part0059

Dylan Kane grinned at Atlas attempting a girly voice. It came off rather disturbing. He walked over to the door, not bothering to check the peephole.

Nobody could fake that voice.

He opened the door and smiled at his former Delta Force comrades. “Right on time, gentlemen.” He stepped aside, exchanging thumping hugs with each of them, only Atlas’ slightly painful. “I was expecting a nice little French Maid’s outfit.”

Atlas dropped into a chair by the window. “We’re not in France, otherwise I would have.” He jerked a chunky thumb at Niner. “Besides, I’d have had him constantly trying to look under my skirt. Seeing what a real man is packing, he’d have been scarred for life.”

Niner did a Michael Jackson junk-grab with one hand, and flipped the bird with the other. “I’ve never had any complaints.”

“That’s because you’ve only dated polite women.”

Kane grinned, this the only thing he missed about the Unit.

The life of a spy was a lonely, solitary one. Even when with people, they were rarely your friend, and almost always had an agenda.

But with the Unit? Everyone had your back, everyone was your friend.

Though he’d never go back.

“If you two are done with your swordplay, I have some toys for you boys.” He pointed to the bed where several large duffel bags were sitting. “Have at it.” He patted one of them. “But this one is mine.”

The boys attacked, the gear quickly unpacked, sorted, inspected, and doled out, while he hooked up the comms and jacked into Langley. “Control, this is Whiskers, do you copy, over?”

Dawson gave him a look. “Whiskers?”

He shrugged. “I was feeling frisky.”

“Whiskers, Control Actual, we read you.”

Kane smiled at his friend’s voice, switching it to VOX so the entire room could participate. “Hey buddy, you’re on speaker with some old friends.”

A round of greetings was shouted deliberately incoherently at the radio.

Kane laughed. “What’s new since yesterday?”

Leroux brought them up to date about the manhunt. “The bottom line is they haven’t been spotted since last night. The police have found the van they used to leave the museum grounds, and it was parked near a marina just north of the city where a boat has been stolen. They think the professors might have taken it because the timing fits.”

“Can they track the boat?” asked Dawson.

“We haven’t heard anything on that yet. We’re trying to find out.”

“What about those social media profiles?” asked Kane. “I was looking at them and they’re complete bullshit.”

“We’ve been able to prove they’re fake. We’re still tracing back to see who created them. We’ve linked them back into all kinds of activist groups. Animal rights, climate change, save the whales. All kinds of things. It looks like whoever is behind this provides support to all these types of groups by supplying them with social media followers for their causes, so they look more legitimate. They generate posts and try to get things trending that shouldn’t.”

Niner inspected a Glock. “So, it’s a big fake news type of scam.”

“Yes, though this one doesn’t seem to have anything to do with politics and everything to do with activism.”

Kane chewed his cheek. “So, do we have any theories? Government? Private?”

“It’s a little sloppily done in some ways, so we’re thinking it isn’t government. Besides, we can’t find any motivation for a government to do something like this. Our working theory is that this is private. Some type of background agitators like Soros, Koch, Tides, that type of thing.”

“So, some rich person with an agenda or well-funded group with few morals.”

Niner grunted. “Well, that narrows it down.”

Kane chuckled. “Okay, you guys keep working on it. Are you getting the word out that the accounts are fake?”

“We’ve already pushed this over to the FBI, and they’re contacting the various social media platforms to have the profiles removed plus any others we’ve identified as fake. At the moment, we’re hoping to have them down by the end of the day, but who knows. Sometimes they cooperate, sometimes they don’t.”

“Fingers crossed they get these things down soon before it does too much damage to their reputations.”

“We’ve already got our own bots posting replies to pretty much every post involved, telling them that they’re fake and to ignore anything they read.”

“Will that work?”

“Of course not. It’s the Internet. Too many people think that everything they see on there is true.”

“Then why bother?” asked Atlas.

“Because intelligent people will realize it’s fake and hopefully ignore it, but it also allows us to tag the ones who disagree with our opinion, so we can dive deeper into them to clean up anything they might post. Once we get these things down, we’ll have our bots go through to find anything left that needs to be scrubbed. With the professors’ deep pockets, they can sue to have anything that’s left removed, but the quickest way to save their reputations and possibly their lives, is to find them and find out who is really behind this.”

Kane agreed. “Yeah, we’re here and ready to act on any intel you’re able to get us, but we’re going to need something to work with. I want to find them and get them into safe custody, but we also need to somehow get access to the witnesses to find out what actually happened inside that museum.”

“State department should have somebody there by now. I don’t know if I can put you in touch with them because you’re unsanctioned.”