the sign-in desk that would make a record of the weekend visit. A private elevator led to Arthur Gardner’s suite of offices on the twenty-first floor, and that was the way they’d be going in.
The elevator had originally been an auxiliary freight lift, largely unused until its luxury conversion when Doyle & Merchant established their New York offices here in the 1960s. There was only one wrinkle in the layout: the ground-floor entrance to this elevator had to be located on the next-door tenant’s property, which was currently a multilevel, tourist-trendy clothing store.
The employees of this shop were aware that well-dressed strangers might occasionally be seen entering and leaving through their employees-only swinging doors in the back. D &M paid the tenant a monthly fee for the easement, and executive assistants occasionally escorted the firm’s more reclusive clients into the agency by this odd, private route. The idea of a semisecret entrance added an extra bit of intrigue to the visit for some.
During normal business hours the protocol was simply to raise your company ID above your head and quietly proceed to the rear of the store, as the floor manager knowingly waved you on. Since an encoded swipe card and a restricted key were required to operate the elevator, no further checks were really necessary.
This was Saturday night, however, and the two of them were dressed more like college students than business executives. Consequently they received a good deal of extra scrutiny as they passed through, and the store’s rent- a-cop tracked their progress from a discreet distance, all the way down the back hallway and inside the elevator car. So much for keeping a low profile.
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.
