Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

“Tell me.”

Landers bent and spoke into his ear, and as he did so he made a motion toward the door. Two guards entered with a small and bloodied man dragged between them.

They forced the prisoner to his knees in the center of the room. One of them held him where he knelt, slapped him hard across the face, and wrenched his arm behind him with a smart twist to bring him alert for the questioning.

“What’s your name?” Landers asked.

The kneeling man was looking only at Aaron Doyle. His voice was winded and broken when he spoke, but the words were quite clear. “I thought you people knew everything,” he said. “Don’t you already know who I am?”

He was struck again, and Landers repeated his demand.

“Tell us your name.”

“I’m Ira Gershon.”

The other guard had left the room but now he returned and began to methodically spread wide, thin plastic sheeting in overlapping layers behind and around the prisoner, a precaution to keep any of the fine furnishings from being soiled.

“And your friends, Mr. Gershon, where are they?”

“I don’t know.” This denial was met with another blow and a twist of the arm hard enough to dislocate the joint. The kneeling man drew in his breath sharply, but he didn’t cry out. His eyes were still fixed on Aaron Doyle.

“We have other avenues to find them,” Landers said. “There’s nowhere they can hide—”

“But they’re not hiding anymore.”

Doyle turned to the prisoner for the first time, and leaned closer. “What is it that she’s going to do?” he asked.

“That, I can tell you,” Gershon said. “Someday soon, she’s going to win.”

Landers sighed and gave a nod to the man behind, who’d now finished his preparations. He came around, drew his pistol, and stood ready.

Ira Gershon straightened himself up as best he could. “Would you let me pray a last time?” he asked.

“Go right ahead,” Landers said. “Why not waste your last few seconds on earth with a plea to the empty sky?”

As the kneeling man set about his foolish ritual, Landers bent again to the ear of Aaron Doyle, lowered his voice, and spoke with assurance. “I have good people working on the forensics from their last hideout. They tell me to expect definitive information within a few hours, a day at the most. With some luck we’ll know everything we need to. Whatever they do, you’ve planned for it, sir. We’ll turn it against them and make the best of it.”

Doyle nodded slowly, but he didn’t seem so sure.

Landers stood, checked his watch, and turned back to the man on his knees. “All right, then. Have you finished?”

The pious silence dragged on for a few seconds longer and at last Ira Gershon unclasped his hands and looked up. “Yes, I’m finished.”

Landers motioned to the executioner, who checked his silenced weapon for readiness, pressed the muzzle to the prisoner’s forehead, pulled back the hammer, and waited for the final order.

“Hell of a lot of good all that praying did you,” Landers said.

The man on his knees smiled at this, having made his peace with what was coming, and then he quietly spoke his final words.

“What makes you think I was praying for me?”

PART THREE

Chapter 49

Most American citizens wouldn’t believe how difficult it had become to travel freely—untracked, unrecorded, and unidentified—within the borders of their own home country. What was once the norm had become all but impossible, and that had made Hollis’s transcontinental trip to Pennsylvania not only dangerous but also very expensive.

He’d caught barely an hour of troubled sleep and felt achy and lightheaded as he awoke. He was hurting, and it wasn’t getting better. First he’d taken a glancing blast from a sawed-off shotgun at the start of that vicious gunfight at the Merrick ranch, then he’d been hit twice again as they made their escape from California.

These latest wounds had bled a lot but the bullets had passed right through without hitting anything vital. Noah’s doctor friend had stitched him up and dug some day-old birdshot from his shoulder and the side of his neck. She’d strongly advised him to go to the hospital—sound advice that he’d obviously ignored—and then she’d given him a course of strong antibiotics, which he’d promptly left behind as he and the advance team left in a rush the night before.

He was still determined to grit his way through these injuries, but he could tell he was weakening. The fever was real now, he could almost feel an aggressive infection spreading under his skin, and his left arm was growing more swollen and inflamed as time went on.

Hollis was semi-reclined in the passenger seat of an eighteen-wheeler that had picked them up for the final leg of their overnight journey. Lana Somin and Cathy and Tyler Merrick were in the sleeper compartment behind him. When he turned to check on them, mother and son were resting peacefully, but the young lady was not. Her gaze was far away and serene, but there were traces of tears on her cheeks that she hadn’t bothered to wipe away.

They’d just passed through a commercial area of the town and soon their driver slowed and made his wide turn onto a rough service road.

The orange and black signage along this private thoroughfare carried the distinctive logo of HomeWorx, as did the tractor-trailer they were riding in. This company was a family-owned, mid-Atlantic chain of big-box home improvement stores, and up ahead stood one of its original locations, now converted to a regional distribution center. In recent years they’d had to close a number of locations and move their base of operations farther east, rendering this particular warehouse nearly obsolete for its original purpose.

“Take us around back, if you would,” Hollis said.

He alerted young Lana and she woke the others. As the truck pulled to a stop at a loading bay in the rear of the warehouse, Hollis said his thanks to the driver and went inside to meet their contact. When he was assured that all was well he waved the all-clear to the other three.

The head of this chain had been a longtime supporter of Molly’s mother and he’d been happy to help when he’d gotten the call. Ask anything, he’d said, and Hollis had asked for a lot.

So they could blend in as much as possible, the four of them were issued light orange coveralls like those worn by the staff. After they’d changed, Hollis called them together in a cavernous vehicle bay, along with a small group of carefully screened employees who’d been put at his disposal for the day.

“Let me make something clear,” Hollis said. “If this goes bad today, if we get cornered by the cops—I mean actual law enforcement—we won’t put up a fight. We don’t fire a shot or raise a hand to the police. If it comes down to that I’ll go out and give myself up, alone, and all of you will swear on a Bible that I forced you here at gunpoint. They’ll believe that right off, things being as they are. We’ll send word to Molly beforehand so they won’t get her, too, and then I’ll take the fall for all this. Everybody understand?”

No one looked happy at the prospect, but they all agreed.

“Now,” Hollis continued, “the clock’s running, and I’d say we’ve got a good morning’s work ahead of us. I’ve radioed the others that we’re all clear so far but we don’t know exactly when they’re coming, so we’ve got to be ready ASAP. First, we need security. You”—he pointed to the heftiest of the local men and read his nameplate—“Hector, you pick your own partner, and then you two boys keep watch for anyone who doesn’t belong here. Don’t confront anybody.” He slid a pair of in-store handheld radios across the table. “Just call me and tell me what you see. Keep that walkie-talkie on channel 14. Okay?”