51

“If we aren’t careful how we handle this, it’s going to look like a stunt.” Jane took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“You mean it isn’t?” Angus popped open a bottle of Stone IPA left over from a fundraiser, handing a bottle and the opener to Sarah.

“Not as far as Matt’s concerned.”

It was late, after ten. The volunteers had gone home. The three of them sat, not in Jane’s office, but in chairs near the kitchen. Angus had switched off the overhead fluorescents and turned on the various desk lamps instead—“mood lighting,” he’d said.

Sarah knew she should be tired. The hours had been brutal lately, and she hadn’t slept well last night. But she was too wired to feel her own fatigue right now.

Wyatt sent the packet to her house. It had arrived yesterday. How had he known where she lived?

Don’t bother asking, Sarah told herself again. As long as no one else knows.

Whatever Wyatt was about, she didn’t think he wanted to hurt her.

She’d opened the mailing box—it actually had Wyatt’s name and a post office box as a return address. So the name’s fake for sure, she’d thought. A six-inch-thick stack of documents that looked like tax returns. She’d flipped through the pages, torn between wanting and not wanting to know.

Dark money made its way into campaigns through 501(c)(4)s, “social welfare” organizations that were allowed to do political work. They could not legally coordinate with candidates’ campaigns, but that was about the only thing they couldn’t do, and they skirted those laws all the time. And with donors’ identities shielded in 501(c)(4)s, it was nearly impossible to tell where the money came from. One 501(c)(4) could donate to another, obscuring the money trail even further. And they could also donate to 527s, organizations that could support candidates directly.

There was one organization she’d recognized right away: the Committee for American Values. They’d been pumping out the worst of the hit pieces on Matt, even nastier than Tegan’s.

If she went through all the documents, she’d find links between the donors who funded the Committee for American Values, the donors funding Tegan, and the donors funding Jacob Thresher, she was certain. Wyatt had pretty much come out and said it.

But she hadn’t gone through all of it. If this stuff had been illegally obtained—and how could it have been legally obtained? The only source of donors’ names would be the 501(c)(4)s themselves and the IRS—then maybe it was better if she didn’t know.

The documents took up most of the space in her big messenger bag, a literal heavy weight on her shoulder. There was no way she wanted to leave them at home.

“What do we do about media?” Jane asked. “We want coverage, but we don’t want a circus.”

“You think there’s that many clowns in the clown car who’d be interested?”

“With everything that’s happened? Sadly, yes.” Jane stood up and opened the door to the minifridge for a bottle of beer. “They’re going to want to see how Matt handles himself. How people react to him.”

“And hey, there’s always a chance someone else might get shot. They wouldn’t want to miss that.” Angus stretched out his long legs, tilted his head back. “I gotta say, this is a shitty way to get earned media.”

“Yes, it is.” Jane sat down and took a sip of her beer. “But we’re just going to have to try to turn it into something positive.” She sighed heavily. “Presley’s not wrong. It’s a branding opportunity.”

“Okay. So what do we do, send out a press release?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. What if we get too many responses?”

“Optimistically,” Angus said.

“Optimistically. Say there’s a lot of interest. We really don’t want a half dozen news crews following Matt around a precinct. There’s security considerations, for one thing.”

“How’s that piece going to work?” Angus asked. “SDPD and the Capitol Police and, I don’t know, the FBI are all going to get together and game plan? That’s not really going to happen for a precinct walk, is it?” He shook his head, huffed out a laugh. “Because that’ll look like a great use of public resources. It’ll feed right into Tegan’s narrative about a wasteful Washington insider and Thresher’s line about a paranoid warmonger with anger-management issues.”

Jane chuckled. “Yeah. Isn’t this fun?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “It won’t be that elaborate. We’ll let all of them know and maybe ask for a squad car. We just need to find a precinct with limited entrance and egress and keep the location quiet till the last minute.”

“And disguise that Morgan dude as a volunteer?” Angus was giggling now. “Can you see him canvassing voters? ‘Stand clear of the door, ma’am, and keep your hands where I can see them. Now tell me how important you think a clean energy economy is to District 54. Don’t you think it will enhance our national security as well as create good jobs in our community?’”

Jane snorted, spraying a little beer. She lifted her hands, struggling not to laugh, finally managing to swallow.

Sarah found herself smiling too. It really was funny, in a horrible way. And seeing Angus and Jane like this, seeing who they really were …

This is what it feels like to belong to something, she thought suddenly. To care about other people.

Then she remembered Wyatt’s package, stuffed in her messenger bag.

“Okay, okay.” Angus was still grinning. “We don’t want too many news crews. So what do we do, give someone an exclusive?” He turned to Sarah. “Our pal Casey Cheng?”

“Well, Casey’s definitely been friendly to us,” Sarah said. Her mouth was dry from nerves, thinking about what was in her bag. She took a sip of her beer. “And her stories give some context to Matt’s claim that the campaign is being deliberately targeted to advance a political agenda.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Yes,” Jane said. “That’s what’s going on, isn’t it.” Like she hadn’t really thought of it in exactly those terms. “Okay.” Jane straightened up. Refocusing. “We definitely want Casey, assuming she’s interested. But I think we need to be careful that we’re not playing favorites here. Or that we’re not being too obvious about playing favorites.”

“How about a pool?” Angus said. “You know, tell them because of security we can’t have too many crews, and see if they’ll agree to pool the coverage. Then offer a press event with Matt after.”

“I like it. One camera. They can take turns if they want and share the footage.” Jane turned to Sarah. “Why don’t you get in touch with Casey, give her a heads-up?” She smiled. “We can give her a little extra access, on the down-low.”

And suddenly Sarah knew what to do with Wyatt’s package.

“Another campaign worker has been shot in a hotly contested congressional election, this time in Florida—”

“Shit,” Casey said.

Rose paused the video on her laptop. “Yeah. At least this one didn’t die.”

The story had made the national news. Probably because of the Cason shooting, Casey thought. Cason was national news now, something similar happened elsewhere, ergo …

“Do you think there’s a connection?”

“You mean, are those assholes tweeting and posting with the True Men and AJLA hashtags?” Rose leaned back in her swivel chair. “Yeah. Your guess is as good as mine what that actually means.”

Rose had photos of her and Diego up in her cube now. One was the classic heads-together selfie, with Rose holding a particularly over-the-top umbrella drink in a tiki mug. The cube walls had a metal surface, so you could stick things up there with magnets, which Casey had always liked. You could put up documents pertaining to a story, notes, cartoons, kid’s drawings. Casey had even had a photo of Paul up in her cube, briefly.

“So what are we up to?” she said. “A campaign worker shot in Florida, firebombing of a campaign headquarters in Flint, shots fired at a congresswoman’s car in Pennsylvania, racist flyers in … ?”

“I think it’s North Carolina.”

“And we’ve got people praising all these actions using the hashtags.”

“Yeah. But we don’t know what that really means. Are any of them involved with the incidents themselves? Are any of them connected or are they just randos who jerk each other off online?”

Casey found herself staring at the photo of Rose and Diego. Diego had on a Hawaiian shirt with giant tiki heads on it. Rose wore what looked like a Hawaiian print dress from the sixties and a chunky Bakelite bead necklace. Maybe they’d gone to the annual Tiki Convention at the Hanalei Hotel in Mission Valley.

I want someone to go with to a tiki convention, she thought. Except maybe not to a tiki convention. More like, a trip to Bhutan.

“Obviously we can’t speculate too much on that,” she said. “But we can talk about the connections that we do know about. The phenomena. Why do they use the hashtags? What do these guys support? Who do they hate? Maybe we can get a couple of the people tweeting this stuff to talk to us.”

“Just message them and see who bites?”

“Sure. Why not?” She had a flash of that pompous ass George “I’m just a storyteller” Drake. “There’s going to be somebody in that crowd who’s enough of a narcissist to want to spout his nonsense on TV. There always is.”

Her phone rang—the X-Files theme, the ringtone she used for sources.

She looked at the screen. Sarah Price.

“Hello?”

“It’s Sarah.” Her voice was low, but it wasn’t weak, or hesitant. “I have something for you.”