The Eye of Moloch (36 page)
The Department of Homeland Security had blanketed the entire region with yet another nonspecific elevated terror alert, letting citizens know only that they should stay at home under curfew and await further announcements. Uniformed men at the checkpoint ahead were turning back the sparse traffic and pulling aside selected vehicles for searches and questioning of the drivers and passengers.
As she reached the front of the line she saw that these men were armed and organized but only a few were actually state or local police. The rest were contractors, all sporting the Talion insignia and behaving as if they had every legal right to do what they were doing.
After showing her identification she waited in her rental car as they huddled to discuss how to deal with such an unexpected visitor. After a number of tense calls up the food chain, at last an okay was handed back down.
She was given a coded site pass to hang around her neck and a few of the men directed her around the barrier and waved her onward toward the ranch. An escort van pulled out behind her, the nonofficial yellow strobes on its rooftop flashing all the way.
On her flight into the area Virginia had reviewed a backgrounder that included many photographs of the Merrick property. What she saw when she pulled up at the outer fence line bore no resemblance to those pictures at all.
The area was lit with portable banks of lights, smaller versions of the arrays one might see at an outdoor sporting event. All she could see under the glare was a cratered, blackened wasteland. To her right a few structures were still in flames, including what was left of the main barn and the shells of other smaller buildings. The fire trucks and EMS vehicles that had responded were being held away at the far perimeter. Evidently it had been determined that nothing and no one here would be worth the risk of saving.
A large number of corpses were scattered around the grounds, apparently lying right where they’d fallen, most with weapons still in their hands or by their sides. Next to each of them someone had placed a body bag topped with a weighted paper form and a Ziploc container for evidence or personal effects. As yet, however, it seemed that nobody had made a priority of tending any further to the dead.
Virginia got no special attention, either; these workers looked past her like she wasn’t even there. Instead nearly all the suited-up personnel were sifting through the smoldering wreckage where the family house had once been.
She walked slowly into the scene, picking out details, trying to roll back time in her mind’s eye to let the ruins tell their tale.
A sheriff’s vehicle had been here for a while before the shooting started—it was parked close to the residence, where a welcome visitor might stop. A deputy was dead at the wheel, clearly shot through the window as he sat waiting. The shotgun beside him was still in its mount,
his sidearm was holstered, the radio mike was in its clip. He hadn’t been expecting any trouble until it crept up and hit him from behind.
It occurred to her that the vehicle’s always-on dash-cam would be perfectly positioned to show a replay of much of the incident. As she bent by the broken window she saw that the camera had been ripped out by the wires and the car’s black-box video recorder was gone along with it.
Virginia stood again and took a long look around.
As before, it seemed that no one was paying her any mind, though without any doubt she felt eyes on her from behind the darkened glass of the van that had followed her in. She walked on again, feeling more alone than ever and distinctly aware of the comforting weight of the pistol at her hip.
Three bodies were outside the house near the frame of a shattered window. One of them was shot but the other two had their throats ripped out; it looked like they’d lost a fight with either a large guard dog or a small bear. In all likelihood this spot was where it started, with the family inside their home, a company of bad guys creeping up to surround them from cover, and these three amateur assassins coming in close to a ground-floor window, maybe with a specific target in mind.
These men had come here for a massacre.
Whatever vehicles had transported them, all had been parked somewhere out of sight, though there had also been two massively armed pickup trucks on their side. One of these vehicles lay overturned, the other had crashed headlong into a ditch, and both looked like they’d driven here straight from the set of
Mad Max
. Each had a belt-fed machine gun mounted in its bed.
Virginia headed back out toward the edge of the yard and knelt down beside one of the dead men there. He’d been shot in the face, and by his posture and the placement of his rifle he’d apparently been killed while firing toward the house from a prone position. Like some of the others he had a U.S.-made light rocket-launcher slung across his back, though he’d never had a chance to fire it.
It all seemed to fit. These marauders had come prepared for a coordinated surprise attack on those inside. They obviously got far more of a fight than they’d bargained for once the shooting had begun.
There’d been a prolonged gun battle then, and it appeared that the Merrick family had won. Whatever had totally destroyed the house and the grounds, though, had happened after the fight was over.
She checked several of the bodies for those distinctive markings she’d seen on the skin of the perpetrators from other regions—that line of tattooed diamonds denoting members of George Pierce’s organization. Some had them and others didn’t, many were burned too badly to tell, but there was more than enough jailhouse white-power ink among them to convince her that they’d all come from the same wicked source.
A man was walking her way and she spoke to him but he took no notice, being so thoroughly absorbed in his iPad that she had to stop him physically to get his attention.
“Are you in charge of this scene?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Who is?”
“Over there.” With a flick of his thumb he indicated a man standing nearer to the remains of the house.
Virginia turned and started that way without wasting another word. As she walked she crossed paths with several soot-covered workers leaving the rubble with salvage in their hands: computer components, hard drives, printers, laptops, and desktop units.
The man who’d been pointed out as the site manager looked up as she approached.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
She showed her ID. “Tell me what happened here.”
He scanned her credentials under his flashlight. “Figuring that out is not my job. Who let you through the roadblock—”
“One more time,” Virginia said. “What happened here?”
The man frowned for a few moments, as though he were performing
a block of long division in his head. “Air strike,” he said at length, “on some terrorism suspects.”
“Who ordered it?”
“Who
ordered
it? Nobody ordered it; it’s procedure. The rules of engagement ordered it. And why the hell are you asking me? I saw your ID, I know where you’re from. You people probably wrote the training manual for all this, and you’re asking me what happened here?”
She felt like putting her fist through something but it wasn’t anyone or anything within her reach right then. “Who was in the house when the strike came down?” she asked.
“We haven’t been through it all yet. Just two people as far as we can tell.”
“Let me see them.”
“I will,” he said, “but there’s not much left to see.”
The bodies he showed her were burned and torn up far beyond any hope of a field identification. She snapped on a pair of thin gloves from her kit and knelt down with the remains to discover what she could.
One thing became absolutely clear after only a few minutes of the grim work. These two bodies by the house were not those of Molly Ross and Thom Hollis. Though in life they’d indeed been a large man and a small woman, both of these people had been much older.
“Where’s everyone else?” Virginia asked. “I’m told over twenty people might have lived here, and somebody defended this place against an army of white-supremacist goons just a little while ago.”
“Don’t know anything about that,” the man replied. “Wasn’t part of my briefing.”
But they must have been here,
she thought. They must have escaped after the initial attack but before the air strike had come, and someone had decided that fact was to be kept quiet.
She stayed where she was, pretending to be performing a further examination though there was little more she could learn from those remains. She needed time to think.
Several years earlier, Virginia Ward had decided that the Big Picture was something she simply wouldn’t acknowledge anymore. She believed she’d earned the right to retreat in this way. In fact, she’d paid for that right with her own flesh and blood.
Haven’t I done enough for my country?
That’s how she’d rationalized her withdrawal from the larger issues.
On the ground was where she’d chosen to live, face-to-face with good and evil, where a limited form of justice could always be done and she could see it done with her own two eyes. There was a perfect clarity in such small-scale engagements. No matter who she was working for or what their ultimate objectives might be, at least she could always know and do what was right in that moment of truth.
It had worked just fine for her that way, but always with one nagging flaw: all the while a war had been under way, right here on her home soil, and she’d been involved only in its smallest details. The question that she’d somehow managed to keep at bay now loomed large.
Whose side was she on?
From everything credible Virginia had seen and all the data she’d collected, it seemed clear that Molly Ross and her people had never done anything but fight for their country by seeking the truth, albeit at times with tactics that bordered on the unlawful. In a way she’d taken up the role that the traditional press had long since sold out and forsaken. She’d made some very powerful enemies as a result, all the way to the top.
And the family that had lived in this place, the Merricks, they’d been known as pillars of their community until the recent smears against them had begun. Their only crime had apparently been material support of a legitimately patriotic cause that was dangerous and unpopular in the current climate.
And Noah Gardner was a good young man who’d never had a direction—he’d been a fellow bystander—and had finally found himself only when he’d gotten caught in the middle of a battle he was only now beginning to understand.
Those people were on one side of the war. And then there was the other.
George Pierce and his men obviously needed no further condemnation; their heinous vision of the future was crystal clear. But despite his FBI nickname, Pierce was no real general. He was only a puppet at best, one of many, and someone else was up there above him, funding, supporting, and pulling the strings. It was obvious to her now that Warren Landers must be a player behind the recently orchestrated turmoil, but he wasn’t at the top, either.
Arthur Gardner, Landers’s employer, had actually been Virginia’s original contact in this matter. If Gardner was the ringmaster of this whole thing then why would he bring her in? He must have known that, given her reputation, she might uncover the truth. Was that what he’d wanted? Could it be that he’d come face-to-face with the same decision she was now facing, and that he’d made a bold choice of his own?
Thom Hollis was still the only wild card in her mind. With so much deception at work she still wasn’t sure of who or what he really was.
And that was that; she made her decision right then. For better or worse, Virginia Ward had finally acknowledged the war and chosen her side.
She motioned for the fellow in charge to come nearer.
“What have you got?” he asked.
“Those two fugitives,” she said, “Molly Ross and Thom Hollis?”
“Yeah.”
Virginia did her best to never tell a lie, but in her line of work, sometimes there was simply no sound alternative.
“In my opinion this is them, right here,” she said, handing him her card. “Congratulations, your air strike killed them both. The next time you report in you’d better tell that to your boss, on my authority.”
• • •
Virginia hadn’t been completely clear on her next steps, but when she returned to her car and checked her mail there was some shocking news that told her exactly where she needed to go.
Arthur Gardner was dead.
A private memorial gathering had been scheduled on the grounds of a highly exclusive club on the West Coast. It was set for the following day. The late Mr. Gardner’s son would of course be in attendance, as might other players as yet unseen. And if Molly Ross was still alive and on the run again—and if she was planning something like what Virginia was beginning to believe she was—then she might see this development as an opportunity to get in touch with Noah, and maybe to pull him into her service once again.
Virginia opened up a browser on her tablet and quickly made reservations for the next available flight to Sonoma County Airport, just a few miles east of the funeral’s strange location.
