The Eye of Moloch (4 page)

From a home base in the row-house slums of East Baltimore, young
George had accompanied his parents on caravan tours of tent shows and soapbox rallies. In town after town he’d watched and learned as they spouted a bizarre mélange of Bible-bending apocalyptic foolishness and race-baiting bull-roar. At age fifteen he was old enough to take up the pulpit himself, and this proved to be a turning point. Where Mom and Dad had enjoyed only limited appeal even with like-minded audiences, George showed an uncanny knack for drawing larger and larger crowds and filling the collection plates to overflowing.

He soon left home and took his own brand of revival show on the road, drumming up support, gathering disciples, and hawking self-published white-power pamphlets and paperbacks along the way. Back then the regional press gave him plenty of ink because most people really loved to hate him. But some, it seemed, just loved him; the more he was denounced and banned the more popular he became. His litany of run-ins with the law became a test case for the limits of the First Amendment, and with every arrest more anonymous money would pour in for his defense. He even ran for a seat in the state legislature at one point, and to the horror of the good people of Louisiana, he’d very nearly won.

It was only a decade later, though, with the explosion of the online social media revolution, that George Pierce graduated into a full-fledged underground phenomenon. In this new medium he enjoyed an advantage the old-school KKK leaders never had—no sheets or hoods were required for membership. His followers never even needed to step out of their homes to meet and plan and join in the crusade. Instead they hid behind members-only firewalls, closed forums, and scary nicknames, safe and secure in the anonymous darker corners of the Internet.

As Pierce’s underground white-nationalist movement began to gather strength, the FBI added an alias to his criminal profile. In their internal alerts and briefings they called him the General, and by the look of things he’d now taken that rank to heart.

Grave times can bring out the best in good people, and open the
door to all manner of evils for the rest. In the recent turbulent years Pierce had read the tea leaves and transformed himself, at least to the uninitiated, into a grassroots champion for the downtrodden majority. He’d retooled his public messages to be more appealing to a growing audience of hopeless and disillusioned Americans. He’d temporarily put aside his radical pose, in other words, for the sake of his radical ends. To the flocks of newcomers he presented himself as a simple man with plainspoken, commonsense answers to the troubles of a changing world.

All the pus and poison still festered at the core, though, waiting for its time. A day finally comes when the old hatreds begin to rise again and the enemy can be named, and in his twisted end-times gospel that day was dawning soon. George Lincoln Rockwell Pierce had a long list of enemies ready for indictment, trial, and punishment at his hands.

•   •   •

“Miss Ross?”

She’d heard the closing
amen
but hadn’t spoken it herself. It was Pierce who’d addressed her with a subtle testiness, the headmaster calling out a promising student caught daydreaming in class.

“Yes?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t make yourself a part of our prayer just now.”

“That’s right.”

“And why is that?”

“I prayed earlier,” Molly said.

“Ah.”

In the ominous silence that followed she heard a match scrape and flare, then the distinctive sounds and scents of a third-rate cigar being lit and drawn upon.

“You rescued us today,” Molly said, “and I was grateful for it.” She turned her head and raised her voice slightly. “Thank you. I want to say that up front, to all of you here.”

“And we all appreciate that expression of your gratitude,” Pierce said, “tardy though it may be. I for one had begun to wonder—”

She turned back to the sound of his voice. “What I don’t understand is why a man like you would stick his neck out for people like us.”

“People like you?”

“Yes. People like us. People who’ve clearly and repeatedly condemned every single thing you stand for.”

The room became somewhat restless, particularly toward the back, as her last words hung in the air. After a series of sharp raps on the desk—did he actually have a
gavel
over there?—the scattered muttering died down right away.

“Oh,” Pierce said quietly, “surely you don’t condemn everything we stand for, Molly. May I call you Molly?”

“Sure.”

“Far from everything, Molly.” A creaking of old wood and springs arose as he stood. By the sound she could tell that someone stationed behind him had slid his chair back, butler-style, to allow the great man adequate space for an anticipated oration. “All of us here have sworn to uphold the divinely inspired U.S. Constitution,” Pierce said, “to the letter, as it was originally written and intended. We stand for American interests to be first and foremost in our foreign policies. We oppose globalism. We believe this country has the right and the obligation to secure its borders, its sacred heritage, and its values. We believe that American jobs, American ingenuity, and American resources must be protected and preserved for the good of the American people. We believe that the blame for our economic woes, past and present, lies with that incestuous den of thieves and shylocks in the revolving door between Washington, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve. And we believe in a small and constrained federal government, with its inevitable corruption confined within the limited role set out for it by the Founding Fathers—”

“All due respect, Mr. Pierce,” she said, “the few things we might
happen to agree on are far outweighed by everything else. On which we don’t.”

“I met your late mother once, Molly, may God rest her soul. And I’m not surprised to learn that the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.” This was obviously spoken for the benefit of the others in the room, and his crowd responded with tentative laughter.

Having grown up as a drifter Pierce never acquired a legitimate regional accent of his own. In his recorded speeches and videos, however, he had a way of mimicking the native dialect of his varied audiences. Hack politicians often engage in such faked familiarity in an attempt to ingratiate themselves to different ethnic or cultural groups while stumping on the campaign trail. Presumably on her behalf, he’d begun to shade his words with a generic cornpone twang that no true southerner, much less a real Tennessean, would ever mistake for authentic.

“I’d like to go now,” she said.

“Hear me out, Molly—”

“Nothing you say will make a difference.” She moved to stand but rough hands from either side gripped her shoulders and kept her seated. “I’m warning you—”

“Warning me,” he said, with what was obviously meant to be a good-natured amusement in his voice. “It shouldn’t come to this. We have a common enemy in this revolution. You shy away from the clarity of some of our beliefs, I understand that, but it’s only a small step I’m asking you to take. We’re both outlaws in the oppressors’ eyes, after all. Have you seen what they’ve done to you, and your group, and to your mother’s memory?” He paused. “You haven’t, have you? You’ve been on the lam all these months, and you haven’t seen, or your people have kept it from you. You’ve been spared from what the Jew-run blogs and the leftist underground media and their minions have made of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve officially become an enemy of the state, Miss Ross. You,
and your insiders, and your dead friend Danny Bailey—by all accounts you’re all homegrown terrorists, enemy combatants, the dreaded white al-Qaeda. You plotted with a turncoat FBI man to destroy a federal building and half of Las Vegas last fall, and you nearly succeeded. Your mother was so distraught over your treason that she committed suicide.”

It took a physical effort, but Molly kept her voice steady. “All lies.”

“If a hundred million people believe a lie and only one knows the truth, tell me, whose version do you think history will record?”

“More than one knows the truth.”

Pierce sighed heavily and retook his chair. “Let’s cut to the heart of it. On my orders we saved your life today, at a considerable cost of men and materials. Though some of my advisors disagreed with me on this course, the decision was mine. In my view what that means, at the minimum, is that you owe a great deal to me. In our discussion outside this door just now there were differing opinions on how that debt was to be paid.

“After much prayer and soul-searching I’ve determined there are two courses, and the one we take will be yours to choose. The first is an official and public alliance between us.” The room was still as he waited for her to respond in some way. She didn’t. “Do you understand?”

“I understand the word
alliance,
yes.”

“With your eyesight as it is, can you see at all?”

“Only some light and shadow,” she said.

“All right.” There was a brief rustling of paper. Someone walked past her to the desk and then came back, took her wrist, and put a single sheet on a clipboard and a heavy marker into her hands. “Despite the best efforts of our enemies there are still likely hundreds of thousands of your mother’s faithful who still may believe in you. These represent a valuable constituency to me. I’ve written a statement and you hold it there. We’ll have someone read it to you so you can memorize it. I want you to sign it, and sign it big, John Hancock–style. We’ll scan it then for a mass e-mail announcement, and when you’re ready you will deliver it for the camera—”

“You don’t have to read it to me. I’m sure I know the essence. It’s addressed to your audience, and mine. It says that I’ve seen the error of my ways and decided to join forces with you. It says that everyone who believes in what my mother stood for, and that I still stand for, should all follow my lead and do the same.”

“. . . You’d rather speak it from the heart, then?”

“Actually,” Molly said, “I’d much rather die.”

Pierce crushed out his cigar with a good deal more force than would have been required to simply snuff it. “And there you’ve struck upon the second option, but you should know something before you choose it. Any noble stand you take will be for nothing. Out on the Internet a dead person can go on living for a long time, for years maybe. So through the magic of technology you’ll sign and deliver that statement postmortem, and many others after that, and nobody will ever know that it wasn’t really you.

“But I’d rather we didn’t go that way. If you’re to be a living ally you bring several advantages to me. If not, then you bring only one. My boys here haven’t seen such a pretty young woman in a month of Sundays, at least one whose affections they didn’t have to purchase. I expect they’ll all want to enjoy you for a spell before we bury you alive.”

Pierce said this with the inhuman detachment of a textbook sociopath, with no discernible anger or malice. Molly sat for a few seconds, thinking. The character of the waning light through that window had dimmed and grown warmer, but not yet quite enough. She would need just a little more time.

“I’m still listening,” Molly said.

“That’s better.”

“What about the people who were with me?”

“What’s left of the Founders’ Keepers? They’re out there under guard in the next room, sweating out your decision, and I’m afraid they’re quite a bit worse for the wear. One’s wounded and I’m told that we brought back another—a Mr. Church, if I recall—who’d sadly expired
from the rigors of the day. But it’s good you asked, because there’s one of your number we can’t account for. This big mulatto that rarely leaves your side, this Thom Hollis, I believe his name is. What is he to you, some kind of a Secret Service?”

“He’s my friend.”

“And he’s a half-blood, is he? Or a quarter?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s never come up.”

“Well, despite the fact that he’s a good fraction of a porch-monkey, I’m told that he’s a rare breed. From what I hear he’s not your typical black man; hell, I’d say the half that’s Caucasian may be a better soldier than most of these whole white men right here. I hear he fought well for you. They also tell me he’s articulate, and bright, and clean. He’s light-skinned with no Negro dialect. I want you to know I need men like him, so don’t you worry about that boy.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What I’m saying is, he’d have a place with us here if that’s what’s on your mind. You just think about how far we’ve come. A few years ago this guy would have been fetching us coffee, and here I’m pulling up a seat for him, right here next to me. And it would be a considerable load off my mind if you told me where he is right now.”

“I wouldn’t tell you that, even if I knew.”

“Now, there’s no need to be that way. Look, I’ve got three of my best trackers out there looking for him, and they’ll bring him on in living or dead before too much longer. Three against one on enemy territory, them’s tough odds to beat, I don’t care how good he is. But, if I had an encouraging word from you about my proposal, well, then, I’d just radio my boys and it’d go much better for him. For both of you. The choice is yours, it’s no skin off my nose either way.”

His voice had taken on a new earnestness that only made the words that much uglier. “I think you’ve got me all wrong, Molly. I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. My old mom told me, ‘George, you can’t go to
heaven if you hate anybody.’ We practice that. There are white niggers, I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time.

“See, I don’t hate the kikes, or the spooks, or the beaners, or the rag-heads. I don’t even hate the chinks anymore. I don’t hate any of those unfortunate people. We should all just stay with our own, you see? I think even brother Farrakhan would join hands with me on that score.

“This is our time, Molly, and our God-given commission. It falls to this generation to cleanse this country, to take it back to the purity it once was. It’s us or them. That’s why I’ve got to know right now if you’re going to be one of us. You’ve got a way with the common people I’ll never have, but you’ve had no muscle behind you. These men here that fought for you today and thousands more like them across America, this is your army. We’re ready to march. Now let’s do what we have to do and take these sons of bitches out.”