Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

A solid wall of marketing communications was the first category to come up on the display. Advertising was a dark art somewhat related to his own. From what he saw, the primary challenge these days seemed to be how best to portray young people—supposedly living exciting and enviable lives—while they did nothing but stare nonstop into the little glowing screens in their hands. Ads for reality shows, ads for helpful chronic pharmaceuticals, ads for luxury vehicles, ads for bankruptcy advisors, ads for credit cards: in every stage of decline there were still desires to be stoked and needs to be created, and a last bit of money in the public’s pocket to be fought over and won.

His own business model was not centered in luring the gullible into wanting things they didn’t need. Instead, he made them know things, and love and hate things, and fear things, and thereby he made them do things, and the profit in that had proven nearly limitless. Despite the exorbitant fees he charged, the process was actually pretty simple: make the people learn and remember lies while burying the very truths that could save them.

And if those frightening, liberating truths should ever come to light, what then? Would it make any difference? Now, with mankind facing the final precipice, could any revelation be powerful enough to open their eyes and turn the tide?

We would see. He’d done what he could, as his wife had asked. He’d set a last, far-fetched opportunity into motion, put the intrepid players in position, and then stood aside. It was out of his hands now; the rest was destiny.

“Sir?”

Warren Landers stood at the open door.

“Yes?”

“I know it’s late but I’m glad I found you here. There’s a problem in the London office and I’m afraid they need your thoughts.”

Arthur Gardner sighed, and nodded. “We can do a conference call from here, I believe.”

“No, our links are down and we don’t have any techs on the night shift to make it happen. I’ve arranged for a video call at a vendor on Sixth Avenue. Come on, I’ll drive you there.”

Gardner met the gaze of the other man and waited, let a grim understanding pass between them, then he nodded once again, closed his book, and stood. Everything was in order, after all; he’d seen to that. There was no need for fighting it, then. He already knew his end was near, and he supposed this was as good a time as any to let it come.

“Let’s get going, then,” he said. “We mustn’t keep our colleagues waiting.”

They went together in silence to his corner office. Once there, he took a last long look around at all his treasured things, then walked to his private elevator and pushed the button, going down.

“It’s been a real experience working with you, Warren,” he said.

There was no response from the man waiting just behind him.

A pleasant ding issued forth from the elevator. The doors opened to a deep black emptiness.

Arthur Gardner’s thoughts were already far away as he felt a firm shove at his back. And save for the grim prospect of a possible coming judgment from on high, there was almost no fear in him at all as he fell forward into the yawning darkness.

Chapter 33

Noah opened his eyes from a deep, troubled sleep to see the first light of the morning. Whatever he’d been dreaming had left him with a sense that there was danger all around him.

The first thing he did was check his e-mail for a reply from Molly. There was none, and so he wrote a variation of the previous night’s message and sent it off, hopefully to find her. On his way to the kitchen, then, he saw that the couch was empty with the bedclothes folded at one end. A precisely handwritten note was placed atop the linens:

Was called away, but I’ll see you soon.

V

Noah took the long way on his route to the office. As he walked he saw the same things he’d seen the previous day when he was out with Ellen Davenport, only now the sights seemed to mean something more.

The high fence and the watchtowers would indeed serve to hold people inside, but a sudden societal collapse would require an equally effective means of keeping other people out as well.

The new housing going up, the stores of nonperishable food and drinking water, the generators and stand-alone communication systems: it was all designed to make this a huddling place in the aftermath of a planned disaster. In that event this would be a command center as well, one of several meant to support a new form of government that he’d once heard his father describe—one that was poised and ready to replace the nation described in the quaint and obsoleted U.S. Constitution.

• • •

Even before he’d turned the last corner to the hallway near the office he could already hear his two colleagues in a heated discussion through the heavy door.

As Noah keyed himself in, there was no pause in the argument. Their contention at the moment seemed to be over the ins and outs of immigration policy.

“Do you want to know why,” Ira Gershon said, “I don’t believe we should just open up the borders to anyone who can manage to sneak across the line?”

“Because old Jews are racists and hate Mexicans?” Lana Somin replied.

“No, dear. It’s the same reason we don’t let everyone into medical school who says they want to be a doctor, and we don’t let everybody into the NFL who’s ever touched a football. We don’t do that for the same reason that we can’t just suddenly say that everyone who comes here is automatically an American. Because all those things are difficult, you have to work very hard to do them properly, and not everybody will have what it takes to make the grade.”

The girl turned to her computer, where she quickly performed a search and brought an image up to full screen. It was the front page of some comedy blog based in France, one seemingly devoted to celebrating the laughable characteristics of the typical ugly American. That day’s selection showed a grotesquely overweight woman in a red-white-and-blue Snuggie cruising the mall in her three-wheeled scooter with the stars-and-stripes flapping from the handlebars.

“See that?” she asked. “This lazy tub of lard that looks like the Fourth of July threw up on her? What’s so damned difficult about that?”

Noah edged his way to the counter for a cup of coffee, hoping to stay out of the fray.

“This is what you always do,” Ira said. “You hold up some extreme example and then act like you’ve won the argument. As if that’s what everyone who loves this country is like.”

“Plenty of them are.”

“What about the Constitution?” Ira asked. “Don’t you think that makes us special in some way?”

“Words on a page.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. Just more empty words, written by old dead white guys with wooden teeth who owned slaves and got rich growing tobacco.”

“Uh huh.” Ira leaned back in his chair, thoughtfully. “You’re a big fan of the Internet, aren’t you?”

Lana seemed thrown off for a moment by what seemed like a drastic change of the subject. “Yeah. So?”

“And remind me, what’s the government of the Internet like?”

“There isn’t one,” Lana said. “Not much of one, anyway.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. There’s a basic, scalable structure that’s so simple it’s brilliant, and then a few little groups that watch over protocols and standards to protect it and keep things stable, and that’s it.”

“Wow,” Ira mused. “So those are the people that thought of Amazon.com?”