“Why?”
“They could catch on to what we’re doing any minute and when they do they’ll shut off our high-bandwidth access to the outside—like I said, everything but this old modem carrying the video over the red-phone line.”
“Why didn’t they shut it down immediately?”
“It’s a last resort,” Lana said, “going dark is like doomsday for a place like this. They’ve got a ton of redundant high-speed connections, massive pipes for all the data flowing in and out, and it’s all automated so their clients can have access 24/7. These people live and die by their service record. If they take themselves down, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do. My guess is that they’d prefer to keep this little incident a secret as long as they can. We know they’re pretty good at keeping secrets.
“But once they really realize we’re in here with our hands in the cookie jar? Yeah, they can kill all those links from the edge-routers upstream. I’m working on some half-assed solutions for that—like the dial-up connection for the video—but what I come up with will be slow as hell by comparison, like 1990s slow. Anything big that you want to send from here, we’d better get on with it.”
“Why don’t we just send it all?” Tyler asked. “To hell with it, just do a mass release, while we still can.”
“No,” Molly said. “We don’t have any idea what’s in there. The corporate and diplomatic and financial and military intelligence secrets—the way the world works now, they’re all entwined. We could help our enemies and murder our allies. We could expose every American undercover agent everywhere. We could get a lot of people killed and start a few wars in the process. Letting it all loose without a filter is not an option.”
“So what do we do?” Lana asked.
Molly didn’t answer, so Noah handed over their handwritten list. “Start with those things while we’re thinking this through. Do what you said, find everything related, package it up, and burn what you can to a DVD or something. If the high-speed lines stay up, hide it outside somewhere so we can get it and use it later on.”
“Okay.” As Lana spoke this word the lights overhead flickered briefly. She frowned, did a quick diagnostic on her machine, and then looked over at Noah again. “That’s it,” she said. “We’re already screwed. They’ve done it; we’re cut off.” She typed and clicked to verify this, and then quickly checked the modem line for a carrier. The distinctive screech was still there on the speakerphone. “Yep. Every outgoing connection except the one for the video is down.”
That news was bad, but the picture on the security monitor brought even worse tidings.
Outside, many hundreds of evacuated employees were being pushed back far away from the entrance. A convoy of black SUVs rolled up; the familiar Talion yellow crest adorned their side doors. In the distance, a long line of heavy equipment and weaponry was pulling into a ready position.
The work had barely begun and their grand plot was already uncovered. Now they were trapped in the vault they’d risked everything to get into, with no way to get back out.
“So you’re sure that dial-up video link is still streaming out,” Noah said.
“Yeah,” Lana replied, “but it’s not going to be anything like a hires broadcast. The stream’s just hooked up to one obscure old node in Michigan—”
“Okay, then. Molly, it’s your decision. In the time we’ve got left we can sit right here in front of that camera and you can say what you want, and I’ll read off some of these things we’ve found so far, and we’ll keep going until those guys break in here and do whatever they’re going to do to us. Nobody may ever see it, but at least it’s something after all this. Or, I can go now and find Hollis and the others and see if they’ve found an escape route, and if they have then we can still try to run. Either way, I’m with you.”
He could see her thinking for long seconds, and at last she seemed to come to a very hard and final decision.
“Go and find Hollis,” Molly said. “I guess we’ve got to run.”
Chapter 64
That was it, then. If Hollis and the others had discovered an alternate route to the outside, the time had come to take it.
They’d gone off on their search a while ago and Noah and Tyler set out to find them, leaving Molly and Lana in the computer room with a promise to hurry back soon. Escape was the only priority that remained, and time was short.
Noah could feel it now as well as hear it: a harsh vibration had begun to rattle the walls. It had been soft and isolated at first, but soon it was everywhere, as if the entire mountain above them was trembling under the bit of a giant drill press.
Tyler was the first to spot his mother and Claire and Hollis. The three of them were on their way back, coming up one of the dark side-corridors. As Noah and the boy ran to meet them they saw that the big man barely seemed able to stand on his own.
“Did you find a way out?” Noah asked.
“I think we did,” Cathy Merrick replied. “It’s an air shaft from the oldest part of the mine. It’s steep and it’s pretty tight and we didn’t make it all the way up but it may be the best chance we’ve got.”
A shuddering boom resonated through the corridor as a layer of dust and a loose tile or two fell from the ceiling.
“Where is she?” Hollis breathed. “We have to get Molly.” His eyes were bleary, his voice barely audible.
“How bad is he?” Noah asked.
“He’s not good at all.” Cathy Merrick was supporting him with Claire on his other side.
“Tyler, you stay here with them,” Noah said. “I’ll go back for Molly and Lana. We’re getting out of here.”
As he ran he was careful to memorize the twists and turns of the path back to the computer room. When he came to a particularly confusing crossroads he had to stop for a moment to regain his bearings.
Another of the many wide-screen video security monitors was mounted near the ceiling at this corner. Lana had obviously flipped that switch she’d mentioned; the picture showed multiple views from all over the facility and in the center stood the empty chair from which Molly had hoped to deliver her broadcast exposé over the Web.
On the outside view he could see technicians and laborers working hard on the front gate. Judging by the ever-increasing sounds of digging machines and the occasional detonations they were also trying to come in via other avenues.
A familiar discoloration along the wall reminded him which way to go and he ran full out the rest of the way. When he got to them Lana was still working at her place and Molly was off to the side, praying. He went to the desk first.
“Come on, let’s pack it in,” Noah said. “We’re leaving.”
“There’s something here you need to see,” Lana said.
“Not now, we don’t have the time.”
“We’ve got time for this. She wants you to see it, and you may never get another chance.”
Just one more minute, he told himself. That would give Molly a little space to finish her prayers—heaven knows they needed all the help they could get—and then they would go. “Okay, make it quick.”
“One of the items you wrote down, ‘Trapwire, Abraxas, Stingray, RIOT, and TIA,’ do you even know what those things are?”
“It was just something I remembered from my father’s work in New York, from last year. No, I don’t know what it is, but it seemed important and awfully secretive.”
“Well, this is what it is,” Lana said. “TIA stands for total information awareness. It was a post-9/11 program that supposedly got killed because it was too scary, even for those times. But it’s still alive, and it’s right here, linked directly to that giant intelligence complex they’ve built out in Utah. I’m going to use it now to do a search on you. Take a look at what comes up.”
She typed in his name and hit ENTER, selected his specific record from the resulting list of other Noah Gardners, and moments later a flicker of cascading documents, forms, and profiles flooded onto the screen.
“That’s no
t a surprise,” Noah said. “Of course they’re keeping tabs on me. What would you expect after all this—”
“Wait. Now give me any name at all, someone from high school; pick the most boring, harmless person you can think of.”
“Howard Pankin from Great Neck, New York,” Noah said. “I don’t see the point of this.”
Lana entered the name and again the screen filled with an elaborate profile. It was every bit as extensive as Noah’s had been. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of detail: locations and driving routes, purchase histories, private accounts and memberships, political leanings, medical records, school records, financial statements, friends and associates, phone records and transcripts, Internet tracks—and photographs.
These weren’t just the pictures this ordinary man had taken and put up on Facebook; they were pictures of him from every angle and life situation. They were from traffic cameras, street cameras, store cameras, work cameras, restroom cameras, phone cameras, bus and subway cameras; even his gaming console and his Webcam on his own home computer had supplied a folder of embarrassing images in which he clearly didn’t know he was being monitored.
Noah leaned closer, trying to understand. “What does this mean?” he asked.
“It means they’re watching every last one of us,” Lana said. “They’re linking all their electronic eyes and ears together, storing everything about us, cradle to grave. They’re building a case against each of us so nobody can ever step out of line without getting punished for it. Don’t you see, it’s the individuals they’re afraid of. They can use this to predict who’s going to cause them trouble and then stop them before they ever get started.”
“Good God.”
“Yeah. Take a look.” She called up a master listing of all records in this massive table. The number of entries flagged USA was 347,168,099.
As he watched, that number incremented by one.
“And that means . . .”
“Another serf was just born, in St. Louis,” Lana said. She brought up that new record. There was a first photo, with tiny hand- and footprints right beside. The data form started out empty but it didn’t stay that way for long. Soon the first few fields filled in. It was a boy, he was Caucasian, he was born to a single mother in the fifth generation of a family supported solely by the State, and even before he had a name, he had a number.
“How are we still seeing this?” Noah asked. “I thought the Internet was down.”
“Not this,” Lana said. “I don’t think this thing ever goes down.”
Another blast shook the room, this one nearer still, and it snapped him back to the situation at hand. “Let’s move,” he said, and as Lana gathered her things he went over to Molly and knelt beside her.
“Honey, we really have to go now.”
She shook her head. “I changed my mind,” she said. “Lana told me what she found. I have to show them—”
“It’s too late, Molly. We’re too late to show them anything. We have to try to get out of here, and then we can think of what to do next once you’re safe.”
She didn’t answer, but at his gentle urging she let herself be lifted up and led along. He held on to Molly’s hand as the three of them ran back along the path to where the others were waiting.
Hollis was visibly worse by then and fading fast. Noah and Tyler shared some of his weight as they all set off on the winding path toward an exit they weren’t even sure was there.
The rough corridor gradually narrowed until up ahead they saw the last door between the modern construction and the older passages of the mine. They’d just dragged themselves through this portal when another explosion rocked the place. This time the tremors seemed to spread and multiply as though a deep fault in the mountain had been disturbed. The earth heaved and everyone was thrown from their feet.
When it was quiet again, Noah reached out to find her hand again, but Molly was gone.
The door behind them slammed shut and he heard the bolt on the other side slide home.
“No,” he whispered.
Noah clawed his way to the door and threw his fists against it, calling out to her. Through the small glass window he could see her in there feeling her way back along the route they’d come. He grabbed the handle and strained against it with everything he had but it held fast. Desperate, he took the flashlight and ran ahead to look for another way around, but the tunnel only constricted further. From that point on there was no other way back.
His companions cleared the path as he returned to the sealed door. Through its cloudy window he could just see the security monitor mounted high on the other side. The wide screen still showed the multi-inset view that Lana had wired together before.
And soon there she was, in the middle of the screen. Molly had found the chair they’d set up for her in the computer room and was seated there. She leaned forward and felt for the microphone, touched the button on its base that would activate it, faced the nearby camera, and began to speak.
On the upper corner of the monitor he saw the fortified entrance at the front of the place being pushed inward and the truck they’d left to block the way skidding aside like a toy. The gigantic blade of a bulldozer pulled back through the opening and then a squad of men rushed in.
Noah pounded again on the door, harder and harder until he felt the bones in his hands nearly break against the unyielding metal. When there was no more will in him he pressed his ear to the thick glass. He could just barely hear what she was saying over the intercom speakers inside.
“I came here to tell you the whole truth,” Molly said, “and then I got here and realized that’s been tried before. These people who want to run the world, all their secret knowledge is here, but you don’t really need those secrets to see what they’re about. All you have to do is look around you, and really listen. They’ve already told you exactly what they’ve got in mind for you.
“It’s not their own secrets they’re so interested in keeping anymore. It’s your secrets they want. They’re building this vast, all-seeing eye, I’m sitting here in the midst of it, and I know you’ve heard about pieces of what they’re doing, but do you realize why they’re doing it? They’re trying to see into your heart, people, into every corner of your mind, and believe me, it isn’t so they can answer your prayers. It’s a power they want because it belongs to God. Most of us have only sat by and watched as they stole everything that’s ours. Now they’re trying to take what’s His, as well.
“It won’t be me that continues this fight to restore what’s been lost; it’s got to be you. All of you, anyone who hears this, it’s up to you now. I’m not asking you to all be the same, to all think the same; it’s your precious differences that once made this country great, and can still make it great again. All I’m asking you to do is remember what it means to be an American.
“I’ve talked enough; I’m not going to say any more. No more talk about the past. I’m going to let your enemies show you who they are, and the evil that you good people are up against in this battle that never ends. Let them show you what’s always at the end of this one-way, progressive road they’re building toward your future. And then it’s up to you to choose whose side you’re on.”
There was a clatter in the background and Molly raised her empty hands in surrender. There were tears in her pretty eyes, not because she was afraid, he imagined, but rather because there was so much she’d left undone.
A man in full body armor walked up beside her, put the muzzle of his pistol against her temple, turned briefly to share this moment of triumph with his gathered colleagues, and then shot Molly Ross in the head.
Chapter 65
His mind was struck numb with shock and sorrow, and Noah was still moving only for the sake of the others.
Had he been alone he would have waited to be found and then gladly died fighting them with his raw and bleeding hands, just so he could feel in some small way that he was beside her again. But he wasn’t alone, and so they ran.
/> The tunnel shrank to barely shoulder-width as the path continued to ascend. They were exhausted, arms and legs worn out from the long climb, dragging their wounded and barely able to keep their footing on the slick stone. The climb only got harder but still they pressed on.
Noah was in the lead when he smelled fresh air and soon after he saw the metal grate at the end of the line. He braced himself against the drag of the slope and kicked hard into this final barrier, and again, and again until it began to weaken at the rusty frame and finally gave way.
He pulled himself from the tunnel and emerged into a small clearing; there wasn’t any visible sign of civilization on this side of the mountain. Tyler Merrick was next. The two of them together helped the others out and onto the cold, wet ground and when that was done there was no strength left to stand.
No one arose from where they lay. Whether it was fatigue alone, or that plus all the sadness and defeat of what they’d just endured, they all stayed right where they were, motionless but finally breathing freedom.
“All of you, hold it right there.”
The firm, cold voice had come from a shadow near the trees.
Hollis was lying motionless beside him and Noah reached over for the gun in his belt, but before he could touch it a boot came down hard on his injured hand and pressed it to the turf. The blinding glare of a flashlight hit his face.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
If this was to be the end, Noah thought, then he should answer as Molly might have done.
He was worn out and winded, his chest still ached from the strain of the run and from the loss of her, but he brought himself up to an elbow and looked the man above him in the eyes. Noah formed his words carefully, giving a breath to each of them so at least one by one they’d be as strong as she would have wanted them to be.