The Eye of Moloch (26 page)
T
hey’d set up a workstation for Noah, and while all office activities were no doubt closely monitored, his access to the Internet didn’t seem to have any obvious restrictions. As the other two returned to their work he performed a few searches to try it out. The first subject was a young woman named Lana Somin.
The term
hacker
gets tossed around a lot in the media but this girl certainly fit both the original as well as the pop culture definition. Though she’d been given up for adoption at birth, she came from a family of certified geniuses, and her particular gift, as one of her lawyers had put it, was in the field of creative exploration. She was a whiz at breaking into places, digitally speaking, and she did so just to see if she could. After a bit of looking around, without stealing or even disturbing anything, she would promptly back out, cover her tracks, and leave the same way she came in. Her favorite places to go were those massively secure electronic fortresses that held themselves out to be impenetrable.
When she found a weakness in a security system she would venture in just far enough to record proof of the exploit and then inform the company involved that they had a problem. Many of them actually
appreciated the service. If they disregarded her repeated notices or otherwise indicated that Lana should mind her own business, she shared her discoveries on a private blog for discussion among her anonymous online community.
Then someone had taken what they learned from her and done some serious crimes—a rash of identity thefts, wire fraud, targeted phishing scams, and the wholesale exposure of access codes and passwords to millions of user accounts. Some of these incidents got the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, and it wasn’t long before Lana Somin was taken into custody.
Her otherwise clean record, her age, and the rules of evidence being what they were, she still might have avoided prosecution, but her foster parents had flipped out and cooperated fully with the authorities. She was tried as an adult and convicted, and the sentencing judge had really thrown the book at her. The whole process hadn’t taken more than a few months, beginning to end.
The articles Noah scanned suggested that she’d been sent to some sort of a juvenile facility to serve out her punishment. Evidently there was more to the tale than that.
Ira Gershon’s presence in this place remained more of a mystery.
It had been well over a decade since he’d last been on television and much longer since his heyday back in the golden age. That was centuries ago in Internet time. Though he’d once been a trusted nightly presence in millions of homes there simply wasn’t much about him anywhere on the Web. There were a few pictures from his younger years, mostly with Gershon as the second face in a shot featuring someone else from the hall of fame of his profession: Paley, Murrow, Cronkite, Collingwood, Smith, Sevareid, Huntley, and Brinkley.
Some people have come to think that all information is waiting out there free and clear, that everything that’s ever happened and everyone who’s anyone is just a Google search away. But the universal library’s being continually pruned and revised; more and more, knowledge is
being systematically narrowed down, filtered, and sanitized, limited to only those things granted a permit to be properly remembered.
Noah’s last search concerned
The First Circle,
the wording of that sign over the door outside.
He’d gotten the reference to Dante right away. In his
Divine Comedy
the First Circle of hell was on the borderlands of damnation, a place of mild despair without torment. Being sent there for eternity was considered a small measure of mercy, a lesser sentence granted to virtuous pagans while still denying them access to heaven. The sign here, though, was no doubt an even more subversive slap at authority, sent by way of Solzhenitsyn. In his book by that same title he’d written of Stalin’s treatment of select, valuable prisoners rounded up in the purges. They were spared the more brutal conditions of the gulag provided they continued to obediently bow down to the will of the regime.
The old-fashioned clatter of the typewriter ceased with a last ding and a carriage return. There was a sharp ratcheting sound as a sheet of paper was pulled up and out.
“All right, new guy,” Ira said, “how about if you proofread this piece for me? Let’s see what you can do to pull your weight.”
“Okay.” Noah took the three pages and picked a red pencil from the assortment in his desk drawer. “You know, I used to watch you on the news every night,” he said, as he began to read.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. I was pretty young to be a newshound then, but there was something very comforting about your delivery. I trusted everything you said.”
“Back then I did, too.” He indicated the story in Noah’s hands. “I hope you know to be a little more discerning now.”
As Noah began to read the piece he understood what Gershon had meant. This text was obviously nothing more than a load of talking-points propaganda for consumption by the wire services. Beyond the slanted content, though, there was another, more obvious problem.
Early yesterday in Chicago, what began as a peaceful march for fiscal reform and social justice erupted into a show of violence and brutality unlike anything seen in the city since the Days of Rage in the late 1960s. When the smoke had cleared four people lay dead, including one police officer. Scores of others were wounded, some critically, in what organizers are calling a bloody wake-up call and a rallying cry for the many similar citizen groups arrayed across a troubled nation.
“What’s wrong with the lowercase
d
on your machine?” Noah asked.
“It’s broken, that’s what’s wrong with it, and they’ve stopped making parts for the old girl.” Ira had gotten up from his chair and he spoke from near the credenza by the wall. He was carefully slipping a vinyl LP onto the spindle of an ancient record player. “Do you notice how nobody fixes anything anymore?”
Lana spoke up. “Do you notice how I’m going to stick my head in the oven and turn on the gas if I have to listen to Glenn Miller again today?”
“No, dear,” Ira said, “no big bands today.” The needle touched vinyl and soon a swell of smooth violins came drifting over the speakers, followed by the velvety tones of Nat King Cole. “Feast your jaded ears, young people. ‘Stardust’ is without any doubt the most beautiful song ever recorded by mortal man.”
Noah continued to read and make his marks as the music played on, and the girl raised no further objections as she worked away at her keyboard. When he came to a part near the end of the text he stopped and looked over at its author.
“You’re seriously going to submit this?” Noah asked.
“I can only write what I’m told these days,” Ira replied. “My only job is to write it well enough. What, you don’t believe what’s there?”
The paragraph in question was near the end of the story. Unnamed sources in the Justice Department had confirmed that members of a
right-wing domestic hate group were claiming responsibility for the shooting that set off the violence at a Chicago protest march. A string of other incidents established an escalating pattern of terrorist activity, moving west across the country. Evidence found at the scene also pointed to the direct involvement of their suddenly notorious leadership. This group called themselves the Founders’ Keepers.
“No, I don’t believe it.”
“Oh, really?” Ira came back to his place and took a seat. “And why not?”
Noah didn’t answer. Instead he looked around briefly for any obvious cameras or listening devices.
“They aren’t watching us in here,” Ira said. “There are other indignities we have to endure”—he patted his ankle, where his own house-arrest bracelet would be—“but they’ve never bothered to spy on us in this room, not that way. Go on, you can speak freely.”
“Okay. I don’t believe the story because I know those people.”
“Oh, I know that you know them,” Ira said, “and I know more than that. I recognize you, too, Mr. Gardner.”
He frowned. “I’m sure we haven’t met before.”
The older man nodded with the hint of a smile, holding eye contact for a little longer than was entirely comfortable, and then he abruptly changed his heading. “Are you finished marking up my copy?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m finished with it, too. I don’t need to see it again. Hand it over to my girl Friday there so she can type it up and send it out on the wires.”
As Noah leaned toward her and held out his minor edits, Lana clipped the papers from his hand without looking over and with barely a pause in her typing.
“You must have some questions about what goes on here,” Ira said.
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Well, then, let me show you around a bit and I’ll fill you in.”
One wall was dominated by a huge flat-screen monitor. Noah’s father had kept a nearly identical device running constantly in his private conference room. Its ever-changing display was a patchwork mosaic of running videos, pictographs on hot topics, graphs of market movements, headlines, and scrolling news items. All the little blocks were in constant motion, organizing and reorganizing themselves. Top to bottom, left to right, the order reflected the trending importance of each item. This visual gauge of popular interests would be of critical importance to the hive-mind of the press-and-PR juggernaut as it worked to shape the public discourse to its own ends.
The rest of the space seemed like a standard modern newsroom, though like the other rooms down the hall it looked virtually deserted. With the exception of their three places all the desks were unoccupied.
“Where is everybody?” Noah asked.
“All of this,” Ira said as he gestured around them, “started as an experiment. The news would be created and supervised in places like this, managed from a central location, and then that approved content would be sent out for the people’s consumption. What it took them a long time to realize, though, was that they were wasting a lot of effort. It turned out they didn’t have to compel their messages by force. There was no need to trick the majority of today’s pack of so-called journalists to do and say what they wanted. All they really had to do was ask.”
Across the room but obviously within earshot, Lana Somin quietly put on a handmade tinfoil beret and continued her work without further comment.
Despite the girl’s obvious skepticism this was a lesson Noah’s father had taught him when he’d first begun to intern at Doyle & Merchant. A subservient press corps was one of the keys to power in the PR business. The same sickness had long ago infected politics: promises of access, reward, and advancement had become the primary driving forces for
most reporters, especially the sharp and ambitious ones. Any pretense of truth-seeking was left by the wayside, stuck in the back of the briefcase with their diplomas, their pride, and their principles.
On the flip side, naturally, there was a swift punishment waiting for those who defied their industry’s corruption. By way of example, Ira Gershon explained his present situation.
His last position in the mainstream media, granted as a favor from a retiring network CEO, had been as the executive producer of a weekly local investigative news segment. His contract included total control over staff and content; apparently no one upstairs had expected much controversy from an aging icon on the verge of being put out to pasture. He’d immediately landed in hot water over a segment on the widespread use of a cancer-linked growth hormone in the American milk supply. The manufactured hormone was the cash-cow product—no pun intended—of a multinational biotech giant. This company had its fingers in more than enough pies to get whatever it wanted, especially from the media. They killed Ira’s story with nothing more than a threat to pull their advertising.
Needless to say, the problem wasn’t that the story was false. It never ran, Ira sued his employer, and the only outcome of the protracted lawsuit had been a landmark decision in American media. The court ultimately determined, once and for all, that bald-faced lies in the news were perfectly okay. Journalists had neither the inherent right nor any legal obligation to go on TV and tell the truth.
The story that finished off his waning career, though, had been a multipart series about the sinister origins of the debt crisis that was currently rocking the world. It was his magnum opus, the treasure at the end of a trail he’d been following since the 1970s. The piece was well researched, carefully vetted, and it centered on a shadowy financier and economic plunderer named Aaron Doyle.
“Aaron Doyle,” Noah said. “He was a principal at my father’s company.”
“Was?”
“Yeah, was. I met him a few times when I was a kid. He was old as dirt back then; he can’t possibly still be around.”
Ira Gershon sat thoughtfully for a moment.
“Noah,” he said, “do you believe in God?”
“There he goes again,” Lana sighed, from her desk several feet away.
“I don’t know. Not really, I guess. Why?”
“Because I first met Aaron Doyle when I was a kid, too. He was old as dirt even then. And once you’ve seen the devil, son, trust me, it really helps if you believe in God.”
