The Eye of Moloch (8 page)

“We’d like some cold water also,” Landers said, and the man gave an earnest nod and left to fetch the refreshments with barely a glance back toward Pierce for his leave. “Now,” Landers said as he opened his folder to its agenda page, “the first and most pressing order of business is this Ross woman—”

“Oh, I’m way out ahead of you on that score,” Pierce said. “Thirty men left here not an hour ago, hot on the scent. She’ll be dead and gone by sundown, and damn glad by then to be that way.”

“No, she will not be,” Landers said. “I want you to call back your men immediately. We’re going to let her go.”

“We?” Pierce laughed the word aloud and nearly triggered a fit of coughing in this blurt of his amusement. “Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about now?
We?
From where I sit, as of now I’ve got the better part of a million dollars and a brand-new helly-copter on my hands”—he checked his watch—“and you’ve got about four minutes left to breathe.”

“You need to call back your men, immediately.”

“Screw the four minutes.” Pierce looked up at the remaining man beside him. “Do me a favor and put a hollow-point through the empty skull of this highfalutin son of a bitch.”

The guard slipped his revolver from its holster and drew down and pulled back the hammer with his thumb, one slick motion and a steady, practiced ease with the prospect of killing an unarmed man.

Landers held up an index finger, as though to offer a polite suggestion for a wayward employee. “May I have a few last words, then?” he asked.

“This I’ve gotta hear.”

He closed the folder, removed his glasses, and calmly began.

“We’re already silent partners, Mr. Pierce, though you haven’t realized it. Aside from one notable failure last year—again involving the
troublesome Molly Ross—you’ve done good work for us in the past. The source of the funding and the guidance you’ve received remained in the shadows, but we’re on the cusp of a great opportunity now, and the time is right to formalize our arrangement. You’re free to decline, of course; at the moment it seems you’re determined to do so. It’s only fair that I tell you what it means if you do.

“Until this morning we didn’t know precisely where to find you, nor had there been a particular need to do so. You enjoyed the safety of a hidden asset, but that’s no longer to be the case. Since I landed, the sensors in that helicopter out there have been collecting, and recording, and relaying a torrent of information, all about you. It’s listening to us right now. By now this headquarters of yours is pinpointed and mapped to the millimeter, and every man here has been identified and profiled with enough data to track him down wherever he might try to run. I’m sure you see how these new facts might weigh on your decision.

“Because I am at this moment overdue to check in with my employers,” Landers continued, “about twenty minutes ago a small squadron of armed Predator drones and an A-10 Thunderbolt took off from the same private air base from which I departed earlier this morning. If you’re not familiar with the primary weapon of the A-10, let me describe it for you. It’s a Gatling gun that would span this room, loaded with depleted-uranium-tipped high-explosive shells the size of a Coke bottle, and it fires those at a rate of almost four thousand rounds per minute. The only way to improve on this gun as a killing machine, its designers once said, would be to make it fly. That’s the A-10, and right now it’s coming for you.

“Understand, this is not a rescue mission. Once they’re convinced by my continued silence that I’ve failed to usher you into our service, they’ll simply erase us all, myself included, and their plans will then proceed without pause, and without you and me. And one last thing you should know, if it’s crossed your mind to try to coerce me into calling them off. It won’t work, though you’re free to waste our final minutes in the attempt.”

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “You see,” Landers said, “if I have to die, this is exactly how I want to do it. Looking into the eyes of a man who’s about to see the wrath of hell rain down on him, and everything he’s built be destroyed, all because he didn’t have the good common sense to choose prosperity instead.”

George Pierce sat quite speechless, and one got the distinct impression this was a state with which he was rather unaccustomed.

Landers had first seen this look in a man’s eyes in the mid-1970s when he was only a fresh recruit. The circumstances of these standard introductory meetings differed, but this look never changed. It was dread mostly, gradually dawning, with the slightest whiff of desperate hope to color in the edges. To stare one’s destiny in the face is a difficult thing—to reach that decision point when a tinhorn tyrant must choose between his own shortsighted ambitions and the many benefits of taking on a smaller role in the bigger picture.

His diplomatic efforts had always been confined to domestic players: party leaders, entrenched career politicians, union officials, rising icons of various social movements, media moguls, pundits and thought leaders, judges and legislators, masters of finance and industry, so-called community organizers of all shapes and sizes, even religious figures if they’d shown the proper appetites for corruption and control.

While Landers worked exclusively within North America, his colleagues had sat across similar tables all around the globe. They’d watched this same moment of truth dawn upon a hundred self-styled luminaries: Hussein, Qaddafi, Chávez, Kim, Duvalier, Mugabe, Karimov, Amin, Shwe, al-Bashir, al-Assad, Mubarak, Thein Sein, Afewerki, Biya, Zenawi, Ahmadinejad, Castro, Assad, Déby, Obiang, Museveni, Lukashenko—as the wheels of progress turned year by year the puppet list grew longer.

There’d been a real piece of work in Gambia who insisted on being addressed as
His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Azziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh.
That hubris was short-lived indeed. Behind closed doors this one now answers simply to
Hadji,
and he’s
learned to accept this private mockery without objection. To such a man the reward for giving up his dignity was worth that small price paid. In return for doing as he was told he got to dress up like a real head of state, parade around in a long limousine, and indulge in his unique perversions with reckless abandon. And, if he continued to play his cards just right, he would also get to die in office of old age.

Obviously not everyone has the right stuff, both to get on board and then to ride to the end of the line. It remained to be seen on which side of the ledger the name of today’s candidate would be written.

“Now then, George,” Landers said, “what will it be? Death in obscurity, or an excellent chance to attain all your goals simply by playing a minor role in mine?”

Outside, that growing storm in the northern sky had nearly arrived and a low roll of thunder filled the silence as Pierce considered what his answer would be. To his credit, his deliberation didn’t last very long.

“What is it that you want me to do?”

Landers smiled, replaced his glasses on his nose, and opened his folder once again. “First, you need to call back the men you’ve sent after Molly Ross. She’s in our thoughts, believe me, but we’re going to let her go for now.”

After a seething moment George Pierce looked up at the guard beside him, who’d long since seen which way the wind was blowing and quietly reholstered his gun. Pierce gave a nod to pass along the order, and when the man had left he looked across the table again with something like respect in his eyes. Close enough for today, in any case.

“And what next?”

“What next?” Landers said. “Next, Mr. Pierce, we’re going to spit upon our hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

Chapter 9

I
n a sudden swoon of vertigo Thom Hollis snapped wide awake with a start, heart pounding, drenched in a frigid sweat and clutching the quilted comforter like a slick lifeline. His throat was raw and his breathing labored, and though he felt all these physical things and knew that the warm, darkened room around him must be real, it still took the solemn march of several seconds before he could assure himself he was alive.

With the heavy curtains drawn there was just enough daylight seeping in to gauge the proportions of a large guest suite and trace the outlines of unfamiliar furniture. A silent figure stood backlit in the doorway with what appeared to be a basket in its hands.

“Who is that?”

“You called out just before,” came the quiet answer. “You’re safe now. Your friend Molly and all the others are okay, too.”

Bedside lamps lit with the click of a wall switch and the woman who’d been standing there came into the room. The wicker basket she held was filled with pressed and folded clothes, and she placed it on a
low dresser, pulled out a wide drawer, opened a closet, and began to put away the laundry.

“You’ll have to pardon me, ma’am—but who are you, and where am I?”

She spoke to him as she worked. Her tone was genuinely pleasant, though hued with the good-natured patience of one who was explaining something very simple for the second time around.

“I’m Cathy Merrick. This is my dad’s place. This is your room, and these are your clothes—the tatters you wore when you got here, along with some other things I figured might just fit you. The rest of the family met you for a few minutes yesterday night. In the state you all were in, I guess I’m not too surprised if you don’t remember.”

But he did remember, vaguely. The face reflected in the dresser mirror was handsome and mature, with clear brown eyes that seemed subtly amused by some unshared thought just behind them. These features were framed with dark brown hair that fell easily around her shoulders. A wisp of mid-thirties premature gray played here and there, along with the sort of highlights the sun would have left throughout a life lived in the great outdoors.

She looked more familiar, in fact, than his own more distant image alongside her in the glass. The man there looked quite thin and substantially younger than he felt, all due to the extra weight he’d gradually lost over their long winter on the run. He touched his cheek—the skin was clean-shaven for the first time in years.

“Oh, that reminds me.” She came over to sit next to him, then took his chin to turn the far side of his face toward the nearest lamp. “You’ve got a cut here at the jawline that probably should have had a couple of stitches a few days ago.” As he moved to feel the spot she stopped his hand with a gentle smack, as one might correct a greedy child about to take another cookie out of turn. “Just leave it be; we’ll see how it heals. I had to shave that part to treat the laceration, and then you looked kind of funny that way, so I took off the rest.”

She must have noticed he was fixating again on his transfigured face
in the mirror across the room. “For heaven’s sake, that bushy old beard’ll grow back if you want it to. And you told me you didn’t mind; you were talking to me all friendly just like you were downtown with the boys at the barbershop.”

“I hope I didn’t say anything I should be ashamed of.”

“Oh no, you were quite the complimentary gentleman, even if you weren’t strictly conscious. Exhaustion and running yourself half starved for weeks on end begins to play some havoc with the mind.” She looked at him, with the slightest frown on her face. “You really can’t recall?”

He shook his head, then pushed himself up through some sharp aches and pains to sit back against the headboard. “I don’t even remember getting into this bed.”

“Last night, while I was looking after some of the others, the men came to let me know you’d fallen asleep in the shower. So, we cleaned you up real good and dried you off and I found something for you to sleep in, and then we put you down for the night.” She checked the clock on the wall. “That was about twenty hours ago.”

He felt his face getting red. “You all got me dressed?”

She smiled at him, took his wrist, found the pulse, and turned her head aside again so she could watch the second hand as she counted the beats. “I was married for eleven years, I’m a rancher’s only daughter in a family of nine, and I’ve been called upon to patch up farmhands and cowpokes since I was a teenager. Don’t you worry, Mr. Hollis, you can rest assured I came across no undiscovered country.”

“Try as I might, I’m finding little solace there.”

“Do you have a headache at all?” Now she was running her hands over his unkempt hair, as though checking for signs of an unreported blow to the skull.

“No.”

“The boys tell me that you fainted out there, when they found you.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly. Just let myself get stretched too thin, I guess, and the burden got the better of me.”

“And they also said that even after that you insisted on walking back into the woods all alone to bring out your people.”

Hollis nodded, though much of the memory was there only in bits and pieces.

“This loss of consciousness, has anything like that ever happened before?”

“I’ve had a . . .” He sought the proper words for a moment. “Since I got back from the war I’ve had a bad spell or two. Hadn’t happened in years, though. They told me that stress could bring it on. And I guess I’m just not as young as I used to be.”