Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

“It sounds like now you get to pick your own battles.”

“That’s right, I do.”

They were quiet for a while. When he saw that she was finished with her meal he took their recyclable trays to the kitchen and poured them both some coffee.

“Does the name Merrick mean anything to you?” Virginia asked.

“Merrick? No, I don’t think so.”

“Molly never mentioned anyone by that name?”

“No, not that I remember. Why?”

“It’s just a bit of a lead that I’m following up.” Virginia made some notes on her pad. “Did you see the story in the news today about the rioting in Chicago?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I helped write it.”

“There’ve been other incidents around the country, shootings mostly, but also some fires and robberies, threats to politicians, threats against property, at least one actual bombing, and now this thing in Chicago. If you draw a line on a map between these incidents, it’s clear they’re heading this way, east to west. Molly and her group are claiming responsibility for all of it, and that’s looking very credible.”

He shook his head. “It’s not them.”

“I’m talking about what the evidence clearly indicates.”

He placed her coffee in front of her and as he sat down she reached into her bag and slid some blurry photographs across the table.

“Do you recognize anyone there?” she asked.

The pictures were time-coded and pixelated stills from surveillance videos. They showed a tall man in a long dark coat on a city street with a petite woman walking beside him.

“No, but it’s pretty obvious who they’re supposed to be,” Noah said.

“What makes you think these aren’t photos of Thom Hollis and Molly Ross?”

“Look at her clothes, for one thing.”

“So?”

“That woman’s wearing a tight short skirt and high heels.”

“And Molly wouldn’t own anything like that?”

“For Halloween, maybe.”

“What about the man?”

Noah thought about that for a few seconds. “I can’t say. He’s the right size, but thinner than I remember him. I told you I don’t think he would do the things you say he’s doing, but I can’t back that up, not with anything solid.”

“Do you know what the term signature strike means?”

“No.”

“It’s a new kind of attack order, the kind that’s been issued now for Molly and Hollis, just today. These drone wars the administration’s so fond of now, the idea came from those missions. It doesn’t just mean that Molly is now eligible to be shot on sight. It means that everyone around her is also a valid target.”

“Good God,” Noah said. “I’ve told you these people are no threat. They’ve got no power and no hope to get any. They’re being scapegoated, you can see that, can’t you?”

She rose gracefully above that question. “I asked you to reach out to her. Have you had a chance to do that yet?”

“No.”

“Come on, then.” She got up and walked to the laptop computer on the corner desk. “I don’t know if it’ll make any difference, but let’s start trying now.”

Chapter 30

By their second cup of coffee he’d composed and deleted several messages; none of them felt quite right. Though she was an ace at deception herself, Molly Ross was also a very difficult person to lie to.

“Clear out your mind for a minute,” Virginia said. “Just talk to her. Like I said, just relax and communicate. Think about your relationship.”

“I wish I had more to think about. We didn’t have much of a chance to get to know one another. There wasn’t a lot of time involved, not in the way you’d normally think of a relationship.”

“But you seem to have gotten so close.”

“I got close. I don’t know, maybe she did, too.”

“What did you talk about while you were together?”

“I spent most of my time saying stupid things, if I remember correctly. And I guess a lot of the things she told me weren’t true.”

“And yet you say that you trust her.”

“I know, it doesn’t seem to make sense. She tricked me, it was as simple as that in the beginning, but I don’t blame her. Whatever I got from them I deserved; that’s how I see it. What they were trying to do in those few days was better than anything I’d ever done with my whole life. Can you understand that?”

“I can.” She sat back, considering. “Let’s keep this simple.” She leaned over him and clicked open a new message. “You’re just trying to open a line of communication. We need to break through the clutter and establish that it’s really you who’s writing to her. Ideally it should be something that only the two of you would know about.”

He thought for a moment, and nodded as he began typing. “I think I’ve got something like that.”

The subject line he wrote was As a fellow oenophilist, let me B Frank.

“What’s that word mean?” Virginia asked, pointing it out on the screen.

“Oenophilist. It’s a wine word, and I only knew it because I was a spelling-bee geek. It was in a crossword puzzle we were doing in my apartment.”

“And B Frank, as in . . .”

“As in Barney Frank. That’s from a story I told her the night before.”

“When you slept together.”

“Right, when we literally slept together. She woke up at one point, and then she woke me up and asked me to help her get back to sleep. I asked her how I was supposed to do that, and she wanted me to tell her a story.”

“That sounds like something she’d remember.”

“She was very interested in anything about my father,” Noah said, “so I told her one of his tall tales. It’s the only kind of a bedtime story I ever got from him as a kid. No dragons or knights in shining armor, it was always about his work, and the one I told her involved Barney Frank.”

“Did it work?”

“Like a charm.” He cracked his knuckles. “Let me finish this up. You said to keep it simple, right?”

In the body of the message he typed a single line.

Molly, it’s Noah. Write back to me. I promise you I can help.

After waiting for Virginia’s approval he checked over the text once again and hit SEND.

With the message to Molly finally away, the fatigue of their separate days seemed to hit them both at once. Virginia asked if the couch was available for the night, and of course that was fine; he had the room and she wanted to stay close in case there was a reply. He brought out some sheets, a pillow, and a blanket as she changed in the bathroom, and then by the time he’d brushed his teeth and returned to say good night she’d made up the couch as tight as an army cot and had already tucked herself in.

Noah turned off the last lamp and there was just enough moonlight coming through the window so they could see one another clearly in the dark.

“I’m worried she won’t answer,” Noah said. He didn’t say so, but he was also every bit as worried that she would.

“If she doesn’t write back we’ll just keep trying.”

He nodded. “Last chance,” Noah said. “You can take the bed if you want.”

“No, this is better than I’m used to. I’ll be fine. I’m feeling a little overstimulated, though; too much caffeine, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I might have to hear that Barney Frank bedtime story.”

“All right, if you think it’ll help. It’s going to sound kind of odd.”

“That’s the one thing I’m sure of right now. Just tell it to me exactly like you told it to her.”

“Okay,” Noah said, and when he spoke next he’d taken on the soft and calming tones of a bedside storyteller. “Once upon a time, in a faraway land called Washington, in the United States House of Representatives, two powerful trolls named Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich wrote a memo at the direction of their party’s masters. With this memo they started a rumor that the new Speaker of the House, Mr. Tom Foley, was a homosexual, and possibly even a pedophile. Now, politics had always been a dirty business and always would be, but to many people on both sides of the aisle this was several giant steps over the line.