The Eye of Moloch (40 page)
M
ost American citizens wouldn’t believe how difficult it had become to travel freely—untracked, unrecorded, and unidentified—within the borders of their own home country. What was once the norm had become all but impossible, and that had made Hollis’s transcontinental trip to Pennsylvania not only dangerous but also very expensive.
He’d caught barely an hour of troubled sleep and felt achy and lightheaded as he awoke. He was hurting, and it wasn’t getting better. First he’d taken a glancing blast from a sawed-off shotgun at the start of that vicious gunfight at the Merrick ranch, then he’d been hit twice again as they made their escape from California.
These latest wounds had bled a lot but the bullets had passed right through without hitting anything vital. Noah’s doctor friend had stitched him up and dug some day-old birdshot from his shoulder and the side of his neck. She’d strongly advised him to go to the hospital—sound advice that he’d obviously ignored—and then she’d given him a course of strong antibiotics, which he’d promptly left behind as he and the advance team left in a rush the night before.
He was still determined to grit his way through these injuries, but
he could tell he was weakening. The fever was real now, he could almost feel an aggressive infection spreading under his skin, and his left arm was growing more swollen and inflamed as time went on.
Hollis was semi-reclined in the passenger seat of an eighteen-wheeler that had picked them up for the final leg of their overnight journey. Lana Somin and Cathy and Tyler Merrick were in the sleeper compartment behind him. When he turned to check on them, mother and son were resting peacefully, but the young lady was not. Her gaze was far away and serene, but there were traces of tears on her cheeks that she hadn’t bothered to wipe away.
They’d just passed through a commercial area of the town and soon their driver slowed and made his wide turn onto a rough service road.
The orange and black signage along this private thoroughfare carried the distinctive logo of HomeWorx, as did the tractor-trailer they were riding in. This company was a family-owned, mid-Atlantic chain of big-box home improvement stores, and up ahead stood one of its original locations, now converted to a regional distribution center. In recent years they’d had to close a number of locations and move their base of operations farther east, rendering this particular warehouse nearly obsolete for its original purpose.
“Take us around back, if you would,” Hollis said.
He alerted young Lana and she woke the others. As the truck pulled to a stop at a loading bay in the rear of the warehouse, Hollis said his thanks to the driver and went inside to meet their contact. When he was assured that all was well he waved the all-clear to the other three.
The head of this chain had been a longtime supporter of Molly’s mother and he’d been happy to help when he’d gotten the call. Ask anything, he’d said, and Hollis had asked for a lot.
So they could blend in as much as possible, the four of them were issued light orange coveralls like those worn by the staff. After they’d changed, Hollis called them together in a cavernous vehicle bay, along
with a small group of carefully screened employees who’d been put at his disposal for the day.
“Let me make something clear,” Hollis said. “If this goes bad today, if we get cornered by the cops—I mean
actual
law enforcement—we won’t put up a fight. We don’t fire a shot or raise a hand to the police. If it comes down to that I’ll go out and give myself up, alone, and all of you will swear on a Bible that I forced you here at gunpoint. They’ll believe that right off, things being as they are. We’ll send word to Molly beforehand so they won’t get her, too, and then I’ll take the fall for all this. Everybody understand?”
No one looked happy at the prospect, but they all agreed.
“Now,” Hollis continued, “the clock’s running, and I’d say we’ve got a good morning’s work ahead of us. I’ve radioed the others that we’re all clear so far but we don’t know exactly when they’re coming, so we’ve got to be ready ASAP. First, we need security. You”—he pointed to the heftiest of the local men and read his nameplate—“Hector, you pick your own partner, and then you two boys keep watch for anyone who doesn’t belong here. Don’t confront anybody.” He slid a pair of in-store handheld radios across the table. “Just call me and tell me what you see. Keep that walkie-talkie on channel 14. Okay?”
“Okay,” Hector said, and he nodded to the fellow next to him. “Him and me, we’ll keep watch.”
“Good. Check in with me every quarter hour.” The two men left for their stations, and Hollis turned back to the other employees. “This place has got just about everything we could need but we’d waste a lot of time trying to find it all ourselves. Whatever these two ladies here ask you for, if you could jump on it and fetch their supplies, that’ll be a great help. They may need some extra hands, too, so please, just be at their service. Now, Ms. Somin, Noah Gardner told me you’re good with computers.”
“I am,” she said.
“We’ll need some IDs. I’ll show you examples when you’re ready
to start on them. They just need to be good enough to flash; no one’s going to have time to look at them too close. And then there’s this.” He handed across a thick spiral-bound book that had been left for him in a locker there. “That’s the system layout and the network administrator’s manual from the place we’re going after today. Take good care of that; it took a lot of doing to get it copied and slipped out of there for us. Now if you could get a head start on looking into the guts of what we’ll be up against—”
She’d had a chance to read only the cover before she interrupted him. “I can tell you right now, there’s no fricking way. A facility like this? It’s not like in the movies. There’s no way I could break into this system in one day, not in a month, nobody could, not from outside.”
“Well, that’s okay,” Hollis said, “because we’re going to be inside. If we all do our jobs right we’re going to drive up to the front gate, big as life, and they’re going to open up the doors and let us in.”
With that bit of news delivered, Hollis saw the first shade of a smile forming.
“Cool,” Lana said.
“Now, I want you all to assume that this is going to go off without a hitch. You don’t have time for worries along with everything else. But Tyler and I will be making preparations in case things should go awry.”
“I thought you said if we got caught we were going to give up,” Tyler said.
“I said if we got caught by law enforcement. But if I see the kind of scum roll up here like those that came for you and your folks on the ranch, son, there’s going to be some hell to pay.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” Cathy Merrick asked.
“You’re my graphic artist.”
“I don’t understand. What kind of art do you need?”
“Well, ma’am, near as you can manage, we need for that thing over
there”—he pointed to a sun-faded and road-worn HomeWorx rental truck parked across the bay—“to look just like this right here.”
Hollis opened a folder and passed it across the table to her. On top of the papers inside was a series of detailed color photos showing every angle of a hazmat emergency vehicle from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Safety.
A
t the clinic outside San Francisco, Ellen Davenport had tended to her patient through the night. As the morning came, Ellen reviewed the chart once again and, satisfied that she was stable and comfortable, left to check in on her old friend Noah.
The sleep lab in this clinic had a one-bedroom suite designed and decorated like a space that might be found in a nice, normal home. It was made that way so that the slumber patterns of visiting subjects could be evaluated in a more calming environment than a cold and sterile hospital room. This suite was where Noah and Molly had been put up together for the night.
When Ellen looked in the door she found them sleeping in each other’s arms, dressed in borrowed clothes they’d been provided with for their upcoming journey. It seemed as though they’d awakened earlier, bathed and gotten ready to depart, and then drifted off again in the midst of an intimate conversation.
Ellen had known this young man for a long time and he’d always been blissfully superficial in his relations with the opposite sex. This was a different picture; she’d never seen him like this, not with any other
woman. The two of them looked like they belonged together, like they’d always been together, and like they didn’t intend to ever be apart again.
Ellen left the sleep lab and took a long, hot shower. When she returned to Virginia’s room she found her patient awake and as alert as the medication would allow.
“Where are we?” Virginia asked.
“We’re in San Francisco. You’re doing much better—”
“And where are the others?”
“Noah and Molly are in the next room. Everyone else headed off for Pennsylvania last night.” Ellen checked her watch. “We’ve got a flight to catch soon ourselves, and I have to get them up in a few minutes. My colleagues here are going to take good care of you—”
“They shouldn’t leave,” Virginia interrupted. She made a move to rise but Ellen stopped her with a gentle hand. “None of you should leave. Let me talk to them.”
“They’re very determined—”
“Please, let me talk to them.”
“Okay, shh. Just rest now. I’ll send them in before we go.”
• • •
Later, as Noah and Ellen and Molly buckled into their seats on the small private jet, he recalled their parting conversation with Virginia Ward.
She’d tried by every means to persuade them that the safest course was to put themselves under her protection, and she was probably right, but wisdom and reason had no effect on Molly. She was not going to be stopped this time and Noah wouldn’t be leaving her side, and so the decision was made.
Once they’d left, Noah had insisted on one thing, however, and he’d gotten no argument. As soon as they landed for their connection in Illinois, Ellen Davenport would part ways with them, catch a cab to O’Hare, and travel on to New York alone. There she’d meet with Charlie Nelan to figure out how to deal with the events of the last several days and begin to get her life back on track again.
The jet had been fueled and waiting for them at Hayward Executive Airport, near the bay. These arrangements were made by a well-to-do secret friend of Molly’s group, the CEO of a chain of hardware stores in the East, and his gift had allowed them to sidestep the heightened security that surely would have snared them instantly if they’d tried to go anywhere near San Francisco International.
As the jet taxied out onto its assigned runway, Molly felt for his hand and squeezed it tight when she found it. Then she told him where they were ultimately bound.
Her objective was a maximum-security storage facility in rural Pennsylvania. It was the crown jewel of a group of fortresses operated by a company called Garrison Archives. Naturally, Noah knew this place well. They stored many rare treasures there, irreplaceable collections and priceless works of art, all preserved and protected in a controlled underground environment built to withstand even a nearby nuclear war.
But another, larger level of Garrison had a different purpose. It housed a vast chamber of secrets through which the highest levels of classified information flowed. This was the place where the world’s most powerful entities—including many clients of Noah’s late father—kept all the electronic records of their dealings, records that the world outside was never meant to see.
Molly planned a controlled release of the darkest of these secrets onto the open Internet, just as Virginia Ward had come to suspect. If the truth really could set us free, this one act should provide more than enough of it to do the job.
Assuming they actually made it inside, there wouldn’t be much time. She needed Noah—and his years of experience with such information at Doyle & Merchant—to help her navigate the sea of files and documents, separate the wheat from the chaff, and then package the best of it to be leaked for mass consumption.
He hadn’t told her this, but even in the unlikely event that they were successful he had his own strong doubts about the lasting effect that
such a release would have. It takes a lot of courage to see the truth even when it’s right there in front of you. Denial is so much easier, and these days most people wouldn’t know what to do with the truth if they saw it.