THE OVERTON WINDOW (32 page)

I fear not that any motives of interest may lead me astray; I am sensible of no passion which could seduce me knowingly from the path of justice, but the weaknesses of human nature and the limits of my own understanding will produce errors of judgment sometimes injurious to your interests.

I shall need, therefore, all the indulgence which I have heretofore experienced from my constituents; the want of it will certainly not lessen with increasing years.

What struck Noah as he read these words was a fundamental difference in tone from the political discourse of later times. Here was one of
the founders of the nation, maybe the greatest thinker among them, and yet he spoke with a quality that was so rare today as to be almost extinct among modern public servants. It was a profound humility, as though nothing were more important to express than the honor he felt in being chosen again as a guardian of the people’s precious liberties.

There was a great deal more to read. Noah held his place, looked down at Molly, and found her still sleeping. He adjusted the light above him so it was less likely to disturb her rest.

Then he remembered something else that he’d been meaning to ask her, if they’d only had a moment to breathe. Nothing important, but he was curious.

Of all the remote destinations Molly could have picked for her flight to safety—anywhere in the world, really—he wondered why she’d chosen Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 38
 

Danny Bailey and Agent Kearns had been on the road in their bomb-laden van for nearly five hours straight, and they were past due for a fuel stop and a stretch.

After taking his turn in the gas station’s cramped restroom Danny picked up a diet soda and a candy bar and brought them to the counter. As the cashier was ringing him up he scanned the visible stories on a bundled stack of newspapers off to the side. Two headlines stood out, and he read them over again.

N
ATIONWIDE
T
ERROR
A
LERT
S
TATUS
E
LEVATED
O
NCE
M
ORE
DHS C
HIEF:
I
NTEL
C
ONFIRMS
‘C
REDIBLE
T
HREAT
’
FOR
W
ESTERN
U.S.

He looked up into the corner and saw a dusty security camera looking back down at him. Even out here, he thought, on the outskirts of civilization, some backward distant cousin of Big Brother is still watching. From that odd camera angle Danny’s fuzzy, jerky image was displayed on a small black-and-white TV on the side shelf, wedged between the cigarettes and a rack of dog-eared porno magazines.

“I’ll take one of these, too,” he said, holding up the paper.

Stuart Kearns walked past him toward the door, still rubbing his hands dry. “Let’s go, kid, we’re burning daylight.”

Danny nodded an acknowledgment but the words and their urgency had barely intruded on his running thoughts. A few seconds later the cashier had to nudge his hand to snap him out of it, and he picked up his bagged purchases and his change and headed for the van.

As the trip progressed southward the Nevada roads had gradually become more and more rustic and empty of traffic. From the first wide interstate, to four-lane turnpikes, down to the aging two-lane desert highway they’d now been on for a good while—in a sense it felt as though they were traveling further back in time with every passing mile. At this rate they’d be bumping down a mule trail before sunset.

Danny still had the newspaper he’d bought draped across his lap, though he’d stopped reading it several minutes before.

“Can I run something up the flagpole, Stuart?”

“Sure.”

“The terrorism alert is elevated. I take that back—it was already elevated two days ago, and now it’s been raised again.”

“Right.”

“They’re talking here”—he tapped the paper—“about what they call a specific credible threat, maybe two, that they’re tracking somewhere in the western United States. They’re already stopping and searching cars at all the bridges in San Francisco.”

Kearns looked over, then put his attention back on the road. “What are you getting at?”

“Put on your tinfoil hat for a minute and I’ll tell you.”

“Okay, okay, go.”

“You remember the 7/7 bombings in 2005?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know that a security company, with a former Scotland Yard guy in charge, was running a terrorism drill in London that very morning? And this random drill involving a thousand people was planned out months in advance to simulate the same kind of bombing incidents, on the same targets, on the same day, and at the same times?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“And then it really happened. While they were running the drill, the exact, actual thing they were practicing for actually fricking happened. What are the odds of that being a coincidence?”

“If any of that were true,” Kearns said, “I’d know about it. So what does that tell you, Oliver Stone?”

“Well, then,” Danny went on, undaunted, “do you know that the guy your old friends in the U.S. government believe was the actual mastermind of those bombings—his name is Haroon Rashid Aswat—was also some sort of protected double agent who was on the payroll of some obscure faction of MI6? The CIA knew all about him but they weren’t allowed to touch him; he even lived over here for a few years. Hell, he tried to organize an al-Qaeda training camp in Oregon—”

“You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”

“One more thing. The guy that we haven’t seen yet, his name is Elmer, right?”

“Right.”

“The guy in charge on September eleventh was Mohamed Atta. He had a lot of aliases, and that’s the one he started using after 2000 when he got into the United States. He was born Mohamed Elamir awad al-Sayed Atta Karadogan. But the name on his work visa, the one he showed when he enrolled in flight school in Florida, was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir.”

“And
el-Amir
sounds like
Elmer”
Kearns said. “Do you take a nap during the day? Because you must stay up all night thinking about this crap.”

“In English,
el-Amir
translates to ‘the general.’ It could be a code
word. Atta used el-Amir back then in 2001, and this guy’s using it now. If this whole thing is part of some false-flag operation—if they’re really trying to bring this war back home—they need a new boogeyman right here on U.S. soil, and they need to connect him to past events and to the patriot movement so they can demonize the resistance.”

“Mohamed Atta is dead.”

“Yeah? So is Osama bin Laden, but that doesn’t stop him from putting out a tape every six months. And I’m not even saying it’s a real live Islamo-fascist behind any of this, but making it look that way will make the story that much scarier when something happens.”

“Look,” Kearns said, “I’ll tell you one thing I do know. There’s an election coming up, and fear has been a swing factor in party politics for as long as I can remember. The timing of this whole thing, the terror alert, and all the rest of it—it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find out after all this is over that we’re just playing a bit part in somebody else’s political ambitions. Technically, I guess you could call that a conspiracy, if it makes you happy.”

It didn’t make him happy, but Danny decided to let it lie.

“How much farther now?” he asked.

Kearns checked his watch and then glanced at the screen of the GPS. “About a half hour, maybe less.”

As the ride went on in silence Danny looked across occasionally at the older man, hoping that he’d at least planted a seed of warning. In that small way it seemed he’d been successful. You can’t see another man’s thoughts, but you can sure see him thinking.

CHAPTER 39
 

The fasten-seatbelt light had just blinked on above Noah’s head, accompanied by an intercom announcement that the flight would soon begin its on-time descent into McCarran International.

He rubbed his eyes and they felt as though he hadn’t blinked in quite a while. The time had apparently flown by as he’d been occupied reading and rereading the many quoted passages that filled the pages of Molly’s book.

In the course of his supposedly top-shelf schooling he must have already been exposed to much of this, and if so, it shouldn’t have seemed as new to him as it did. And in a strange, unsettling way—like reading a horoscope so accurate that its author must surely have been watching you for months through the living-room window—it seemed that each of these writings was addressed to this current time, and this very place, for the sole, specific benefit of Noah Gardner. There’d been many examples, but this was one that stood out:

The phrase “too big to fail” had been reborn for propaganda purposes during a brainstorming session at the office last year. This was in
the run-up to the country’s massive financial meltdown, the multiphase disaster that was only now gathering its full head of steam.

The original purpose of the phrase in business was to describe an entity that was literally too large and successful to possibly go under— think of the
Titanic,
only before the iceberg. But this newly minted meaning, it was decided, would be a threat, rather than a promise.

While the crisis had in truth, of course, been nothing less than a blatant, sweeping consolidation of wealth and power—perpetrated by some of Doyle & Merchant’s most prestigious Wall Street clients—it wouldn’t do to allow the press and the public to perceive it that way. So the government’s bailout of these billionaire speculators and their legion of cronies and accomplices was instead presented as a bold rescue, undertaken for the good of the American people themselves.

We have no choice
—that was the sad, helpless tone of both the givers and the receivers of those hundreds of billions of dollars, monies to be deducted directly from the dreams of a brighter future for coming generations. AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citi, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Fannie and Freddie, and the all-powerful puppetmaster behind it all, Goldman Sachs—these companies are the only underpinnings of our whole way of life, so the breathless story went, and if they go down, we all do.

It was a fresh way of presenting the public with a familiar choice: the lesser among evils. There was talk of a death-spiral drop in the stock market, a wildfire of bank runs and wholesale foreclosures; even martial law was threatened, from the floor of Congress, if the bailout failed to pass. These were the alibis repeated by the PR pundits and the complicit men and women in our supposedly representative government when they were asked,
Why did you do it?

The choice they made was to reward the corruption, but all of them knew the better answer, or should have. It didn’t take a thousand-page bill to get it across.

“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!’

In Molly’s book this quote was unattributed but the ideal it conveyed was ancient, and the central pillar of the rule of law. Thomas Paine, quoted on the same page, had put it a different way, in
Common Sense:
“In America, the law is king.” Even the most powerful can’t place themselves above it, the weakest are never beneath its protection, and no corrupt institution is too big to fail.

So that’s what a principle is,
Noah thought, as though he were pondering the word for the very first time.

It’s not a guideline, or a suggestion, or one of many weighty factors to be parsed in a complex intellectual song-and-dance. It’s a cornerstone in the foundation, the bedrock that a great structure is built upon. Everything else can come crashing down around us—because those fleeting things can always be rebuilt even better than they were before—but if we hold to it, the principle will still be standing, so we can start again.

Next down this page was John Adams’s take on something Noah’s father had told him only that morning:

The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves
...