thoughts are manufactured by people like me. What about the public? Twenty years ago in this room I showed a small group of shortsighted businessmen how to sell the public the most abundant substance on the face of the earth at ten times the price of premium gasoline, the very same water that flows from their own kitchen faucets for one-tenth of a penny per gallon. That would seem unbelievable; it defies all logic and reason. Your grandparents would have called it larceny, fraud, or wanton thievery… and rightly so, I might add. But that experience proved one thing to me: there’s a double-edged sword by which the public can be sold anything, from a three-dollar bottle of tap water to a full-scale war.”
The screens winked out at once, and left behind were three tall words in black on white, dominating the room from floor to ceiling.
HOPE AND FEAR
“Do you see? If the people are simply swindled there’s always a chance they might one day awaken and rebel against the crime. But we don’t change their minds; we change the truth. Most people simply want to be left alone; they’ll go along with anything as long as we maintain their illusions of freedom and the American way. We leverage their hopes and feed their fears, and once they believe, they’re ours forever. After that they can be taken by the scruff of the neck and shown the indisputable scientific proof, with their own eyes they can read the label that says contents drawn from a municipal water supply, and they will only nod their sleepy heads and walk past the faucet to the vending machine. That’s when you know that anything is possible.
“You!” He pointed to Mr. Purcell at the far end of the table, who flinched as though he’d just been goosed by a cattle prod. “You entered this room thinking of me as a hired hand, believing you were a master of these proceedings, and since you pay my salary, by all rights you should have been correct. Why then did you allow me, your humble employee, to overpower you, to control you, to humiliate you in front of your peers and subordinates? Why?”
When it became clear that not even a stammering answer was forthcoming the old man continued.
“Indoctrination. I made you afraid, Mr. Purcell, and in your fear you accepted my truth, my power, and you abandoned your own. The public will do the same; leave them to me. The misguided resistance that still exists will be put down in one swift blow. There’ll be no revolution, only a brief, if somewhat shocking, leap forward in social evolution. We’ll restore the natural order of things, and then there will be only peace and acceptance among the masses.” He smiled. “Before we’re done they’ll be lining up to gladly pay a tax on the very air that they breathe.”
Arthur Gardner walked a few steps closer to the group at the other end of the table.
“Each of you was invited here this afternoon at my suggestion. The small but serious problem you brought with you was merely a point of entry, a premise for our introduction today. That leaked document sparked a conversation that I’ve had with your superiors, and they with theirs and so on, about a wide-ranging plan of action that has long been in development and now awaits its execution.
“I told them that now is the time, and ultimately they concurred, with one condition. You, all of you here, are to be put in charge of enforcement-the boots on the ground, if you will. Before this new order of things can be brought forth, it was decided that you must all, unanimously, agree to protect and defend and rebuild what will remain of this country after its transformation.”
On the screen behind him a quotation faded in, finely lettered as though written in the author’s original hand. It took a moment but Noah soon recognized the words from Julius Caesar.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
and we must take the current when it serves,
or lose our ventures.
The old man watched them as they read, and then he spoke again.
“Shakespeare wrote of a time of great decision, and ladies and gentlemen, that time has come. We stand at a crossroads; the civilized world stands at a crossroads. Down one path all men are created equal: equal in poverty, equal in ignorance, equal in misery. Down the other is the realization of the brightest hopes of mankind. But not for all men; that was a brief experiment, tried and failed. Abundance, peace, prosperity, survival itself-these coveted things are reserved for the fittest, the deserving, the most courageous of us, the wisest. The visionaries.”
The room was still again, and he let it stay that way for a while.
“Now,” Arthur Gardner said, his voice just above a whisper, “while the tide is in our favor-come with me. You can still save yourselves, and in so doing, you can help us build a whole new world upon the ashes of the old.”
CHAPTER 4
Noah stopped in the middle of the main hallway and stood there for a while, his head full of unfinished thoughts and that troubling fogginess you feel only when you’ve forgotten where you’re going, and why.
That meeting was still going on, but without him. His father had called a break and passed him a note with a list of phone numbers and a few bullet points of instructions-one last errand to perform before he could leave for the weekend. These were apparently VIPs to be invited for the after-hours portion of the presentation, provided the first part had gone as hoped. Evidently it had.
This task he’d been given had started out strange, and then one by one the calls had only gotten stranger.
There were no names, only numbers. Each of the calls was answered before the second ring, not by a service but by a personal assistant. Every one of those phones was professionally attended after business hours on a Friday night, and probably twenty-four hours a day by the sound of it. That seemed oddly extravagant, but maybe it wasn’t so unusual considering the circles in which his father was known to travel.
There’d been audible indications of a scrambler during at least four of the brief conversations, and some sort of voice-alteration gizmo on one of them. Everyone had seemed extremely wary of revealing any information about the identity of the person associated with each number, but the last one hadn’t been quite careful enough.
Noah had caught a last name spoken in the background during this final call. It was a Manhattan number, a 212 area code, and the name he’d heard was an uncommon one. He’d also seen it in the newspaper earlier in the day. That call had been to the private line of the most likely nominee for the next U.S. Treasury secretary, assuming the election went as forecast.
This man was also the current president of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. He and twenty or so others of comparable status were apparently now dropping everything and coming here, bound for a conference room where Noah’s father was waiting with the previous attendees.
He walked to the southeast corner suite and keyed himself into the private kitchen used to prepare his father’s meals on those days he was in town. The room was all tile and polished granite and stainless steel, larger than most of the executive offices and equipped for Arthur Gardner’s personal chef.
Noah flipped on the blower over the range, lit the cooktop in back, and followed the final instruction on his list of things to do.
Destroy this paper; be certain to watch it burn.
CHAPTER 5
His errand complete, Noah resumed his drift through the halls. It was hard to say how much time had passed since he’d been ordered out of the remainder of that meeting. No clocks were allowed on the walls or the wrists at Doyle & Merchant.
It was one of the many quirks meant to remind everyone that this wasn’t just another workplace. Over the
