The Overton Window

  Maybe they’ll stop in time, and maybe they won’t, Noah thought, but either way he’d slow them down. Other than that, he knew only two things: Molly Ross was still fighting, and that despite what was bearing down on him ahead, he wasn’t afraid.

  By the time the lead car had skidded to a stop he could feel the heat on his face from its headlights. Some of the vehicles behind were backing up and their drivers were trying to find a way around the bottleneck, but off the road the sand was too soft for traction and those who’d gone into the gully were stuck, their tires spinning uselessly.

  He looked up and saw five uniformed men approaching, their guns drawn. They were all shouting orders he couldn’t really understand.

  And then they disappeared, as did the rest of the world, in a silent split-second flash of bright white light from behind him. It was so bright that it crossed the senses. He could feel it on his back, he could hear the light and smell it. When his vision returned Noah saw the officers standing in the road where they’d been, some covering their eyes, but most looking past him, blank-faced, their hands hanging down at their sides.

  He turned to look back over his shoulder, in the direction Molly had gone, and miles away he saw the rising mushroom cloud, a massive, roiling ball of fire ascending slowly into the evening sky. The expanding circle of a shock wave was tearing across the desert toward them, toward everything in all directions, and a few seconds later it arrived with a crack of thunder and the sudden gust of a hot summer wind.

  CHAPTER 45

  It could have been most of the night that they worked him over. It could have been days for all he knew. All sense of time had left him while he was still out there on the road.

  The questioning had started in one place, and at some point they’d satisfied themselves that the worst they could do wasn’t going to be good enough. There’d been a dark ride in a car, and then a flight somewhere. At the new place they’d started in on him again.

  They knew a lot already. They knew that calls had been made from Noah’s apartment to a long list of accomplices of a known agitator who’d conspired to destroy an American city or two. They knew that Noah helped one of the central figures in this conspiracy gain access to classified files and information. They knew that he’d helped her evade security and fly across the country to play her part in the failed attack. They knew that two nuclear weapons had fallen into the hands of these terrorists, and that one of them had detonated but the other was still unaccounted for.

  This second group of interrogators was more organized and clinical in their methods, and far more creative. It wasn’t only pain they inflicted, but terror; the most effective torture happens in the mind. After many hours and methods they’d eventually settled on using a reliable old standby that seemed to have the most immediate and positive effect for their purposes.

  Strapped flat to a cold metal table, head immobilized and inclined to be lower than the feet, a wet cloth over the face to restrict his breathing— and then just a slight dripping of water, maybe half a glass, just enough to begin to run down the nostrils and into the throat. Some primitive part of the mind simply comes unhinged when it knows it’s drowning and knows it can’t get away. Try to be as strong as you want; it doesn’t matter. If he’d actually known anything at all that they wanted to learn, before ten seconds had passed he would have told them, and they would have known he was telling the truth.

  In the course of their work they told him a lot of things to encourage him to break his silence. They told him that Molly’s mother, under similar questioning, had revealed the entire plot, including the depth of Noah’s involvement. They said that Molly herself had been apprehended and they described in excruciating detail the particular techniques they had employed on her. She’d given him up almost immediately, they’d claimed, along with all of her co-conspirators.

  After all they’d put him through, Noah would have gladly believed almost anything they’d said, but even to his clouded, brutalized mind these last two assertions didn’t ring true—those two would never betray their cause. If Molly was going down, she would go down swinging and silent. Knowing that gave Noah the first bit of hope that he’d had in a long time.

  It went on that way, though, again and again, as if they had nothing but time and nothing to lose by confirming over and over that he didn’t know anything that could help them. They seemed to take his complete lack of useful knowledge as a sign of stubborn resistance to their questioning. And, after all, you never know when a valuable little nugget of intel might surface.

  And then they stopped.

  They spent a few minutes cleaning him up as well as they could, unstrapped one of his hands, adjusted the table to a more natural recline, and even slipped a couple of flat pillows beneath his head. They never addressed him directly, but Noah was able to gather from what they said that a special visitor was coming, someone special enough to put a hold on the most critical interrogation since they’d captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed two years after 9/11.

  As they prepared to leave, they put their things in order, like a team of seasoned mechanics might tend to the tools of their trade. These actions made it clear that they’d be back if necessary after this brief interlude, to take up their work right where they’d left it off.

  A number of dark plastic surveillance domes were distributed across the ceiling. The chief interrogator looked up at one of the cameras and made a gesture to those watching to indicate that the subject was now ready to receive his guest. On that cue, the tiny red lights of the surveillance cameras winked out in sequence.

  A few seconds later, a figure appeared in the open doorway.

  CHAPTER 46

  Noah had been savaged for many hours, of course, brought to the brink mentally and physically in his interrogation. No one would blame him if he didn’t immediately recognize his visitor—the man was so rarely seen outside of his natural, elegant habitat. Yet despite all of these mitigating factors, Noah knew instantly whom he was staring at because it was his own flesh and blood: the legendary Arthur Gardner.

  The old man came in and walked to the middle of the room, discharged his bodyguard and the others with a slight dismissive wave, and he and Noah were left alone.

  His father pulled over a high stool instead of the rolling office chair that had been arranged for him. He was taking the high ground, as usual; seated in this way the old man towered above his son, who was still bound securely to the metal bed.

  For a time they only regarded each other in silence. It might have been a bit of his father’s mano a mano gamesmanship, often employed in business interactions: in hostile negotiations it’s often the first one to speak who loses. After a while, though, the quiet must have outlasted his patience.

  “This woman you became involved with,” Arthur Gardner began, “do you have any idea what she has cost us?”

  “I don’t know,” Noah said. His voice was hoarse from lack of moisture, and from the suffering they’d already put him through. “Billions?”

  The old man’s fist came down on edge of the table, hard enough to break a bone.

  “She cost us impact!” he shouted. “It was to be a clean and spectacular event, a thing to be leveraged into a leap forward toward our new beginning. Instead it’s become a complete debacle. We were left with an almost unnoticed explosion out in the empty desert that barely rattled a teacup in the nearest town. There aren’t even any pictures—we’ve had to resort to artists’ conceptions and special effects. We’ll be up all night trying to make a credible story of it all, to salvage the greatest effect we can. After all the years of preparation it was rushed forward, against my advice, due to the actions of this meaningless resistance. Which my son was somehow a part of.”

  By all appearances his father must have been thinking that some form of apology would be appropriate at this point. Noah chose his words carefully.

  “I didn’t set out to be, Dad.”

  The old man muttered something poisonous under his breath
and then seemed to make an effort to gather his dignity again. He straightened the already-perfect knot of his Persian silk tie, and when he spoke again his voice was under somewhat tighter control.

  “Not that it’s been a total failure. Your friends lost before the fight even began. We’ve spent years painting them as a fringe group of dangerous heirs to the likes of Timothy McVeigh, and of course they’ll be revealed as the villains behind this failed attack.” He stared off into the distance as if he were talking to no one in particular. “It’s too bad that these friends of yours have been so transparent in their desire for violence. They wave signs with slogans about ‘reloading’ and watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. They wear shirts that endorse the ‘targeting’ of politicians, and, Noah, let’s not forget about that unfortunate incident you got yourself caught up in at that downtown bar. These people never wanted to give peace a chance—and now they’ve shown just how far they are willing to go to send their message.” He was actually smiling, clearly enjoying a sadistic satisfaction with it all.

  “Thankfully, there’s already talk of suspending the presidential election. Though either candidate would have been equally useful in the aftermath, it will be a powerful bit of symbolism nevertheless. Many sweeping pieces of helpful legislation will be rushed through in the coming days with little or no debate, and those will be used to clamp down further on what remains of this Ross woman’s pitiful movement. And naturally, a wholesale roundup is under way to ferret out all those connected with these backward revolutionaries, with full support of the media and the cowering public.

  “Saul Alinsky was right, Noah—the ends do justify the means. I can’t imagine how any thinking person could believe otherwise. Which do you really think the huddled masses would prefer if they knew what I know—that they have only two choices: a quick if somewhat painful transformation, or yet another century of slow progress and suffering toward the same inevitable end, only this time with all of the country’s wealth and potential stolen away from them before the decay even begins.

  “And yet these selfish and ignorant meddlers—patriots, they have the gall to call themselves—they would stand in the path of destiny. What do they think they’ve accomplished? The lives of how many were saved tonight? Thirty thousand? Five times that many people die around the globe every day. They die in obscurity at the end of an aimless existence, and they disappear to dust as though they’d never been. But those thirty thousand, they would have died for a cause greater than any other, their names would have been etched in monuments in the new world, on the granite markers heralding mankind’s new beginning. One world, ruled by the wise and the fittest and the strong, with no naïve illusions of equality or the squandered promises of freedom for all.

  “How many times must we learn the same lessons? Leave the useless eaters to their pursuit of happiness, and the result is always slaughter and chaos and poverty and despair. What your new friends fail to see is that this country was nothing more than a brief anomaly, a mere passing second in the march of time. People often ask how slavery could’ve happened, but that just shows their ignorance. Slavery and tyranny have been the rule for thousands of years; freedom is the short-lived exception.

  “The United States should never have survived as long as it has, but all good things must come to an end. The system is broken beyond repair. It costs a billion dollars to run for president these days; Abraham Lincoln would never have lasted past the Iowa caucuses. And if the occasional visionaries actually make it into office, their corruption begins immediately. They’re overcome by the problems they inherit. But the majority of politicians are only prostitutes and puppets, and they always will be. Their simple-minded lusts for money, and sex, and power make them controllable, but they disgust me. When they’ve served their purpose, they’ll learn what real power is, along with everyone else.

  “Whatever chance we have to take control of this world is in controlling who pulls the strings. Presidents, senators, governors—all of these come and go, but I and my peers have been here all along, raising them up and tearing them down. The real enduring powers in this world are older than any modern government, and it’s past time that we put an end to these empty dreams of liberty. Now, we openly take the reins. Now, we’ll give the people the government they’ve shown themselves to deserve. No one knows the people better than I do, and I know what they need. We’ll give them a purpose: a simple, regimented, peaceful life with all the reasonable comforts, in service of something greater than any single, selfish nation.”

  The old man stood, walked to the door, rapped on the frame three times, and then came back and took his seat again. After a moment, others entered the room, a different group of professionals than Noah had seen before.

  “Your mother,” Noah’s father began, “meant a great deal to me. I saw in her my last hopes for humanity. She had her weaknesses, but in thinking back on it now, those weaknesses may have been what drew me to her. She believed in people, for one, that the good in them could outweigh the bad. For the brief time I was with her, a touch of those weaknesses even spread to me. We had a child together, though I’d sworn I’d never bring another human being into this world. But she poured all of her innocent dreams into her son.

  “And as she lay dying, your mother told me that I should expect to see wonderful things from you, Noah. I’ve held on to that hope. But as I stood out there just now, watching outside this room for the preceding hour, I had to wonder if this was to be the end of my ambitions for you.”

  “Your ambitions … for me?”

  “Believe it or not, my boy, I won’t live forever. There’s much to do before I die; the outcome of my life’s work is still very much in doubt, and I need help to see it through. I need your help.

  “My wish has been that you would someday stand beside me as we bring forth this new world together. You have great gifts, Noah, but those gifts have been kept dormant by a trick of heredity. I know you’ve felt this conflict, and it must have been quite painful at times. You have your father’s mind, but your mother’s heart. Neither will permit the other to come to the fore.

  “But it seems you may have been exposed to a disease in your thinking over the last few days. I’m familiar with this infection, and once it takes hold in a person I’m afraid it’s shown itself to be quite incurable. It will be with you until you die, in other words. And so, before you can help me, Noah, before I can trust you to do so, we must be certain that this woman and her friends haven’t passed you a sickness that cannot be permitted to spread.”

  The technicians had already begun their preparations. Now some brought heavy copper cables and electrodes and fastened these to various points on Noah’s body with wraps of white tape. A cold dab of conductive gel was applied to his temple on one side, and then on the other.

  “Tm here to save you, Noah,” his father said, “one way or the other, and to preserve my legacy. One of two young men will leave this room with me. The first was taken hostage by this Ross woman and her terrorist militia, but he managed to escape and then bravely risked his life by standing in the road to prevent a group of policemen and federal agents from being killed in that terrible explosion in the desert. This man is a hero, and will carry on my work and be my eyes and ears in the field as our plans proceed.

  “The other man played a part in a similar story, with one sad exception: This other man is dead.”

  Arthur Gardner nodded to one of the seated technicians.

  “And now,” he said, “let’s find out together, once and for all, if Noah Gardner is really his father’s son.”

  CHAPTER 47

  They’d refashioned his bonds in a manner that would still restrain him, but with less likelihood of causing him to injure himself in the course of the coming ordeal. He was instructed to bite down on a length of hard rubber hose they’d placed between his teeth.

  What they did, they’d learned from decades of trial-and-error and thousands of prisoners who’d been down this
last road before him. Even in a clinical setting, electroconvulsive therapy was far more an art than a science; the results were never fully known until the procedure was finished. The goals were different here, but their main purpose was plain: to destroy any remaining will to resist or evade, so the truth would be the only thing he’d be left capable of speaking.

  For a long while his father sat silently next to the metal table as the technicians administered the voltage with a jeweler’s precision. Noah could hear the screams, and he knew they were his, but a small part of him was detached enough to simply observe the suffering.

  His mind, once his greatest, if least used, asset, was no longer under his control. He couldn’t focus on the technicians or the pain and he’d long ago stopped wondering how much longer it would go on. All that was left were random snapshots of the past that flashed uninvited into his head.

  All his defenses had left him hours before. In this state if he’d had any information to reveal he would have gladly offered it, but they were now probing for something much deeper than mere intelligence. Each time he thought there was nothing left, they found another fragile layer of his soul to peel away. In the end, when all he could see was darkness, whatever was left of him finally gave in and tried its best to surrender.

  As if sensing it was finished, the old man stood from the rickety wooden stool and stood over his son. “Now, now, Noah, I think we are both finding out what kind of man you are, and I have to tell you, it’s quite disappointing.” He referred briefly to a sheet of notes he’d been handed. “Inconclusive. I’m sure you know, that’s a word I hate more than any other. And doesn’t it place a sad little period at the end of the story of a rather aimless and forgettable young life?