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?”
Chapter 35
Noah’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?”
“Twenty-seven hundred and four,” Lana Somin said, only half listening, and without even breaking her stride at the keyboard.
“I’ll go with that.”
“You’re a little low, my young friends,” Ira said, and he picked up a pencil from the desk. “There are about one hundred and fifty sextillion atoms in this little yellow stub, including the eraser, but that number isn’t even close to the answer. The fact is, there are as many ways to rearrange this deck of cards as there are atoms in our entire galaxy.”
“No way,” Noah said.
“Yes way.” He put down the pencil and then shuffled again. “And that means that of all the games and all the decks that have ever existed in all of history, it’s almost impossible that these fifty-two cards right here have ever been stacked in precisely this way before, or that they ever will be again.”
Lana slowly removed her headphones, frowning and looking very thoughtful. “I totally hate to say it, but he’s right.”
“Wonders seem so hard to come by these days,” Ira said. “I take them wherever I can find them.” He got up and walked to the phonograph. “What’ll it be today? Old Blue Eyes? Duke Ellington?”
Noah shrugged. “I’m sure whatever you play will be fine.”
“Then I guess you’ve never heard the Harmonicats,” Lana said.
They’d just gotten down to work again when a red light flashed over the doorway and out in the hall a harsh buzzer began to sound. The other two stopped what they were doing, rolled back their chairs and placed their hands in their laps, and at an urging from Ira, Noah did the same.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“You’ll see.”
Two people wearing security uniforms came into the room, and one by one they visited the three occupied desks, examined the computers, opened the drawers, swept an electronic wand here and there over each of the workers and their belongings, performed cursory pat-downs, made some notes on their handheld screens, and then without saying a word left again and closed the door behind them.
“Where are we, at the iPhone factory? Does that happen a lot?”
“I told you there were no cameras in here,” Ira said. “Spot inspections are one of the trade-offs for that.” He picked up his cards again, and shuffled. “They’re not supposed to keep a schedule but they’ve gotten very predictable. We won’t see them again for a week or so.”
This was Ira Gershon’s day to write his newspaper fillers, and all through the morning he’d stopped occasionally to share a particularly interesting factoid with his coworkers.
“Did you know,” Ira said, “that sea otters hold hands with their mates while they’re sleeping so they won’t drift apart in the night?”
“Some of us are trying to concentrate here,” Lana snapped. “I swear I can’t take much more of this.
‘Did you know that ninety percent of all pumpkins come from Peoria, Illinois? Did you know that there are nine thousand metric tons of ants on earth? Did you know that Flipper’s real name was Kathy, and when the TV show was canceled she committed suicide?’ I know exactly how that fish felt, Grandpa.”
“Dolphins are mammals.”
The girl got up abruptly. “I’m going to the bathroom, and we’re going to start this day all over, my way, when I get back.”
The two men were alone, then, and Ira came closer and sat down by Noah’s side. When he spoke his previously jaunty mood had darkened a bit and turned quite serious.
“Did you listen last night, like I told you,” he asked, “to the radio that I gave to you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what did you hear?”
“I got a late start, so I only heard the very last part of the Gettysburg Address. And at the end, the guy said, ‘We are Americans. God bless Molly Ross.’ ”
Ira nodded. “I want to ask you about what you said yesterday, about it being too late to save this country. Is that how you really feel?”
Noah paused before he answered. “I don’t want to believe that, but—”
“Then don’t believe it. That’s the first step. Noah, I know they’re trying to get you to help them bring her in. Never mind how I know, I know. I’m here to tell you, that’s not what you were meant to do.”
“What do you mean? What was I meant to do?”
“Take this.” Ira quickly looked both ways and then handed over a small memory stick on a neck-chain. There was also a sheet of paper, folded and sealed, tucked into its pocket clip.
“Is it from her?”
“No, smart guy, it’s from me. Now, we don’t have much time. You look at what I gave you there later tonight, listen some more to that little radio, and then after that, read what I wrote to you in that note. I hope it all may change your mind about things.”
“Okay, but—”
“And promise me this: whatever happens, the three of us, you and I and Lana, we’ll stay together. We’ve all made the same enemy, and I hope you can see that he’s only keeping us around temporarily. We’re only still here because they haven’t figured out what to do with us exactly, but that won’t last forever. I don’t care about myself, but just like you, that girl was meant for bigger things than to wither away in this place. One way or another, whether it’s fast or slow, that’s what’s in store for all of us. So if you get a chance to leave here you’ll take us with you, understand?”
“Of course I will, if I can,” Noah said. “That’s a promise.”
Chapter 36
Noah returned to his room that evening and after a quick walkthrough to ensure he had the place to himself, he went directly to the computer.
There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that everything he did on this PC was being monitored, right down to the keystroke. The only question was how closely. Was someone watching in real time or was the spying more passive? Ultimately he decided that it didn’t matter; he was going to do what he was going to do.
The sealed note attached to the storage device that Ira had given him said “READ ME LAST” on its outer surface and so he put the paper aside for the moment. Then he found an open USB port on the machine, slipped in the memory stick, and watched as the screen responded.
A menu of videos appeared along with a listing of their archived locations on the Internet. The addresses were strange and unconventional, as though they referred to remote and secret places hidden safely outside the reach of the day-to-day corporate search engines. These files would be exceedingly hard to find if you didn’t know where to look, and so they’d also be difficult to scrub away if those in charge should ever feel inclined to order them removed.
He clicked on the first one, not really knowing what to expect. Maybe it would be yet another stirring but toothless speech from a fringe-libertarian rally, maybe some clip of Molly or one of her faithful, firing up the fresh recruits back in the days before they’d all been made into outcasts and targets of terrorism investigations.
The video began to play then, and if he’d been given a thousand tries to guess what it would show, what he saw next still would have surprised him.
It was a transfer of a grainy old analog videotape. A reporter was introducing a story from the location of a large, loud Washington protest march that had taken place at the height of the Vietnam War, while Nixon was still riding high. The camera turned to the subject of the reporter’s interview, and there stood a young Jaime Wilson—Noah’s mother.
Though his mom did pop up for a few embarrassing seconds in that Woodstock movie, other than that Noah had only photographs to remember her by. Those pictures were from later on, when she’d become a wife and a mother. Here she seemed barely older than Lana Somin but as fearless and confident in front of the camera as any seasoned spokesperson could be.
In the various videos it became clear that she’d been at the heart of a number of grassroots organizations, all dedicated to fighting and exposing the corruption that even then was dragging her troubled country toward disaster. But, one by one, she’d left the groups she’d helped create as they’d gradually been taken over by provocateurs and radicals. These agents—people like Warren Landers—had either come to weaken her work from within or to push these once-peaceful movements toward the violent paths of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen.
He watched each clip in utter fascination, lost in the sound of her voice and the strength of a message even more relevant today than it was back then. This was a part of his own history that he’d never known before, and as she spoke it was as though her words were for him alone. When he’d gone through all the files he came back to that first one to watch it again. At the end the reporter had asked her to sum up her message to the young people of America.
“My message,” Jaime Wilson said, “is that if you want things to change, first you’ve got to commit. Don’t look to me or anyone else, look inside. Educate yourself, learn from history, this has all happened before and it’ll happen again. And you can’t just grab a sign and find a march and think you’ve made a difference. You’ve got to wise up before you rise up.
“Every generation thinks it’s all going to be different when they finally get into power. They think a better world is coming just as soon as the old folks die off. Not true.
“This country only works if good people get involved. That better world you want won’t come on its own, and if you think watching from the sidelines and making clever comments and sniping and whining is doing something, you’d better think again. Don’t go to sleep at night until you’ve made this a better place than it was that morning. That’s my message: you’re the key. Without you we’ll all be dead and gone before we ever see peace and prosperity again.”
Noah got up from the computer in a daze, walked into the other room, and then saw Ira’s little radio on his bedside table. He sat down, put in the earpiece, and listened to the faint signal coming through. It sounded like an old recording of a speech that was playing, though he didn’t recognize the voice.
We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it is time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
With that the broadcast ended, concluding with the same sign-off as the previous night.
Noah was tired and troubled and it was getting late, but he remembered the folded note that Ira had given him. When he found it on the desk where he’d left i
t, he unfolded it and began to read.
Noah,
There’s a reason you were born in these times, and yes, to the father and the mother you were born to. There’s a reason you met Molly Ross when you did, if only you’ll believe what I know to be true.
I see something in you, Noah, and Molly did, too. I always look for signs, messages of guidance from above, and one was sent to me late last night as I sat at my old, broken typewriter, shuffling my cards and for whatever reason, looking for a sign in the letters of your name. And that sign was sent down to me then, in such a way that only I could receive it. That’s how I know that it’s real. I give it to you here.
Believe it, Noah, and then go and be the man you were born to be.
This previous section was handwritten; the final part was only two short typed lines. The first of these was Noah’s own last name, though with that uniquely imperfect d on Ira’s typewriter it appeared to be misspelled:
g a r d n e r
He felt a knot in his stomach the size of a softball as he read the line just below. There, the letters of his name had been reshuffled and arranged into a new order.
r r e d g a n
Oh, come on now.
He laughed aloud, sitting all alone in his room, and he wished that Ellen or any other sane and rational person could be there to help him counteract the craziness. No, it was beyond just crazy. Talk about grabbing at straws—
Noah’s thoughts were interrupted by a quiet knock at the door. He walked over and opened it to find Ellen Davenport standing there.
“Ellen,” he said. “I was just thinking about you. I thought you’d have gone home by now. Come in, you’ve got to see this.”
She stepped inside and hugged him for a long while, and there were tears in her eyes as she looked up into his. “I’m so sorry, Noah.”