Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

When she found a weakness in a security system she would venture in just far enough to record proof of the exploit and then inform the company involved that they had a problem. Many of them actually appreciated the service. If they disregarded her repeated notices or otherwise indicated that Lana should mind her own business, she shared her discoveries on a private blog for discussion among her anonymous online community.

Then someone had taken what they learned from her and done some serious crimes—a rash of identity thefts, wire fraud, targeted phishing scams, and the wholesale exposure of access codes and passwords to millions of user accounts. Some of these incidents got the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, and it wasn’t long before Lana Somin was taken into custody.

Her otherwise clean record, her age, and the rules of evidence being what they were, she still might have avoided prosecution, but her foster parents had flipped out and cooperated fully with the authorities. She was tried as an adult and convicted, and the sentencing judge had really thrown the book at her. The whole process hadn’t taken more than a few months, beginning to end.

The articles Noah scanned suggested that she’d been sent to some sort of a juvenile facility to serve out her punishment. Evidently there was more to the tale than that.

Ira Gershon’s presence in this place remained more of a mystery.

It had been well over a decade since he’d last been on television and much longer since his heyday back in the golden age. That was centuries ago in Internet time. Though he’d once been a trusted nightly presence in millions of homes there simply wasn’t much about him anywhere on the Web. There were a few pictures from his younger years, mostly with Gershon as the second face in a shot featuring someone else from the hall of fame of his profession: Paley, Murrow, Cronkite, Collingwood, Smith, Sevareid, Huntley, and Brinkley.

Some people have come to think that all information is waiting out there free and clear, that everything that’s ever happened and everyone who’s anyone is just a Google search away. But the universal library’s being continually pruned and revised; more and more, knowledge is being systematically narrowed down, filtered, and sanitized, limited to only those things granted a permit to be properly remembered.

Noah’s last search concerned The First Circle, the wording of that sign over the door outside.

He’d gotten the reference to Dante right away. In his Divine Comedy the First Circle of hell was on the borderlands of damnation, a place of mild despair without torment. Being sent there for eternity was considered a small measure of mercy, a lesser sentence granted to virtuous pagans while still denying them access to heaven. The sign here, though, was no doubt an even more subversive slap at authority, sent by way of Solzhenitsyn. In his book by that same title he’d written of Stalin’s treatment of select, valuable prisoners rounded up in the purges. They were spared the more brutal conditions of the gulag provided they continued to obediently bow down to the will of the regime.

The old-fashioned clatter of the typewriter ceased with a last ding and a carriage return. There was a sharp ratcheting sound as a sheet of paper was pulled up and out.

“All right, new guy,” Ira said, “how about if you proofread this piece for me? Let’s see what you can do to pull your weight.”

“Okay.” Noah took the three pages and picked a red pencil from the assortment in his desk drawer. “You know, I used to watch you on the news every night,” he said, as he began to read.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. I was pretty young to be a newshound then, but there was something very comforting about your delivery. I trusted everything you said.”

“Back then I did, too.” He indicated the story in Noah’s hands. “I hope you know to be a little more discerning now.”

As Noah began to read the piece he understood what Gershon had meant. This text was obviously nothing more than a load of talking-points propaganda for consumption by the wire services. Beyond the slanted content, though, there was another, more obvious problem.

Early yesterday in Chicago, what began as a peaceful march for fiscal reform and social justice erupted into a show of violence and brutality unlike anything seen in the city since the Days of Rage in the late 1960s. When the smoke had cleared four people lay dead, including one police officer. Scores of others were wounded, some critically, in what organizers are calling a bloody wake-up call and a rallying cry for the many similar citizen groups arrayed across a troubled nation.

“What’s wrong with the lowercase d on your machine?” Noah asked.

“It’s broken, that’s what’s wrong with it, and they’ve stopped making parts for the old girl.” Ira had gotten up from his chair and he spoke from near the credenza by the wall. He was carefully slipping a vinyl LP onto the spindle of an ancient record player. “Do you notice how nobody fixes anything anymore?”

Lana spoke up. “Do you notice how I’m going to stick my head in the oven and turn on the gas if I have to listen to Glenn Miller again today?”

“No, dear,” Ira said, “no big bands today.” The needle touched vinyl and soon a swell of smooth violins came drifting over the speakers, followed by the velvety tones of Nat King Cole. “Feast your jaded ears, young people. ‘Stardust’ is without any doubt the most beautiful song ever recorded by mortal man.”

Noah continued to read and make his marks as the music played on, and the girl raised no further objections as she worked away at her keyboard. When he came to a part near the end of the text he stopped and looked over at its author.

“You’re seriously going to submit this?” Noah asked.

“I can only write what I’m told these days,” Ira replied. “My only job is to write it well enough. What, you don’t believe what’s there?”

The paragraph in question was near the end of the story. Unnamed sources in the Justice Department had confirmed that members of a right-wing domestic hate group were claiming responsibility for the shooting that set off the violence at a Chicago protest march. A string of other incidents established an escalating pattern of terrorist activity, moving west across the country. Evidence found at the scene also pointed to the direct involvement of their suddenly notorious leadership. This group called themselves the Founders’ Keepers.

“No, I don’t believe it.”

“Oh, really?” Ira came back to his place and took a seat. “And why not?”

Noah didn’t answer. Instead he looked around briefly for any obvious cameras or listening devices.

“They aren’t watching us in here,” Ira said. “There are other indignities we have to endure”—he patted his ankle, where his own house-arrest bracelet would be—“but they’ve never bothered to spy on us in this room, not that way. Go on, you can speak freely.”

“Okay. I don’t believe the story because I know those people.”

“Oh, I know that you know them,” Ira said, “and I know more than that. I recognize you, too, Mr. Gardner.”

He frowned. “I’m sure we haven’t met before.”

The older man nodded with the hint of a smile, holding eye contact for a little longer than was entirely comfortable, and then he abruptly changed his heading. “Are you finished marking up my copy?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’m finished with it, too. I don’t need to see it again. Hand it over to my girl Friday there so she can type it up and send it out on the wires.”

As Noah leaned toward her and held out his minor edits, Lana clipped the papers from his hand without looking over and with barely a pause in her typing.