Mark didn’t speak. Larry turned and looked out the window, up at the crown of Mount Republic, and made a soft sound with his tongue.
“And God made family,” he said. Then he got to his feet.
“Tell you something, Markus-older you get, the more you realize the only things in this world that can really cause you pain are the people you love. I always did love you, son, and it’s damn clear you loved your wife. No doubt about that. It would be easier on us both right now if we weren’t so afflicted, right?”
Mark stayed silent. Larry nodded as if the silence were a good enough answer, then said, “I s’pose it’s time for me to put my pants on, isn’t it? We’re burning daylight, and you’re running a race against the police. Won’t win that one sitting here by the fire, will we?”
“Thank you,” Mark said. His voice was rough. “And I’m sorry.”
His uncle stood looking out the grimy window at the mountain. “You know what I thought, the day those cocksuckers whipped me? I thought, Lord, if only my brother were still alive. Not that it would have put the numbers in my favor, but with Ronny, I didn’t mind being outnumbered. Ronny’s been in the ground a long time, though. I always miss him, but never more than I did that day. I needed a brother, and my brother was gone.” He turned back to Mark and gave a cold, humorless smile. “I got a nephew, though. How ’bout that. Now the question is, how much of Ronny is in you, boy?”
Part Three: Wardenclyffe
45
The council fire had been planned for evening, but Eli’s accelerated timeline forced him to move it to dawn, and for once he saw a benefit. The sunrise was more powerful than the sunset in this location; from the ridgetop, the earth seemed to be lit from within for a few spectacular minutes, an ethereal glow that spoke of the ancient world. That would matter to the group he was assembling. Any extra touch that enhanced their mission commitment was valuable, if not imperative. Eli’s command was going to be tested during this ceremony, and he would need to call upon the natural world for power. While the gathering crowd had been pliable enough in initial talks, everything was different on the eve of action, and they would arrive with at least some level of doubt. The group en route was as close to battle-tested as any Eli could assemble, minus a few key parts. He thought of the women in the cabin, of the empty shackles that lined the walls, and the image was bittersweet. He had counted on five more alongside Sabrina Baldwin, and Lynn Deschaine had not been in that mix. But those people remained available to him for the future, and in the future, a world of fear would be easier to rule.
When darkness fell, chaos would reign, and the man who controlled the chaos? His ascent to leadership was natural order. Proof of this was in the history books of every civilization.
Eli read voraciously about biological warfare and understood both the potential and the challenge-you needed to determine how to infect the first wave of carriers with the virus. A careful study of human nature, however, told you that every human on earth already carried two viral qualities: fear and hope. Each was contagious and could spread rapidly under the right conditions, but at first glance they seemed to be natural enemies.
False.
Fear and hope were fundamentally joined, inseparable. Anyone whose fear drove him to make predictions, to offer dire warnings, nursed a secret hope that these things would actually come to fruition. If you devoted much of your energy to, for example, a political campaign against a candidate you feared deeply and then that individual rose to power, would you not wish him to fail? Perhaps with spectacular consequences?
Eli believed that most people would. And for those he had found on the radical fringes, the ones itching to be mobilized for a cause, it was simply a matter of joining their fear and their hope. This is what he had nursed so long among so many. First he coaxed forth a prediction born of fear-The Islamic terrorists are coming; The Christians will kill us; We’ll die when they take our guns; We’ll die because they won’t take our guns; the details of these fears were less interesting to Eli than what they could do, because all fears harbored potential for action. They harbored, he believed, a secret hope: The doubters will finally see that I was right. Any prophet wanted his prophecy fulfilled.
And so Eli coaxed them, encouraged them, nurtured them. Then he solicited the promise: When it happens, we will act.
When the western electrical grid went down, Eli was confident that at least seven groups of wildly different ideologies would be compelled to act, and he was hopeful about five more. Yesterday he began careful cloud-seeding of rumor, issuing predictions of a massive action from, depending on the message board or forum, ISIS, the U.S. government, the Tea Party, Greenpeace, the Ku Klux Klan, and Wall Street.
In return, he had his promises: If it happened, action would be taken, and-most critically-his varied cells promised that they would not be fooled by whatever narrative their opposition offered. Because of course they would offer an explanation, of course they would bury the truth in a lie. Eli had warned of this as well.
When a nation was attacked, the nation looked for an explanation, tried to understand what would incite anyone to take such action. It was an arrogant assumption that any strike against society implied an ideological cause, some bizarre attempt to correct society, rather than a clean and simple desire to watch it burn.
The group that would initiate the most significant terrorist strike ever made on North American infrastructure gathered on the ridge just before dawn. They shared only a few words of greeting, some no words at all. There was palpable tension. They had to be wondering how ready they really were. And, perhaps, wondering what they were doing there at all.
Eli shared none of their doubt. He’d been years in the planning of this operation, and in its study. If you could convince a band of people that the evil they were doing was not only justified but also the opposite of evil-a righteous act, a noble act-you could coax far more out of them than they would have ever dreamed. There was much to learn about humanity from watching a lynch mob.
The dozen he’d gathered here had been carefully culled from fringe environmental movements, castoffs drawn in by Violet’s ludicrous appropriation of American Indian spirituality. In her bizarre ways, she was perhaps the most brilliant recruiter he’d found. He knew the secret of her success was her sincerity. She believed with a depth of passion, a true intensity, that few could match. When she spoke of the way the strike on the grid would provide a needed wake-up call for the nation, she believed it, and her words carried that.
There was no messenger so effective as a true believer.
She also preached nonviolent resistance. Eli had explained this dilemma to Garland and the two other guards he’d recruited, men who responded well to whispered assurances that only a select few were being trusted with the task of pulling triggers. None of them were present now. Eli didn’t want any guns in sight.
As the sun made its first timid appearance on the horizon, a faint band of gray, Eli put his back to it and stood on the summit, looking down on the chosen twelve.
“We gather in darkness,” Eli said, his voice the deep, textured thunder that he had practiced so long to achieve, “because we do not fear darkness. We know its necessity. And we also know this-those who would keep us in darkness have reached their day of accountability.”
A few murmurs, a few nods. Eli held silence for several seconds, staring at them.
“Here is what we know,” he said, voice lower now, cool as the mountain wind. “We know without question that those in power, be they government actors or titans of wealth and greed, have manipulated the very planet itself for their own agendas, their own gains. The greatest gift we’re given, the source of our very existence, has not only been abused, it has been claimed. There are many who think that they have dominion over the planet.