Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

He heard a distracted, private laugh next to him, and Hollis glanced that way and leaned to read what was on the screen. He was so alarmed by what he saw that he nearly knocked the boy into the lake as he snatched the phone from his hands and canceled the entry before it could be sent.

Tyler’s immediate verbal reaction went quiet in mid-profanity. Even if he didn’t know what he’d almost done, it seemed by the look on his face that he knew he was in trouble.

“I’m sorry—”

“I’m afraid sorry’s just not gonna cut it,” Hollis said. “Your folks told you we were lying low here, didn’t they? And you know what that means, don’t you?”

“I said I was sorry. God, I didn’t mean anything—”

“What you typed was Showing some hilbilly around the farm. Somebody please shoot me. ” Hollis put the deactivated device into one of his pockets and its battery into another. “First off, you need to be careful what you wish for. Second, there are four l ’s in hillbilly. And third, I imagine the reason your mother is up your backside so often, as you say, is because she damn well needs to be. Every year you get older, the mistakes you can make get bigger, and the consequences get harder to survive.”

Before the boy could speak Hollis held up a hand to quiet him. “I don’t need to hear a thing you’ve got to say right now, but you need to hear this. That phone’s got a microphone and a camera, so it can see and hear whatever’s around it. It can recognize a face, understand words, and match a voiceprint. It’s got an accelerometer, so it knows when you sit, when you stand, and which way you’re walking. It’s got a GPS receiver that tracks where you are within a five-foot circle. And whether you know it or not, you’ve signed over your permission to strangers to monitor and make a record of all those things every minute of the day. Google’s a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar company but they give away almost every product they make for free. Don’t you know what they’re selling to make all that money? They’re selling you.

“You wouldn’t trust your best friend with what that phone knows about you, and yet you trust all those strangers lurking out there in the cloud, who’ve all said time and again that privacy is a relic of the past and a man’s wish for it is a cause for suspicion. If you’re dumb enough to believe that way, then go right on ahead. But you will not imperil me or mine with your foolishness.”

The boy sat silent, and when he worked himself up to speak again his voice was timid. “Are you going to tell my mom?”

“No, I’m not. You’re going to tell her, all about it, and then I’ll be having a talk with both of you after dinner. Now get on back home.”

Hollis turned away to look out across the water.

When the boy had left him alone Hollis stayed and thought and waited, but no trace of the serenity he’d felt just before would be returning. The unsullied vastness of this sovereign land shrank before his eyes, retreating to within its fragile, unprotected borders. This ranch was an island of peace and personal liberty, he’d allowed himself to think, a place of safety, and maybe even a glimmer of hope for a better future. But an island is another thing he’d failed until then to consider.

Surrounded.

Chapter 11

Upon his return to the main farmhouse Hollis stopped by to ask a favor of the fellow he’d been told was in charge of security and technological matters. Then, without identifying a specific offender, he made it clear that some strict remedial instruction should be given to all residents right away, particularly regarding the safe use of electronic communications during this sensitive time.

On his way to see Molly he took a shortcut through the kitchen. As the evening meal was being prepared the large bright room was a gauntlet of elbows, steaming pans, and jovial clatter, and few took much notice as he edged his way by. Near the swinging doors to the dining room, though, he did catch the eye of Cathy Merrick. By the carefree wink she gave him it seemed she hadn’t yet heard the latest news from her wayward son.

Hollis arrived at Molly’s room to find her alone, kneeling at the foot of her bed in prayer, hands clasped beneath her chin.

From his watchtower on an overstuffed easy chair in the corner, the dog whuffed to announce to his mistress that she had a visitor.

Molly breathed a few more earnest phrases and finished, then turned her head toward the door and got to her feet. “That’s you, isn’t it, Hollis?”

“It is.” How exactly she’d known that, he didn’t pause right then to wonder.

She took a small step and beckoned to him with open arms. There was a sweet, brittle smile on her face that seemed burdened underneath by some awful sadness. She caught her breath as though a flood of tears were on their way, and he went to her and hugged her close against his chest. There was nothing to be said or done for the moment; whatever grief it was that had overtaken her, he let her cry it out.

This was so unlike the old Molly Ross. In earlier times she’d kept her emotions well guarded and such displays of vulnerability were rare.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, after the worst of it had passed. “I know I need to be stronger.”

“Don’t trouble yourself now. I’d say you’ve been plenty strong enough.”

They sat for a while, then, and caught up with one another. The Merrick family, he learned, were longtime friends of the Founders’ Keepers—true dyed-in-the-wool libertarians and covert financial supporters of Molly’s late mother and her cause. They’d volunteered their home as a shelter for the group more than a year before. Unlike some fair-weather patriots who scarcely dared to dip a toe into the shallows of the movement, these folks had stood by their offer to help even as the crisis in the country grew worse and worse. Until now, for their protection Molly had kept almost every detail of the family’s involvement to herself.

Next she filled him in on the status of their companions, her brief time in the clutches of George Pierce, and some details of the past day that Hollis had nearly slept through. At length it seemed only a single topic remained to be raised. Throughout the conversation he could almost see her avoiding it; the answer would stay safely unreal if the question went unasked. But in the end she did ask about him.

“Have you heard anything about Noah Gardner?”

This was somewhat telling, the way she used his full name, as though to hold that rare, painful brush with intimacy at a more formal and comfortable distance.

In her role as her mother’s civilian intelligence agent, Molly had worked her way into the lives of any number of gullible marks in the loftiest realms of the country’s plutocracy. Most of them had been privileged young men of high position—political aides to corrupted candidates, media insiders, union apparatchiks, rising stars in nongovernmental organizations, sons of crony capitalists, Wall Street prodigies—all heirs to the unelected thrones of power bent on subverting the American way of life to their own selfish ends. Through one deception or another they’d each been charmed into revealing whatever small part of the enemy agenda had been entrusted to them. Once the prize was in hand and put to good use, she’d vanished and moved on to the next unsuspecting target without ever looking back.

Noah Gardner had once been just another of these brief, dispassionate assignments, but for a number of unexpected reasons her time with him had become a different story altogether.