The Eye of Moloch (49 page)

“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.

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

T
hat 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.

“How are we still seeing this?” Noah asked. “I thought the Internet was down.”

“Not this,” Lana said. “I don’t think this thing ever goes down.”

Another blast shook the room, this one nearer still, and it snapped him back to the situation at hand. “Let’s move,” he said, and as Lana gathered her things he went over to Molly and knelt beside her.

“Honey, we really have to go now.”

She shook her head. “I changed my mind,” she said. “Lana told me what she found. I have to show them—”

“It’s too late, Molly. We’re too late to show them anything. We have to try to get out of here, and then we can think of what to do next once you’re safe.”

She didn’t answer, but at his gentle urging she let herself be lifted up and led along. He held on to Molly’s hand as the three of them ran back along the path to where the others were waiting.

Hollis was visibly worse by then and fading fast. Noah and Tyler shared some of his weight as they all set off on the winding path toward an exit they weren’t even sure was there.