Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

“Okay,” Hector said, and he nodded to the fellow next to him. “Him and me, we’ll keep watch.”

“Good. Check in with me every quarter hour.” The two men left for their stations, and Hollis turned back to the other employees. “This place has got just about everything we could need but we’d waste a lot of time trying to find it all ourselves. Whatever these two ladies here ask you for, if you could jump on it and fetch their supplies, that’ll be a great help. They may need some extra hands, too, so please, just be at their service. Now, Ms. Somin, Noah Gardner told me you’re good with computers.”

“I am,” she said.

“We’ll need some IDs. I’ll show you examples when you’re ready to start on them. They just need to be good enough to flash; no one’s going to have time to look at them too close. And then there’s this.” He handed across a thick spiral-bound book that had been left for him in a locker there. “That’s the system layout and the network administrator’s manual from the place we’re going after today. Take good care of that; it took a lot of doing to get it copied and slipped out of there for us. Now if you could get a head start on looking into the guts of what we’ll be up against—”

She’d had a chance to read only the cover before she interrupted him. “I can tell you right now, there’s no fricking way. A facility like this? It’s not like in the movies. There’s no way I could break into this system in one day, not in a month, nobody could, not from outside.”

“Well, that’s okay,” Hollis said, “because we’re going to be inside. If we all do our jobs right we’re going to drive up to the front gate, big as life, and they’re going to open up the doors and let us in.”

With that bit of news delivered, Hollis saw the first shade of a smile forming.

“Cool,” Lana said.

“Now, I want you all to assume that this is going to go off without a hitch. You don’t have time for worries along with everything else. But Tyler and I will be making preparations in case things should go awry.”

“I thought you said if we got caught we were going to give up,” Tyler said.

“I said if we got caught by law enforcement. But if I see the kind of scum roll up here like those that came for you and your folks on the ranch, son, there’s going to be some hell to pay.”

“And what am I supposed to do?” Cathy Merrick asked.

“You’re my graphic artist.”

“I don’t understand. What kind of art do you need?”

“Well, ma’am, near as you can manage, we need for that thing over there”—he pointed to a sun-faded and road-worn HomeWorx rental truck parked across the bay—“to look just like this right here.”

Hollis opened a folder and passed it across the table to her. On top of the papers inside was a series of detailed color photos showing every angle of a hazmat emergency vehicle from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Safety.

Chapter 50

At the clinic outside San Francisco, Ellen Davenport had tended to her patient through the night. As the morning came, Ellen reviewed the chart once again and, satisfied that she was stable and comfortable, left to check in on her old friend Noah.

The sleep lab in this clinic had a one-bedroom suite designed and decorated like a space that might be found in a nice, normal home. It was made that way so that the slumber patterns of visiting subjects could be evaluated in a more calming environment than a cold and sterile hospital room. This suite was where Noah and Molly had been put up together for the night.

When Ellen looked in the door she found them sleeping in each other’s arms, dressed in borrowed clothes they’d been provided with for their upcoming journey. It seemed as though they’d awakened earlier, bathed and gotten ready to depart, and then drifted off again in the midst of an intimate conversation.

Ellen had known this young man for a long time and he’d always been blissfully superficial in his relations with the opposite sex. This was a different picture; she’d never seen him like this, not with any other woman. The two of them looked like they belonged together, like they’d always been together, and like they didn’t intend to ever be apart again.

Ellen left the sleep lab and took a long, hot shower. When she returned to Virginia’s room she found her patient awake and as alert as the medication would allow.

“Where are we?” Virginia asked.

“We’re in San Francisco. You’re doing much better—”

“And where are the others?”

“Noah and Molly are in the next room. Everyone else headed off for Pennsylvania last night.” Ellen checked her watch. “We’ve got a flight to catch soon ourselves, and I have to get them up in a few minutes. My colleagues here are going to take good care of you—”

“They shouldn’t leave,” Virginia interrupted. She made a move to rise but Ellen stopped her with a gentle hand. “None of you should leave. Let me talk to them.”

“They’re very determined—”

“Please, let me talk to them.”

“Okay, shh. Just rest now. I’ll send them in before we go.”

• • •

Later, as Noah and Ellen and Molly buckled into their seats on the small private jet, he recalled their parting conversation with Virginia Ward.

She’d tried by every means to persuade them that the safest course was to put themselves under her protection, and she was probably right, but wisdom and reason had no effect on Molly. She was not going to be stopped this time and Noah wouldn’t be leaving her side, and so the decision was made.

Once they’d left, Noah had insisted on one thing, however, and he’d gotten no argument. As soon as they landed for their connection in Illinois, Ellen Davenport would part ways with them, catch a cab to O’Hare, and travel on to New York alone. There she’d meet with Charlie Nelan to figure out how to deal with the events of the last several days and begin to get her life back on track again.

The jet had been fueled and waiting for them at Hayward Executive Airport, near the bay. These arrangements were made by a well-to-do secret friend of Molly’s group, the CEO of a chain of hardware stores in the East, and his gift had allowed them to sidestep the heightened security that surely would have snared them instantly if they’d tried to go anywhere near San Francisco International.

As the jet taxied out onto its assigned runway, Molly felt for his hand and squeezed it tight when she found it. Then she told him where they were ultimately bound.

Her objective was a maximum-security storage facility in rural Pennsylvania. It was the crown jewel of a group of fortresses operated by a company called Garrison Archives. Naturally, Noah knew this place well. They stored many rare treasures there, irreplaceable collections and priceless works of art, all preserved and protected in a controlled underground environment built to withstand even a nearby nuclear war.

But another, larger level of Garrison had a different purpose. It housed a vast chamber of secrets through which the highest levels of classified information flowed. This was the place where the world’s most powerful entities—including many clients of Noah’s late father—kept all the electronic records of their dealings, records that the world outside was never meant to see.

Molly planned a controlled release of the darkest of these secrets onto the open Internet, just as Virginia Ward had come to suspect. If the truth really could set us free, this one act should provide more than enough of it to do the job.