The Eye of Moloch by Glenn Beck Page B

sharp come-hither gesture with his hand, as though summoning a tardy waiter for a neglected refill. With only this minortest of dominance-response the man seemed to instantly set aside his former attitude. He sprang into service like Pavlov’s executive assistant, taking up the folders and placing one in front of each of the seated men.
    “We’d like some cold water also,” Landers said, and the man gave an earnest nod and left to fetch the refreshments with barely a glance back toward Pierce for his leave. “Now,” Landers said as he opened his folder to its agenda page, “the first and most pressing order of business is this Ross woman—”
    “Oh, I’m way out ahead of you on that score,” Pierce said. “Thirty men left here not an hour ago, hot on the scent. She’ll be dead and gone by sundown, and damn glad by then to be that way.”
    “No, she will not be,” Landers said. “I want you to call back your men immediately. We’re going to let her go.”
    “We?” Pierce laughed the word aloud and nearly triggered a fit of coughing in this blurt of his amusement. “Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about now? We? From where I sit, as of now I’ve got the better part of a million dollars and a brand-new helly-copter on my hands”—he checked his watch—“and you’ve got about four minutes left to breathe.”
    “You need to call back your men, immediately.”
    “Screw the four minutes.” Pierce looked up at the remaining man beside him. “Do me a favor and put a hollow-point through the empty skull of this highfalutin son of a bitch.”
    The guard slipped his revolver from its holster and drew down and pulled back the hammer with his thumb, one slick motion and a steady, practiced ease with the prospect of killing an unarmed man.
    Landers held up an index finger, as though to offer a polite suggestion for a wayward employee. “May I have a few last words, then?” he asked.
    “This I’ve gotta hear.”
    He closed the folder, removed his glasses, and calmly began.
    “We’re already silent partners, Mr. Pierce, though you haven’t realized it. Aside from one notable failure last year—again involving thetroublesome Molly Ross—you’ve done good work for us in the past. The source of the funding and the guidance you’ve received remained in the shadows, but we’re on the cusp of a great opportunity now, and the time is right to formalize our arrangement. You’re free to decline, of course; at the moment it seems you’re determined to do so. It’s only fair that I tell you what it means if you do.
    “Until this morning we didn’t know precisely where to find you, nor had there been a particular need to do so. You enjoyed the safety of a hidden asset, but that’s no longer to be the case. Since I landed, the sensors in that helicopter out there have been collecting, and recording, and relaying a torrent of information, all about you. It’s listening to us right now. By now this headquarters of yours is pinpointed and mapped to the millimeter, and every man here has been identified and profiled with enough data to track him down wherever he might try to run. I’m sure you see how these new facts might weigh on your decision.
    “Because I am at this moment overdue to check in with my employers,” Landers continued, “about twenty minutes ago a small squadron of armed Predator drones and an A-10 Thunderbolt took off from the same private air base from which I departed earlier this morning. If you’re not familiar with the primary weapon of the A-10, let me describe it for you. It’s a Gatling gun that would span this room, loaded with depleted-uranium-tipped high-explosive shells the size of a Coke bottle, and it fires those at a rate of almost four thousand rounds per minute. The only way to improve on this gun as a killing machine, its designers once said, would be to make it fly. That’s the A-10, and right now it’s coming for you.
    “Understand, this is not a rescue