark barracks-length tent, a hasty perimeter, and a couple of uniformed guards walking the line—still, it was the only trace of law and order in all these empty miles.
She saw that there was a diesel generator off to the side of the tent but it was still strapped to its trailer, untouched. Apparently these geniuses had decided to let the sun go down before anyone thought to get their power going. Such a lack of foresight didn’t bode too well for the brilliance of the rest of their plan, if they had a plan at all.
One of a pair of young sentries straightened himself up and began motioning toward a parking spot, sporting his best hard-guy face in preparation to challenge and screen the new arrival. But the wiser of the two, his weapon ready, wouldn’t peel his eyes from the long, hostile flats stretching south toward the horizon, down toward the border where the real danger lay.