Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

“Is this a good time?” the man asked, smiling.

“Good as any. Please, come on in.”

He did, removing his jacket and laying it over his arm as he walked up near the bed. “Do people call you Ginny?”

“Not often.”

“Virginia, then.” He seemed to make note of her more visible injuries. “You took some damage out there tonight.”

“You should see the other guy,” she said without humor, and with hopes that the niceties would soon be coming to a close.

“I’ll bet.” He reached out and she shook his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Virginia. My name is Warren Landers.”

• • •

This guy was very well connected; that was the first impression he’d obviously sought to give her. His boss was a man named Arthur Gardner; he was the one who’d reached out to Virginia’s people a few days before. Landers had been sent to Arizona to observe her previous mission, and after apparently finding her work to be adequate for his needs, he’d followed her here.

As usual in these cases, once his credentials were established she hadn’t expected him to provide many other details of the organization behind him, and none were offered.

Mr. Landers sat and waited while she went through the backgrounder he’d brought.

At first blush the man whom Landers and his group were targeting seemed hardly more than a cold-blooded murderer. There’d been scattered sightings of him across the country and other seemingly random shootings along the eastern seaboard seemed to bear his signature as well.

He’d once been a military man with a sterling record, but upon returning home he’d apparently suffered some sort of a gradual post-traumatic breakdown. According to one supposedly reliable source, he’d later fallen in with a group of homegrown extremists. For almost two decades this organization had managed to stay under the law enforcement radar before suddenly popping up late last year.

“Thom Hollis,” she said.

“Thom or Thomas; he seems to go by both.”

She flipped through the upper corners of the remaining paperwork. “By the dates on these documents this has all been put together rather quickly. And recently.”

He nodded. “That’s true. This Hollis guy and the group behind him just made the President’s kill-list. The White House is about to green-light a signature strike on them, so there was a bit of a scramble to get up to speed.”

This “kill-list” to which Mr. Landers referred was a relatively new development, at least among governments that still tipped their hats to the rule of law. Together with a small contingent of advisors the President would regularly meet to nominate and then pass judgment on foreign (and now domestic) “militant” individuals deemed eligible for termination without the benefit of due process.

“So tell me about this group.”

“As you just read, Thom Hollis has been running with one of those right-wing domestic militias. Real throwbacks, Constitutionalists, religious fanatics, Sovereign Citizens, I’m sure you know the profile. They call themselves the Founders’ Keepers, and I guess they want to drag us all back to 1789, slaves and all. You’re familiar with George Pierce and the United Aryan Nations?”

“Of course.”

“They’re branches on the same tree, and apparently they’re all in the process of joining forces. There was a showdown a few days ago up in Wyoming; the good guys finally had these people pinned, and they hit back with the kind of weaponry and tactics and numbers that tells us they’re at a whole new level now. Most of them got away, and this Hollis guy split off from there.”

“And the woman who’s with him?”

“Her name is Molly Ross. Her mother was Beverly Ross, you might have heard of her, she was some kind of a libertarian activist dating back to the 1970s. She started this group and they seemed mostly harmless while she was alive, a lot of crazy talk but very little action. Mom put herself out of our misery last fall, killed herself, after the daughter and some of Pierce’s men perpetrated that incident north of Las Vegas.”

“That incident?”

“That nuclear incident.”

Though Virginia knew exactly what he was talking about, it had seemed more judicious to pretend as though she didn’t. This Landers guy didn’t need to know how plugged in she really was.

Much like that recent and surprising launch of a Chinese-made ballistic missile from a submarine off the coast of Southern California, the cover stories about the Nevada explosion had flown in so thick and fast that the whole event had passed immediately into the wacky realm of the conspiracy theorists. It was a meteorite, it was a plane crash, it was a botched underground test—only a handful of people really knew what had happened, and their hard knowledge concerned only the fact of the unplanned nuclear detonation, and not the full story behind it. This was the first that even Virginia had heard of a specific terrorist connection.

“Honestly, Mr. Landers, this sounds like a job for the FBI, and the police.”

“I would agree with you,” Landers said, “but it’s not so much what Hollis has done so far that’s concerning us. He killed one of his own the other day, a guy named Ben Church, just a harmless old man from the group who was probably trying to talk some sense into him. Shot him in the head. You’ll see it in the psych profile, they’re calling that a ‘triggering incident.’ Anyway, they pulled some DNA and fingerprints from some handmade cartridges around that murder scene. Both belong to Hollis. And those other shootings you saw in the brief? The prints and the other evidence at those sites point straight to him, too. We’ve got some fairly good pictures from surveillance videos; he’s traveling with a young female companion, and they’re obviously disguising themselves but she looks an awful lot like Molly Ross.”

“As I said—”

“With all due respect,” Landers cut in, “I think this is a job for you. These killings are only a drum roll. They’re laying the groundwork for a major terrorist attack, and as soon as the press gets hold of it these two are going to start getting their names in the paper, and that’s just what they want. They want people to know who they are so everyone will know who’s responsible when they do what we think they’re planning to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“You and I both know there was a clear lead-up before 9/11. Small things that looked unrelated, and we only saw the connections after the attack. If we’d understood them before, we could have prevented a disaster and saved thousands of lives.” He took a step closer. “Virginia, it’s these people that were responsible for that near calamity last year. If they’d succeeded it would have made September 11th look like a garden party. Sure, the real facts never made it to the press, but you saw what happened. Even the nonspecific alert they caused was serious enough to move Congress to delay the fall elections; they still haven’t happened yet. But they didn’t stop after that. What these people have said very clearly to all of their underground followers is that something big is coming, something really spectacular, and they’ve promised that they’re bringing it soon.”

She closed the folder and thought for a moment. “All right. I’ll take a thorough look and let you know what I think by morning.”

“That’s all I ask; just give us your thoughts. And one other thing. We’ve got an advantage here if we want it. We have a back channel to this Molly Ross that I think can help us find her and bring her in.”

“What kind of a back channel?”

“It’s why this situation has become personal for me and the men I work for. We’ve got a family member involved. He was duped into helping these people last year, and my hope is that he can provide you with some insights, and maybe even make contact. His name is Noah Gardner.”