WASHINGTON, D.C.
Special Agent Jennifer Fields poked her boss when she saw that the valet for the Commodore Yacht Club had come on duty.
“We’re on,” she said, watching as the young man opened his stand.
Carolan looked up from his phone and replied, “Let’s give it a few minutes. We don’t want to be the first ones in.”
Fields readjusted her sidearm and settled back in her seat. “Just so we’re clear,” she stated, watching the valet, “I think everything you told me about this place is next-level lunatic.”
“Too bad your opinion doesn’t matter. Which goes double for mine.”
“Are people that stupid?”
Carolan shrugged. He was in a mood.
“So, you’re telling me,” she continued, “that I could start a conspiracy tomorrow, in which Martin Luther King, Coolio, and Flip Wilson weren’t dead, but had been put into suspended animation, just waiting for the right moment to be brought back in order to convince the Black community to support something crazy, like the U.S. government going back on the gold standard?”
“I think you’d have better luck with Tupac and Bernie Mac over Coolio and Flip Wilson, but yes, with the right resources, that’s what I’m telling you.”
Fields shook her head. “That’s insane.”
“Life is complicated. People want a sense of control over the uncontrollable. They want easy answers, and conspiracy theories fill that need.”
“There’s no way the answer is that simple.”
“Of course it is. People see themselves as the heroes of their own stories. Nobody wants to live in a boring timeline. Conspiracy theories offer a heroic adventure; a sense of excitement, the feeling that you’re privy to some sort of secret knowledge that no one else sees.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“And,” he pressed on, “the more people ridicule you, the more you revel in your superiority over them. To you, the uninitiated are sheep. They’re sleepwalking while you’re fully awake—aware of the ‘real’ world and everything that’s happening within it. No matter how many actual facts get launched at you, no matter how much data gets presented demonstrating how wrong you are, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because conspiracies, by their very nature, are unfalsifiable. That’s what makes them so dangerous and why the Russians love them so much. They’re experts at weaponizing them against the U.S. and derive a huge return on an incredibly small investment. It’s like injecting the population with an aggressive form of societal cancer. Once it’s in the body politic, all the Russians have to do is sit back and watch as our country eats away at itself and gets weaker and weaker.”
“Which is what you think the Russians are attempting to do with Burman’s death.”
Carolan nodded. “An old Soviet disinformation specialist dubbed it the ‘Potter’s Wheel.’ You pick a central point for your audience to focus on and then start things spinning. Once you’ve captured their attention and have them mesmerized, all you have to do is drop a lump of wet clay onto it and you can shape it into anything you want.”
“Meaning any sort of conspiracy.”
Carolan nodded again. “In this case, the wheel is the yacht club. It’s the perfect jumping-off point for a Russian conspiracy. It’s members-only, which means the general public is not going to be able to get inside and there’s only so much information people can dig up about it online. The club itself would be completely naïve when it comes to information warfare, so they’d have no clue as to how to fight back once they found themselves in the conspiracy crosshairs.”
“Hold up. How do you know the Russians even have an interest in it?”
“Because we keep a close eye on several of their most prolific troll farms. Over the last six months, we watched one of those farms gathering information about the club, its employees, and its membership.”
Fields shook her head. “The Russians must vacuum up a ton of information, on a ton of weird subjects, every day. Why would you care about this one?”
“You’re right. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t have the time or manpower to follow up on. The Commodore Yacht Club, however, is different. Among its membership are six Senators, fifteen members of the House, a Supreme Court Justice, and multiple other prominent D.C. personalities. It’s no accident that the Russians have been looking at it.”
“Agreed. But how do you go from them looking at it to assuming they’re building some kind of information operation around it?”
“It helps to know where to look.”
“Meaning?”
“The troll farms divide up the work. No single operation is conducted under the same roof. While a farm in St. Petersburg may be doing the initial research, another in Rostov-on-Don will be creating and populating blogs with disinformation, while a third farm in Kazan or Vladivostok will be pushing bots and fake accounts out onto social media to amplify whatever messaging has been decided upon. As much as they try to mix things up and cover their tracks, there’s still a pattern to their behavior. Although this time, it was a bit harder to catch.
“Three years ago in Tampa, a homeless man named Alejandro Diaz, naked and high on bath salts, was found in the act of eating another homeless man’s face off. Tampa PD shot him eight times, at which point he turned and charged them. The responding officers fired seventeen more rounds, stopping Diaz and dropping him to the ground. They described it like something out of a zombie movie.
“As you can imagine, it made for pretty spectacular headlines, which were picked up across the country. Then, the story faded.
“A couple of weeks later, the Tampa Bay Times had a short follow-up piece. Diaz had an aunt all the way up in Pensacola who came down to claim the body. There was just one problem. The corpse that was presented to her wasn’t that of her nephew. Someone had screwed up. Alejandro Diaz’s body had mistakenly been cremated.
“Thankfully for all involved, the aunt didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. She was deeply ashamed of what her nephew had done, but as his only living relative had felt obliged to see to his remains. She left Tampa with his ashes and a stream of apologies.”
“That’s a horrible story,” said Fields, “but what does it have to do with a D.C. yacht club and Russian troll farms?”
“In the last two months, a blog popped up—allegedly based in Florida—called The Public Truth, which was looking into what ‘really happened’ to Alejandro Diaz. It was posing a lot of outlandish questions, like, if there was no body, how can anyone be sure he’s really dead? Did Diaz wear the face of his victim in order to escape just like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs? Could the killer cannibal still be on the loose? And on and on with that kind of absurd nonsense. Not long after The Public Truth went live, the Commodore Yacht Club was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Fields’s eyes widened. “They got hit by ICE?” she asked. “What for?”
“Apparently, the club was using a lot of undocumented labor.”
“How come I never heard any of this?”
“With six Senators, fifteen members of the House, a Supreme Court Justice, and a host of other D.C. muckety-mucks on the membership roster, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest someone called in a favor to keep it quiet. The story did, however, break on one blog in particular.”
“Lemme guess. The Public Truth blog; the one dedicated to Alejandro Diaz.”
“Bingo,” Carolan replied. “But you’re going to love this because it goes even further. One of the employees rounded up that day is named Gustavo Alejandro Diaz.”
“Any relation to the cannibal from Tampa?”
“Nope. The man had never even set foot in the state of Florida. Not that it mattered. All The Public Truth blog needed to do was insinuate that it was the same person and the fuse was then lit.
“Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that one of the other employees taken into custody—a dishwasher—had multiple outstanding felony warrants, one of which was for child molestation.”
“Jesus,” she exclaimed.
“The blog ran with that, too. It published a totally bogus ‘report’ that the pair came from the same South American country, had been smuggled into the United States by the same coyote, and that there were wire transfers—washed through an account in the Caymans—that traced back to a powerful group of club members, none of which is true.”
“This was all the Russian troll farms at work?”
Carolan nodded. “As you can imagine, with a small collection of bots and fake social media accounts, a story this juicy was able to start gaining purchase in some of the darker corners of the internet. Because of the club’s location and membership, it played right into people’s growing distrust of government and institutions. But to keep the fire spreading, it had to be stoked even further with more outrageous kindling. This is where the conspiracy really takes off.
“They took the myth of the cannibal and mashed it together with the outstanding warrant for child molestation. The next thing you know, the club is home to a child-trafficking cabal of pedophiles who feast on their victims’ flesh.”
“Like I said,” Fields replied. “Next-level lunacy.”
“Even better, they allegedly keep scores of children locked up in the club’s basement.”
“Basement? There aren’t any basements along this part of the Potomac. The water table’s too high. Half that club, if not more,” she said, pointing out the window, “is built on pylons.”
“You don’t think a cabal of evil, child-trafficking politicians and elite power brokers can’t figure out how to sink a secret basement beneath their yacht club? Could they have ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to build a top-secret, backup fallout shelter for Congress there? Better yet, maybe the club is constructed over an abandoned D.C. metro stop that has been erased from all modern maps. Perhaps the basement is actually an old vault that Abraham Lincoln used to hide the Union’s gold in case the Confederacy ever stormed the capital. How can anyone really be sure?”
Fields smiled. “We’re back to all that stuff about conspiracy theories being unfalsifiable, aren’t we?”
“We are,” Carolan responded.
“So why do you think this connects to Burman and how are you so convinced we’re looking at his murder and not a suicide?”
“I’ll take those in reverse order, starting with his shoes. He was wearing pristine, white leather sneakers. The toes, however, were noticeably scuffed. Unless he drags his feet around town like a petulant six-year-old, somebody—likely a person on each arm—dragged him out onto the terrace and tossed him over. I’m guessing that he was heavily under the influence of something and probably wasn’t even conscious.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because if you’re dragging me anywhere against my will, I’m digging in my heels, not my toes.”
“Good point,” Fields admitted.
“Another reason I’m leaning toward murder is the fact that his wallet is missing. It wasn’t on the evidence log for the personal effects found on his body and it wasn’t on the list up in his apartment.”
“Could it have been a robbery gone bad?”
“They take his wallet but leave his Rolex, eleven hundred bucks in cash, and all the art and everything else in his penthouse? No way. Plus, how many robberies have you ever heard of where they throw the victim off a roof? It would have been much easier to kill him inside the building. This is all about creating a public spectacle. That’s what they wanted. And it’s quintessential Moscow.”
“You and I both know,” said Fields, “that people get tossed out of windows and off of rooftops in Russia all of the time, but here? In the United States?”
“I had trouble remembering earlier, but there was one. Four years ago. A Russian media figure who had run afoul of Peshkov fell out the window of his hotel in Manhattan. He had been seen drinking heavily in the bar that evening and, with no evidence to the contrary, the cause of his death was ruled accidental.
“But what triggered my recollection was that—like Burman—his wallet was never found. Afterward, someone told me a rumor that Russian wet-work teams have been known to keep the wallets of their targets as a kind of scalp, proving to their superiors that they were the cause of death and not some well-timed accident.”
“Okay, I’m willing to go with both—that Burman was killed by the Russians and that Moscow wants to build some sort of conspiracy theory around the Commodore Yacht Club. What I don’t get is, what’s the connective tissue? What ties the two together?”
Carolan spread his hands as if he were revealing a table loaded with food and replied, “Like everything else in this town—politics. And more to our purposes, geopolitics. The Commodore has a certain slant, which makes absolutely no difference to me, but it does to the Russians.
“To a person, the Senators and Congressmen who are members here are decidedly pro-Ukraine. Not only are they some of Kyiv’s biggest backers, but there’s also more than one defense contractor who moors a boat here, as well as a handful of lobbyists who are getting their beaks pretty wet via the war.”
“But why tie Burman into all of this?” Fields asked. “Was he even a member of the club?”
“I don’t recall seeing his name on the roster. Not that it matters. Killing a Peshkov critic could serve more than one agenda. It sends a message to all the other critics, particularly those who think they’re beyond the reach of Moscow, that none of them are safe—not even steps away from the White House.
“Also, a high-profile death makes the conspiracy surrounding the club even more salacious and draws in exponentially more eyeballs. A dead body stinks in more ways than one, and some of that stink risks sticking to members in ways that none of them deserve.”
“So, the Kremlin gets a potential twofer in bumping off Burman. That still doesn’t give us enough proof to make our case.”
“True,” Carolan responded as he turned off the engine and reached into the backseat for his jacket. “For that, we’re going to need to do a little more legwork. Let’s see what the Commodore’s staff can tell us about Burman and what may have happened last night.”
Glad to be getting out of the car and taking some action, Fields was first to open her door and step into the parking lot.
As she did, the heavyset, redheaded man from earlier raised his camera and began snapping more photos.
It was no coincidence that he was there at the same time. Someone had sent him. The question was, who and why?