Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

“Fine.” Landers caught the eye of one of the henchmen, pointed across the table to a pair of navy blue folders from his emptied bag, and said, “We’ll need those.”

When there was no immediate movement to comply, he snapped his fingers and made a sharp come-hither gesture with his hand, as though summoning a tardy waiter for a neglected refill. With only this minor test of dominance-response the man seemed to instantly set aside his former attitude. He sprang into service like Pavlov’s executive assistant, taking up the folders and placing one in front of each of the seated men.

“We’d like some cold water also,” Landers said, and the man gave an earnest nod and left to fetch the refreshments with barely a glance back toward Pierce for his leave. “Now,” Landers said as he opened his folder to its agenda page, “the first and most pressing order of business is this Ross woman—”

“Oh, I’m way out ahead of you on that score,” Pierce said. “Thirty men left here not an hour ago, hot on the scent. She’ll be dead and gone by sundown, and damn glad by then to be that way.”

“No, she will not be,” Landers said. “I want you to call back your men immediately. We’re going to let her go.”

“We?” Pierce laughed the word aloud and nearly triggered a fit of coughing in this blurt of his amusement. “Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about now? We? From where I sit, as of now I’ve got the better part of a million dollars and a brand-new helly-copter on my hands”—he checked his watch—“and you’ve got about four minutes left to breathe.”

“You need to call back your men, immediately.”

“Screw the four minutes.” Pierce looked up at the remaining man beside him. “Do me a favor and put a hollow-point through the empty skull of this highfalutin son of a bitch.”

The guard slipped his revolver from its holster and drew down and pulled back the hammer with his thumb, one slick motion and a steady, practiced ease with the prospect of killing an unarmed man.

Landers held up an index finger, as though to offer a polite suggestion for a wayward employee. “May I have a few last words, then?” he asked.

“This I’ve gotta hear.”

He closed the folder, removed his glasses, and calmly began.

“We’re already silent partners, Mr. Pierce, though you haven’t realized it. Aside from one notable failure last year—again involving the troublesome Molly Ross—you’ve done good work for us in the past. The source of the funding and the guidance you’ve received remained in the shadows, but we’re on the cusp of a great opportunity now, and the time is right to formalize our arrangement. You’re free to decline, of course; at the moment it seems you’re determined to do so. It’s only fair that I tell you what it means if you do.

“Until this morning we didn’t know precisely where to find you, nor had there been a particular need to do so. You enjoyed the safety of a hidden asset, but that’s no longer to be the case. Since I landed, the sensors in that helicopter out there have been collecting, and recording, and relaying a torrent of information, all about you. It’s listening to us right now. By now this headquarters of yours is pinpointed and mapped to the millimeter, and every man here has been identified and profiled with enough data to track him down wherever he might try to run. I’m sure you see how these new facts might weigh on your decision.

“Because I am at this moment overdue to check in with my employers,” Landers continued, “about twenty minutes ago a small squadron of armed Predator drones and an A-10 Thunderbolt took off from the same private air base from which I departed earlier this morning. If you’re not familiar with the primary weapon of the A-10, let me describe it for you. It’s a Gatling gun that would span this room, loaded with depleted-uranium-tipped high-explosive shells the size of a Coke bottle, and it fires those at a rate of almost four thousand rounds per minute. The only way to improve on this gun as a killing machine, its designers once said, would be to make it fly. That’s the A-10, and right now it’s coming for you.

“Understand, this is not a rescue mission. Once they’re convinced by my continued silence that I’ve failed to usher you into our service, they’ll simply erase us all, myself included, and their plans will then proceed without pause, and without you and me. And one last thing you should know, if it’s crossed your mind to try to coerce me into calling them off. It won’t work, though you’re free to waste our final minutes in the attempt.”

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “You see,” Landers said, “if I have to die, this is exactly how I want to do it. Looking into the eyes of a man who’s about to see the wrath of hell rain down on him, and everything he’s built be destroyed, all because he didn’t have the good common sense to choose prosperity instead.”

George Pierce sat quite speechless, and one got the distinct impression this was a state with which he was rather unaccustomed.

Landers had first seen this look in a man’s eyes in the mid-1970s when he was only a fresh recruit. The circumstances of these standard introductory meetings differed, but this look never changed. It was dread mostly, gradually dawning, with the slightest whiff of desperate hope to color in the edges. To stare one’s destiny in the face is a difficult thing—to reach that decision point when a tinhorn tyrant must choose between his own shortsighted ambitions and the many benefits of taking on a smaller role in the bigger picture.

His diplomatic efforts had always been confined to domestic players: party leaders, entrenched career politicians, union officials, rising icons of various social movements, media moguls, pundits and thought leaders, judges and legislators, masters of finance and industry, so-called community organizers of all shapes and sizes, even religious figures if they’d shown the proper appetites for corruption and control.

While Landers worked exclusively within North America, his colleagues had sat across similar tables all around the globe. They’d watched this same moment of truth dawn upon a hundred self-styled luminaries: Hussein, Qaddafi, Chávez, Kim, Duvalier, Mugabe, Karimov, Amin, Shwe, al-Bashir, al-Assad, Mubarak, Thein Sein, Afewerki, Biya, Zenawi, Ahmadinejad, Castro, Assad, Déby, Obiang, Museveni, Lukashenko—as the wheels of progress turned year by year the puppet list grew longer.

There’d been a real piece of work in Gambia who insisted on being addressed as His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Azziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh. That hubris was short-lived indeed. Behind closed doors this one now answers simply to Hadji, and he’s learned to accept this private mockery without objection. To such a man the reward for giving up his dignity was worth that small price paid. In return for doing as he was told he got to dress up like a real head of state, parade around in a long limousine, and indulge in his unique perversions with reckless abandon. And, if he continued to play his cards just right, he would also get to die in office of old age.

Obviously not everyone has the right stuff, both to get on board and then to ride to the end of the line. It remained to be seen on which side of the ledger the name of today’s candidate would be written.

“Now then, George,” Landers said, “what will it be? Death in obscurity, or an excellent chance to attain all your goals simply by playing a minor role in mine?”

Outside, that growing storm in the northern sky had nearly arrived and a low roll of thunder filled the silence as Pierce considered what his answer would be. To his credit, his deliberation didn’t last very long.