THE OVERTON WINDOW Read Online Free PDF Page B

up to gladly pay a tax on the very air that they breathe.”
    Arthur Gardner walked a few steps closer to the group at the other end of the table.
    “Each of you was invited here this afternoon at my suggestion. The small but serious problem you brought with you was merely a point of entry, a premise for our introduction today. That leaked document sparked a conversation that I’ve had with your superiors, and they with theirs and so on, about a wide-ranging plan of action that has long been in development and now awaits its execution.
    “I told them that now is the time, and ultimately they concurred, with one condition. You, all of you here, are to be put in charge of enforcement—the boots on the ground, if you will. Before this neworder of things can be brought forth, it was decided that you must all, unanimously, agree to protect and defend and rebuild what will remain of this country after its transformation.”
    On the screen behind him a quotation faded in, finely lettered as though written in the author’s original hand. It took a moment but Noah soon recognized the words from
Julius Caesar.
    There is a tide in the affairs of men,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
and we must take the current when it serves,
or lose our ventures.
    The old man watched them as they read, and then he spoke again.
    “Shakespeare wrote of a time of great decision, and ladies and gentlemen, that time has come. We stand at a crossroads; the civilized world stands at a crossroads. Down one path all men are created equal: equal in poverty, equal in ignorance, equal in misery. Down the other is the realization of the brightest hopes of mankind. But not for all men; that was a brief experiment, tried and failed. Abundance, peace, prosperity, survival itself—these coveted things are reserved for the fittest, the deserving, the most courageous of us, the wisest. The visionaries.”
    The room was still again, and he let it stay that way for a while.
    “Now,” Arthur Gardner said, his voice just above a whisper, “while the tide is in our favor—come with me. You can still save yourselves, and in so doing, you can help us build a whole new world upon the ashes of the old.”

CHAPTER 4
 

    Noah stopped in the middle of the main hallway and stood there for a while, his head full of unfinished thoughts and that troubling fogginess you feel only when you’ve forgotten where you’re going, and why.
    That meeting was still going on, but without him. His father had called a break and passed him a note with a list of phone numbers and a few bullet points of instructions—one last errand to perform before he could leave for the weekend. These were apparently VIPs to be invited for the after-hours portion of the presentation, provided the first part had gone as hoped. Evidently it had.
    This task he’d been given had started out strange, and then one by one the calls had only gotten stranger.
    There were no names, only numbers. Each of the calls was answered before the second ring, not by a service but by a personal assistant. Every one of those phones was professionally attended after business hours on a Friday night, and probably twenty-four hours a day by the sound of it. That seemed oddly extravagant, but maybe it wasn’t so unusual considering the circles in which his father was known to travel.
    There’d been audible indications of a scrambler during at least fourof the brief conversations, and some sort of voice-alteration gizmo on one of them. Everyone had seemed extremely wary of revealing any information about the identity of the person associated with each number, but the last one hadn’t been quite careful enough.
    Noah had caught a last name spoken in the background during this final call. It was a Manhattan number, a 212 area code, and the name he’d heard was an uncommon one. He’d also seen it