Glenn Beck - The Overton Window

Monday, about noon; he’d been dead to the world for forty hours. Noah tried his best to let that sink in as two of the men helped him to his feet. They stayed close, as though half expecting him to collapse immediately if he tried to walk on his own.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

The woman looked at him, and her demeanor had noticeably chilled. It’s a thing with some doctors; the instant you’re well they don’t see much use in courtesy.

“Your father wants to see you,” she said.

“What time zone is Nevada?” Danny called out toward the trailer’s kitchenette. His watch was a Rolex knockoff and it wasn’t easy to reset, so whenever he was traveling he always put off messing with it for as long as possible. This, however, was shaping up to be a day when he’d need to know the time.

“Pacific Standard, same as L.A.,” Agent Kearns shouted back. “It’s about twenty-five after eight.”

They’d both overslept a bit and now there was a rush to get on the road. To add to the tension Kearns had said he’d been unable to reach his FBI contact the night before, and this morning he’d received a rather cryptic e-mail from their new terrorist brethren.

The message had been from the missing man, the one named Elmer. There was to be another meeting this afternoon, the real meeting this time, at which the weapon would be exchanged for the money, and some final brainstorming would take place on the eve of tomorrow’s planned bombing in downtown Las Vegas. The rendezvous was set for 5 p.m., out somewhere in the desert so far from civilization that only a latitude and longitude were provided as a guide to get there.

Between the two of them Danny was more capable on the computer, so it had been entrusted to him to plan the route to this remote location through a visit to MapQuest. While Kearns was in the bathroom Danny had logged on to his favorite anonymous e-mailing site and fired off a quick text update to his staff in Chicago, with a copy to Molly and a short list of other trusted compatriots:

* FYI ONLY DO NOT FORWARD DELETE AFTER READING *

Big mtg today, Monday PM, southern

Nevada. If you don’t hear from me by

Wednesday I’m probably dead*, and this is

where to hunt for the body:

Lat 37°39’54.35”N Long 116°56’31.48“W

› S T A Y A W A Y from Nevada TFN ‹

* I wish I was kidding

The message was safely gone, the browser history deleted, and the map to the meeting location printed out and ready by the time Kearns returned to the room.

When the artificial bomb was loaded into the van again Danny sat in the shotgun seat and waited, warming his hands around a cup of instant coffee as the engine idled. An eight-hour drive was ahead, with an unknown outcome waiting at the end of it, but all things considered, he felt unusually calm.

Kearns appeared a minute or so later, but when he was halfway out to the vehicle he stopped and lightly smacked himself on the forehead as though something important had almost slipped his mind. He turned back and hurried to the front door of the trailer, unlocked it and held it open, called inside, and gestured for half a minute until that moth-eaten cat appeared and scampered past him out into the barren yard. Then Agent Kearns knelt and filled an inverted hubcap with water from the hose and set it carefully near the stairs, in a spot where it would stay cool in the shade for most of the day.

This was a thing any person might do if they owned a pet and knew they’d be away on a trip until late tomorrow. But, and it was hard just then to put his finger on precisely why, it certainly seemed to Danny like this man thought he might be going away for an awful lot longer than that.

After they’d delivered him to 500 Fifth Avenue Noah’s escorts waited outside his suite as he took a quick shower and then changed into the neatly folded set of fresh clothes his secretary had arranged for him. The entourage then proceeded with him across the twenty-first floor to the far corner office.

Arthur Gardner was there behind his desk, looking thoughtful and sober as a judge, long fingers knit together, slightly reclined and contemplating in his favorite leather chair.

Charlie Nelan was standing by the window. He looked over, then shook his head almost imperceptibly as Noah met his eyes. Charlie seemed worn-out and wired at the same time, his wrinkled shirt undone at the collar, sleeves rolled up to the forearms, no necktie. This was far from the lawyer’s polished public face; it was the look of a man who’d been awakened from a sound sleep to help fight a five-alarm fire.

The doctor had given Noah an unlabeled prescription bottle that contained a number of small white pills. It was a low-dose oral variation of the drug in the shot he’d received earlier, meant to counteract the lingering effects of that anesthetic patch she’d peeled off his chest when they found him. He’d taken one of the pills already, and it helped, but even with the aid of the drug he still felt like he’d just stepped off the Tilt-A-Whirl. The bottle rattled in his pocket as he sat in a chair that was pulled up for him, across the wide desk from his father.

The boss of the firm’s security service, an ex-mercenary hard guy named Warren Landers, consulted for a few moments with his four employees who’d brought Noah in. There’d been only a few occasions in the past when Noah had come in close contact with this man but it hadn’t taken very long to get the intended impression. Landers was the bully in the schoolyard who’d grown up and found himself an executive job where he could dress up and get paid for doing what he still loved to do. There was always an undertone when he spoke, a smirk in his eyes as if something about you was the punch line of a running joke he was telling in his head.

At a slight wave from Arthur Gardner the four underlings left the room and Mr. Landers walked over and stood next to the desk. With everyone facing his chair Noah got the feeling it was his turn to say something, but he was lost as to what it should be.

“Dad-”

“I’m happy to see that you weren’t hurt,” the old man said. He certainly didn’t look happy, but the words seemed sincere enough considering their source.

“How did you find me?”

“The same way I found you last Friday night, at the police station,” Charlie said. “We found your cell phone. They’d taken out the battery, but someone put it back in and turned the phone on about an hour ago.”

Noah thought about that for a moment. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand-you tracked my cell phone? How did you do that?”

Landers finessed right past that question. “The first piece,” he said, “was that we figured out who leaked that government document to the press last week.”

“Who was it?”

“It was scanned and sent out from right here. About two hours after it came into the mailroom.”

“I don’t believe it,” Noah said.

Landers picked up a manila folder from the desk and put it in Noah’s hands. “Take a look for yourself,” he said.

The tab on the folder wasn’t labeled and the paper inside was still warm from the copier. The top document was the cover page of a dossier, and the bold heading was just a name: Molly Ross.

He flipped the page to find a breadcrumb trail of computer activity sent up from the IT department. There was her log-in and some fairly cagey attempts to hide the suspicious actions through a proxy mask, along with the e-mail message in question, addressed to a list of a few hundred recipients outside the company firewall. And there was the attachment that contained a digitized version of the formerly secret DHS memorandum.