Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

Faced with such little time, but free access to all the answers she’d ever wanted, Molly seemed to struggle at first to narrow her scope to the most important things. Just as a starting point the two of them came up with a list of keywords to be searched once Lana had gained access to the computer system. These topics came to them in no particular order of validity or priority as Noah wrote them down:

Frederic Whitehurst, Sibel Edmonds, and the FBI

Gary Webb and Nicaragua

Kathryn Bolkovac and DynCorp

Katharine Gun, Karen Kwiatkowski, and Iraq

Julia Davis and DHS: Google, Facebook, NSA, CIA

Trapwire, Abraxas, Stingray, RIOT, and TIA

Trailblazer, NSA, Stellar Wind, Wiebe, Roark, Binney, and Loomis

AT&T, Mark Klein, and Room 641A

LIBOR, rate-fixing, derivatives, the Tower of Basel, BIS, and worldwide central banks

Anything to do with the shadowy foundations, conglomerates, investments, and under-the-table political funding linked to a man named Aaron Doyle

Molly stopped and asked him to read back this partial list. As Noah did so he saw in her face that she was feeling exactly as he did.

They’d just scratched the surface and it was way too much already. And at the same time, it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

The truth behind nearly all these individual revelations—the secret partnerships, the hidden influence, the lies and corruptions and scandals, the high crimes against the American people perpetrated by their supposed leaders—it was already out there on the open Internet for anyone to uncover for themselves.

The problem wasn’t a lack of evidence but a basic human bias: we see only what we’re prepared to believe. After all, Molly and her mother and Danny Bailey had each spoken out on most of these things in the past, and where had it gotten them? Nowhere, except that two of them were dead and the other was about to play her last remaining card.

“It’s no good,” Molly said, and the expression on her face was desolate. “It’s not going to work.”

“We’re here,” he replied. “There’s no use giving up now. Come on, let’s do what we came to do.”

Tyler Merrick walked up then and said, “Lana’s ready for you now.”

The three of them hurried over to where the young woman was immersed in the database system. Several employees had left themselves logged in when they’d fled their desks and that had saved her some work cracking passwords.

As requested, she and Tyler had also set up for the video portion of the project.

A large TV monitor was mounted above the desk where Lana sat. Other monitors like this were all over the place. Its screen displayed insets of live feeds from several security cameras around the facility, including views from the front entrance and various rooms and key intersections. In the center there was a larger rectangular picture that currently showed an empty chair next to the desk.

“Molly should sit there,” Lana said.

Noah helped Molly to the seat as Tyler adjusted the Webcam to center her image. He repositioned some floor lamps to perfect the lighting until the picture looked as good as it ever would, given the circumstances.

“Where’s this video going?” Noah asked.

“No place yet. We’re all set to feed it to her website and to some other video hosts when she says go. I’ve got a backup stream running through a modem that’s older than I am and a dial-up connection on one of their secure phone lines. Even if they cut the Internet fiber optics, they probably won’t think to also cut those phones. The quality may be pretty bad but it should stay live. When I flip the switch this feed will take over all the security monitors in the place, so everybody here will see the broadcast, too.”

“And you’re into the data system already?”

“I am. You should know, that layout I got is just a part of what’s here. The old part.”

“But all the dirt we’re looking for, it’s still in there?”

“Oh yeah, it’s in here.” She leaned and glanced at Molly’s list, chose the LIBOR rate-fixing heist, and keyed in some entries. Her screen filled with lists of private correspondence, phone records and transcripts, names and places and minutes from illegal meetings that had planned the recent theft of tens of trillions—enough hard evidence to convict a hundred insanely powerful people if it should ever be exposed.

Throughout all this Noah stayed at Molly’s ear, describing everything he saw. “What you’ve got on the screen there,” he said to Lana, “what can you do with that?”

“This little piece? I can print it, I can save it locally, I can zip it up and send it to a place on the Net where we can pick it up later and do whatever we want with it. If you really want to spread it around I can make a torrent and put it up on the Pirate Bay. But if we’re going to do anything online we need to do it soon.”

“Why?”

“They could catch on to what we’re doing any minute and when they do they’ll shut off our high-bandwidth access to the outside—like I said, everything but this old modem carrying the video over the red-phone line.”

“Why didn’t they shut it down immediately?”

“It’s a last resort,” Lana said, “going dark is like doomsday for a place like this. They’ve got a ton of redundant high-speed connections, massive pipes for all the data flowing in and out, and it’s all automated so their clients can have access 24/7. These people live and die by their service record. If they take themselves down, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do. My guess is that they’d prefer to keep this little incident a secret as long as they can. We know they’re pretty good at keeping secrets.

“But once they really realize we’re in here with our hands in the cookie jar? Yeah, they can kill all those links from the edge-routers upstream. I’m working on some half-assed solutions for that—like the dial-up connection for the video—but what I come up with will be slow as hell by comparison, like 1990s slow. Anything big that you want to send from here, we’d better get on with it.”

“Why don’t we just send it all?” Tyler asked. “To hell with it, just do a mass release, while we still can.”

“No,” Molly said. “We don’t have any idea what’s in there. The corporate and diplomatic and financial and military intelligence secrets—the way the world works now, they’re all entwined. We could help our enemies and murder our allies. We could expose every American undercover agent everywhere. We could get a lot of people killed and start a few wars in the process. Letting it all loose without a filter is not an option.”

“So what do we do?” Lana asked.

Molly didn’t answer, so Noah handed over their handwritten list. “Start with those things while we’re thinking this through. Do what you said, find everything related, package it up, and burn what you can to a DVD or something. If the high-speed lines stay up, hide it outside somewhere so we can get it and use it later on.”

“Okay.” As Lana spoke this word the lights overhead flickered briefly. She frowned, did a quick diagnostic on her machine, and then looked over at Noah again. “That’s it,” she said. “We’re already screwed. They’ve done it; we’re cut off.” She typed and clicked to verify this, and then quickly checked the modem line for a carrier. The distinctive screech was still there on the speakerphone. “Yep. Every outgoing connection except the one for the video is down.”

That news was bad, but the picture on the security monitor brought even worse tidings.

Outside, many hundreds of evacuated employees were being pushed back far away from the entrance. A convoy of black SUVs rolled up; the familiar Talion yellow crest adorned their side doors. In the distance, a long line of heavy equipment and weaponry was pulling into a ready position.