The Eye of Moloch by Glenn Beck

sadness. She caught her breath as though a flood of tears were on their way, and he went to her and hugged her close against his chest. There was nothing to be said or done for the moment; whatever grief it was that had overtaken her, he let her cry it out.
    This was so unlike the old Molly Ross. In earlier times she’d kept her emotions well guarded and such displays of vulnerability were rare.
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered, after the worst of it had passed. “I know I need to be stronger.”
    “Don’t trouble yourself now. I’d say you’ve been plenty strong enough.”
    They sat for a while, then, and caught up with one another. The Merrick family, he learned, were longtime friends of the Founders’ Keepers—true dyed-in-the-wool libertarians and covert financial supporters of Molly’s late mother and her cause. They’d volunteered their home as a shelter for the group more than a year before. Unlike some fair-weather patriots who scarcely dared to dip a toe into the shallows of the movement, these folks had stood by their offer to help even as the crisis in the country grew worse and worse. Until now, for their protection Molly had kept almost every detail of the family’s involvement to herself.
    Next she filled him in on the status of their companions, her brief time in the clutches of George Pierce, and some details of the past day that Hollis had nearly slept through. At length it seemed only a single topic remained to be raised. Throughout the conversation he could almost see her avoiding it; the answer would stay safely unreal if the question went unasked. But in the end she did ask about him.
    “Have you heard anything about Noah Gardner?”
    This was somewhat telling, the way she used his full name, as though to hold that rare, painful brush with intimacy at a more formal and comfortable distance.
    In her role as her mother’s civilian intelligence agent, Molly had worked her way into the lives of any number of gullible marks in the loftiest realms of the country’s plutocracy. Most of them had been privileged young men of high position—political aides to corrupted candidates, media insiders, union apparatchiks, rising stars in nongovernmental organizations, sons of crony capitalists, Wall Street prodigies—all heirs to the unelected thrones of power bent on subverting the American way of life to their own selfish ends. Through one deception or another they’d each been charmed into revealing whatever small part of the enemy agenda had been entrusted to them. Once the prize was in hand and put to good use, she’d vanished and moved on to the next unsuspecting target without ever looking back.
    Noah Gardner had once been just another of these brief, dispassionate assignments, but for a number of unexpected reasons her time with him had become a different story altogether.
    “I haven’t heard much of anything about anybody yet,” Hollis said. “The last we knew for sure they were going to send him out with those so-called government peacekeepers that are hunting us now, I guess as some sort of a slap in the face to both of you.” He hesitated to say more, but there seemed little use in pretending things were any better than they were. He couldn’t lie to her, and only a lie would put her mind at ease. “I thought I saw him through the scope, in fact, the other morning up at Gannett Peak.”
    “You saw him there?”
    “It sure looked like him to me. They’d put a rifle into his hands and by the way he held it I doubt he’d ever touched a loaded gun before. They might as well have hung a bull’s-eye on his back to go along with it.”
    “And what happened?”
    “I sent a bullet past his ear to remind him to keep his head down at least, but I lost track of him once things lit off.” He patted her knee, and she put her hand on his. “We know people that might be near to him, at least near enough to know. I’ll try to find out later if he’s—if he’s all right, and where