WASHINGTON, D.C.
Tuesday 22 December
Peter was missing.
Not literally maybe. But the boy hadn’t shown in the office for days, which was worrying enough.
With the crap now spewing out of the Internet about him, Brooks thought . . . well she didn’t know what to think. “This vile animal should be put down,” someone on 5Click who called themself TruthSeeker had written.
“Die you motherfucking bovine piece of crap. I am coming for you. And I will be carrying.” That had been written by someone calling himself SheriffJack.
Five days had passed since she and Rena had returned from Colorado. The attacks had not subsided; they’d grown and jumped from the semi-dark web into the public Internet. It was like watching cancer cells through a microscope metastasize so fast you could see them replicating.
The public bile was bad enough. Peter had also received dozens of private “direct” messages threatening his life: people who didn’t even know him wishing him dead. The numbers had become hard to process. Thirty-five thousand posts in five days, half of that in the last two. Peter had become a notorious celebrity in an anonymous digital world of paranoia and conspiracy about which a week ago Brooks had only a passing awareness. Wiley and Lupsa were still trying to track it all down, but the viral spread complicated the task.
Rena, meanwhile, was not answering emails or texts. She’d dropped by his row house two days ago and he had seemed okay, promising to be back in the office Monday. But the pace of all the crap piling up online had accelerated, and he hadn’t shown. Then since yesterday, radio silence. It was time to go see him. And bring Ellen Wiley.
He met them at the door. He was dressed, at least. He had been in his den, his little reading cave. Nelson, the cat, was keeping guard. His laptop was open on the library table, with an empty martini glass next to it. And four toothpicks next to the glass. So it was not his first, she thought. It was a little after 4:00 P.M.
She set herself down on his sofa and began to unpack her purse to show she was staying awhile. Suck it, fella. Ellen sat down, too. They had a plan. They were going to rouse their man by engaging Peter in the fight.
“I called a friend who works at Y’all Post,” Brooks started. “A former Nash Justice Department guy. This nimrod lawyer is now making a million plus lobbying for a tech platform.” She rolled her eyes. “He promised to look into the attacks on you. When I didn’t hear back, I called him again.”
Peter said nothing. He looked like he couldn’t wait for them to leave.
“He told me he’d asked someone back in the Security Services division in Cupertino to check on the accounts threatening you. He said while they appeared to be real people—not robots—they didn’t live anywhere near Washington, and didn’t have many followers.” She inhaled a deep breath of frustration just even thinking again about this useless Y’all Post dude. “I pointed out to my friend that these lunatics don’t need many followers. It only takes one.”
“What did he say?” Wiley asked, trying to bring some enthusiasm to the conversation.
“That people had a constitutional right to free speech.” She scowled. “That’s when I really lost my shit.” She glanced at Peter and hoped, in vain, that might nudge a smile out of him. “I told him he worked for a goddamn private commercial billboard company, not the Supreme Court, and he wasn’t protecting anyone’s constitutional rights. Just maximizing their fucking revenue.”
That got a smile from Ellen at least.
“I may have added that they were using the Constitution as a loincloth, too, which meant putting their dicks in the Founding Fathers’ sacred text.”
“What did he say to that?” Wiley asked.
“Some shit about ‘the Open Web being a foundational value of the company’s civic philosophy.’” She added a frown. “And I said something along the lines of ‘Fuck you, Ted. Your only philosophy is greed.’” She gave a little shrug. “I hadn’t meant to say that. But then I hadn’t planned on his puking corporate PR goo all over my shoes, either.”
Wiley laughed. Peter was still quiet.
“So then I said, ‘If someone were doing this to your CEO, what they’re doing to Peter, is this how you guys would react?’”
“And?”
“That’s when he said fuck you back to me.”
Wiley laughed harder this time, and so did Brooks. Peter finally at least smiled.
Randi became more serious. “I told him if someone shows up coming after Peter, he could bet on his mother’s grave I would come after him, and his punk-ass company and its thirty-five-year-old sociopath CEO. And I would bring the goddamn leader of the free fucking world with me. And his predecessor. And Ellen Wiley. And then he would learn something about foundational values.”
Usually, when she told a story like this, about losing her temper, and telling someone exactly how she felt, Peter would squint at her in mock disapproval and make some tough-guy repressed-male-trying-to-be-cool remark. Peter loved Brooks’s brazenness—that she had no filters and no fear, that she cursed and belly laughed and hugged and told everyone the truth. He thought people were drawn to her honesty like a hearth.
But he had no response to her story. Instead, he leaned forward in his chair toward Wiley. “Why is this growing?”
“Remember, Peter, what I told you about ‘shepherds and sheepdogs’?” Wiley asked. “And trying to get someone to provide the moment of human touch?”
Rena nodded.
“We know more about the shepherds now,” Wiley said. “The account who said they had proof you abused your wife and killed your baby was an account called EagleSquad. It is almost certainly a fake account.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“The account’s owner claims to be a former army officer, a woman, now living in Sarasota, Florida. But the account posts too often to be real—more than sixty thousand times in three years. And her photo is doctored.” Wiley had a small notebook open where she had made notes. “But the account has a lot of followers—more than a hundred and seventy thousand. If you post that often, you get a lot of followers.”
EagleSquad, she said, was part of a private group of accounts that shared and amplified political messages about national security. So EagleSquad was followed by some influential people who were real. “Senior Pentagon officials. Foreign policy types. Fringe national security folks.”
“Do these people think EagleSquad’s a real person?” Brooks asked.
Wiley said, “Who knows what they think. But some of them probably do. And some of these officials are serious people.” Peter looked a little stunned. “But then remember the post I told you about the other day?” Wiley asked. “That lawyer in Illinois who was appalled by what she heard about you, Peter?”
At the mention of it, Rena finally seemed to engage. “Camilla Goldberg,” he said. “In Peoria.”
Wiley nodded. “Yes. She is a real person. She was ‘the human touch.’ That’s a real person who’s so provoked by what she’s seen, that she’s commented on it and passed it along and given the whole thing authenticity.”
“And she has no connection to the fake bots?” Brooks asked.
Wiley said, “Probably not.”
Peter, so quiet a moment ago, began to offer details about Camilla Goldberg he had picked up. She was a lawyer in Peoria, Illinois, who supported gun and LGBTQ rights and had posted how angry she was to hear Rena had allegedly killed his unborn child. It was after she posted about him that the false rumors about Rena really went viral. “Her Y’all Post message was shared more than seventy-five thousand times.”
And Brooks realized that for the last five days Peter had been living in the little corner of the world that hated him. That’s what he’d been doing here, holed up in his row house. Reading shit about himself on the Internet, trying to understand it. And drinking.
“Peter, you asked what changed,” Wiley said. “Why this got so much bigger? Well, Camilla Goldberg changed it. But then it got turbocharged after that.”
“Turbocharged by what?” asked Rena.
“A podcast. By David Highsmith,” Wiley said.
“Who the hell is David Highsmith?” asked Brooks. “Another asshole spreading lies about Peter whose First Amendment rights Y’all Post is protecting?”
He was a political activist who was big online, Wiley explained. He called himself “a self-employed private investigator exposing the ‘New World Order agenda.’”
Brooks said, “The new what!”
“The New World Order,” said Wiley.
“Weeping mother of Christ!” Brooks added as punctuation.
Ellen looked at Rena. “Highsmith claimed to have done more research on you, Peter. And then he was interviewed by TrueFlag about it for one of their podcasts.”
This was like peeling a rotten onion, Brooks thought, and finding just more dark mealy paste inside.
She knew about TrueFlag. It was a conspiracy website with a huge audience—something like seventeen million followers—and most of them avidly shared what they heard there. TrueFlag’s imprint was significantly larger now than any of the three old evening newscasts.
“I listened to the podcast, Peter,” Wiley said. “It’s ugly. Highsmith couches everything; they’re just allegations; he’s trying to sort out the truth. It’s clever, legally. None of it asserted as fact.”
Rena closed his eyes for a moment. Apparently, even if he had been diving into what was said about him online, he didn’t know about the podcast. “What did he say?” he asked.
“The same lie. That you beat your wife, which killed your unborn child. And that’s why Katie left you.” Brooks saw Rena take a deep breath. He looked more vulnerable than she had ever seen him. “He also says you accused someone of sexual harassment so that when the army threw you out, you could say it was revenge against you.”
All of this—the accusations against the general—had occurred before Brooks had known Rena. The general was being elevated to take over Central Command, the U.S. military’s Middle East Theater. Rena, who was a military investigator, was tasked with the man’s final vetting. He began to discover holes in the general’s file, and three weeks later the general quietly retired.
A few months after that, Peter was gone from the army, too. That’s when Senator Burke hired Peter as a staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Which is where Brooks and Rena met, working for senators from different parties.
Ten years ago.
Wiley hadn’t finished her story. “The day after Highsmith appeared on the TrueFlag podcast, Peter, the allegations against you went viral for real.” She leaned toward Rena. “The day before, your name scored zero on something called the Composite Search Index. The next day you scored a hundred.”
“The what?” Brooks asked.
“It’s a score of how often something gets searched online,” Wiley said. “One hundred is as high as it goes.”
Wiley hadn’t had a chance to fully brief Brooks before they’d made this trip to Rena’s, and while she and Peter had dealt with bizarre venom on the net before, it wasn’t her world. The goddamn New World Order? She and Peter were about as far from whatever the hell that was as you could get. They were just old enough to have been pre-Internet adults and they’d had the nagging feeling for the last twenty years of barely keeping up.
Wiley continued, “The Highsmith podcast got attention. Dash Zimbalist did a show on it.” Dash Zimbalist was a popular alt-right radio talk show host and ran a series of websites that was now the largest political talk empire in the country. “And then Zimbalist did an interview with some ex-military officer who said he knew you. Someone named Arthur Duke.”
Duke was a character so dark, so amoral, it was hard to believe he was real. But he was. He was a billionaire ex–Special Forces guy who ran an infamous private security firm. He’d been blackballed from contracting with the U.S. government after committing war crimes. Now he worked mostly for notorious foreign regimes.
“Traffic about you doubled after Zimbalist’s interview with Duke,” Wiley said.
“So this thing swirled in the semi-dark web till Camilla Goldberg, a real person, picked it up. Then these podcasts picked up the story, which really turned the gas up?” Brooks said, trying to get the trajectory right in her head. Wiley nodded.
Peter looked overwhelmed. He loved the military. He loved its commitment to duty and honor, the courage and sense of higher purpose of the people who served. Peter was Randi’s cunning Boy Scout. But she was beginning to think that coming to his apartment had been a mistake. Seeing him now, she worried that, rather than engaging him, they might drive him deeper into whatever hole he was crawling into.
“It’s all a pretty fairly familiar formula,” Wiley said, trying to be reassuring. “Plant the rumors. Spread them with bots. Wait for the human touch, then when it comes, boost the conspiracy on websites and podcasts.” She gave Peter a smile. “Lots of cases follow similar patterns.”
If Peter had been trolling the web about himself for the last two days and didn’t know about the podcast, his online wanderings must have been pretty aimless, thought Brooks. She had never seen him so low.
“I want to listen to that Highsmith podcast,” Rena said. “And the Duke interview.”
“They’re garbage, Peter,” Wiley said.
“I want to hear them.”
“Let me listen to them, Peter,” Brooks volunteered.
“Has to be me,” he said.
Brooks gave Wiley a pleading look. They both knew, however, that Peter would never back down.
“I’ll share the link with both of you,” Wiley said.