“I guess I have.” There was a display screen on a swing arm that was partially between them, and Molly eased it aside. “Do you have any music in this car?”
“Sure.” He tapped a touchscreen near the door, and having no idea what she was into, let the vehicle decide on a playlist.
“It was my twenty-eighth birthday today,” Noah said. “Yesterday, I mean.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks. When I blew out the candle on my cupcake, I made a wish that we’d spend some time together tonight.”
She smiled a bit. “You probably should have been more specific.”
“You’re right. I should have said not behind bars.”
A song began to play low over the speakers, just a sweet, haunting voice and a quiet guitar.
“Noah?”
“Hmm?”
“I want to apologize.”
“For what?”
“I think I misjudged you.”
“I don’t know if you did or not.”
She looked out the window for a while. There was a scuff and a bruise on her cheek from the fight in the bar, but these marks did nothing to diminish the profile that he’d found so enchanting at first sight.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Nowhere right now. Do you want to go home?”
She shook her head. “I’m hungry.”
“Say no more.” Noah touched the intercom. “Eddie, could you take us up to Amy Ruth’s, on One-hundred-and- sixteenth? And call ahead, would you? I don’t think they’re open yet. Tell Robert we need some orange juice and two Al Sharptons at the curb.” Through the glass divider, he saw the driver nod his head and engage the Bluetooth phone system.
“What’s an Al Sharpton?” Molly asked.
“Fried chicken and waffles. You’re a Southern girl, right?”
She nodded. “But I think the South may be a little bigger than you New Yorkers think. I’ve never heard of chicken and waffles.”
“Then I guess you’re in for a treat, aren’t you?”
On the way to the restaurant he learned a little more about her life. Her family had moved around a great deal when she was young, following her father’s job as a journeyman engineer for Pratt & Whitney. They’d ended up living near Arnold Air Force Base outside Manchester, Tennessee. When her dad was killed in an accident at the testing facility there, that’s where they stayed. Her mother then reclaimed her maiden name and started the patriot group they were both still a part of, the Founders’ Keepers, a few years later.
“How old were you when you lost your father?” Noah asked.
“Nine.”
He sighed, and shook his head. “I was ten when my mom died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know what? New topic. Ask me anything.”
“Okay. Who’s the most fascinating person you’ve ever met?”
He didn’t hesitate. “President Clinton. Hands down.”
“Really?”
“All politics aside, you’ve never seen so much charisma stuffed into one human being. And you brought up the subject of lying earlier-this man could keep twenty elaborate, interlocking whoppers in his head at a time, improvising on the fly, and have you believing every word while you’re holding a stack of hard evidence to the contrary. His wife might be even smarter than he is, but she doesn’t have any of that skill at prevarication, and Gore was pretty helpless if he ever dropped his script. But Clinton? He’s like one of those plate spinners at the circus: he makes everything look completely effortless. And obviously, in a related skill, he’s a total Svengali with the chicks.”
“I never found him all that attractive.”
“Oh, but it’s a whole different thing when someone like that is right next to you, as opposed to on your TV. If he was sitting here now, where I’m sitting? I promise, you’d be helpless. He wouldn’t even have to try. You’d listen to him recite from the phone book for an hour and swear it was written by Oscar Wilde. Clinton could read you a fairy tale and you’d be down to your panties by the time Rapunzel let down her golden hair.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“That being said, he’s also one of the most ruthless sons of bitches who ever walked the earth, and we won’t see another one like him for generations.” He briefly checked their progress out the window. “And how about you?”
“Hmm?”
“Who’s your most fascinating person?”
“Oh.” Molly thought for a moment. “My mother, I guess. I don’t travel in the circles you do, but I’m a huge fan of integrity.” She took a last sip from her soda, leaned back, and put the bottle down. “Speaking of fascinating parents, your father would be a gripping subject.”
“That he would.”
“So?”
“Let me think about where to start… Rhodes Scholar, that’s a little-known fact. He was studying anthropology at Oxford when he met a man named Edward Bernays-Bernays was an admiring nephew of Sigmund Freud, if that explains any part of this messed-up business-and Mr. Bernays needed some new blood, someone with my father’s skill set, to give a shot in the arm to the industry he’d invented a few decades before.”
“Public relations.”
“Right. Bernays got his start in the big leagues helping Woodrow Wilson beat the drums to push the U.S. into World War I. And my father’s first project with him was a massive propaganda campaign for Howard Hunt and the CIA, along with the United Fruit Company, when they all got together to overthrow the president of Guatemala in 1954.”
“No.”
“Yes. And the rest is literally history.”
She frowned. “I just imagine armies and tanks in the streets when I think of a coup d’etat, not a bunch of posters and leaflets.”
“No, no, it’s so much more than that-politics and war, it’s all social psychology, and maybe it always has been. Look at the PR push that got the American people behind going back to war with Iraq in 2003. That wasn’t our company, it was the Rendon Group in Washington, but they do the same work we do. And we don’t take sides unless we’re paid to do so. If somebody comes to us and wants to drum up support for a war, for example, we don’t ask whether it’s right or wrong, any more than the ad agency for McDonald’s asks whether their client is really better than Burger King. But in our case it’s not just words and pictures; that makes it seem too simple. Public relations is the scientific engineering of consent.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Take a manufactured takeover, like Guatemala. We engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected president, and this guy was popular, he was going to take their land back from United Fruit and return it to the people. So he had to be demonized before he could be taken down. If you just march in one night, the people might rise up and resist, and you don’t want that. They have to be pacified, so their minds are the first thing you have to change.
“Use our own country as an example. Eighty million citizens own guns in America, you’d never win if they all started pushing back. You can’t take away the freedom of an aware, informed populace; they have to give it up themselves.
“So the soldiers come last, and if the PR job’s done right then there’s almost no fight left in the public at all. By the time the tanks roll in, the people welcome them. You know, the whole ‘hearts and minds’ thing. They submit to searches, give up all their rights, and forget about their neighbors that got taken away. Listen, the centerpiece on
