The Eye of Moloch (33 page)
The men had brought in a folding table, set up the rig, and run the proper line to an antenna array outside. His most skilled communications specialists sat before the snowy display screen, tuning and tweaking the dials with a safecracker’s touch, searching along the narrow spectrum for a faint encrypted signal somewhere out there, just within range.
Those Talion people Landers had hired to do his bidding were very well trained and equipped. Their gear, however, wasn’t the latest tech available to the legitimate U.S. military. They had weaponry, helicopters, tanks, APCs, and even jets, but it was all years old, the type of equipment often sold to second-rate allies overseas.
Their drones were yesterday’s news as well, and the secrets of this particular class of craft had been studied and ultimately cracked by the very terrorist forces they’d been deployed to watch and harass along the Afghan–Pakistan border. A UAV maintains a constant data link with its controllers, and that signal can be captured if a man knows where to find it.
At last the picture swam and hissed and then stabilized. An image appeared, the same one he’d seen for only a second when Landers had
shown it before: a large house, outbuildings and corrals, and sprawling open land surrounding it all. With a tapping on the keyboard an electronic inquiry was sent and back streamed a screen full of telemetry data, including the coordinates of the target residence.
The men let out a triumphant yell, one of them turned up the lights, and another called out the key data to be copied down. George Pierce bent over the large map on his table, traced the coordinates with his fingers, and quickly found the place.
“Feed those numbers into a GPS,” he said, “then get all the men together, get everybody, but do it quiet.” He was thinking of the skeleton crew of Talion mercenaries that Landers had left with him, camped in the field outside. Without any doubt part of their job was to keep watch over their hosts and report any hints of revolt.
But a time comes when every leader must face the Rubicon and make his choice to cross it or deny his destiny. This was a turning point, and although it had come sooner than he’d expected, he would not shy away.
“No,” Pierce said. “We’re not going to slink off our own land and sneak away to do what’s right. Now listen up. Keep the man out there in the radio tent alive, and we’ll persuade him to keep his boss informed that we’re all still doing what we’re told. As for the others, I want you boys to go now and kill everyone outside that ain’t one of us. Take them all at once, and I don’t want to hear any alarms go off, you understand? Make it quick and quiet and clean.”
The men nodded, and a few of them smiled.
Then Pierce thumped the X he’d drawn on the map in front of him.
“And then you go there,” he said, “all of you. Drive down to that ranch and murder everything moving. Man, woman, or child, it makes no difference to me. Kill them all and we’ll let God sort ’em out. Burn the place to the ground, but you save one thing for me.” He raised his voice so all could hear. “I’ll give ten thousand in gold to the man who brings that Molly Ross back here alive to face the music.”
T
he Wyoming sky had become overcast and Hollis knew that sundown was only a couple of hours away. It had already been another hard day of preparations for the trip north to safety and there would be a long night of final tasks ahead.
A waist-high table was lined with a dozen open grab-and-go kits that he’d been putting together with the aid of his young helper. This job had mostly consisted of him telling Tyler Merrick what to fetch. Now the boy was late in coming back, and with just a few vital provisions still needed to fill up the survival bags, Hollis, after a few more minutes of waiting, got up to go and get what he needed himself.
As he set out for the distant pantry, along the way he confirmed something that Tyler had told him earlier: the local sheriff’s squad car was in the driveway in front. To avoid being seen Hollis made his way toward the garage through paths outside and back halls that eventually took him past his own suite.
He paused at Molly’s room and looked inside through the half-open door. It seemed she hadn’t moved since the last time he’d checked in. The curtains were drawn and her dinner tray was on the side table, still
untouched. She appeared to be sleeping, but then for the most part she’d appeared that same way for several days.
Together the two of them had soldiered through a lot of difficult times, but it had never been like this; he’d never seen her adrift this long with all the wind taken out of her sails. They say that time heals all wounds. He could only hope that would begin to prove out once they’d left this latest losing battle far behind.
Hollis considered stopping in to give her some recent news and then he thought better of it. He’d received an e-mail message, supposedly from Noah Gardner, via one of her older private addresses. The message offered Molly his help, whatever that might mean. Most likely it was some attempt at subterfuge, and whoever knew enough about their relationship to fake that note also knew enough to be a real threat. Even if it was actually Gardner who’d written it, though, it could be just as dangerous. Real or not, encouragement from a message like that was the last thing Molly needed to receive at the moment.
Since their last ill-fated meeting, the other members of his party had also been keeping to themselves and he’d seen very little of them. Meanwhile, the Merricks were all occupied with serious concerns of their own. It was becoming clear that they were the targets of a dedicated smear campaign, and the regional press had begun to relay some of these stories without even questioning their truth. There’d been three visits so far from the law, including this one from the sheriff that very afternoon. The first two were official but this time he’d evidently come calling off-duty, apparently to offer some unauthorized legal counsel to his old friends.
Along his route Hollis paused in the shadows near enough to the front door so he could overhear a bit of the conversation. As unbelievable as it sounded, the sheriff had come with his deputies to let this family know that they were soon to be the subjects of a federal terrorism investigation.
At length Hollis moved on, and before long he came to the small
outbuilding that contained the supplies he needed. He opened up the metal door, but before he could step inside, the boy Tyler came running up to him, breathless.
“Oh man, I’m glad I found you,” Tyler said. “Come on, my great-grandmother wants to see you.”
Hollis frowned. “Well, I sure as hell don’t want to see her.”
“No, you don’t understand. When she asks for you, you go. Believe me, you don’t want her coming after you.”
“Did she say what she wanted with me?”
“She never does. You’ll find out when you get there.” The boy reclosed the cooler door and locked down the handle. “Come on, seriously.”
“I ain’t ready for this,” Hollis said.
“You don’t know how true that is. Now let’s go,” Tyler said, and they started off. “I’ll take you as far as the last hallway and then you’re on your own.”
H
er name was Esther, he’d been told, but under no circumstances was he to call her that to her face—not if he knew what was good for him.
After the boy had abandoned him at the corner, Hollis had kept his apprehension under control for the first few steps, but by the time he’d reached the entrance to the antiquated original section of the Merrick house, the long walk down the darkening, lamplit hall had begun to feel like the last mile to the gallows.
It was a trip back in time as well, those last twenty yards. The wood in the walls and the floor seemed to age and weather with every step onward. The clean, rustic look of the rest of the ranch was mirrored here but it had gradually changed its character, transforming from a quaint designer’s choice in country décor to the old-fashioned real McCoy.
Hollis took a deep breath and rapped three times on the heavy varnished door.
The voice that came from inside wasn’t at all what he’d anticipated. It was neither the screech of a winged harpy nor the weakened wheeze one
might expect of a typical centenarian. It sounded spirited and sure and gracefully feminine, all that conveyed in only five little words.
“You come on in, now.”
He opened the door and stepped softly into the front room.
She was seated in a cane rocking chair near her stone hearth, warmly outlined in the amber glow before the low, crackling flames. A round Dutch oven hung from a hook in the top of the firebox, and whatever concoction of beef and herbed gravy and root vegetables was cooking in there, it smelled so good it nearly weakened his knees.
The place was like a lovingly preserved museum exhibit, the very essence of the American West at the turn of the twentieth century. Beneath the rafters to a vaulted ceiling the rough log walls were painstakingly planed and shaped with every joint hand-fitted. The frame and structure looked as though it had been built with little more than a hatchet, a wedge and a great deal of love and care.
The wide mantel was lined and hung with an array of archaic things: bear traps, powder flasks, articulated metal toys, nutcrackers, and cook’s helpers. There were implements of various shapes and sorts made of wrought iron, bronze, hammered copper, hardwoods, and thick tanned leather. These relics recalled the essential technologies of a time gone by, things on which life itself had once depended but whose practical functions were now mostly long forgotten.
She sat there, rocking gently with her sewing in her lap, a cup of hot tea by her side, and the handle of a fireplace poker in the grip of one bony hand.
“Well, my stars,” Esther said quietly, “if it ain’t Lucifer’s servant himself, Thom Hollis.”
“Ma’am, with all respect, I’m nobody’s servant, least of all—”
“Don’t you say one word to me, not until I give you my leave. The devil uses good people, too, once he sees they’ve lost their salt. Now find you a seat and pull it up here close. I need to see you good and clear and these eyes of mine aren’t all they used to be.”
There was an ottoman near the couch and he brought it over in front of her chair, and sat.
“The Good Lord has ways of herding lost sheep back into the fold,” Esther said. “You do need to listen, though, otherwise He’ll only speak His wisdom again, but louder and stronger the next time, in a voice that makes it harder to ignore. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she snapped, and it looked for a moment like she was about to swing the hook of that poker at the broad side of his skull. “You’re either about Satan’s work or you ain’t got the sense that God gave geese, and we don’t have much time to sit and ponder which it is.” She leaned forward with the tractor-beam glare that he’d seen before only from a safer distance. “Best that I can figure, you’re afraid, Thom Hollis, and fear in a man like you saps the will out of every blessed soul around you.”
“I’m not afraid. I’m only trying to protect Molly—”
“She’s protected already.”
“She’s not the woman she used to be, she’s blind—”
“We walk by faith, not by sight,” Esther said. “That girl’s got a calling, and she needs you next to her for one thing and one thing only: to help her do what she’s been called up to do. And some which way or t’other you’ve got the idea into your thick head that you know destiny better than He who shapes it, that you alone know what is and isn’t possible. You tell her and her people to surrender His fight when the battle’s hardly begun. And then you’ve got the crust to strut around here in high feather, like a tall dog in a meat house, like you think you’re still on the side of right. You come into my home, talking back and prideful while you sit there given in to cowardice and sloth, makin’ eyes at my granddaughter all the while. I saw you myself the other night in the billiard room, feet up in an easy chair like there wasn’t a worry in the world, and drunk as a peach-orchard boar. If my husband was alive today he’d haul you out back on general principles and beat you like a rented mule.”