The Eye of Moloch (48 page)
And last, at some unspecified time in the very near future, she would be ready to put on a small performance for her coworkers.
Here’s what she was supposed to do: once she’d gotten the go-ahead signal, and when her nose detected a very specific fragrance wafting through her workplace, she was to mention the smell to her colleagues, fake some vertigo and troubled breathing, and then faint dead away on the spot.
The first steps were already accomplished. When an announcement came over the PA system that a threat had been received of a possible chemical or biological weapons attack against the facility—and that this was not a drill—she knew that her final task would be required within minutes.
• • •
Anyone who’s gotten a whiff of actual cyanide gas and lived to tell the tale would confirm that its odor of bitter almonds is quite different from the familiar nutty scent of the supermarket variety. The real thing would certainly bear little resemblance to the cloying, sweet almond scent that would soon begin to show itself in the cool filtered air throughout the Garrison underground facility.
Rooms away from where Molly’s planted intern waited, the package she’d received and prepared came to life as a cell phone inside it received a call.
The ringer electronics of the phone activated a microcontroller-enabled circuit board and the salvaged heating element from a head-shop vaporizer warmed up to a bright orange glow. Servo motors whirred, pistons worked, gears and rollers turned, and at a rate of a drop per second, two ounces of Italian amaretto began to drip with a hiss onto the hot metal.
Moments later, pungent white smoke began to waft through the
holes in the box, soon permeating the utility room before being sucked into the recirculating air of the HVAC system.
• • •
The minute the WMD threat had been announced all seventeen hundred employees stopped working and awaited further instructions at their posts and desks. Despite the nationwide alert that was currently in force, no immediate evacuation had been ordered. Garrison was a high-profile and somewhat controversial facility among some elements of society, and such threats were not that uncommon.
Often, after a few minutes of break time the all-clear would be sounded and everything would quickly return to normal. They were protected by many levels of security, after all, and safely ensconced more than two hundred feet beneath ground level in a rock mine hidden under a mountain.
The main Information Services room seated nearly two hundred workers, all arranged in an open grid of rows and columns of identical desks and computer workstations. The space was one of the original dug-out areas of the mine, and while the room was large it also felt somewhat claustrophobic due to a low suspended ceiling overhead.
As the employees waited out the alert period with solitaire games and chitchat, the only person still working seemed to be the mailroom girl. She rolled her cart up one row and down the next, dropping off letters and memos and making light conversation with those who bothered to acknowledge her.
Near the center of the room, the girl suddenly stopped, looking troubled. She coughed a bit, put a hand to her chest, and leaned on her cart as though she might swoon.
“Does anybody smell that?” she called out, and suddenly the room got very quiet.
Some of those near her rose at their desks and acknowledged that yes, there was an unusual odor.
“It smells like—” Her knees seemed to weaken and her voice was strained as she tried to speak again. “It smells like . . .” And with a last guttural gasp she grabbed her throat and crumpled to the floor.
As some came to her aid the clear signs of physical distress began to spread rapidly to others. Another collapsed, and then another, and many covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs or shirtsleeves and hurried for the exit to escape the now visible, seeping gas. As fear took hold and threatened to spark a stampede toward the safety of the outdoors, someone with their wits still about them ran to the wall, broke a pane of protective glass, and pulled the big red lever that sounded the general alarm.
• • •
Even before the last of the many hundreds of employees, managers, technicians, and guards had evacuated, those near the back of the crowd saw the leading vehicle of the first-responders speeding up the private road toward the facility.
A series of security barriers that were set up earlier had been pulled aside as soon as the state of emergency within the complex had been announced. All the gates were still manned but they were now standing open so as not to impede the arrival of the rescue workers.
As the first hazmat truck arrived it slowed briefly at the farthest checkpoint and then was waved on through. The lights and sirens of many others were approaching in the distance; police, EMS, and fire departments from all over the surrounding region had been automatically summoned by the internal alarm.
The evacuated crowd parted to the sides of the road to clear the way and the first truck rumbled past them and through the fortified entrance of Garrison Archives.
Once the vehicle had disappeared inside, the remaining stragglers were quickly escorted out to safety and then, oddly enough, the massive double doors of the entrance swung closed.
N
oah stood off to the side as their now-empty truck was backed up and parked with its bumper jammed hard against the closed, inward-opening doors. It wasn’t until he heard that solid crunch of metal on metal that he allowed himself to accept it:
They were in.
With the fearless exuberance of youth, Lana Somin had already set to work in the abandoned guards’ booth by the front gate. A cloned keycard and PIN number of the night-shift supervisor were among the items they’d been passed by their insider. Using these, within a minute she’d reset all other access codes to random numbers and done what she could to lock out further changes.
Such measures obviously wouldn’t hold forever. The entrance to this place was built like a giant bank vault and was probably strong enough to withstand the assault of a small tactical nuke. All that strength wasn’t much comfort, though. Somewhere in an engineer’s notebook there was a contingency plan for this very scenario and that engineer’s phone would be ringing very soon. Once the people outside fully realized
they’d been scammed they would bring whatever it took to force their way back in.
There was no time to waste and the clock was already running.
A number of low-slung electric people-movers were parked near the entrance. All six members of the group piled into one and set off down the main two-lane corridor with Cathy Merrick at the wheel. Despite the ordeal of their journey, all were in good shape, with the exception of Hollis. He was clearly weakening, his neglected fever was spiking, and those were only symptoms of something underneath that was probably growing worse by the minute.
The look of the place was an odd visual hybrid, part cave and part corporate. Twelve feet above the smooth pavement of the indoor road there were heavy cables, conduit, air and water ducts, and periodic amber lighting running along the rocky ceiling. The offices and workrooms they passed were like those you might find in any upscale high-rise, but the pitted walls of the tunnels leading between them appeared to have been carved out with tools no more subtle than dynamite and jackhammers.
After a half mile of dim, descending straightaways they began to realize that their hand-drawn map was far from perfect. Its errors and omissions led to some maddening backtracking and wrong turns. Valid routes looked the same as dark unfinished passages dwindling off toward dead ends. There was a great deal of new construction and very little signage to guide them. Apparently, if anyone got this far into the place without an escort it was assumed that they should know exactly where they were going.
Just as it seemed they were hopelessly lost, they rounded a bend and happened onto the very room they were looking for. It was a huge space filled end to end with identical desks and computer stations. The label
INFORMATION SERVICES: CLOUD
79 was displayed above the entrance.
As they pulled over and parked they were met by a young woman
with a Garrison ID pinned to her shirt. She introduced herself as Claire; she was the mailroom intern who’d helped them get this far. Once the rush for the exit had begun she’d slipped away in the confusion and hidden herself until the rest of the employees were gone. Now that they had a knowledgeable guide with a key to nearly every door, the real work could begin.
Molly’s aim seemed simple enough: to find the most frightening truths buried here in these vast archives of above-top-secret data, and then to release it all into the sunlight. It was her feeling that if the people finally saw the authentic documentation, if they could follow the actual tracks of the conspirators who were bent on destroying her country, then the good citizens of the United States of America would wake up all at once and be moved to act to save their nation.
It was a noble idea but Noah’s doubts were still lingering. Many, many damning truths had already been told in the past and most were soon forgotten. Often in those cases it was only the whistle-blowers themselves who’d been punished for the crime of speaking out.
Still, it was Molly’s hope that this time would be different. If the facts could be brought out in this definitive way—with all the evidence, all the connections, all the answers to that key question,
who benefits?
—then the resulting shock to the system might finally be too powerful to ignore.
The seven of them split up onto three tasks. Molly and Noah would prioritize a list of evidence they wished to find hidden within these nearly limitless memory banks. Lana Somin would worm her way into the front end of the master database with Tyler Merrick standing by to assist as he could. Lastly, Hollis, Cathy Merrick, and the new girl, Claire, would take a set of site blueprints and try to find an alternate way out of the place for when the time came to cut and run.
Faced with such little time, but free access to all the answers she’d ever wanted, Molly seemed to struggle at first to narrow her scope to the most important things. Just as a starting point the two of them came up
with a list of keywords to be searched once Lana had gained access to the computer system. These topics came to them in no particular order of validity or priority as Noah wrote them down:
Frederic Whitehurst, Sibel Edmonds, and the FBI
Gary Webb and Nicaragua
Kathryn Bolkovac and DynCorp
Katharine Gun, Karen Kwiatkowski, and Iraq
Julia Davis and DHS: Google, Facebook, NSA, CIA
Trapwire, Abraxas, Stingray, RIOT, and TIA
Trailblazer, NSA, Stellar Wind, Wiebe, Roark, Binney, and Loomis
AT&T, Mark Klein, and Room 641A
LIBOR, rate-fixing, derivatives, the Tower of Basel, BIS, and worldwide central banks
Anything to do with the shadowy foundations, conglomerates, investments, and under-the-table political funding linked to a man named Aaron Doyle
Molly stopped and asked him to read back this partial list. As Noah did so he saw in her face that she was feeling exactly as he did.
They’d just scratched the surface and it was way too much already. And at the same time, it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
The truth behind nearly all these individual revelations—the secret partnerships, the hidden influence, the lies and corruptions and scandals, the high crimes against the American people perpetrated by their supposed leaders—it was already out there on the open Internet for anyone to uncover for themselves.
The problem wasn’t a lack of evidence but a basic human bias: we see only what we’re prepared to believe. After all, Molly and her mother and Danny Bailey had each spoken out on most of these things in the past, and where had it gotten them? Nowhere, except that two of them were dead and the other was about to play her last remaining card.
“It’s no good,” Molly said, and the expression on her face was desolate. “It’s not going to work.”
“We’re here,” he replied. “There’s no use giving up now. Come on, let’s do what we came to do.”
Tyler Merrick walked up then and said, “Lana’s ready for you now.”
The three of them hurried over to where the young woman was immersed in the database system. Several employees had left themselves logged in when they’d fled their desks and that had saved her some work cracking passwords.
As requested, she and Tyler had also set up for the video portion of the project.
A large TV monitor was mounted above the desk where Lana sat. Other monitors like this were all over the place. Its screen displayed insets of live feeds from several security cameras around the facility, including views from the front entrance and various rooms and key intersections. In the center there was a larger rectangular picture that currently showed an empty chair next to the desk.