“So what?”
“So if you’re all on this great mission, shouldn’t you be out there saving the country instead of sitting here?”
From the mouths of babes, Hollis thought. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but in a few minutes down the hall that very important question would be put to a final vote.
Chapter 17
Hollis wasn’t anxious to get where he had to go, so he took the scenic route to the dining room.
When he could avoid his destination no longer he arrived at the meeting place with the sheaf of printouts he’d collected from the Web. He paced for a while, listening in, before finally opening the door to step inside. The program was going full steam by then, and the current speaker went right ahead without taking much notice as Hollis found a seat near Molly’s side.
The spirit of ’76 was running high in these people, and it sounded all too familiar. They were deep in their Founding Fathers’ roles, talking on about various grassroots actions to ignite a reawakening in the American people.
Samuel Adams stressed the critical importance of the clergy as a sure route to reach a wider, sympathetic congregation—there were 180 million churchgoers across America who might be reached with this message through the pulpit. Alexander Hamilton put forth a more political agenda, with goals secured by throwing the group’s support behind enlightened and right-minded candidates in future elections. Ethan Allen spoke of organized boycotts, protests, and other high-profile public acts of civil resistance meant to raise awareness of the unfolding crisis threatening to destroy the great country they loved.
Incredibly, they proposed these things as though they were actually possible, as though some vast and dormant constituency was out there just waiting to embrace the message, hit the streets, and take up the cause.
Hollis watched Molly through each of the impassioned speeches. With every untenable tactic put forth and debated, not a trace of uncertainty showed on her face. She looked as driven and determined as ever, ready to take any measure whatever the risk, as long as the action might move their campaign of liberty forward.
And when it was Molly’s turn to speak, Hollis learned that she had an idea of her own that made the others seem mild by comparison.
In her past work as a white-collar spy and whistle-blower, Molly would infiltrate her target organizations and then, through contacts in the press, leak what she’d learned to the world at large. These escapades would sometimes yield a few days of below-the-fold headlines before fading into the general swamp of corruption and vice in the news. More often than not, though, the stories found no traction and simply disappeared. By and large the public seemed to have grown completely immune to outrage anymore.
The problem had been one of scale, she now said, not of substance. This time, rather than taking on these targets and exposing them piecemeal, Molly proposed an elaborate scheme to bring about a single, massive day of truth-telling far too big for her enemies to cover up.
Apparently she’d been thinking this through for a long while. When they’d been together in New York, Noah Gardner had inadvertently told Molly of the place where his father sent the most sensitive and damning information concerning his list of powerful clients. And it wasn’t only Arthur Gardner, but all the scheming villains in every hidden seat of power—in government, in media, in activist corporations, in global finance, every one of them, right to the very top—they all stored the evidence of their dark designs in this one ultrasecure facility.
This near-mythological place was called Garrison Archives, and its heavily guarded doorway was Molly’s new finish line. Her goal was to take a team and travel east to open up this vault of secrets to the sunlight, unmasking the enemy’s agenda all at once in a scorched-earth exposé that finally couldn’t be ignored.
No one present raised the slightest concern at the prospect of such a dangerous, one-way mission, and “one-way” described it perfectly. It was clever to a fault, right up until the all-important moment of the getaway. This group talked a lot about miracles and, at the end of such a fool’s errand, they’d need one.
After all his warnings, after all they’d just been through, the sad truth of their situation still hadn’t dawned on these people.
At last he’d heard enough. Before he could temper the impulse he brought the flat of his hand down onto the table, hard, and put the whole room quiet at the sound.
“No,” Hollis said.
The others turned to him and stared.
Not being a bona fide member of the group, he had no official voice in these meetings. But in another area—when it came to Molly’s safety—he would always hold the deciding vote.
“I’ve tried to tell you every way I know how”—Hollis stood as he continued—“but somehow it ain’t sunk in. So let me put the hay down where the goats can get it. We’ve lost, people. The other side won.
“I guess you’ve all forgotten where we were a few days ago, so I’ll remind you. We had no food or water or shelter and no money to buy any more. We’d been chased until we’d finally painted ourselves into a corner and had no place left to run. We were one inch away from being dead and gone forever, and you can thank God all you want but dumb luck and some damned neo-Nazis were the only things that pulled us through and got us here.
“And this house we’re in? Far as I can tell this is the home of the last friends we’ve got. If you don’t believe me, you read what I’ve been reading.” As Hollis shoved his tall stack of Internet printouts the papers fanned across the polished table and some slid onto the floor.
“Go on and read it if you’ve got the stomach, but I’ll summarize. After what happened last year to put us on the run, everybody else has turned tail and jumped ship. The things we believe in have been thoroughly smeared and demonized in the mainstream press, and they’d treat every one of you the same way if they’d bother to talk about you at all. You’re just the butt of a vulgar joke to the majority of people who never took you serious in the first place. Outside of this house the only folks that still seem to want us are employed by the FBI.
“The most we can do now is try to survive. So I say it stops, right here. I say we disappear while that option’s still available. The minute I see that it’s safe we’ll hightail it up north. We’ve got a place there that’s all built for us, dug-in and ready, and we’ll ride out the crash and make the best lives we can in what’s left of this country in the aftermath.
“This time, what I say goes,” Hollis continued. “That’s the way it’s going to be. You all fought the good fight, and everyone who matters still respects you for what you tried to do. But it’s over now.”
He waited for a rebuttal, having come fully armed to make his case, but none came forth.
They might have already known these things—how could they not?—and had managed to stay in a fragile state of denial, swept along one day to the next, borne on false hope, until finally faced here with the indisputable facts from one of their own.
A few had begun to read from the printed pages he’d brought, touching the words with their fingers, grim and baffled as if they’d come across their own obituaries in the Sunday morning gazette. The rest, it seemed, didn’t really need the confirmation. As the silence persisted all of them appeared to be slowly deflating from the soul on outward. The heroes they’d each embodied were dissipating before his eyes, retreating from the needful present to resume their hallowed place in history.
Then, before he knew what was happening, Molly had taken up her guide dog’s harness and run from the room.
By the time he caught up with her she’d already made it to her suite. He found her kneeling by the side of her bed, but this time she wasn’t praying. She was weeping from some awful place deep inside. An admission of defeat this final was something she’d never had to face before.
Hollis sat next to her, near enough so she would know he was there, but he didn’t try to comfort her. Coming from him, the things normally said at these times would all ring hollow
because he knew them to be empty and untrue.
Everything will be all right.
Better days are coming.
This, too, shall pass.
And of course, Have faith.
Her breathing eased after a time, her hand found his, and she said only a single word, but it was enough.
“Okay.”
“Good,” Hollis said. “Now don’t you trouble yourself; you stay and rest. I’ll tell the others myself.” He paused before deciding to leave her with the only bit of good news that he had. “I got word this morning that Noah Gardner made it through that battle up at Gannett Peak. He’s hurt, but he’s alive, Molly. And he’d want you to stay that way, too.”
When he returned to the group they were still assembled and waiting. They took the news of their coming retreat better than he might have expected, and just like that, it was over.
Hollis stood at the window of the dining room after the others had left to return to their quarters. In the end they’d seemed relieved, more so than their still-tenuous situation should warrant. These days, to disappear completely was a difficult thing. Safety was within reach, but they weren’t nearly there yet.
Then, across the enclosed interior garden he saw that ancient woman again, seated in a rocking chair, watching him from a second-story dormer in the rustic, original part of the Merrick house.
Just as he had at dinner, he tried at first to convince himself that she couldn’t really be focused on him from such a distance. But no, she saw him all right, and that black scowl of hers was locked on like a geriatric heat-seeker.
It wasn’t just the old lady that seemed to be haunting him. Outside the sky was as clear and blue as he’d ever seen it; the winds were unusually calm for that time of year. This peace and quiet was deceptive, though.
At high altitude a glitter of sunlight reflected off something that shouldn’t be there. If that something overhead was one of those domestic government drones that were all over the news, up there searching and watching, it only confirmed his decision.
They were down to one choice, now: hunker down, keep watch, pack and prepare, and then at the first safe opportunity, sneak out and run for their lives into hiding.
Chapter 18
As sunrise touched the spires of the man-made paradise of Dubai City, Aaron Doyle awoke in his palatial bedroom among the clouds to a gentle pattering against the windows. It was the quiet, comforting sound of the desert rain he had summoned the night before.
He let sleep depart him slowly; morning was the worst time of day for the discomforts of his age. Over the years every organ, joint, and tissue that medical science could improve had been surgically repaired or replaced—some more than once—but wherever the decaying original parts were still in service the pain in them was constant and every movement scraped nerve against bone.
He wasn’t quite ready to face the physical punishments of a new day; the dawn could wait. Instead, as his dreams of the preceding night were still lingering he would close his eyes and hang on to the memories for a little while longer. There in his mind he’d be young again, in a place where time itself had not yet turned against him.
In those olden days, youth was a near-terminal condition that only the strong survived. After fleeing to America to escape the Czar’s persecutions, he settled into the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. From a family of ten he’d seen his younger brothers and sisters taken one by one by the pestilence that arose amid the squalor of the breeding poor—smallpox, dysentery, influenza, pneumonia, and scarlet fever.
He’d somehow cheated death by epidemic only to be rounded up in quarantine, locked far away from the privileged classes, fenced off with the untended sick and dying as cholera stalked the fetid slums. It was there that his parents had passed away, but again, he’d somehow lived on.
Where disease had failed, starvation and exposure nearly killed him. Barely an adolescent, he was all alone in the cold gray city, a scrawny urchin from a despised minority living on whatever he could beg or steal.
Between the cops and the hoodlums there was nowhere safe to hide. He ran errands and grifted and panhandled until one day a local boss took a shine to him and he was brought under the wing of the Eastman Gang. Those street boys could have schooled the modern Crips and Bloods about thug life, and they showed their new mascot the simple laws of survival in the depths of that cruel metropolis.
They changed his name to one less likely to invite harassment and discrimination—Ilya Reinier became Aaron Doyle. As he rose through their ranks and learned to live by his wits, he also taught himself to read and write and speak in English like an educated native son.
In a few years’ time Aaron Doyle felt the limits of a life of petty larceny. Though he’d found his first taste of success as a thief and a confidence man, the triumph over his childhood trials had convinced him that he must have been chosen for something much higher.
Through the gang’s connections with the Sons of St. Tammany he’d already seen that the true, gold-paved path to riches led down the very thin line between politics and organized crime. While his cohorts were mostly called upon for strong-arm tactics and intimidation at the polls, young Aaron spent his time in the smoke-filled rooms, forging friendships among those who greased the wheels of the corrupt New York machine.
In the course of his candlelight studies, as he sought to find his way to the next milestone of achievement, he’d discovered something fundamental. A moment before it had been invisible, but once perceived it was so obvious that he couldn’t imagine how it had ever eluded his grasp. Through this single, sudden insight his true life’s work began.
While guns and knives could strike fear and level threats, leaders rarely rose to greatness through violence alone. No, he’d already seen the most fearsome weapons ever conceived, and he’d seen them in his books. They’d been wielded throughout man’s brutal history by despots and saviors alike. The ones who built and brought down nations, amassed fortunes, murdered millions, and founded dynasties, at the core their mighty war machines were built of nothing more than words.
When he was nineteen and the New York Times had just marked forty-six years in business, he left his gangland years behind, donned a suit and tie, and walked into the newspaper offices to seek an entry-level job. He had no credentials, no references, no experience, and no degree; all he brought to recommend him was a clever pitch and a masthead slogan he’d written, which they quickly purloined: All the News That’s Fit to Print.
From copy boy to typesetter to cub reporter to columnist, his roles soon brought him into contact with the captains of thriving empires of their own invention: Ford, Woolworth, Carnegie, Bell, Hilton, Lehman, Warburg, Westinghouse, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Edison, and more. He wrote their stories when they would allow the exposure, elbowed his way into inner circles, and learned from everyone. Along the way he saw elections swung, wars ignited, genocides launched, great men created and destroyed, kings enthroned and deposed, all through the awesome, subtle persuasion of the printed and spoken word.
As his skills improved he grew to prominence in the most powerful medium of its day. Then quite by chance he happened to meet a grudging admirer named William Merchant. Their first fiery discussion had nearly been their last, but after much correspondence over the ensuing months a permanent bond had formed between them. Neither would ever call it a friendship; their differences were far too profound. From background to worldview, in fact, they had only one thing in common. For as long as they could remember, they’d both had a recurring vision that they would one day change the world.
Their ambitions were diametrically opposed: one dreamed to tame and rule mankind, the other to free it. While they never stopped battling over which had conceived the most fitting destiny for the species, they each had a keen understanding of the dark magic they would use to pursue their aims. They each knew they would need a vast fortune to fund their efforts, and they also knew that, despite their rivalry, they could amass that wealth
far better together than alone.
And so, hand in hateful hand, Doyle & Merchant would build a business empire and found a secretive industry of public influence, media control, and mind manipulation. Their century-defining science wouldn’t even have a name until it was later brought to unwelcome prominence by a brash young protégé named Edward Bernays.
In the late 1960s their company was left in the able care of Arthur Gardner, a devoted colleague Doyle had come to love like the son he’d never had. But despite his announced retirement, the globe-spanning work of Aaron Doyle had continued without pause. His philosophical rivalry with William Merchant still raged to the present moment—such is the nature of a fight to the death—even though the two men had long since parted ways.
They’d last seen one another in the flesh in late November 1941, and it was the first time they had ever come to blows. This had been the culmination of their most vicious and personal contest so far, concerning the question of whether the United States would intervene against the Axis powers in World War II.
The incitement of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had been a brilliant move by his opponent to be sure, but the resulting reversal of fortunes created a rift between the partners from which their strange, contentious relationship would never again recover.
He remembered feeling much younger then, but on that day that would live in infamy, Aaron Doyle was sixty-three.
This coming November—the gods and doctors willing and barring anything unforeseen—three most significant things would come to pass: his plans to unite this miserable world under the iron fist of a new social order would finally come to their fruition; he would at last declare a decisive win against the libertarian delusions of his old nemesis, William Merchant; and he would become only the third man in recorded human history to turn 132 years old.