The Eye of Moloch (30 page)
There was more at the very end, delivered as though it was a common sign-off for these nightly underground broadcasts. It was only seven little words, but they left Noah troubled and sleepless for a good long while after they’d come in.
We are Americans,
the anonymous man had said.
God bless Molly Ross.
A
rthur Gardner hadn’t died immediately from the effects of his tragic accident at the elevator.
In fact, it was several hours later, and still he hadn’t yet managed to give up the ghost. As bad luck would have it he’d fallen only about fifteen feet into the empty shaft before striking a maintenance platform and coming to rest unconscious on its narrow steel ledge.
Well, when life hands you a lemon,
Warren Landers thought.
His former boss’s stubborn lingering-on might be made into a small blessing in disguise. As was so often the case in this job, one must roll with the changes, and thus he’d immediately set about making the best of this unexpected development.
Mr. Gardner was in that rare class of people who don’t go to the hospital; the hospital comes to them. One urgent call to the multibillionaire’s version of 911 and the quick and discreet process had been set in motion.
The victim was collected and brought to his own bedroom, which in the interim had been rearranged and fully equipped to support intensive care. His ragged wounds and fractures were stitched and daubed and
splinted to the extent required to stabilize him, and the proper drugs were administered to make his final hours comfortable and quiet.
Quiet, in particular.
Sadly, he wasn’t expected to pull through. This wasn’t a medical opinion so much as a direct order, delivered by Warren Landers to the company physician in charge. After the proper inducements had been paid, the rest of the staff concurred and proceeded accordingly with Arthur Gardner’s terminal treatment plan.
Another thing was made clear: not a word of this affair would leave the room until the time was right. Naturally, neither the press nor the authorities had been informed of the accident. The story would require some finesse. That, and a key witness still lived who might cast doubt on the official version once it had been conjured up. Everyone else who knew anything was bound by an ironclad nondisclosure agreement that would promptly ruin their lives and end their cushy careers should they ever rediscover their principles and go public.
It might seem to a layman that such a threat couldn’t carry enough weight to engage a diverse group in the obvious cover-up of a first-degree murder. But Landers knew from long experience that it would be more than sufficient. Getting otherwise honest people to look the other way, that was the most common transaction in the world of public relations. The perpetrators of much grander crimes—institutionalized child abuse, stock market manipulation, the looting of whole economies, entire wars, in fact—had gotten away clean with far less leverage than this.
When the others had left the room, from near the archway to the bedroom he observed the broken man lying still among the tubes and wires and hanging bags of fluid. Save for his breathing he hadn’t moved, but he wasn’t sleeping, either. Without expression, as Landers looked at him, he was simply looking back.
An assistant came to whisper that a special guest had entered the lobby downstairs. Several others had begun flitting around the sprawling apartment, tidying and misting disinfectants and turning up the HEPA
filters to their maximum settings. The reclusive VIP who was now on his way up was known to be sensitive to the many invisible hazards that might lurk about in a sickroom. Whether the germs were real or imagined he would want to know that his concerns had been respected in advance of his arrival.
A minute later everyone had disappeared, shooed into side rooms to clear the path for this visitor. Landers went to the front door and opened it, and there, wearing simple clothes and a demeanor of humble majesty—and not looking a day older than 110—stood the old gentleman himself, Aaron Doyle.
• • •
Mr. Doyle’s entourage maintained a respectful distance as the two men had refreshments and walked together to the balcony, talking in low tones along the way.
Only the briefest matters of business were discussed: updates and statuses, confirmations and forecasts. Mostly it was a tour through the luxurious spaces of Arthur Gardner’s apartment—it was a true Manhattan palace, and a reward soon to be passed to Warren Landers in recognition of his upcoming accomplishments.
In their larger objective, the final countdown had begun. If all was well, as it seemed to be, there would be little more to do than watch to see which variation of their coming victory would unfold.
Mr. Doyle could have supervised all this from the comforts of his home, of course, but it seemed only fitting that he personally attend to see his long-standing colleague off to his permanent retirement. As such it had been a pleasant surprise to learn that Arthur Gardner had indeed lived to see him one last time. With some overmodest reluctance Landers accepted full credit for having engineered this happy accident.
With the tour complete, the time had come to say their good-byes to the patient. The two men dismissed their escorts and made their way to the quiet bedroom.
Gardner couldn’t be said to be unresponsive; his eyes showed
recognition as the two approached, but there was no more to it than that. Aaron Doyle came close to his old and formerly trusted friend, and he reached out, turned back the sheet, and warmly patted the arm that wasn’t broken.
“I’m so hurt that it came to this, Arthur,” he said. “More than you’ll ever know. But I’m here now because I wanted to tell you something in person.
“This was my will, what you’re suffering now, this pain you’re feeling and your death that’s fast approaching; this is all by my hand. You’ve been like a son to me, and I wanted to come here and show you that I still have a strength that you seem to have abandoned. I have the strength to discipline my own.”
From his bed Arthur Gardner was staring into the eyes of his employer. There was little emotion in his face and he said nothing at all. It wasn’t even entirely clear, considering his injuries, whether he retained the faculties of speech.
“Your last wife . . .” Mr. Doyle paused as he tried to remember. “What was her name, Warren?”
“Jaime,” Landers said.
“Yes, Jaime.” Doyle
tsked,
and shook his head. “She wasn’t as pretty as the others, not to your old standards, in any case. And a
waitress,
Arthur, and a noble citizen activist, a person so beneath the station of a man like you. A mismatch like that could never have ended well. You do recall, don’t you? Though I rue the day, I was the one who sent you out to meet with her. And it was a simple thing that I’d asked, the same kind of errand that our Mr. Landers here somehow manages to perform time after time without falling in love and siring an heir with the object of his negotiations.”
Still, there was no response.
“Those were critical times,” Doyle continued. “We had a chance then, in the creeping malaise of the Carter years, to revive an uprising among the commoners and organize them into a force for our kind of
change. She could have used her former notoriety, she’d been one of the only strong and principled voices among that 1960s rabble, but because of those very principles she wouldn’t step forward and lead for us. She refused every gift we offered and wouldn’t do what we needed her to do. Instead she bewitched you, and she very nearly turned you against me.
“But I recovered then, and I’ll recover now. Despite the many hurdles put in my way by William Merchant our agenda is succeeding beyond my wildest hopes. We’re molding the deluded young into an army of dependent ciphers. With your help we’ve conditioned them from birth to happily sign away their rights and vote as they’re told, staring slack-jawed into one electronic screen or another and obediently parroting our every crafted word.
“The loudest radicals from the sixties and seventies are now firmly installed in the establishment, from the universities to the media to the White House, the courts, and the Cabinet Room. We didn’t need your wife at all, do you see? Both she and her high-minded principles are long forgotten.
“I had her killed, you know.” Doyle waited, as though to see if his words were truly connecting with the shattered man before him; there seemed to be no change. “At first I did my best to keep you busy so that work might separate the two of you. But I could see you weakening and perhaps even planning to leave me one day, and so for your own good I did what I needed to do.
“Mr. Landers here arranged it. She had tried to steal from me, so I wanted it to be slow and painful and hopeless, and a particularly nasty carcinoma filled that bill quite nicely, I thought.
“And you came back to me when it was over, fully recovered from a handful of lost and lovesick years, and you were soon as hard and strong as ever—more so, if that’s possible. I saved you then from throwing your future away. I saved your life, in a sense, Arthur. And now I’ve come to take it back again.”
It might have been a trick of the light, but at this moment there
seemed to be a glimmer of something stirring behind Arthur Gardner’s eyes.
“Your son, too, will be joining you and his useless whore of a mother very soon. I know you were trying something, Arthur. Maybe you were only trying to save him. Maybe you’ve fallen into collusion with Mr. Merchant. Now I may never know. Why you chose to involve your boy again I’ll also never know, but believe me, he won’t go unpunished. It will all be over soon, for you and your bloodline, and with that knowledge you can rest in peace.”
“So long, boss,” Warren Landers added. “I’ll see you at the funeral.”
The room was quiet for a few seconds after. And then as the two men began to turn to leave, without warning the still hand on the bed arose and clutched outward and took Aaron Doyle firmly above his delicate wrist.
It was as though Arthur Gardner had saved his last ounce of energy to allow himself a chance to respond, to speak with the strength he wished to show in this final confrontation.
“I do have something to tell you, Aaron,” he began. His voice was strained and weak but steady as stone. “All this time I’ve helped you in your battle of wills against your old partner. At first the stakes were small, and then your goals grew larger along with their toll, and now it seems that your ambitions have reached a practical limit. Now, if you have your way, the whole world hangs in the balance. And I think that’s finally too much. I think that won’t be allowed.
“I’ve watched this war rage for most of my life. You move, your opponent counters, on and on I’ve watched the games unfold by your side. But I’m afraid there’s something you don’t know. You made a confession to me just now, and I have one of my own for you. There’s something I’ve kept from you, something I learned myself only a few months ago.”
“What is it?” Doyle asked softly.
“Bill Merchant . . . died . . . in 1979.”
Gardner pulled Aaron Doyle even closer, his voice fading, his nails
cutting into the papery skin at the forearm, and his eyes burned with the very last of his departing spirit.
“You now have to wonder, don’t you, Aaron? If Merchant is dead, then who in heaven’s name has been up there fighting against us for these past thirty years?”
N
oah’s second day at work began much like the first, and he was getting the feeling that sameness and a dry routine were all he could look forward to for the rest of his life here. Ira Gershon was the only one who didn’t seem to have given in to the structured monotony.
“Can either of you tell me,” Ira chirped, as they were finishing their lunch break in the office, “just approximately now, how many possible different ways that a deck of cards can be arranged when you shuffle them?” He’d been fiddling with some cards, riffling them and then studying them, as he ate his cold turkey sandwich from its clamshell tray.
“I don’t know.” Noah thought about it for a few seconds; no branch of arithmetic had ever been his strong suit. “What’s fifty-two times fifty-two?”