A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR 9 страница

Noah swiped his card and the doors closed, then he inserted the stubby cylindrical key and turned the elevator’s panel switch to Enable. There was no vertical line of buttons to choose the floor with; this thing went only two places: all the way up and back down again. With the click of relays and a deep ascending hum the car set into motion.

He was silently watching the wall above the doors where the advancing floor numbers should have been when Molly stepped up to him, close.

“Thank you, Noah.”

“I’m not really speaking to you right now.”

She touched his chest and put a hand on his shoulder; he looked down into her eyes.

“I hope I’m wrong,” she said. “I want to be wrong; you should know that. Now please just decide to forgive me, at least until we’re out of here again.”

He looked away, but after a time he nodded.

“Okay.”

There was only one way to warrant a blatant breach of business ethics such as this, and that was to attribute his actions to a higher cause. If Molly was right, then a cute but quirky mailroom temp had identified a grand, unified, liberty-crushing conspiracy that had been hatched in the conference room of a PR agency. The benefits of learning that would easily outweigh the consequences: forsaking his father’s trust and violating the ironclad, career-ending nondisclosure clause of his employment contract. After all, with the fate of the free world in the balance, the prospect of getting fired, disowned, and probably sued into debtor’s prison should be among the least of his worries.

If Molly was wrong-and no ifs about it, she was wrong-then he’d be vindicated, she’d be deeply apologetic and sworn to secrecy about this whole fiasco, and there might still be a chance to salvage what remained of the weekend.

A flimsy rationale, maybe, but for the moment it helped him avoid the more troubling thought that after all he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, deep down he needed to know the truth every bit as much as she did.

The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.

The old man’s office was never dark. Night or day it was always the same: warmly lit and immaculately kept, smelling faintly of pipe smoke, black tea, and silver polish, furnished with all his fine, precious things. From the art on the walls and pedestals to the antiques and small collections of rarities interspersed among the bookshelves, everywhere you turned there was something priceless. For him it was less a place of business than an inner sanctum of quiet meditation and a shrine to the very real forms of happiness that money could actually buy.

Few employees ever had occasion to set foot in these rooms and see these sights, but Molly paused only at the sight of one thing.

“What is this?” she asked.

She was looking at a marble sculpture on a pedestal in the corner. Noah’s father had commissioned it years ago. The figure depicted was a strange amalgamation of two other works of art: the Statue of Liberty and the Colossus of Rhodes. Molly would have known that much by looking; what she’d meant to ask was, What does this mean?

“It’s the way my father looks at things… at people, I mean: societies. The law may serve some superficial purpose, but it only goes so far,” Noah said, touching the spear in the statue’s left hand. “At some point the law needs to be taken away and replaced with force. That’s what really gets things done. People ultimately want it that way; they’re like sheep, lost without a threat of force to guide them. That’s what it means.”

Molly silently took in the statue for a while longer, like she was memorizing it. After a few more seconds she drew in a deep breath, walked to the door, peeked around the corner to make sure the coast was clear, and then turned and motioned for Noah to follow.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said.

Weekend work was one of the many things his father frowned upon, which led nearly all of the up-and-coming employees to maintain second offices at home. This allowed them to put in the expected seventy-plus hours per week while appearing to comply with company policy. It also meant that, with luck, Noah and Molly would have the place to themselves for the duration of their espionage.

Down the central hall and adjacent to the conference room they keyed themselves into the locked AV booth, where the presentation files were stored. Molly stood by him as he found the coded folders on the computer, entered their passwords, and prepared the show to be launched from a remote controller at the podium inside.

When they entered the conference room the programmed lights had already dimmed and wide white screens were descending around the walls. Digital projectors hummed and glowed as they received their data, and soon the screens lit up with an introductory slide.

In the beginning he clicked through the content fairly rapidly; this was the section he’d already seen. He paused only when Molly asked him to stop while she absorbed the content of some particular display.

Without the benefit of a speaker to explain them, many of the slides and visuals were difficult to understand. Animated graphs illustrated various social and political trends, time lines ticked off progress toward unnamed goals, maps with highlighted regions expanded or contracted to show unidentified changes over months, years, or decades.

“Stop,” Molly said. “Go back one.”

They were deeper into the presentation now, past the point at which Noah had left the meeting, but nothing had seemed particularly shocking or frightening to him. He’d breezed right past the screen she’d asked to see again. It was an introductory agenda for the group of very important people who’d come to attend the final half of the meeting.

The heading was “Framework and Foundation: Toward a New Constitution.” No names accompanied the headings that followed, only the areas of government that each new attendee supposedly represented.

• Finance / Treasury / Fed/Wall Street / Corporate Axis

• Energy / Environment / Social Services

• Labor / Transportation / Commerce / Regulatory Affairs

• Education / Media Management / Clergy / COINTELPRO

• FCC / Internet / Public Media Transition

• Control and Preservation of Critical Infrastructure

• Emergency Management / Rapid Response / Contingencies

• Law Enforcement / Homeland Security / USNORTHCOM / NORAD / STRATCOM / Contract Military / Allied Forces

• Continuity of Government

• Casus Belli: Reichstag / Susannah/Unit 131 / Gladio / Northwoods / EXIGENT

“Who was in this meeting, do you know?” Molly asked.

“The people I saw were mostly from some advance-planning division of the DHS; domestic war-gamers, like the international kind at the Pentagon. There’s a stack of tent cards here somewhere with their names. I don’t know about the ones who came later; I only had their phone numbers.”

“Do you still have that list?”

“No, I don’t. I was told to burn it, and that’s what I did.” He walked toward the screen and pointed to the last entry. “What does this term mean? My Latin’s a little rusty.”

She glanced up from her notes only for a moment. “Casus Belli. It means an incident that’s used to justify a war. Come on, let’s keep going.”

The slides thereafter made continual references to pages in some briefing document that must have been handed out to the meeting’s participants. Without those pages it seemed there was little use in continuing further.

“That’s it,” Noah said. “I don’t think there’s any more to see.”

“It’s not over yet. We’re not to the end.”

He held his thumb down on the advance button and the screens ticked by more and more rapidly. “I’m telling you, look at it, this is nothing but page numbers-”

The walls went black, leaving the room in almost total darkness.

One by one the screens faded in again, encircling the room with new content they hadn’t seen before. Each screen contained a linear diagram that was a trademark of the company’s strategic plans. These diagrams were used to show the firm’s clients a step-by-step layout of what to do, and how and when to do it.

The headings mirrored the disciplines of the attendees shown earlier: Finance, Energy, Labor, Education, Infrastructure, Media, Emergency Management, Law Enforcement, and Continuity of Government.

A security dialog popped up, and with a vocal sigh Noah entered his override password. If anyone ever checked to see who’d accessed these files and when, this would be another nail in his coffin. An hourglass indicator appeared, along with the message: Please Wait… Content Loading from Remote Storage.

“It’ll be a few minutes while this downloads,” Noah said. “We keep some of the more sensitive stuff off-site, to guard against the kind of thing we’re doing right now.”

Molly had left her seat and walked a complete circuit of the round room, looking over the various headings on the screens. She stopped by his side, pointing out a bracketed rectangle that enclosed part of the illustration on the slide in front of them.

“What’s that box?” she asked.

“It’s called the Overton Window. My father stole the concept from a think tank in the Midwest; it’s a way of describing what the public is currently ready to accept on any issue, so you can decide how best to move them toward what you want.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. She was looking at the screen related to national security and law enforcement. Except for the heading and the long thick line with an open box near its center, the slide was mostly blank. “How does it work?”

“The ends of this long line”-Noah walked up to indicate the starting point-“represent the extreme possibilities. At this end of the scale is the unthinkable, and all the way over at the other end is something else you can’t imagine ever happening, but in the opposite way. Too much good here, too much evil over there. If we were talking about government, it would be too much liberty at this end-which would be anarchy-and a complete top-down Orwellian tyranny at the other, so no liberty at all. Those in-between points are milestones along the way.”

Molly still looked a little lost in the concept, and she motioned for him to go on.

“Use airline security as an example,” Noah said. “Forty years ago people could pull up to the airport a few minutes before their flight, be treated with courtesy and respect, present no ID, just a ticket, and then get on the plane with just about anything in their pockets and their bags. There was some security, but it was almost invisible. Today that’s unthinkable, right? It seems like we could never go back to those days.”

She nodded.

“Now at the other end of the spectrum, let’s make the passengers arrive four hours early for the security line, allow no carry-ons, enforce a mandatory strip search, full-body X-ray, a cavity probe for everyone, and you have to stay in your seat the entire flight with a stun bracelet on your wrist in case you try to get up to go to the bathroom-which, of course, no longer exists.”

“They’re actually talking about doing some of those things,” she said.

“That’s getting to my point. If you suddenly had to go through everything I just mentioned you’d give up flying, correct? And with no security at all, you’d also never set foot on an airplane. So your Overton Window is somewhere in the middle, within this box. But my goal is to get you to accept more of those radical things over there, one step at a time.

“Let’s say tomorrow some idiot makes his way onto a flight with a little tiny homemade explosive of some kind. It’d be all over the news for weeks, whether the guy actually did any damage or not. You get scared, and the TV is telling you that all we have to do is buy some more expensive screening machines, hire some more of the same people who let that nut on the plane in the first place, and give up a little more dignity at the checkpoints, and we’ll be safe. That, of course, is a lie, but it has the desired effect.”

“It moves the window,” she said.

“Right. We put a false extreme at both ends to make the choices in the middle look moderate by comparison. And then, with a little nudge, you can be made to agree to something you would never have swallowed last week.”

“Why, though? Why would they want to do that?”

“The airline thing was just a random example, but I can think of a few reasons. If my client sold those X-ray machines, or had a contract for those extra security people, there’s quite a bit of money to be made there. It makes the government bigger and more involved in our lives, and that can justify higher taxes and fees, more bureaucracy, bigger budgets; it can build support for an unpopular military action, on and on. And who knows? Some of your friends last night might say that it’s all part of a program to condition the American people to put up their hands and submit to anyone in a uniform.”

“And this Overton Window, it’s used all the time?”

“All the time, everywhere you look. We never let a good crisis go to waste, and if no crisis exists, it’s easy enough to make one.

“Saddam’s on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland. If we don’t hand AIG a seventy-billion-dollar bailout there’ll be a depression and martial law by Monday. If we don’t all get vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pandemic. And how about fuel prices? Once you’ve paid five dollars for a gallon of gas, three-fifty suddenly sounds like a real bargain. Now they’re telling us that if we don’t pass this worldwide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater.

“And understand, I’m not talking about the right or wrong of those underlying issues. I care about the environment more than most, I want clean energy, I want this country to recover and be great again, people should get their shots if they need them, and Saddam Hussein was a legitimate monster. I’m saying opportunists can attach themselves to our hopes and fears about those things, for profit, and this is one of the tools they use to do that. The question to ask is, if they’ve got a legitimate case for these things, then why all the lying and fabrication?”

“So even if they can’t get us to accept everything at once,” Molly said, studying the diagrams, “they’re satisfied to move us a little closer toward the end.”

“Exactly. In fact, without some big earthshaking event, like a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11, that’s the only way it can work. Just little nudges in the right direction, and before you know it you’ve progressed yourself right into their agenda. It’s evolution they’re after, not revolution. And when I say ‘they’ I don’t mean some secret society out there. There’s always a prime mover behind these things, and it’s easy enough to figure out who it is. Just do a little research to see who stands to benefit; follow the money and power. You know who was one of the biggest lobbyists for this cap-and-trade business, right?”

“Greenpeace?” Molly said.

“Nope. Enron. A lot of powerful people are lining up to cash in on the deal if it happens, but back then it was a huge push at Enron right before the whole company blew up in America’s face. Carbon trading was going to be their biggest scam since they shut off the lights in California and held the whole state for ransom. They’d already started trading futures on the weather, if you can believe that, but this heist was going to be a thousand times bolder. Back then everybody thought they were joking.”

“Not quite everybody, I guess.”

“You’re right about that,” Noah said. “In fact, Enron was really just a huge diversion, like a Bernie Madoff, a patsy to throw to the wolves. Carbon trading moved forward anyway. The Chicago Climate Exchange is probably the best example, especially since it’s basically founded or fronted or funded by a Who’s Who list of environmental luminaries, like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs. But I can see why no one really cares-the Exchange’s founder thinks it’s probably only a ten-trillion-dollar-a-year market.”

Molly stared at him in astonishment. “Did you say ten trillion a year?”

“Uh-huh. And the backing for it goes right up to the top, internationally. So here’s a little pop quiz: What do you get when you combine corporate greed with political corruption and sprinkle a few trillion on top?”

“I don’t know… fascism?”

Noah shook his head. “You get Doyle & Merchant’s newest client.”

The hourglass on the screen had disappeared moments before, and was replaced by a dialog box with two buttons, one labeled HALT and the other PROCEED.

“Now I know what I’m looking at,” Molly said. “So let’s see what’s next.”

Noah clicked the remote, and the screens all began to change. The slides that had been incomplete filled in with callouts, numbers, names, legends, and dates to illustrate the long-term agendas within each area of American government and society at large. Some of these agendas spanned only a few years, others more than a century.

Pointers along the time lines began to move; text formed and then faded as significant events in recent history were reached and passed by. Milestones appeared, enclosed in the Overton Window of each screen as it moved slowly from left to right.

It was far too much ever-changing information to absorb, like watching all the movies in a multiplex simultaneously. But as they turned and took it all in at the center of the circle of screens, Molly suddenly touched his hand, and gripped it. It seemed the same realization had come over them both, at the same instant: This wasn’t eight separate agendas at all. It was only one.

Along the bottom, the steady advance of time. Through the middle, the slow, sporadic movement of the Overton Window-usually pushing forward, but sometimes pulling back, as though the public might have rebelled briefly against the relentless pressure before giving in to it again.

To the far right of each screen a final goal was listed. As Noah looked to each of them he realized something else that all these endpoints had in common. They weren’t written and presented as though they were unthinkable extremes, but rather as achievable goals in some new, unified framework of command and control, ready to come forth on the day the old existing structure failed.

• Consolidate all media assets behind core concepts of a new internationalism

• Gather and centralize powers in the Executive Branch

• Education: Deemphasize the individual, reinforce dependence and collectivism, social justice, and “the common good”

• Set beneficial globalization against isolationism/sovereignty: climate change, debt crises, finance/currency, free trade, immigration, food/water/energy, security/terrorism, human rights vs. property rights, UN Agenda 21

• Associate resistance and “constitutional” advocacy with a backward, extremist worldview: gun rights a key

• Quell debate and force consensus: Identify, isolate, surveil opposition leadership/threaten with sedition-criminalize dissent

• Expand malleable voter base and agenda support by granting voting rights to prison inmates, undocumented migrants, and select U.S. territories, e.g., Puerto Rico. Image as a civil rights issue; label dissenters as racist-invoke reliable analogies: slavery, Nazism, segregation, isolationism.

• Thrust national security to the forefront of the public consciousness

• Finalize the decline and abandonment of the dollar: new international reserve currency

• Synchronize and fully integrate local law enforcement with state, federal, and contract military forces, prepare collection/relocation/internment contingencies, systems, and personnel

According to the progress shown, many of these initiatives were already well under way. The slide devoted to Finance showed a time line beginning in 1913, and its Window had moved nearly to the end. The screen for Education began at a point even earlier and was also well along. Advances in one, concerning surveillance, security, and the militarization of law enforcement, had accelerated radically in the years since 9/11.

There’s a difference between suspecting a thing and finally knowing it for certain. Noah felt that difference twisting into his stomach. You can hold on to the smallest doubt and take comfort in it, stay in denial and go on with your carefree life, until one day you’re finally cornered by a truth that can no longer be ignored.

“Look over there,” Molly said.

But he’d already seen it. While every other slide had shown advancement and slow progress over its individual time span, one hadn’t moved at all, as though its role in all this was simply to be ready and awaiting activation. Also unlike the others, its time line didn’t measure years or decades, but only three final days.

Unlike the others, this slide had no Overton Window. EXIGENT was the legend at the far end of the line, and it seemed there would be no question of public acceptance, no need to rally opinion on this front. Whatever it was, it would bring its own consensus.

“Casus Belli,” the heading said, and Molly’s translation was still fresh in his mind.

An incident used to justify a war.

CHAPTER 20

Outside the skies were still threatening, and to accompany the frigid light rain a wicked crosstown breeze had begun to blow. In that sort of weather almost everyone on the street is looking for a ride, so it took a few blocks of trying before Noah and Molly were able to hail an empty cab headed downtown.

When they’d closed the door the driver turned and asked where they were going.

“Ninth Street and Avenue B, by Tompkins Square Park,” Noah said. “And do us a favor,” he added, passing through enough of a tip to make his point. “We’re not in a rush, so just take it really, really easy, understand?”

The man in front took the money, gave a nod in the rearview mirror, and then signaled and pulled away from the curb with exaggerated care, hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, driving as if an inspector from the Taxi & Limousine Commission were watching from the shotgun seat.

Molly kept to her side of the car, looking out the window in silence as the ride got under way, but after a minute she reached across and found Noah’s hand to hold.

“There were no dates on those screens at the end,” Noah said. “There’s nothing to say that this thing is happening tomorrow, or next week, or next year.”

She shook her head. “It’s happening now.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I can see it. The economy is crashing, Noah. There’s no net underneath it this time. That’s why they’re rushing through all this stimulus nonsense, both parties. All the cockroaches are coming out of the woodwork to grab what they still can. It’s a heist in broad daylight, and they don’t care who sees it anymore. That’s how I know.

“They’ve doubled the national debt since 2000, and now with these bailouts, all those trillions of dollars more-that’s our future they just stole, right in front of our eyes. They didn’t even pretend to use that money to pay for anything real, most of it went offshore. They didn’t help any real people; they just paid themselves and covered their gambling debts on Wall Street.” She looked at him. “You asked how I know it’s happening now? Because the last official act of any government is to loot their own treasury.”

He couldn’t think of a thing to counter that, at least nothing that either one of them would believe.

“We’ll be okay,” Noah said.

“Who’ll be okay?”

“The two of us. And look, I’m not talking about any commitment you have to make, or a relationship, or whatever, I know we just met so let’s take all that out of the picture and not worry about it right now. I’m just telling you that I’ll help you, you and your mom, no strings attached.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Just give it some thought. I know, it would probably feel like some pact with the devil. I feel the same thing, but it’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?

“Whatever happens, it isn’t going to hit everyone equally. A lot of people I know probably won’t feel a thing, and I’m set up to be okay through just about anything. So I’m just saying that we can fix it so you and your mother are okay, too.”

“You’re wrong-you won’t be okay. No one will. If they accomplish half of what we saw on those screens then money won’t protect you. Nothing will.”

She turned her attention back to the window and the dark, blustery night beyond the glass.

After a time her clasp on his hand tightened for a few seconds, but it didn’t really feel like affection. It was more like the grip a person might take on the arm of the dentist’s chair, or the gesture of unspoken things an old love might extend at the end of a long good-bye.

CHAPTER 21

When the cab pulled to a stop Molly opened the door and turned back to him as he paid the fare.

“Come on up,” she said. “See how the other half lives.”

The path to the entrance began with a forbidding metal gate at the sidewalk. The lock took quite a bit of finesse to operate. It looked as though it had been jimmied open more often than unlocked with a key. A dismal courtyard lay beyond the gate, and at the entrance a triple-bolted fire door opened to a sad little front hall lit by a single hanging lightbulb.

He followed as she started up three narrow, creaking flights; he took her occasional cues to avoid a splintery patch on the railing or a weak spot in the stairs. On the second floor the entrance from the landing was secured with a heavy chain and padlock. His first thought was that the door was blocked to discourage squatters, but considering the run-down, gray-market condition of the place, it was probably as much for the safety of the trespassers as a protection for the property itself.

Though the walls and windows showed signs of spotty maintenance the construction was haphazard and incomplete. None of the repair work seemed up to code, but little of the older, existing carpentry did, either. As they continued up the stairs, he saw sheets of plywood over broken windows, and bare studs without plaster here and there. Long, jagged cracks in the remaining walls warned of some structural weakness that might run all the way to the foundation. Random drafts swept up the dim stairwell, accompanied by ominous settling sounds and the distant clank and hiss of old steam heat.

When they arrived at the third floor Molly had her keys ready, and she set about unlocking several dead bolts on the unnumbered apartment door.

“How long have you lived here?” Noah asked.

“Not that long.” She tried the door, and had to put a shoulder to it to bump it free from its swollen frame. “It’s a little nicer inside.”

And she was right. In fact, across that threshold it seemed like they’d entered a whole different world. As she relocked the door he took a few steps in, stood there, and looked around.

Great effort had obviously been taken to transform this space into a sort of self-contained hideaway, far removed from the city outside. What had probably once been a huge, cold industrial floor had been renovated and brought alive with simple ingenuity and hard work. The result was one large area divided with movable partitions to form an impressively cool, livable loft. From where he was he could see a spacious multipurpose room off the entryway, a kitchen and laundry to the side, and what seemed to be a series of guest rooms toward the back.

Molly hung her keys on a hook by the door. “What do you think?”

“How many people live here?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know, eight or ten, so don’t be surprised if you see someone. They come and go; none of us lives here permanently. We have places like this all around the country so we can have somewhere safe to stay when we have to travel. That’s my room over there for now, but hardly any of this stuff is mine.” She stepped into the kitchen, still talking to him. “Have a seat. I’ll make us some iced tea. Or would you rather have a beer?”

“The tea sounds good.”

“We make it pretty sweet where I come from.”

“Bring it on, Ellie Mae. The sweeter the better.”

He walked about midway into the front room and found a slightly elevated platform enclosed in Japanese screens of thin dark wood and rice paper panels. There were a lot of bookshelves, a dresser, a rolltop desk, and a vanity. But the space was dominated by a large rope hammock, its webbing covered by a nest of comfy blankets and pillows, suspended waist-high between the red shutoff wheels of two heavy metal pipes that extended up from the floor through the ceiling. This room within a room was lit softly by small lamps and pastel paper lanterns. The total effect of the enclosure was that of a mellow, relaxing Zen paradise.

A glance through the nearest bookcase revealed a strange assortment of reading material. Some old and modern classics were segregated on a shelf by themselves, but the collection consisted mostly of works that leaned toward the eccentric, maybe even the forbidden. There didn’t seem to be a clear ideological thread to connect them; Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals was right next to None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Down the way The Blue Book of the John Birch Society was sandwiched between Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, Orson Scott Card’s Empire, and a translated copy of The Coming Insurrection. Below was an entire section devoted to a series of books from a specialty publisher, all by a single author named Ragnar Benson. Noah touched the weathered spines and read the titles of these, one by one:

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29