CHAPTER 39

The fasten‑ seatbelt light had just blinked on above Noah’s head, accompanied by an intercom announcement that the flight would soon begin its on‑ time descent into McCarran International.

He rubbed his eyes and they felt as though he hadn’t blinked in quite a while. The time had apparently flown by as he’d been occupied reading and rereading the many quoted passages that filled the pages of Molly’s book.

In the course of his supposedly top‑ shelf schooling he must have already been exposed to much of this, and if so, it shouldn’t have seemed as new to him as it did. And in a strange, unsettling way‑ like reading a horoscope so accurate that its author must surely have been watching you for months through the living‑ room window‑ it seemed that each of these writings was addressed to this current time, and this very place, for the sole, specific benefit of Noah Gardner. There’d been many examples, but this was one that stood out:

The phrase “too big to fail” had been reborn for propaganda purposes during a brainstorming session at the office last year. This was in the run‑ up to the country’s massive financial meltdown, the multiphase disaster that was only now gathering its full head of steam.

The original purpose of the phrase in business was to describe an entity that was literally too large and successful to possibly go under‑ think of the Titanic, only before the iceberg. But this newly minted meaning, it was decided, would be a threat, rather than a promise.

While the crisis had in truth, of course, been nothing less than a blatant, sweeping consolidation of wealth and power‑ perpetrated by some of Doyle & Merchant’s most prestigious Wall Street clients‑ it wouldn’t do to allow the press and the public to perceive it that way. So the government’s bailout of these billionaire speculators and their legion of cronies and accomplices was instead presented as a bold rescue, undertaken for the good of the American people themselves.

We have no choice‑ that was the sad, helpless tone of both the givers and the receivers of those hundreds of billions of dollars, monies to be deducted directly from the dreams of a brighter future for coming generations. AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citi, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Fannie and Freddie, and the all‑ powerful puppetmaster behind it all, Goldman Sachs‑ these companies are the only underpinnings of our whole way of life, so the breathless story went, and if they go down, we all do.

It was a fresh way of presenting the public with a familiar choice: the lesser among evils. There was talk of a death‑ spiral drop in the stock market, a wildfire of bank runs and wholesale foreclosures; even martial law was threatened, from the floor of Congress, if the bailout failed to pass. These were the alibis repeated by the PR pundits and the complicit men and women in our supposedly representative government when they were asked, Why did you do it?

The choice they made was to reward the corruption, but all of them knew the better answer, or should have. It didn’t take a thousand‑ page bill to get it across.

“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall! ’

In Molly’s book this quote was unattributed but the ideal it conveyed was ancient, and the central pillar of the rule of law. Thomas Paine, quoted on the same page, had put it a different way, in Common Sense: “In America, the law is king. ” Even the most powerful can’t place themselves above it, the weakest are never beneath its protection, and no corrupt institution is too big to fail.

So that’s what a principle is, Noah thought, as though he were pondering the word for the very first time.

It’s not a guideline, or a suggestion, or one of many weighty factors to be parsed in a complex intellectual song‑ and‑ dance. It’s a cornerstone in the foundation, the bedrock that a great structure is built upon. Everything else can come crashing down around us‑ because those fleeting things can always be rebuilt even better than they were before‑ but if we hold to it, the principle will still be standing, so we can start again.

Next down this page was John Adams’s take on something Noah’s father had told him only that morning:

The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves…

In short, governments have proven that they always go bad, because they’re made up of imperfect people. But unlike Arthur Gardner, Adams believed that that impossible puzzle had been solved by the ingenious separation of powers at the heart of his new country’s design. Or rather, it was given to the people to solve it every single day, at every election, in the ever‑ wary supervision of their dangerous servants.

On the facing page was a quote from another Adams, a cousin of John, and it had been written much larger and bolder than the surrounding text. It was a challenge that Samuel Adams had laid down as the nascent revolution was nearing its point of no return, a gut check for all those who would call themselves Americans:

If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

Put up or shut up, in other words; go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception, he was saying, not the rule, and if you want it you’ve got to do your part to keep it.

The plane touched down on the runway with barely a jolt and soon began to slow for its turn toward the arrival gate. Something touched Noah’s leg and he looked up from his reading. Molly was finally awakening from her nap; as she finished a languid stretch he passed her a bottle of water.

“Thanks, ” she said. “I didn’t mean to sleep this whole time. ”

“You must have needed it. ”

Molly noticed the book in his hands. He closed it and handed it to her. “I hope you don’t mind that I was reading this. ”

“No, not at all. ” She pulled her bag from under the seat, zipped it open, and returned the book to a sleeve inside.

“Hey, Molly? ”

“Yes? ”

He touched her hand. “I think I get it now, ” Noah said.

“You get what? ”

“I really didn’t before, but I understand what you’re doing now, you and your people. ”

“Oh. ” She nodded, and continued to check over her things.

“I mean it. ”

“I know you do, ” she said, in the way you might address an overly needy child in recognition of some minor accomplishment. “Good. I’m glad. ”

He didn’t know what response he’d expected when he told her of his newfound understanding, but it wasn’t this. There’d hardly been enough of a reaction to qualify as one.

Before long the plane had reached the gate, and the door nearest them was the first to be opened. She was walking ahead of him in the exit tunnel, as though with some purpose that she hadn’t paused to share. He caught up to her as she stopped to scan an informational display with a backlit map of airport services.

“I say we grab a meal, ” Noah said, “spend the night, and then try to figure something out tomorrow. ”

His suggestion was overlooked as if he hadn’t spoken it at all.

“I need for you to help me rent a car, ” Molly said.

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