The Eye of Moloch (22 page)

Having had time to think and reestablish their pecking order, they must have been weighing the overwhelming strength of their numbers against the vulnerabilities of the single armed opponent they now faced. Their only real question would be how and when they would choose to make the final advance.

Whatever they might have been scheming, however, their designs were interrupted a split second later by the awesome and on-time arrival of the Arizona Air National Guard.

Virginia Ward had just expended her last round as the first of the Falcons tore through below treetop level at full afterburner, trailing the scream of an avenging angel. All the front windows shattered and blew violently inward as the clap of the pressure wave slammed against the house. Without firing a shot, in its supersonic wake the lead F-16 had flattened the men outside who’d still been standing.

As the first jet peeled off the second followed on, flying slow on a guns-only strafing run. In a flash of heavy-metal demolition its Vulcan cannon plowed a relentless, rooster-tailing furrow across the driveway and cut through the heart of the clustered enemies. The truck’s fuel tanks burst and exploded and the fire roared heavenward, and as the dust swirled and settled, by the light of the gangsters’ burning treasure she could see no human movement amid the devastation.

There would be a last stroke coming. She picked up a pistol from a dead man’s hand as she hurried away from the window and back to Harland Dell’s huddled family. She held them close, shielding them with her body as the shriek of a Maverick missile sheared the air overhead. A final concussion shook the house to its foundation as the explosion cratered whatever remained of the threat from the men outside.

As the echoes of the strike were still fading away she continued speaking softly to the four survivors. Her voice was reassuring and calm as she listened and watched with her pistol held cocked and rock-steady and trained upon the open door. The sounds of a helicopter approaching with the rescue party barely eased her mind at all; she knew from long experience that the last moment before salvation can be as deadly as any other.

And Virginia Ward also knew something else: the nightmare was far from over for this widowed woman and her children. In fact, it never fully would be; they’d have to learn to live with scars even deeper than her own.

But they would live through this, just as their brave father would have wanted. For tonight, that was the very best that she could do.

Chapter 24

W
hen the rescue helicopter had arrived at the burned-out ranch, one of the physicians had insisted that Virginia be flown to a secure medical facility in Colorado for observation. She’d agreed, in part so she could accompany the Dell family to that same hospital and oversee the beginnings of their care.

Once she’d settled into her recovery room she had to admit that the rest would be welcome. She’d taken a legitimate beating and after two rough flights and an endless debriefing she was left feeling every blow this latest mission had dealt her. Despite multiple cuts and bruises and two grazing bullet wounds, she’d chosen to forgo most of the painkillers when they were offered. She needed to preserve all of her mental faculties for a supposedly urgent meeting set to take place later on.

At least there had been a good hot shower in the bargain, and there would be no more traveling for the moment, not even a walk down the hall. Her next appointment was coming directly to her hospital room; she wouldn’t even need to change out of her bathrobe to meet with him.

With the bedside remote she adjusted herself to a more upright
position. She was still too wired for a nap and too tired to pace the floor, but there was no shortage of reading to be done.

A stack of materials in various media had been brought and left alongside her dinner tray by someone’s assistant. The encrypted touchscreen tablet placed on top would contain all things sensitive and classified, including issue-specific position papers from various intelligence services and an up-to-the-minute recap of the President’s Daily Briefing. A generous bundle of domestic and international newspapers and magazines rounded out the pile, and that’s where she began.

Not that she believed much of the sponsored propaganda that was parroted by the press in these times. No, Virginia kept up with the papers and periodicals purely to see what the general public was being told. Through study of the covert trends and agendas between the lines she could sometimes assemble a better forecast of where and when the next crisis might arise.

The truth was predictably scarce in all those spoon-fed pages. But as someone who spent her days immersed in the undisguised reality of a global house of cards on the brink of total catastrophe, she couldn’t help but think that maybe it was better this way. There was some form of mercy in the fact that the majority of people didn’t have any idea what was coming.

Virginia Ward no longer harbored any fantasies of a happy ending, not even for the nation she loved. Her work was not at all strategic but purely reactive and tactical in nature, clear-cut and eye-to-eye. She put a stop to things that were wrong; that’s how she phrased it on those rare occasions when she was asked what she did for a living by someone who merited an honest answer. Desperate circumstances arose and she went out to meet them, and then she put things right and made that single problem go away.

This was how she wanted it; nothing ambiguous, no soul-searching was required, and there was enough self-determination in her work to make it seem worthwhile. She retained the absolute right of refusal for
these missions, and when she had the opportunity to choose an assignment for herself, she was free to take it on.

That bloody siege in Arizona had been one of her own choosing. The next, though, whatever it was, would no doubt be suggested for her by someone higher up, one of the many competing power brokers who worked their patient plots from behind the tinted glass.

The man she would soon be meeting was new to her. This made it even more important that her mind be clear. It was beyond unusual for her services to be requested—or even learned of—by anyone she didn’t know personally.

As she was lost in her reading there soon came a quiet knock at the door frame. She signed out of her tablet, looked up, and motioned the visitor inside.

“Is this a good time?” the man asked, smiling.

“Good as any. Please, come on in.”

He did, removing his jacket and laying it over his arm as he walked up near the bed. “Do people call you Ginny?”

“Not often.”

“Virginia, then.” He seemed to make note of her more visible injuries. “You took some damage out there tonight.”

“You should see the other guy,” she said without humor, and with hopes that the niceties would soon be coming to a close.

“I’ll bet.” He reached out and she shook his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Virginia. My name is Warren Landers.”

•   •   •

This guy was very well connected; that was the first impression he’d obviously sought to give her. His boss was a man named Arthur Gardner; he was the one who’d reached out to Virginia’s people a few days before. Landers had been sent to Arizona to observe her previous mission, and after apparently finding her work to be adequate for his needs, he’d followed her here.

As usual in these cases, once his credentials were established she
hadn’t expected him to provide many other details of the organization behind him, and none were offered.

Mr. Landers sat and waited while she went through the backgrounder he’d brought.

At first blush the man whom Landers and his group were targeting seemed hardly more than a cold-blooded murderer. There’d been scattered sightings of him across the country and other seemingly random shootings along the eastern seaboard seemed to bear his signature as well.

He’d once been a military man with a sterling record, but upon returning home he’d apparently suffered some sort of a gradual post-traumatic breakdown. According to one supposedly reliable source, he’d later fallen in with a group of homegrown extremists. For almost two decades this organization had managed to stay under the law enforcement radar before suddenly popping up late last year.

“Thom Hollis,” she said.

“Thom or Thomas; he seems to go by both.”

She flipped through the upper corners of the remaining paperwork. “By the dates on these documents this has all been put together rather quickly. And recently.”

He nodded. “That’s true. This Hollis guy and the group behind him just made the President’s kill-list. The White House is about to green-light a signature strike on them, so there was a bit of a scramble to get up to speed.”

This “kill-list” to which Mr. Landers referred was a relatively new development, at least among governments that still tipped their hats to the rule of law. Together with a small contingent of advisors the President would regularly meet to nominate and then pass judgment on foreign (and now domestic) “militant” individuals deemed eligible for termination without the benefit of due process.

“So tell me about this group.”

“As you just read, Thom Hollis has been running with one of those right-wing domestic militias. Real throwbacks, Constitutionalists, religious fanatics, Sovereign Citizens, I’m sure you know the profile. They call themselves the Founders’ Keepers, and I guess they want to drag us all back to 1789, slaves and all. You’re familiar with George Pierce and the United Aryan Nations?”

“Of course.”

“They’re branches on the same tree, and apparently they’re all in the process of joining forces. There was a showdown a few days ago up in Wyoming; the good guys finally had these people pinned, and they hit back with the kind of weaponry and tactics and numbers that tells us they’re at a whole new level now. Most of them got away, and this Hollis guy split off from there.”

“And the woman who’s with him?”

“Her name is Molly Ross. Her mother was Beverly Ross, you might have heard of her, she was some kind of a libertarian activist dating back to the 1970s. She started this group and they seemed mostly harmless while she was alive, a lot of crazy talk but very little action. Mom put herself out of our misery last fall, killed herself, after the daughter and some of Pierce’s men perpetrated that incident north of Las Vegas.”

“That incident?”

“That
nuclear
incident.”

Though Virginia knew exactly what he was talking about, it had seemed more judicious to pretend as though she didn’t. This Landers guy didn’t need to know how plugged in she really was.

Much like that recent and surprising launch of a Chinese-made ballistic missile from a submarine off the coast of Southern California, the cover stories about the Nevada explosion had flown in so thick and fast that the whole event had passed immediately into the wacky realm of the conspiracy theorists. It was a meteorite, it was a plane crash, it was a botched underground test—only a handful of people really knew what
had happened, and their hard knowledge concerned only the fact of the unplanned nuclear detonation, and not the full story behind it. This was the first that even Virginia had heard of a specific terrorist connection.

“Honestly, Mr. Landers, this sounds like a job for the FBI, and the police.”

“I would agree with you,” Landers said, “but it’s not so much what Hollis has done so far that’s concerning us. He killed one of his own the other day, a guy named Ben Church, just a harmless old man from the group who was probably trying to talk some sense into him. Shot him in the head. You’ll see it in the psych profile, they’re calling that a ‘triggering incident.’ Anyway, they pulled some DNA and fingerprints from some handmade cartridges around that murder scene. Both belong to Hollis. And those other shootings you saw in the brief? The prints and the other evidence at those sites point straight to him, too. We’ve got some fairly good pictures from surveillance videos; he’s traveling with a young female companion, and they’re obviously disguising themselves but she looks an awful lot like Molly Ross.”

“As I said—”

“With all due respect,” Landers cut in, “I think this is a job for you. These killings are only a drum roll. They’re laying the groundwork for a major terrorist attack, and as soon as the press gets hold of it these two are going to start getting their names in the paper, and that’s just what they want. They want people to know who they are so everyone will know who’s responsible when they do what we think they’re planning to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“You and I both know there was a clear lead-up before 9/11. Small things that looked unrelated, and we only saw the connections after the attack. If we’d understood them before, we could have prevented a disaster and saved thousands of lives.” He took a step closer. “Virginia, it’s these people that were responsible for that near calamity last year. If they’d succeeded it would have made September 11th look like a garden
party. Sure, the real facts never made it to the press, but you saw what happened. Even the nonspecific alert they caused was serious enough to move Congress to delay the fall elections; they still haven’t happened yet. But they didn’t stop after that. What these people have said very clearly to all of their underground followers is that something big is coming, something really spectacular, and they’ve promised that they’re bringing it soon.”