THE OVERTON WINDOW (37 page)

They’d refashioned his bonds in a manner that would still restrain him, but with less likelihood of causing him to injure himself in the course of the coming ordeal. He was instructed to bite down on a length of hard rubber hose they’d placed between his teeth.

What they did, they’d learned from decades of trial-and-error and thousands of prisoners who’d been down this last road before him. Even in a clinical setting, electroconvulsive therapy was far more an art than a science; the results were never fully known until the procedure was finished. The goals were different here, but their main purpose was plain: to destroy any remaining will to resist or evade, so the truth would be the only thing he’d be left capable of speaking.

For a long while his father sat silently next to the metal table as the technicians administered the voltage with a jeweler’s precision. Noah could hear the screams, and he knew they were his, but a small part of him was detached enough to simply observe the suffering.

His mind, once his greatest, if least used, asset, was no longer under his control. He couldn’t focus on the technicians or the pain and he’d long ago stopped wondering how much longer it would go on. All that
was left were random snapshots of the past that flashed uninvited into his head.

All his defenses had left him hours before. In this state if he’d had any information to reveal he would have gladly offered it, but they were now probing for something much deeper than mere intelligence. Each time he thought there was nothing left, they found another fragile layer of his soul to peel away. In the end, when all he could see was darkness, whatever was left of him finally gave in and tried its best to surrender.

As if sensing it was finished, the old man stood from the rickety wooden stool and stood over his son. “Now, now, Noah, I think we are both finding out what kind of man you are, and I have to tell you, it’s quite disappointing.” He referred briefly to a sheet of notes he’d been handed.
“Inconclusive.
I’m sure you know, that’s a word I hate more than any other. And doesn’t it place a sad little period at the end of the story of a rather aimless and forgettable young life?

“While you’ve given us nothing that implicates you in the treachery of the preceding days, you’ve also said nothing to exonerate yourself to my side of the conflict. A true believer or a traitor to the cause, either one of those I could at least respect. But you’re weak, aren’t you? And fatally so.”

Neither of Noah’s eyes would open fully, and what vision he had was dim and watery. His father looked like a giant silhouette, a featureless shadow. Fragments of memories intruded, a flash from the office break room when he’d first seen Molly, but her image was replaced in his mind with the outline of seven light strokes from a felt-tip pen.

“Continue,” his father said to the technicians.

The lines that had once represented Molly’s exquisite form dissolved into a pool of blackness and pain.

“Noah, I last told you this when you were only a boy, so I doubt you’ll remember.” His father had retaken his position at the side of the table. “It’s a rhyme I made up for you, in answer to some childish question you’d posed. I think it fitting in our present situation.”

When he spoke again the old man’s voice had taken on a softer, more fatherly tone.

“‘There are men who are weak and few who are strong / There are men who are right and more who are wrong / But of all the men huddled in all the world’s hives / There’s but one thing that’s true: It’s the fit who’ll survive.’

“Noah, the meek will not inherit the earth. A faint heart is as great a weakness as a feeble mind. It pains me to say it, but I’m afraid we’ve reached a parting of the ways.”

It was then that Noah felt something beneath him, and behind him, all around him—something outside himself that he couldn’t quite identify.

His father’s mind, his mother’s heart. What the old man had given him was all that these men could tear away, but it was her heart that they couldn’t quite reach. His mother had passed it on to him, and even after her strength had lain unused and scarcely remembered for all these wasted years, it seemed that Molly Ross had somehow awakened it again.

The idea of dying wasn’t nearly as frightening as he would have thought it would be. But somewhere he also knew that this wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Molly had taught him the importance of living to fight another day. She hadn’t been captured, she hadn’t been killed. A spirit like that doesn’t die so easily. He had no facts whatsoever to assure him of this, but he knew it. Maybe it was a bit of that faith that she’d spoken of.

The old man pulled away with a stoic finality and picked up his suit jacket, which had been folded neatly over the back of the office chair. As he put it on, he turned to the man who was clearly in charge of things. “Finish the job and then craft a story to ensure my son is remembered in a way that will bring dignity and honor to our family.”

There was a way out of this, but Noah didn’t know what it was until he heard the answer whispered at his ear, as though Molly were there
right beside him. The fight would go on, she’d said, with her on the outside and him on the inside, where she’d already shown him that the deepest kind of damage could be done. And then she added one thing more:

Don’t be afraid.

As the old man turned away, Noah tried to speak the words she’d given him, but his mouth and lips were so dry that the words were barely audible. “As it will be in the future,” he whispered, “it was at the birth of Man.”

He didn’t even know if he was saying the words aloud or reciting them only in his mind. “There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.” His father’s hand was on the doorknob when he suddenly froze and looked back.

“What did you say?” the old man asked.

Noah continued, his voice becoming stronger. “That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire.” His father had taken a few steps closer to him now. “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”

Arthur Gardner’s usually dispassionate face, so long accustomed to the denial of emotion, could not contain his surprise. He resumed his seat next to the table and motioned the others from the room.

The old man leaned close and squeezed his son’s hand. Noah smiled as best he could and let his father believe what he surely thought he was seeing. “I knew it was in there somewhere,” Arthur Gardner said. “We had to strip all of the other nonsense away, but there it is, from the root of your being; the essence of what I’ve taught you. I knew you couldn’t forget, though I must admit that you had me concerned.”

Noah looked directly into his father’s keen, discerning eyes and nodded.

“Those people you were with,” the old man continued, “they somehow believe that we can have a brighter future by resurrecting the failed ideas of the past. They’re wrong, and their ideas would lead to untold
misery for millions. The answer is a new vision,
my
vision, and together we can make it a reality.”

Noah realized something else then, another thing that Molly had taught him: When you lie for a living, you sometimes can’t see the truth even when it’s staring you right in the face. That’s a weakness that could clearly be exploited.

It was a matter of pride with Arthur Gardner that his heir should be involved in the transformation that was coming. His son, then, would do his best to prove the adage that pride comes before the fall.

The old man smiled. The ordeal was finished, and though he clearly felt he’d won the day, what Arthur Gardner couldn’t know was that the battle lines had only just been drawn.

Noah felt himself fading, and he spoke again, but scarcely at a whisper. These words were meant for different ears, and wherever Molly was, he knew for certain she would hear them.

“We have it in our power,” Noah said, “to begin the world over again.”

EPILOGUE
 

A month to the day had passed since Noah had arrived in his new quarters.

The days in this place had started to meld into one another, so he’d resorted to noting each sunrise with a mark on one of the painted bricks in the wall near his bed. While actual calendars were available for residents of his moderate status, these private etchings seemed to be a more fitting method to keep a tally of his time inside.

With the stub of a pencil from the nightstand he inscribed another X at the end of the last line, and then he began another empty grid beside the first in anticipation of the new month to come.

Noah was familiar with the atmosphere of a dormitory, though he’d never actually had to live in one while in college. That was the style of accommodations this place most resembled. Just a simple bedroom with a pressed-wood desk and a shared bath, more than a cell but considerably less than a real apartment. Some no-nonsense designer had tacked on a veneer of generic warmth just sufficient to allow the space to be thought of as a modest home by its resident, rather than as a place of confinement.

Two floors down it was more like a barracks, and the levels below those floors weren’t on the tour.

A man walked by out in the hall, glancing briefly through the window in the door as he passed. Not a guard, Noah had been reminded at his orientation, but more of a floor monitor; just a benign, overseeing administrator, there for security and safety.

And this wasn’t a prison, not at all, the welcoming committee had gone on to emphasize. This complex and its surrounding buildings might have been originally
constructed
as a prison, but funding cuts and changes in policy had orphaned the place in recent years. Local officials in the small Montana town nearby had been delighted to learn that their costly investment might finally be put to profitable use, providing local employment and helping the country deal with its recently declared emergency.

The old man had arranged his son’s reservation here, and his job. As soon as he’d healed, Noah was to become a key asset in the all-important public-relations push behind the nation’s unfolding, brave new direction. He wouldn’t return to New York right away—he’d be a sort of field correspondent, helping to manage the flow of information from the ongoing fight against the dangerous homegrown forces who’d recently declared open war on American progress.

Noah’s original accommodations had actually been much nicer; a private suite on one of the upper floors—but his unsatisfactory performance in his first real work assignment had resulted in his lodgings being downgraded a notch.

This failed assignment had been pretty straightforward: He was to write up an in-depth piece for the news, outlining the inner workings of the recent homegrown conspiracy that had nearly led to the destruction of Las Vegas and San Francisco. The story was to be told from his own point of view as a courageous hostage and unwilling insider.

His first draft was rejected immediately; there’d been a consistent
undertone in the text that seemed to paint the ringleaders, the Founders’ Keepers, in a subtly but unacceptably positive light. His second try wasn’t an improvement, it was even worse. The strange thing was, if only out of self-preservation, Noah had been trying hard to write what they wanted, but the stubborn truths just kept elbowing their way in.

After an informal inquiry, this first glitch was chalked up to the lingering effects of the Stockholm syndrome, that passing mental condition through which hostages sometimes develop an odd sympathy for the cause of their captors. For the time being it was determined that, until he was better, Noah would be given less-demanding duties and an additional editor to watch over his work.

There was no shortage of things to do, large and small. A lot of PR spin needed to be applied to the changes that were already well under way across the country. Noah was given a stack of small writing tasks, mostly one-liners and fillers that required far less of a commitment to the web of new truths being woven for consumption by the press and the public. For one of these jobs, he was to simply come up with a suitably harmless-sounding name for a new Treasury bureau that would be put in charge of the next wave of government bailouts for various failing corporations and industries.

This was the work of only a few seconds; Noah called it the
Federal Resource Allocation & Underwriting Division.
Nearly a truckload of boxes of letterhead and business cards had been printed before someone in production noticed the problem: The five-letter acronym for this new government bureau would be
FRAUD.

They’d said they believed him when he told them it was an accident, but they’d also moved Noah to this more secure, probationary floor of the residence building just as a temporary precaution.

Once you know the truth, Molly had said, then you’ve got to live it. What she’d apparently neglected to add was that you’ll also tend to randomly
tell
it, whether it gets you into trouble or not.

Noah rearranged his pillows and lay down on his cot, not with an intention to sleep, but just to rest his eyes for a while and try to clear his head.

A thousand things were flying through his mind. It was a condition that his father referred to as a
topical storm,
a state in which so many conflicting thoughts are doing battle in your brain that you lose your ability to discern and to act on any of them. This state was regularly induced by PR experts to cloud and control issues in the public discourse, to keep thinking people depressed and apathetic on election days, and to discourage those who might be tempted to actually take a stand on a complex issue.