Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

The main Information Services room seated nearly two hundred workers, all arranged in an open grid of rows and columns of identical desks and computer workstations. The space was one of the original dug-out areas of the mine, and while the room was large it also felt somewhat claustrophobic due to a low suspended ceiling overhead.

As the employees waited out the alert period with solitaire games and chitchat, the only person still working seemed to be the mailroom girl. She rolled her cart up one row and down the next, dropping off letters and memos and making light conversation with those who bothered to acknowledge her.

Near the center of the room, the girl suddenly stopped, looking troubled. She coughed a bit, put a hand to her chest, and leaned on her cart as though she might swoon.

“Does anybody smell that?” she called out, and suddenly the room got very quiet.

Some of those near her rose at their desks and acknowledged that yes, there was an unusual odor.

“It smells like—” Her knees seemed to weaken and her voice was strained as she tried to speak again. “It smells like . . .” And with a last guttural gasp she grabbed her throat and crumpled to the floor.

As some came to her aid the clear signs of physical distress began to spread rapidly to others. Another collapsed, and then another, and many covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs or shirtsleeves and hurried for the exit to escape the now visible, seeping gas. As fear took hold and threatened to spark a stampede toward the safety of the outdoors, someone with their wits still about them ran to the wall, broke a pane of protective glass, and pulled the big red lever that sounded the general alarm.

• • •

Even before the last of the many hundreds of employees, managers, technicians, and guards had evacuated, those near the back of the crowd saw the leading vehicle of the first-responders speeding up the private road toward the facility.

A series of security barriers that were set up earlier had been pulled aside as soon as the state of emergency within the complex had been announced. All the gates were still manned but they were now standing open so as not to impede the arrival of the rescue workers.

As the first hazmat truck arrived it slowed briefly at the farthest checkpoint and then was waved on through. The lights and sirens of many others were approaching in the distance; police, EMS, and fire departments from all over the surrounding region had been automatically summoned by the internal alarm.

The evacuated crowd parted to the sides of the road to clear the way and the first truck rumbled past them and through the fortified entrance of Garrison Archives.

Once the vehicle had disappeared inside, the remaining stragglers were quickly escorted out to safety and then, oddly enough, the massive double doors of the entrance swung closed.

Chapter 63

Noah stood off to the side as their now-empty truck was backed up and parked with its bumper jammed hard against the closed, inward-opening doors. It wasn’t until he heard that solid crunch of metal on metal that he allowed himself to accept it:

They were in.

With the fearless exuberance of youth, Lana Somin had already set to work in the abandoned guards’ booth by the front gate. A cloned keycard and PIN number of the night-shift supervisor were among the items they’d been passed by their insider. Using these, within a minute she’d reset all other access codes to random numbers and done what she could to lock out further changes.

Such measures obviously wouldn’t hold forever. The entrance to this place was built like a giant bank vault and was probably strong enough to withstand the assault of a small tactical nuke. All that strength wasn’t much comfort, though. Somewhere in an engineer’s notebook there was a contingency plan for this very scenario and that engineer’s phone would be ringing very soon. Once the people outside fully realized they’d been scammed they would bring whatever it took to force their way back in.

There was no time to waste and the clock was already running.

A number of low-slung electric people-movers were parked near the entrance. All six members of the group piled into one and set off down the main two-lane corridor with Cathy Merrick at the wheel. Despite the ordeal of their journey, all were in good shape, with the exception of Hollis. He was clearly weakening, his neglected fever was spiking, and those were only symptoms of something underneath that was probably growing worse by the minute.

The look of the place was an odd visual hybrid, part cave and part corporate. Twelve feet above the smooth pavement of the indoor road there were heavy cables, conduit, air and water ducts, and periodic amber lighting running along the rocky ceiling. The offices and workrooms they passed were like those you might find in any upscale high-rise, but the pitted walls of the tunnels leading between them appeared to have been carved out with tools no more subtle than dynamite and jackhammers.

After a half mile of dim, descending straightaways they began to realize that their hand-drawn map was far from perfect. Its errors and omissions led to some maddening backtracking and wrong turns. Valid routes looked the same as dark unfinished passages dwindling off toward dead ends. There was a great deal of new construction and very little signage to guide them. Apparently, if anyone got this far into the place without an escort it was assumed that they should know exactly where they were going.

Just as it seemed they were hopelessly lost, they rounded a bend and happened onto the very room they were looking for. It was a huge space filled end to end with identical desks and computer stations. The label INFORMATION SERVICES: CLOUD 79 was displayed above the entrance.

As they pulled over and parked they were met by a young woman with a Garrison ID pinned to her shirt. She introduced herself as Claire; she was the mailroom intern who’d helped them get this far. Once the rush for the exit had begun she’d slipped away in the confusion and hidden herself until the rest of the employees were gone. Now that they had a knowledgeable guide with a key to nearly every door, the real work could begin.

Molly’s aim seemed simple enough: to find the most frightening truths buried here in these vast archives of above-top-secret data, and then to release it all into the sunlight. It was her feeling that if the people finally saw the authentic documentation, if they could follow the actual tracks of the conspirators who were bent on destroying her country, then the good citizens of the United States of America would wake up all at once and be moved to act to save their nation.

It was a noble idea but Noah’s doubts were still lingering. Many, many damning truths had already been told in the past and most were soon forgotten. Often in those cases it was only the whistle-blowers themselves who’d been punished for the crime of speaking out.

Still, it was Molly’s hope that this time would be different. If the facts could be brought out in this definitive way—with all the evidence, all the connections, all the answers to that key question, who benefits? —then the resulting shock to the system might finally be too powerful to ignore.

The seven of them split up onto three tasks. Molly and Noah would prioritize a list of evidence they wished to find hidden within these nearly limitless memory banks. Lana Somin would worm her way into the front end of the master database with Tyler Merrick standing by to assist as he could. Lastly, Hollis, Cathy Merrick, and the new girl, Claire, would take a set of site blueprints and try to find an alternate way out of the place for when the time came to cut and run.