Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

The work had barely begun and their grand plot was already uncovered. Now they were trapped in the vault they’d risked everything to get into, with no way to get back out.

“So you’re sure that dial-up video link is still streaming out,” Noah said.

“Yeah,” Lana replied, “but it’s not going to be anything like a hires broadcast. The stream’s just hooked up to one obscure old node in Michigan—”

“Okay, then. Molly, it’s your decision. In the time we’ve got left we can sit right here in front of that camera and you can say what you want, and I’ll read off some of these things we’ve found so far, and we’ll keep going until those guys break in here and do whatever they’re going to do to us. Nobody may ever see it, but at least it’s something after all this. Or, I can go now and find Hollis and the others and see if they’ve found an escape route, and if they have then we can still try to run. Either way, I’m with you.”

He could see her thinking for long seconds, and at last she seemed to come to a very hard and final decision.

“Go and find Hollis,” Molly said. “I guess we’ve got to run.”

Chapter 64

That was it, then. If Hollis and the others had discovered an alternate route to the outside, the time had come to take it.

They’d gone off on their search a while ago and Noah and Tyler set out to find them, leaving Molly and Lana in the computer room with a promise to hurry back soon. Escape was the only priority that remained, and time was short.

Noah could feel it now as well as hear it: a harsh vibration had begun to rattle the walls. It had been soft and isolated at first, but soon it was everywhere, as if the entire mountain above them was trembling under the bit of a giant drill press.

Tyler was the first to spot his mother and Claire and Hollis. The three of them were on their way back, coming up one of the dark side-corridors. As Noah and the boy ran to meet them they saw that the big man barely seemed able to stand on his own.

“Did you find a way out?” Noah asked.

“I think we did,” Cathy Merrick replied. “It’s an air shaft from the oldest part of the mine. It’s steep and it’s pretty tight and we didn’t make it all the way up but it may be the best chance we’ve got.”

A shuddering boom resonated through the corridor as a layer of dust and a loose tile or two fell from the ceiling.

“Where is she?” Hollis breathed. “We have to get Molly.” His eyes were bleary, his voice barely audible.

“How bad is he?” Noah asked.

“He’s not good at all.” Cathy Merrick was supporting him with Claire on his other side.

“Tyler, you stay here with them,” Noah said. “I’ll go back for Molly and Lana. We’re getting out of here.”

As he ran he was careful to memorize the twists and turns of the path back to the computer room. When he came to a particularly confusing crossroads he had to stop for a moment to regain his bearings.

Another of the many wide-screen video security monitors was mounted near the ceiling at this corner. Lana had obviously flipped that switch she’d mentioned; the picture showed multiple views from all over the facility and in the center stood the empty chair from which Molly had hoped to deliver her broadcast exposé over the Web.

On the outside view he could see technicians and laborers working hard on the front gate. Judging by the ever-increasing sounds of digging machines and the occasional detonations they were also trying to come in via other avenues.

A familiar discoloration along the wall reminded him which way to go and he ran full out the rest of the way. When he got to them Lana was still working at her place and Molly was off to the side, praying. He went to the desk first.

“Come on, let’s pack it in,” Noah said. “We’re leaving.”

“There’s something here you need to see,” Lana said.

“Not now, we don’t have the time.”

“We’ve got time for this. She wants you to see it, and you may never get another chance.”

Just one more minute, he told himself. That would give Molly a little space to finish her prayers—heaven knows they needed all the help they could get—and then they would go. “Okay, make it quick.”

“One of the items you wrote down, ‘Trapwire, Abraxas, Stingray, RIOT, and TIA,’ do you even know what those things are?”

“It was just something I remembered from my father’s work in New York, from last year. No, I don’t know what it is, but it seemed important and awfully secretive.”

“Well, this is what it is,” Lana said. “TIA stands for total information awareness. It was a post-9/11 program that supposedly got killed because it was too scary, even for those times. But it’s still alive, and it’s right here, linked directly to that giant intelligence complex they’ve built out in Utah. I’m going to use it now to do a search on you. Take a look at what comes up.”

She typed in his name and hit ENTER, selected his specific record from the resulting list of other Noah Gardners, and moments later a flicker of cascading documents, forms, and profiles flooded onto the screen.

“That’s not a surprise,” Noah said. “Of course they’re keeping tabs on me. What would you expect after all this—”

“Wait. Now give me any name at all, someone from high school; pick the most boring, harmless person you can think of.”

“Howard Pankin from Great Neck, New York,” Noah said. “I don’t see the point of this.”

Lana entered the name and again the screen filled with an elaborate profile. It was every bit as extensive as Noah’s had been. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of detail: locations and driving routes, purchase histories, private accounts and memberships, political leanings, medical records, school records, financial statements, friends and associates, phone records and transcripts, Internet tracks—and photographs.

These weren’t just the pictures this ordinary man had taken and put up on Facebook; they were pictures of him from every angle and life situation. They were from traffic cameras, street cameras, store cameras, work cameras, restroom cameras, phone cameras, bus and subway cameras; even his gaming console and his Webcam on his own home computer had supplied a folder of embarrassing images in which he clearly didn’t know he was being monitored.

Noah leaned closer, trying to understand. “What does this mean?” he asked.

“It means they’re watching every last one of us,” Lana said. “They’re linking all their electronic eyes and ears together, storing everything about us, cradle to grave. They’re building a case against each of us so nobody can ever step out of line without getting punished for it. Don’t you see, it’s the individuals they’re afraid of. They can use this to predict who’s going to cause them trouble and then stop them before they ever get started.”

“Good God.”

“Yeah. Take a look.” She called up a master listing of all records in this massive table. The number of entries flagged USA was 347,168,099.

As he watched, that number incremented by one.

“And that means . . .”

“Another serf was just born, in St. Louis,” Lana said. She brought up that new record. There was a first photo, with tiny hand- and footprints right beside. The data form started out empty but it didn’t stay that way for long. Soon the first few fields filled in. It was a boy, he was Caucasian, he was born to a single mother in the fifth generation of a family supported solely by the State, and even before he had a name, he had a number.