Memoirs And True Confessions Of A Disinformation Warrior (Part III)

Part I is here.

Part II is here.

 

All The World’s A Stage

Twelve years after Rochelle left me, Charlie said he had someone he wanted me to meet. “You’re going to like her,” he told me.

            The person was Susan, and he was right. She was fun, funny, and upbeat. She liked to flirt and dance. It was almost as if Charlie thought what I needed was someone as different from Rochelle as possible. If Rochelle was understated and classy, Susan was showy. You might even say gaudy. Susan dressed for impact. Her black hair was always freshly dyed, her lipstick in place.

            I found it easy to be with Susan. She kept her eyes fixed on me and seemed to enjoy listening to me. For the first time in my life, I turned into something of a talker. She was impressed by everything about my life—my job, the people I knew, my luxury apartment. When I talked, I didn’t hold back. I let her know exactly who I was and what kind of work I did. No matter what I told her, she remained wide-eyed and accepting. She wasn’t an idealist like Larry, but she wasn’t a cynic like Charlie, either. She defied classification. After a while, I understood that while Rochelle had pushed back against me in subtle ways, Susan reflected back whatever I said without judgment.

            Once Susan started spending more time in my condo, the change was immediately apparent. The place was always immaculate. I had a cleaning service, but between cleanings, things tended to get untidy. Not with Susan around. She was a good cook and prepared elaborate meals. At first, I assumed she was attracted to what I had to offer: A life of ease and luxury. After we had been dating two years, I came to believe that her devotion was real.

            “She’s a keeper,” Larry told me after he came to visit for a weekend.

One day I was in my favorite easy chair in the living room reading The Washingtonian when I was startled by the name Leonid Muratov. His name appeared under a headline toward the end of the first section: Russian Gangster On FBI Most Wanted List. According to the article, the FBI wanted Muratov for crimes committed in the United States. The list of crimes he was wanted for was long: wire fraud, racketeering, mail fraud, money laundering, aiding and abetting, securities fraud, filing a false registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and falsification of books and records. Evidently Muratov had participated in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud thousands of investors in the stock of a public company headquartered in Pittsburgh but incorporated off-shore.

            Most of those were crimes Charlie didn’t think should even be illegal—and in fact, before the rise of the administrative state—hadn’t been illegal.

            Rochelle had a different opinion. They’re all thieves, she’d said.

            “What’s the matter?” Susan asked. She had been sitting at the dining room table reading a magazine. Now, she came over and sat in the chair next to mine.

            “This guy,” I said, pointing to his name. “I sold him six condos a while back. He’s wanted by the FBI.”

            “You couldn’t have known,” she said soothingly.

            Not long after that, Susan and I got married in a small civil ceremony. We had under twenty guests: My immediate family, her immediate family, her best friend, and Larry.

Susan and I were still newlyweds when I received a call from my study partner from law school, Ken Dalio. “I’m done with this firm,” he said. “I’ve worked my last seventy-five-hour week.”

            “Give me a copy of your resume and I’ll see what I can do.”

            Ken stopped by our condo that evening to drop off his resume. Over the years, Ken and I had often gotten together when he was in New York for work, but he’d never been to my place. He looked around and whistled. “Even on a partner salary of a half million a year, I doubt I could afford this.” He raised his eyebrows and gave me a look that I assumed to be respect.

            I introduced him to Susan and we invited him to sit down. He and I sat on a couch facing one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Susan went into the kitchen. We heard her opening and closing cabinets. It was early evening. The city lights were already bright against the fading sky.

            “I could retire,” he said. “I’ve got enough money. All I know is that I’m done with civil litigation. It’s nonstop. I think I’m ready for a life of glamour. Look at this place.” He looked around again and whistled.

            I never really thought of my life as glamorous. Money, for me, was security. “Pike sort of expects people who work for him to buy his condos,” I said.

            Susan came in with a tray containing a bottle of chardonnay and glasses, which she put on the glass table in front of the couch.

            After that, we made small talk. We talked about life in New York. He said D.C. was changing but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly how. He said, “My wife is eager for me to change jobs. We’ve taken only one real vacation in fifteen years. Most of our vacations mean I travel for business and she goes along. She spends her day sightseeing alone, and she doesn’t like it.”

            The next day, I took Ken’s resume to Pike’s new right-hand man, a lawyer named Phillip McHugh. He was in his office with the door open. His secretary, at a desk in front, saw me and nodded, indicating that I could walk in.

              I gave him Ken’s resume and said, “He was my study partner during my last year at Franklin. I can vouch for his brilliance.”

            Phillip looked over his resume, and then asked, “What kind of work does he want?”

            “Paperwork. No more litigation. Nothing confrontational.”

            “Negotiating contracts?” Phillip asked.

            “That would work.”

            “I can put him in the licensing department,” Phillip said. “The pay isn’t what he’s used to, but the hours aren’t what he used to put in.”

            “I think licensing would be perfect,” I said.

            “I’ll give him a call,” Phillip said.

About a week after Ken started working for Pike Enterprises, I paid him a visit in the licensing department. I sat down in the chair in front of his desk and asked, “What do you think?”

            He went to close his office door and then sat back at his desk. “This is insane,” he said in a whisper. “Pike earns millions doing absolutely nothing except slapping his name on things. As part of the contracts, he demands credit for whatever operations are involved. In other words, he does no work, puts his name on projects, and takes credit.”

            That sounded exactly like Pike.

            “The Russian capitalists are perfectly willing to let him take the credit he wants,” Ken said. I’m not sure what they get out of some of these deals. They do the work. They put Pike’s name on the project. They give Pike credit. And they pay Pike millions.”

            “Why do you think they do it?” I said. “Are they trying to buy him?”

            “I’ve wondered the same thing. At first I thought he was a slick businessman. Then I wondered if he was a top-notch con artist. The Russians are not the only ones. I don’t know what it is about that guy, but people literally throw money at him just to use his name. This isn’t like the kind of contract negotiations I’m used to.”

            I shrugged. “Maybe he’s lucky.”

            “Maybe.”

            I looked at my watch and stood up. I had a meeting soon.

            “We should go out, the four of us,” Ken said.

            “Let’s do it.”

            We went out the following Saturday. We went to dinner and then caught a play. We learned we had much in common. Ken and Eliza never had children. Susan and Eliza hit it off right away. Eliza had worked in the Senate office when we were in law school, but now she was content to spend her days lunching with friends, shopping, and talking over tea. She and Susan arranged to get together one afternoon during the coming week.

            Soon the four of us were going out regularly. Eliza and Susan planned elaborate vacations we never took because Ken and I were too busy working. Working at Pike Enterprises didn’t require around-the-clock hours of litigation, but neither Ken nor I ever really found the time to take off two full weeks at the same time. We kept saying we would—and I think we honestly intended to—but it just never happened. Eventually, Eliza and Susan announced that they’d had enough. They wanted a vacation. They had passports. So they bought tickets and jetted off for a tropical vacation in Tahiti. Susan sent me postcards of sunny beaches and shimmering blue-green waters.

            I guess I just wasn’t the vacation type. I wasn’t really an adventurer or explorer of new places.

Meanwhile, over the years, the Pike real estate division sold more than 1,000 condos in cash to anonymous shell companies, some of which—if not all—were secretly owned by Russian capitalists. The Russians returned the favor. In 2002, when Pike was about to go bankrupt, a real estate development company with ties to Muratov moved into Pike Towers and partnered with Pike Enterprises to get him out of financial trouble. This happened more than once. Pike got into financial trouble and the very Russians who he had helped, who had now grown ten times richer as ruling oligarchs under Putin, returned the favor by bailing him out.

            The ties between Putin’s Russia and parts of America’s right-wing tightened when Putin enacted anti-gay legislation. His law criminalized disseminating what he called “propaganda” about homosexual relationships to children. Under the law, anyone who presented any information about homosexuality to a minor was in violation of the law. In reality, simply making such information public, or talking about homosexuality, could violate the law because minors would be able to view it.

            The liberals in the United States—those paying attention, and most were not—exploded with rage at what they called Putin’s fascist regime. At the same time, America’s far-right leaders, including Matt Buchon, applauded Putin. Buchon wrote his famous piece in which he said, “Putin is entering the claim that Russia is the Godly nation of today.” Other leaders of America’s Christian Right hailed Putin as leading the counter-revolution against the widespread Western paganism that included easy divorce and readily available abortions.

            By that time, the idea of diversity as a strength had taken root in the United States. P.J. Wiley sent shock waves when he said, “You know, Putin has the right idea. Russia is untouched by the myth of diversity and deranged multiculturalism. The idea that diversity is a strength is one of the left’s most unhinged ideas. Do marriages work when two people are entirely different? Of course not. Does a marriage work if two people have different beliefs and values? Of course not. Diversity is never a strength. It’s an excuse to open our borders and invite in every kind of criminal and bring this great nation to its knees.”

            Another portion of America’s right wing, the Second Amendment gun rights people, found themselves on the receiving end of millions of dollars in donations from Russian capitalists. The Second Amendment people are the guys who believe that the federal government, under the control of liberals, is becoming tyrannical—”

* * *

            “I know who the second amendment people are,” Jessica said. “Please explain the ‘tyrannical’ part. It makes no sense to a rational human being. Even my aunt, a die-hard Pike supporter, thinks that those militia guys are a bunch of weirdos.”

            “They’re well organized and driven by a powerful ideology. They’re more dangerous than your aunt may realize. Those militias organized in the early 1990s in response to President Heller’s gun control laws and the shootouts at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. They embrace Jefferson’s ideas—”

            “Thomas Jefferson?”

            “I guess you don’t know that Thomas Jefferson said, ‘A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’ He also said that when governments become too tyrannical, people should rebel. That shouldn’t be a surprise. That’s sort of what the Revolutionary War was about.”

            “So the logic is, we rebelled against England and set up our own government so now we should be able to overthrow our own government if we don’t like it? Isn’t that sort of insane?”

            “They don’t think the government represents them any longer. They don’t think it’s their government. They don’t recognize what America is turning into.”

            “Because America is no longer ruled entirely by white people and isn’t governed by what they think are Christian laws,” she said.

            “That’s part of it. The other part is that they think the federal government is a large, bloated, bureaucracy located far from their homes. They don’t understand it. They want the government to be small and local so they feel they have some control over their lives. They feel oppressed and they think that when a government turns oppressive, private citizens have a duty to take up arms against the government. I can tell you that the citizens of Baskerville were enraged when the Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960 started handing down rules that changed how they were allowed to live.”

            She sighed. “I think that would have been the white citizens complaining, but all right. Go on.”

* * *

Phillip McHugh called me one evening in late 2013. “There’s someone you need to meet,” he said. “His name is Elliot Seton. He’s looking for people with computer science backgrounds. He has investment ideas.”

            “I majored in computer science a long time ago. Things have changed.”

           “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You have a head for that stuff.”

            He sent me a packet of biographical information about Elliot Seton. From the packet, I learned that Seton started out as an American intelligence officer. As part of his intelligence training, he learned Russian. Most of the American intelligence community viewed Putin’s Russia as a danger: The regime was aggressive, attacked its neighbors, and was abandoning rule of law. Seton, though, like the Evangelical leader Matt Buchon—viewed Russia as an ally instead of an adversary. His superiors, therefore, pushed him out of his job. After leaving his job, he spent time in Moscow and developed close relationships with the Russian capitalists.

            Phillip set up my meeting with Seton for a Thursday in late December. We met in a conference room in Pike Towers. Seton was a serious, thin-lipped man. I had the feeling he rarely smiled. He had almost no chin, giving his face a square shape.

            “I can tell you how the capitalists in Russia hold on to their power,” he told me calmly. “It’s astonishingly easy. You want to win the next election? You want to keep people like the Hellers out of power? I can tell you how. Russian intelligence officers in the Soviet-era KGB understood psychology better than anyone else. The United States may have won the war with technology and machines, but the United States is no match for the Russians in the information department. If we want to survive, we need to understand what they do.”

            “What do they do?”

            He opened his briefcase. “I brought you some reading material.” He took out a stack of papers held together with a clip. “This was an old KGB manual. I translated it from Russian myself.”

            I put the packet into my own briefcase.

            “What do you have in mind?” I asked him.

            “Starting a company to monitor social media.”

            A long-ago memory came back to me: Rochelle and I were watching Nixon’s resignation speech on television. “Liberals control the media,” I had said, “and that’s the entire problem.”

            Nixon’s resignation taught me that we needed our own media if for no other reason than to drown out liberal nonsense.

            “I’m interested,” I told him.

I spent the evening reading the KGB manual Seton had given me. The manual opened with a brag: The Russians were the masters of propaganda. Nobody in the world did it better.

            One heading was “Governing by Crisis and Spectacle.” The idea came from a Russian philosopher named Ivan Ilyin, whose ideas inspired and guided Putin. Ilyin understood that the purpose of government is to create stability and order. The people, though, expect the government to give them things. So what the leader has to do is keep the people so occupied that they don’t have time to make demands. The leader does this in two ways. First, he orchestrates an endless cycle of crisis and spectacle to keep people riveted. Second, he does “battle” with their enemies. Fake enemies work just as well as real ones and are obviously less risky to engage with. So the leader identifies an enemy (or invents the enemy, depending on your perspective) and promises to vanquish the enemy. The people are thrilled—and occupied—by the fight.

            After that introduction, the manual explained the basics of confidence building and the methods for deploying payload content. The manual then went on to describe various propaganda methods, including the firehose of falsehoods method, a technique that builds on Soviet methods but is made far more effective by the Internet. The leader releases a rapid and continuous stream of lies. The key is that the leader must have a shameless willingness to tell outrageous lies without regard for consistency. The more shameless the lie the better because the listeners feel overwhelmed. Fact-checkers can’t keep up. The liar of course has an advantage: A lie can be told in a sentence. Refuting the lie can take hours of research, and hours of presenting the truth, and even then, the fact-checker loses because the liar has the advantage of first impression.

            The manual also explained why go big worked so well for P.J: When a lie is big enough and outrageous enough, the lie itself becomes the story. People talk about the lie and actual news is pushed out of the spotlight. Some lies are so big that once people accept it, they entirely let go of reality and will then believe anything the leader tells them.

            Next, the manual described the method known as whataboutism, which was frequently used in Soviet Russia. If your opponent accuses you of something, you respond by saying, “But what about—,” and then name something the opponent had done. A famous example was:

            Western diplomat: Soviet labor camps are an abomination and human rights disaster.

            Stalin: What about lynchings in the American South?

            In fact, a joke that circulated in Russia went like this: An American calls a Soviet radio station and asks, “Can an ordinary citizen afford to buy a car?” The radio station host says, What about lynchings in the American South?”

            Whataboutism short-circuits a discussion, deflects blame, and throws listeners off balance.

            Another method could be called you’re a bigger one. This is the method whereby you accuse your opponent of doing precisely what you are doing. This one is steeped in cynicism. The goal is to persuade the listener that both sides lie and cheat. If both sides cheat, the winner is the best cheater. If people believe both sides lie and cheat, they don’t mind if their own leaders are lying and cheating. Instead of feeling appalled, they think, “He’s a liar and a cheat, but he’s our liar and cheater.”

            All these various methods dovetailed to create what the manual called noise. The propagandist doesn’t try to silence the truth-teller. In Putin’s Russia the truth was offered on Russia’s state-sponsored news station—but as one possible theory. Other “theories” were also offered. People who insist on only the truth are ridiculed for not being open to other viewpoints. So the truth is put forward, but refuted, and then drowned out by noise.

            The goal is the disruption of the opponent’s messaging.

            The manual included a lengthy section on psychology, explaining that fear was the emotion most likely to engage and hook a person and that once a person formed a worldview, they tended to believe any new information that confirmed their worldview.

            The manual concluded with a brief history of disinformation tactics demonstrating that they have been used and understood since ancient times. According to the manual, the first known use of disinformation to consolidate power dates back more than twenty-five hundred years ago, when Darius I of Persia established his reign. Darius ordered his life story chiseled onto the side of a cliff by artists. The sight was so awe-inspiring that people traveled to see it. The story began like this:

            I am the greatest ruler ever! I am descended from a long line of great kings! My kingdom was given to me by the supreme god Auramazda! Whoever is hostile to me, I utterly destroy! Whoever is a friend, I surely protect! When kings rebel against me, I vanquish them, one by one!

            If you believe the story that followed, Darius never suffered a single loss in battle. Single-handedly, he vanquished all of his enemies. And—this was the important part—he came to power with help from the gods.

            Today, that’s called a founding myth: A story that gives a new regime authority and legitimacy.

            You might say that Darius not only pioneered disinformation and the idea of a founding myth, he also developed a new technology for reaching a wider audience and putting his message forward in a way that had a ring of truth. Words chiseled on a mountain must have suggested to ancient people that a superhuman force was responsible.

            The first known disinformation manual was written for Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire in ancient India, by his prime minister, Kautilya. Kautilya understood there are two kinds of wars, open wars and concealed wars. Open wars are fought on the battlefield. They’re expensive, risky, and always result in casualties on both sides. Concealed wars, or wars of disinformation, were less expensive, carried almost no risks, and were almost guaranteed to succeed.

            He gave an example: If you want to assassinate the king of a neighboring country, or at least diminish his power, killing him is almost impossible and obviously carries huge risks. The easier way is to get his own people to do it by stirring their rage against him with lies. The way to do this—in ancient India—was with skilled secret agents and spies who could first build trust, and then start whisper campaigns.

            With the rise of social media, spies and agents are not needed. All you have to do is infiltrate social media by pretending to be citizens of that country and establish trust. If one political party wants to divide the other, the method is simple: Open online accounts, pretend to be members of the opposite political party, build trust by pretending to be one of them, and then drop damaging lies about their party’s leadership.

            I read the manual in a single evening. Afterward, I felt both dazed and impressed. It was obvious that we could use these methods to destroy the threat of left-wing communism in America. At the same time, I understood that disinformation was a powerful—and dangerous—tool. The manual got me thinking about the similarity between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the Internet. Johannes Gutenberg thought his printing press would spread the word of God. Maybe it did—but it also spread disinformation at a rate never before seen. The disruption and influx of new information that people were not equipped to handle caused the religious wars in Europe that left a quarter of the population dead. Disinformation was a powerful tool that must be used carefully.

Elliot Seton and I formed Outreach Analytics with Robert Fuoco. Pike was also an investor, but he wanted his name kept out of it, so he channeled his investment through a shell company. Pike thought it would be wiser if our offices were not housed in Pike Towers. That was the first—and only—time I knew Pike to suggest someone rent elsewhere. We rented office space in a nearby building.

            In June of 2015, Pike announced his candidacy for president. He’d long talked about running for president, but I never took him seriously—until the day he made the dramatic entry into the grand ballroom at Pike Towers and gave the speech that took the nation by storm.

            Yes, it was a dark speech. He talked about the impending destruction of America. He talked about how the liberals were corrupting and ruining the American way of life. He talked about how the purity and sanctity of the small towns were being ruined. He said the things I’d always felt.

            He named the feeling I’d always had of danger lurking just beyond the horizon. When he talked about enemies coming to our borders, I felt a visceral fear harkening back to my childhood and the sense I had of unseen forces seeking to destroy what was good and pure about America.

            Both of those happened at the same time: He manipulated me, and I understood how he was manipulating me.

            Pike created a founding myth that went like this, “I am a successful businessman. The evidence of that is that I am a billionaire.” He promised to use his business acumen to fix the problems in the country. When his opponents pointed out his string of bankruptcies, he laughed them off as a clever business tactic. He made a killing selling merchandise to his supporters. Tens of thousands of people wanted a baseball cap with his favorite slogan. The money he earned selling merchandise to his supporters allowed him to flaunt the trappings of wealth, which persuaded his supporters that he was a billionaire who didn’t need their money.

            Everyone knew that the Democratic nominee would be Jocelyn Heller. She was then serving as a United States Senator. For reasons I could not fathom, she was the darling of the Democratic Party. She was like Missy Little times ten. We welcomed her as the candidate. We had been pummeling her for years with any hint of a scandal we could find. Now we picked up the pace.

            Jocelyn did what socialist candidates do: She promised free stuff, which is really a way of bribing voters. The part socialists don’t explain is that someone has to pay for all that free stuff. Their idea, like Soviet communists, was that the wealthy (and competent) would pay. To counter what were effectively bribes, we worked to help people understand how the kind of socialistic big government Jocelyn wanted to build would ruin America.

            Most people expected Pike to lose. Heck, even Pike expected to lose. A majority of Americans clearly preferred Jocelyn Heller. The goal of his candidacy was to undermine and delegitimize a Jocelyn Heller administration. I saw Pike as a way to strengthen the conservative movement to withstand four years of Jocelyn Heller. I’d torpedoed Missy’s campaign, and I intended to torpedo Jocelyn’s. I didn’t expect to beat her. I hoped to leave her so bruised and battered that she’d be ineffective as a president.

            Pike had his own reasons for running for president. He entered the race because he wanted publicity. He said he wanted a true conservative message out there and to swing the political center to the right, but he wanted to elevate his brand. He wanted visibility.

            His campaign strategy was to say shocking things to enrage his critics and delight his fans. Like P.J. Wiley, he said what many of his supporters were thinking. His policies were straightforward. He wanted closed borders. He was opposed to globalism. He was a fan of the Russian president, who he admired as a tough leader who promoted capitalism, privatized business, and kept order. Except for a few outspoken show people like Buchon and P.J., most conservatives who admired Putin kept it to themselves. Putin was too unlikeable—and brutal. But Pike was open about his admiration.

            By the time Pike announced his candidacy for president, the Outreach Analytics staff included five directors, a half dozen programmers, a business development manager, and about a dozen media specialists who operated literally thousands of fake social media accounts. We kept the operation lean to prevent trade secrets from leaking out.

            To allow me to focus on my work with Outreach Analytics, Phillip suggested that I move out of the real estate department and into the media and public relations department. He also suggested that Pike Enterprises change my job title to “Media Consultant.” After that, I did very little work for Pike Enterprises. Outreach Analytics took all my time. I still drew a small salary from Pike Enterprises, but most of my income was from advertising revenue generated by our social media accounts.

            Outreach Analytics helped Pike by crowding online sites with so many competing stories that people had trouble concentrating on any one. We overwhelmed the senses. We told so many rapid-fire lies that it became impossible for the media and the Democrats to debunk them.

If someone tried to pin a scandal on Pike—which, to be honest, was easy given the life of debauchery he had led—we flooded the waves with outrageous comments that grabbed everyone’s attention. We measured outrage by tracking the postings the user engaged with and the nature of those engagements. Much of this could be done automatically with algorithms.

            Our media department doctored videos. We took footage out of context, doctored, and edited it. With the flip of a switch, we could spread a doctored video across the Internet to millions of people. The videos were perfectly calibrated to increase that person’s fears and put the person into a fighting spirit. Once we had someone in our clutches, we provided constant entertainment tailored to their particular fears.

            The operation developed by Outreach Analytics was based on several sound principles of psychology. It’s all about identifying a person’s fears. Everyone has fears. Sometimes you have to probe deeply to learn what those fears are, but they’re there. Some people are more fearful than others. The more fearful a person is, the easier it is to control that person. Some people, for example, are terrified of an intruder coming into their homes. Others are afraid their children will abandon their upbringing or culture. Others are afraid of losing their money. Some people are terrified of an authoritarian takeover.

*  *  *

“Isn’t everyone?”

            “Not at all. That’s your fear, but not everyone’s. To most people ‘authoritarian takeover’ is a meaningless phrase. When confronted with an actual authoritarian who promises to blow through the rules, dispense with laws, and get things done, they cheer for him.”

            “Okay, go on.”

            “Once you know a person’s fears, and once you have that person isolated, you can easily manipulate and shape that person’s view of the world.”

            “How can you isolate a person in the age of the Internet?”

            “It’s easier in the age of the Internet. I can isolate a million people with minimal effort. All I have to do is persuade them to distrust and ignore any information that doesn’t conform to what I tell them. When people receive information that reinforces their worldview, they experience a pleasurable feeling. This means once you have shaped a person’s worldview and taught him to distrust alternate sources of information, the work is easy. The person will naturally reject any information that runs contrary to the worldview you have created. Such a person is also easily led to accept new information—as long as the information confirms that person’s worldview.”

            “Confirmation bias,” she said, naming the psychological term.

            “Correct. We followed a simple formula that began with confidence building. We created social media pages and accounts with strong views on a wide range of topics. These accounts, posing as real people, generated content consistent with the theme of the account. Naturally, these accounts attracted like-minded people. We had gun rights accounts, anti-abortion pro-Christianity accounts, Republican-hating accounts—”

            “Republican hating?”

            “Did you think we only brainwashed people on the right side of the political spectrum?”

            “What was your goal?”

            “Our goal was to dismantle the out-of-control administrative state. We had to make the public understand that the entire federal government was corrupt and that Democrats were peddling myths and hope porn. We wanted to expose their lies that they could achieve a perfect government by giving people handouts. We started by keeping detailed digital files on each user. We tested a person’s likes and dislikes and compared their inclinations to their demographic data to create a detailed psychological and political profile for each user.”

            “I know about that,” she said. “Outreach Analytics illegally harvested private and personal information from fifty million users across several social media sites.”

            “One hundred million,” I said. “Moreover, the illegality has never been proven, and never will be proven.”

            “Ha!” she said. “Given the fact that you are currently in prison, your confidence seems, shall we say, unwarranted? But go on. Tell me about these detailed user profiles.”

            “Once we thoroughly understood a person’s fears and their general likes and dislikes, confidence-building was easy. We built confidence by consistently, over a period of months, posting material that confirmed the person’s worldview and played to his or her fears, and by tricking people into thinking our accounts were experts. Social media is so new that people tended to measure the expertise of an account by its number of followers. After building enough confidence—which we measured by the nature of the comments and the amount of engagement an account received—we deployed payload content.”

            “Payload content?” she repeated.

            “That’s the disinformation bombshell, the story you want the target to believe is true. When deploying payload content, we started gradually, testing the waters. If, for example, a particular account attracted people who had a visceral fear of dark-skinned people, we would slip in a video of a group of dark-skinned men committing a crime, perhaps destroying property, or engaging in violent behavior. Similarly, if a different account began attracting the Black Lives Matters people, we’d throw in videos showing Republicans saying something shockingly racist. Then we’d measure the level of outrage the person exhibited. The more outrage, the better.”

            “That’s right,” she said, “that whistleblower who called out that social media site said that anger was the emotion most likely to engage a social media user.”

            “People love to be angry. When you understand that, you can increase your social media engagement. The most helpful accounts were real people, Pike haters who didn’t understand the first thing about how government worked. These were accounts that grew large when Pike came to power. They were good at attacking, and they so effectively attacked Pike that they grew rapidly in popularity—”

            “When you say ‘account,’ do you mean real people?”

            “Yes. I can give you a few examples. One was a retired social worker. He read an article about how easy it is to flip votes in voting machines. He was a bit paranoid and didn’t know the first thing about computers and cybersecurity, but he tweeted out his paranoia. He confused “Something like this can happen with computer systems” with “this can easily happen to voting systems!” He enraged people. He scared people. They thought he knew what he was talking about because he had a few graduate degrees, even though his expertise had nothing whatsoever to do with cybersecurity, but he claimed to be an expert, and sometimes on social media, sometimes that’s all it takes.

            His account grew until he had hundreds of thousands of followers, which persuaded others that he must in fact be an expert. It’s a pattern I’ve seen on social media. An account makes a correct prediction, or claims to have made a correct prediction, based on that, claims to be an expert in all matters—and hundreds of thousands of people believe it.

            This particular retired social worker was so gullible that we easily fooled him into attacking Democratic leaders.

            The steady way she stared at me made me think she knew exactly who I was talking about.

* * *

As we improved our algorithms, we got better at hooking people and pulling them in. All a person had to do was click one of our advertisements, and we had that person in our clutches. After a person ‘liked’ one of our pages, our algorithms performed a full assessment of the user and sent a stream of posts specifically targeted to that person. Each time the person clicked, they were drawn further into our web. We pummeled both sides, Pike supporters and Pike critics, with messages carefully tailored to each user.

            The power was exhilarating. We were the creators of truth. We shaped reality through our fingertips. We sat back and watched the liberals tear themselves to pieces. We cheered as they did our work for us.

            That was when Republicans started jumping ship.

            Larry called me late one night, a few weeks after Pike won the Republican nomination. “I’m out,” he said. After Larry’s last term in Congress ended, he had taken a job with the conservative television network as a political analyst. I was so accustomed to seeing him on television offering political commentary that it was a shock to realize I hadn’t actually spoken to him for about a year.

            “What do you mean, you’re out?” I asked.

            “I’m not endorsing Pike for president.”

            There were a growing number of prominent conservatives who were absolutely refusing to support Pike’s candidacy. Larry was the first of my personal acquaintances to join them. I was surprised—but knowing Larry—not too surprised. Still, I felt the need to push back. “After all the money Pike gave to your campaigns all those years?”

            “There are principles involved,” Larry said. “It’s one thing to accept a donation from a guy. It’s another to support him for president.”

            “Would you rather have Jocelyn Heller?”

            A beat of time passed. Then another. “Yes,” he said.

            That surprised me. “You’re going to vote for Jocelyn Heller?”

            “I’ll vote for a third-party candidate for president. I’ll vote Republican down-ballot. Come on, Bob, you know he’s a bad guy. He shouldn’t be president. He doesn’t know anything about running the government.”

            “He’ll run the government the way he runs Pike Enterprises. He’ll let others do the real work.”

            “I just can’t support him,” Larry said.

            I didn’t like it, but I understood that Larry was an idealist.

From the viewpoint of controlling the flow of information and media narrative, Pike proved to be the perfect candidate. He was a natural at creating noise. Manufacturing crisis and spectacle was second nature to him. He completely dominated the airwaves. Everything he said or did became headlines, which meant there was no space for any serious discussion. Mainstream newspapers, unaccustomed to this kind of politics, were easily tricked into picking up stories about fake scandals, thereby giving them legitimacy.

           Pike leaped from one manufactured crisis to another. If the news cycle slowed down, he’d grab the nation’s attention by doing or saying something outrageous. Once, for example, he said that a female liberal reporter was uglier than a donkey. It was all anyone talked about for a full day. He kept his supporters thrilled by landing blows on the liberals. He kept the liberals spinning with rage, which in turn thrilled his supporters. He understood, with P.J. Wiley, that when the news turns into a show, the winner is the person who puts on the best show.

            Pike directed the narrative. He signaled to us the rumors he wanted to spread—and we spread them widely. He’d give an interview or send out a Tweet that contained something along the lines of  “Many people are saying. . . ” followed by the story he wanted to be told. Other times, he just Tweeted out the lie, and we picked it up and ran with it. He constantly undercut mainstream news outlets and trained his supporters to ignore anything that came from what he called the “lame-stream” or “fake” media. He told his supporters they could believe only him. Pike’s critics made fun of how much cable television he watched, but how else was he supposed to plan his game?

            I knew we had succeeded the day I walked into a bar and local news was on television. People nodded as they listened, taking in whatever we told them. When news becomes entertainment, all that matters is who puts on the best show.

            We watched Jocelyn Heller’s approval ratings slip. It was a beautiful thing to behold.

            I hired more computer experts and promoted the best ones we already had into leadership positions. To work for me, engineers not only had to be qualified, they also had to be loyal to the cause.

            My core team consisted of twelve software engineers who I trained in the arts of propaganda using the Soviet manual Seton had translated from Russian. Each of them understood the need to control the narrative. The offices of Outreach Analytics were still housed in a building near Pike Towers, but we expanded to an entire floor. Occasionally Seton came as well. Sometimes he brought his son, a kid about seventeen and a true believer. I worried about a kid being let in on our secrets, but Seton assured me there was nothing to worry about. His son, Guyton, struck me as a particularly intense teenager. He always wore the red cap signifying that he was a devout Pike supporter.

            I created a structure, putting the three best engineers into leadership positions. That way I had only three direct reports instead of twelve.

            Two of the three, Dominik Randall and Joshua Carroll, were both graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They’d been fraternity brothers and members The Right, the same conservative club I’d joined in college. They had both been working as highly-paid engineers when I hired them.

            The third, Nathan Graham, was a quiet man who kept to himself. I suspected he was the smartest of the bunch. Unlike Domink and Nathan, he didn’t come up through the academic route. He had grown up in Texas. Right out of high school, for reasons he kept to himself, he enlisted in the Air Force. His talents, though, were evidently clear to his superiors. He was moved into a cybersecurity unit and quickly moved up the ranks until—without a college degree—he was working in an elite cybersecurity unit in the Pentagon. After re-enlisting twice, he moved into the private sector where he became a cybersecurity expert. Companies hired him to assess their security. He tested their security by trying to break in, first, by hacking into their computer systems and then by getting into buildings by accessing their electronic security codes. He was one of those natural math geniuses.

            It wasn’t enough for these three to be top-notch engineers. I did thorough background checks on each of them. All three came from die-hard conservative families. All three had impeccable backgrounds.

            All three were ambitious, regularly asking if I needed anything else.

            One day in late summer a few months before the election, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I was walking down Fifth Avenue after a lunch date, heading back to Pike Towers. I looked at my phone. The caller identification came up as “unknown.” I answered anyway and was startled to hear Pike’s unmistakable voice.

            “Bob,” he said. “I have something stunning to tell you.” After that, he rambled. Tucked into his ramblings, he said, “Many people are saying that Jocelyn Heller is running a child pornography ring out of the basement of a pizzeria in Queens.” He then named the pizzeria. Then he asked, “You know about Jessica Heller’s server that was found?”

            There was no server. Supposedly a server from Jocelyn’s campaign had been seized by law enforcement, but it was made up.

            Because I didn’t answer, Pike repeated, “You know that server, right?”

            “Right,” I said.

            “It’s all there, on that server. Evidence about a pedo-ring.”

            “Interesting,” I said. “Sir. I’m about to go into a meeting. I’ll have to talk to you later.”

            Minutes after I hung up, Fuoco called and told me that we needed a conference call to decide what to do about the pizzeria story. By the time I arrived back at the office, Fuoco had arranged the call. All five executive officers were on the call. Fuoco included Phillip McHugh as well.

            Once we were all on the line, Fuoco said, “We have to do it. It’s what Pike wants.”

            “No,” I said. “It’s too preposterous. Nobody will believe it. We’ll end up looking silly.”

            It was Phillip McHugh who said, “Let’s do it. What’s the worst thing that happens? If it bombs, Pike will say something outrageous and everyone will forget all about it.”

            I still had my doubts, but I went along. It was Charlie who created the story. He created a fake social media account under the name Isabella Abrams, a fictitious person whose hometown was given as Fort Smith, Arkansas. This fictitious person posted this:

            My NYPD contact said that emails about a vile and disgusting pedo-ring that was found on Heller’s server. They use a plane called the Lolita Express. It’s clear from the evidence on that server that both Jocelyn and Eddie have a taste for underage girls. We’re talking about enslavement and an international child trafficking ring.

Charlie included a link to a story about stolen yard signs. Evidently nobody bothered to click on the link because the story went viral.  Soon my team had the story humming through our thousands of online accounts. P.J. Wiley picked it up and spread the story to his millions of listeners.

            I believed the story was so preposterous that most people knew it was a lie, and all in good fun. Then one day I saw Nathan Graham in the lobby of the building that housed our offices. He took me aside and whispered, “I am so sick and disgusted by the Heller’s pedo ring. We have to bring that woman down.” I looked closely and saw that he believed it.

            “Absolutely,” I said.

            A few days later, some idiot wearing a Pike for President tee shirt walked into the pizza parlor with a gun. He threatened to shoot up everyone in the place if the children were not freed.

            The owner of the pizza parlor was enraged. He gave tours showing that there was no basement, which obviously proved the story was a complete fabrication. To my amazement, lots of people, including Nathan, continued to believe the story was true.

The next political operative I knew personally to defect from Team Pike was a buddy from college named Kyle Morgan. I hadn’t kept in touch with Kyle, but I’d followed his career. When we were in college, Kyle had worked on Nixon’s campaign as a volunteer and had been a member of the Right. After getting his undergraduate degree in political science, he went to the University of California at Los Angeles film school for a graduate degree in filmmaking. He didn’t finish because, within the year, he was hired by a campaign to film ads. He was so good that he had a steady stream of work.

            After what came to be known as Pizzagate, he had enough. He gave an interview on a major cable network and declared himself a Conservative Against Pike. Susan and I sat together in the living room and watched his interview.

            Kyle said, “It was all lies. Those ads I created for conservative candidates in which I said we stood for family and traditional values. They were all lies. Look at Arnold Pike, who the party is now embracing. He was married three times. His affairs and wild parties have been the stuff of tabloids for decades.”

            The journalist interviewing him held the microphone for him and let him ramble on.

            “All those ads I created about how character matters,” Kyle said. “Those were lies too. The Republicans have nominated a vulgarian. I created ads about how America needs to stand up to authoritarian regimes. Arnold Pike has spent decades doing business with Russian oligarchs. I made ads saying that we stand for personal responsibility and look at Pike. He inherited millions from his father, much of which he squandered. Without dirty Russian money, he’d be bankrupt. I made ads saying that we were the party of law and order, but that, too, was a lie. Pike and his circle freely break laws.”

            I picked up the remote and turned off the television.

            “I know a lot of people like that,” Susan said. “People who refuse to vote for Pike.”

            “Me, too,” I said. “Pike’s gonna lose.”

The Washingtonian ran a story about Outreach Analytics and linked us to Pike’s online media campaign. The article stated—falsely—that the operation was run out of Pike Towers. To my even greater dismay, they ran my picture. My name appeared in the caption, but not in the article itself. Nathan Graham called The Washingtonian to tell them that was not true that the operation was run in Pike Towers. He got them to print a correction.

            After that, I hired a firm that specialized in removing any mention of my name from the Internet. They had some success. I also took more care to stay under the radar, avoiding any situation in which I might find myself mentioned in the media.

Seton called a meeting with me and Fuoco. He said he had something important to tell us. It was an overcast Wednesday morning in September. We sat at a polished oak table in one of the meeting rooms in Pike Towers. The plate-glass window offered a stunning view of Manhattan. Modern paintings were on the wall. We drank coffee from large mugs.

             Seton said, “My contacts in Russia tell me that the Russians set up a troll farm in St. Petersburg. It’s called the Internet Research Agency. Their goal is to elevate Pike to give him a chance at the presidency. Putin hates Jocelyn Heller with a passion. The farm has ninety dedicated staff working full-time. Last year, two highly ranked female IRA employees, came here on an intelligence-gathering mission. They made stops in ten states. Their mission was to understand the divisions and fractures in American culture. They concluded the most divisive issues were racial equality and gun rights. Those are the issues they are seeking to exploit.”

            “Are they impersonating Americans?” I asked.

            “Very effectively. They are operating Black Lives Matter accounts that are building trust and then deploying content about how the Hellers have undermined issues of importance to Black Americans. They have All Lives Matter accounts deploying payload content about the dangers of Black Lives Matter. They have an account with 300,000 followers called the Heart of Texas and another with almost 200,000 followers called Save Islam. The followers are real Texans who believe these organizations are real. Both organizations told their followers they will hold a demonstration in the same park on the same day this weekend.”

            “What a way to make trouble,” Fuoco said.

            “They think chaos will help Pike, who promises to restore order. Nobody thinks someone like Jocelyn can restore order.”

            “They’re right,” Fuoco said.

            I’ll confess that I had a moment in which I wondered whether this was taking dirty campaign tricks too far.

            Seton concluded the meeting by giving us both some information about the Internet Research Agency. After I returned home, I added to the file I had labeled, “D.C.: Disinformation Campaigns.”

The following day, Nathan stopped me in the lobby of the building that housed our offices.

            “I follow a group called Heart of Texas,” he told me. “They’re holding a rally this weekend. My parents have been bugging me to come home for a visit, so I think I’ll go this weekend. That way I can go to the rally. So I’ll be traveling on Friday and Monday, but I’ll be plugged in and working.”

            I thought of all the reasons Nathan shouldn’t attend that rally, including the reason he didn’t know: It had been arranged by Russians in an attempt to cause a fight.

            “It’s all staged,” I told him. “There will be an Islam meeting the same day in the same place.”

            “I heard about that,” he said.

            “You did?”

            “Sure. That’s why I need to be there.”

            “If you know it is a setup—” I began. I stopped when I saw Nathan’s face harden. He was a smart guy, but he tended not to think things all the way through.

            “Let me know how the rally goes,” I said.

            On Sunday evening, he emailed and said, “It was wild. Those Islamic dudes are crazy.”

About this time, Pike shocked the nation by accepting the endorsement of a well-known white supremacist. There was the predictable outcry from mainstream media and the left—the kind of outrage that Pike enjoyed. Now I was completely persuaded that Pike would lose the election. It was one thing for someone like P.J. Wily to use confrontational politics to rile the liberals and stoke hatred of liberals. I didn’t believe such extreme confrontational politics would work for a person campaigning to be president of the United States of America.

            In late September, Kyle Morgan published an Op-Ed in The Washingtonian. He wrote about the Republican Party in general, and Pike in particular. He said he had his epiphany. “I understand it now,” he wrote. “Arnold Pike is not an aberration. He is the natural product of sixty years of conservatism in America. The entire conservative movement has long been permeated with extremism, racism, ignorance, and a desire to return to a bygone era in America—an era of white-picket fences and White supremacy.”

            I shrugged it off. Every coalition has undesirable elements. Besides, Morgan left out the need for small government and the importance of having a party that stood for that.

            Two weeks after Kyle’s Op-Ed, Charlie, who was in charge of the campaign’s outreach to the nation’s Evangelical leaders arranged a revival meeting in Tennessee. The meeting included Pike and about twenty well-known Evangelical leaders. On the surface, the idea of Pike, of all people, courting Christian voters made no sense. Pike never went to church. He had been married three times. He started his relationships with each of his last two wives while still married to the previous wife. For decades his wild parties with underage models were the staple of the tabloids.

            The revival was so successful that Charlie arranged another, larger one in New York with more than fifty Evangelical leaders from across the country. Charlie called me and said, “You’ve gotta come. You won’t believe what you see. It’ll be tomorrow at three in the Pike Towers conference room on the twenty-fifth floor.”

            I entered the conference room just as the meeting was about to begin. The table could seat forty people. All the chairs were filled, and a few dozen more chairs had been brought in from another room, forming a larger ring just behind. When I arrived, there was standing room only. I stood near the door.

            Pike sat at one end of the table where most of the attendees could see him. Pike seemed to have changed into a different person. The swaggering and bellowing Pike had transformed himself into a meditative, pious man. His expression was solemn and contrite. His hands were folded meekly in front of him. He stared at a spot high on the opposite wall, giving him the appearance of one in a trance or deep meditation. He breathed deeply. Occasionally he closed his eyes.

            I recognized two people in the group, John Palmer and Louisa Mitchell. Both were connected loosely to the Evangelical churches and were also members of the Pike campaign.

            One of the attendees was discussing Pike’s three marriages. He was saying, “Arnold Pike has supported abortion. He’s even paid for abortions.” He turned to Pike and said, “You never denied paying for abortions.”

            “May I speak?” Pike asked quietly. All eyes turned toward him.

            “I have had dark moments, but my faith has seen me through,” Pike said softly, as if in a trance. “My faith has shown me the light. When I am president, I will never stop fighting for people of faith. I will appoint judges who understand Christian values. I will restore the faith as the true foundation of American life.”

            He closed his eyes again and breathed deeply.

            “Hallelujah,” Louise Mitchell said quietly but with passion.

            “Hallelujah,” others said, joining in.

            John Palmer said, “Can you all just imagine the heathen judges Jocelyn Heller would appoint if she were to become president? God send us Arnold Pike!”

            That was when I understood that Palmer and Mitchell had been planted there to help orchestrate the show.

            Pike, his eyes still closed, continued breathing deeply. Then, speaking in a voice so faint it sounded unnatural, he said, “We need a revival in this country. We have to get back to common sense and moral values. This country has gone way off the deep end.”

“Amen,” someone in front of me said under his breath.

            I was amazed by Pike’s act. He was good. My first impression of him had been correct. If he’d graduated first anywhere, it was in a school of acting. He was a showman.

            One woman turned to the man next to her, and speaking quietly—but with just enough force to be heard around the room—she said, “He may be a little rough around the edges, but his heart is in the right place, and he tells it like it is.”

            Pike began speaking again, but I don’t remember what he said. I was too fascinated by the reactions of everyone in the room. After he spoke, one of the preachers asked Pike if he could lay his hands on him. Pike didn’t answer. He just closed his eyes and breathed deeply, faking piety so effectively that anyone would think he was feeling God’s presence in the room.

            Dozens of the leaders then stood up. Those closest to Pike laid their hands on him and closed their eyes as if in prayer. Others then touched them, creating a kind of chain around the room.

            At that moment it seemed that everyone in the room had their eyes closed except me. I waited until there was a shuffling as they moved back to their seats. I then seized the opportunity to slip as quietly as I could from the room.

            Later that afternoon, Charlie sent me a text message. “What did you think?”

            “Impressive,” I texted back.

           Then, two weeks before the election, the porn star scandal hit. The porn star herself went on national television and told the newscaster that Pike had paid her hush money and that she and Pike had an affair while Pike’s third wife was recovering from the birth of Pike’s youngest child. As proof, she showed a copy of the payment she had received of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars that had been channeled to her through one of Pike’s personal lawyers. It was all over the news. When asked for a statement, Pike said his lawyer had paid her off with his own money without telling anyone, so Pike knew nothing about it. “She is lying and demanding money to stay quiet,” Pike said. “I’ve never even met her.”

            Photographs then circulated showing Pike and the porn star together, both holding drinks at what was obviously a swanky party. Pike changed his story. “I never had an affair with her,” he said.

            I thought the story was so preposterous that nobody would believe a word Pike said. Then, later that day, Pike’s personal lawyer gave an interview and confirmed that he had made the payment himself without telling his boss. “She was lying,” he told a reporter, “and I wanted to shut her up, and I didn’t want to bother the boss with it.”

            My bullshit detector went off. To say the least, it strained credulity to believe that Pike knew nothing about hush money paid to a porn star claiming to have had an affair with him while his wife recovered from childbirth. The outrageousness of the story was all anyone was talking about. It was all over the papers and cable shows.

            What I should have wondered about at the time, but I didn’t, was why this lawyer had been willing to go on national television and tell a humiliating lie. For a lawyer to make a huge payment to a porn star without telling his client was beyond the pale. To say the least, it strained credulity to think a lawyer would spend that money from his own pocket to protect a client from a false accusation without telling the client or asking his client for reimbursement.

            Then, the next day, Pike’s campaign was saved by an information dump. Hackers had gotten into a server used by one of Jocelyn’s top aides and leaked the personal emails. It was easy to take passages out of context and create a scandal. I suspected—but never knew for sure—that the hackers also edited the emails to make it appear that Jocelyn had made scathing comments about other liberals. American intelligence officers immediately concluded that the hacking had been done by Russians.

            Charlie called me and said, “Get on it.”

            I knew what he meant. I gave the orders and Outreach Analytics swung into action. We blitzed social media and every website we operated with the Jocelyn email “scandal.”

            The ploy worked. The noise drowned out the porn star scandal.

            It turned out that the email leak was more than noise. Whoever doctored the emails understood that a certain segment of America’s liberals disliked Jocelyn and had wanted a different candidate. The doctored emails had Jocelyn’s staff making scathing comments about her former opponent and saying things that completely enraged his supporters. You’d think it would have occurred to them to doubt the authenticity of emails leaked by Russian hackers, but it didn’t.  Anger and confirmation bias persuaded them that the hacked and leaked emails were authentic.

            A day or so later, reporters were back on the scent of the porn scandal story. Pike deflected them by calling a particularly annoying reporter, Lisa Carlisle, “Lyin’ Lisa.” Reporters were so shocked by the juvenile name-calling that they reported it as a story and again forgot about the porn star.

  Here’s the part that’s hard to explain: Watching the way Pike ran the liberals in circles was fun. Watching his antics was like watching a fight. It’s hard to look away. It’s also hard not to silently cheer at the way he played the liberals for fools. I knew Pike had his flaws, of course, but I was willing to overlook a few sins for the sake of unity on the right, and for the sake of destroying the rot that was eating at America.

One night during the weeks leading up to the election, after Susan was asleep, I lay in bed and listened to the sound of her breathing. I reached for my phone and searched for Rochelle’s name. It had been more than thirty years since I’d seen her. The first thing that came up was her book: She’d published a middle-school-level book called All About Dolphins. Next, I saw a social media post in which she called herself a Conservative Against Pike. I scrolled through her social media postings and learned that she was living in Philadelphia. She was married to an architect and she had two grown daughters.

            It wasn’t that she couldn’t have children. She hadn’t wanted them with me.

            I searched through “images” and found her picture. Her hair was cut short. Her face was framed by short wispy hair. She was still heart-stopping beautiful.

* * *

I stopped talking when I realized that Jessica had her hand on her throat.

            “Are you okay?” I asked.

            “I’m fine.” That’s when I saw her eyes were glassy with tears. What she said next startled me deeply. “You poor man,” she said. “You never understood her.”

            “I never deserved her. I probably don’t deserve Susan, either.”

            She sat still for a long time and then, even more quietly, said, “Go on.”

* * *

Pike won the presidency by the slimmest of margins—not the slimmest in history, but he barely squeaked in, helped by two fortunate circumstances. First, people came out to vote for Pike who had never before voted in a presidential election. These were people who previously had no interest in politics, but they hated the liberals and therefore loved Pike. Second, our antics dissuaded enough liberals not to vote for Jocelyn. They didn’t vote for Pike. They voted for a third-party candidate who, like us, hated the Democrats.

            Not long into Pike’s presidency, members of Congress got wind of the fact that there had been some coordination between Pike’s campaign and the Russian government. They started to investigate. Pike responded by pressuring the FBI director to drop the investigation. When he refused, Pike fired him, which set off a maelstrom. “Consciousness of guilt,” the liberals cried. “Why would Pike fire the FBI for investigating him if he had nothing to hide?”

            I was starting to suspect the reason: Pike could not tolerate any disloyalty. The very act of investigating him was the greatest possible insult, and he couldn’t tolerate it.

            The attorney general then appointed a special investigator. Pike responded by targeting and firing any law enforcement personnel who didn’t help him undermine the investigation. Most of the people he targeted were liberals who he believed hated him. No doubt, he was a bit paranoid. If he as much as thought someone didn’t vote for him, he assumed the person was an enemy. There were some people who he wanted to fire, but couldn’t reach, so he targeted them on social media and made their lives miserable.

            That was when Pike began moving people loyal to him into positions of authority and leadership in law enforcement agencies and the Department of Justice. At the same time, Phillip began moving the men Pike referred to as Second Amendment people into rank and file law enforcement positions. Like Pike, these guys had no respect for traditional law enforcement agencies and departments because they believed that agencies had been subverted by liberals who were forcing a new order on the nation.

            Not all of the Second Amendment people infiltrated law enforcement departments. Many formed militias. Pike knew and approved. More specifically, they formed paramilitary units that Pike knew he could call on at any time. Before long, from what I could gather from whispers, Pike could put an actual fighting army into the field.

* * *

            “I know who those militia guys are,” Jessica said. “My aunt, who incidentally is a strong Pike supporter, calls them weirdos. She thinks they’re harmless and she’s cool with them as long as they vote Republican.”

            “They’re not harmless. Most people underestimate them. They were not, in fact, a bunch of weirdos. Many are well-educated. They are well trained and organized. A lot of them were trained in the military. If Pike called on them, there are no limits to what they would be willing to do.”

            “Okay,” she said. “Go on.”

* * *

Another thing that happened after Pike won the election: For the first time, I had enemies. Until then, nobody much cared about me or my work. But Pike put us all in the spotlight, and I hated it. One of the first angry phone calls I got was from my oldest brother.

            “Maybe you should rethink your support of Arnold Pike,” he said.

            Both of my brothers were lifelong Republicans. Both, though, rejected Pike.

            I said something soothing and conciliatory—I dislike direct confrontations—and got off the phone as quickly as I could.

            One evening while I was waiting for Susan in the private restaurant in Pike Towers, I was approached by a resident of the building who I had never met. She was a slender, well-groomed woman about fifty years old. “You’re one of those Outreach Analytics people, aren’t you?”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

            “I read about you in the Washingtonian.”

            I knew exactly which article she meant. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated.

            She stared at me but didn’t respond. Slowly, deliberately, she walked away.

           Then, things took an unexpected turn. Pike began directing his ire against the conservatives who had failed to support him in the election. It was one thing when he targeted liberals and proponents of big government. But when he started going after conservatives, I felt shocked and sick.

            It wasn’t long before he got around to Larry. He attacked Larry on social media, posting Tweets about how Larry was a terrible commentator and couldn’t be trusted. He said Larry was a conservative in name only and secretly sympathized with the liberals. He said Larry was trying to undermine conservatism. As a result, Larry received a constant stream of death threats from Pike’s zealous supporters.

            Larry called me and said, “Can you call him off? I’m getting death threats.”

            “I wish I could. Did you ask Charlie?”

            “Charlie is trying, but he said Pike won’t budge.”

            “I have no influence over Pike at all,” I said. It was true. If Charlie couldn’t budge him, I certainly couldn’t.

            “I have more calls to make,” Larry said. “I need to find someone who can get this to stop.”

            It was hard to watch what happened next: Pike refused to let up on Larry until the network where Larry was employed fired him.

            As soon as I saw the news, I called Larry and offered him money.

            “I’ve got some savings,” Larry said. “I’ll be fine.”

            “If you need anything, let me know.”

            “Thanks, buddy,” he said.

           The Washingtonian kept a running total of the number of lies Pike told in office. He was up to four thousand lies by the end of his first year, and ten thousand by July of his second year. He lied so effortlessly it wasn’t clear at times whether he was using lies as a weapon, or whether he believed the things he was saying.

            Toward the end of Pike’s second year, when Democratic candidates were already declaring themselves in the running for the 2020 election, Larry called me. “I’m going to run for president,” he told me. “I’m going to try to take Pike down in the primaries.”

            “Do you think you can?”

            “I’ll give it my best. Can I count on your support?”

            “Tell me where, and I’ll send money. I’ll be your biggest donor. But I still work for Pike Enterprises, so I have to lay low.”

            “I understand,” he said.

            I signed up for his campaign newsletter. One day, Larry sent me an email with a link to a video. He wrote only three letters in the subject line: OMG. I clicked on the link. The video was from a campaign speech he gave to a crowd of about five thousand in Virginia.

            Larry stood on a stage, raised his fist, and shouted, “We need a president who doesn’t lie to us constantly!”

            “Booo!” the crowd replied.

            Undaunted, Larry shouted, “We need a president who doesn’t destroy anyone who gets in his way!”

            “Booo!” the crowd responded.

            “We need a president who doesn’t invite help from foreign autocrats!”

            “Boo!” shouted the audience.

            That was when I had my—what do you call it?—epiphany. I knew we’d created a monster and the monster was out of control. Until then, the idea of Heller-style communism scared me more than anything Pike was doing. Now I saw that the cure can be worse than the disease. But I was too frightened to do anything but watch as Pike tightened his grip on power.

            When the four of us went out—me, Susan, Ken, and Eliza, we avoided talking about work or politics. It was the least Ken and I could do for our wives, who wanted vacations but settled for evenings out in Manhattan. I knew, though, that Ken was growing uncomfortable with Pike and his antics because, on those occasions when politics or Pike intruded on our conversation, he visibly recoiled. Once, for example, we went into a bar. There was a news program on the television. Pike’s picture showed up. Ken shifted so that he wasn’t looking at the screen.

            I was therefore not surprised when Ken called me on a Saturday morning. “Can we get together?” he asked. “I need to talk.”

            “Certainly,” I said.

            He suggested coffee at a swanky cafe a block from Pike Towers. Ken had long since purchased a condo of his own in Pike Towers. When I arrived he was already there. He’d gotten his coffee and a pastry and was sitting at a private table in the corner. I bought myself a coffee and pastry and joined him.

            He skipped the small talk. “I think I need to resign.”

            I didn’t have to ask why. I knew why.

            Ken took a sip of his coffee and then said, “I was okay with bending the rules. I was okay with making a buck here and there. I didn’t mind the crass parts of Pike’s personality. The job was good. The pay was great. But this has gone too far. I honestly believe he’s a danger to the country. I’m sure you can see the problem.”

            “I see the problem,” I said, “but I don’t think you should resign.”

           “Why not?” he asked.

            I steepled my fingers and tapped them together as I thought about how to answer. My gut told me that resigning was a bad idea. Staying was safest. I trust my gut in these matters, but my instincts are always hard to explain.

            “Why do you think I should stay?” he asked. “I mean, other than the salary. I’m not interested in looking for a different job. I’m not ready to retire, but I don’t know if I can stomach working for Pike any longer.”

            “I think you should stay there, and lay low. Slow down. Take fewer projects. Reduce your hours. But stay.”

            He sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Pike is sensitive to anything that feels like disloyalty.”

            “I just don’t think you should make any enemies right now. I don’t think you should draw attention to yourself. Charlie told me that Pike has been seething about Larry ever since Larry refused to endorse him for president. Pike carries grudges.”

            He sighed again. “I read Kyle Morgan’s Op-Ed piece. Did you see it?”

            “I did.”

            “I agree with him,” he said. “I think we need to build a true conservative party based on true conservative values like the importance of tradition. Having Pike in the White House is an embarrassment. It’s hard to justify being a conservative.”

            We drank our coffee in silence. Then he asked, “What’s going to happen after Pike has completely destroyed mainstream media? What’s left but an authoritarian regime?”

            “The alternative is a liberal regime,” I said. “Which is just a different kind of authoritarianism. They don’t allow dissent. They want complete control. They seize property that doesn’t belong to them in the interests of what they call spreading the wealth.”

            “I think a liberal regime would be better than Pike,” he said.

            “I still think a liberal regime is worse.”

            “But using Pike to fight the liberals means we have to give complete power to Pike. We’re at his mercy.”

            I nodded in agreement. We were at his mercy.

            “You know. I’d like to take my own advice and step back from Pike, his administration, and his business empire. I’m afraid it will look suspicious if we both reduce our hours at the same time.”

            “Nah,” Ken said. “You report to Phillip and you’re never in the office anyway. Phillip has almost nothing to do with my division. Besides, I don’t have to say anything to anyone. Nobody knows how much I work.”

On Monday, I made an appointment to speak to Phillip McHugh in his office. Phillip was now one of the top three people in the organization whose last name was not “Pike.”

            I sat across in a chair facing his desk. “I think I need to slow down,” I told him. “My health isn’t great. I’d like to reduce my hours.”

            “No, problem,” he said.

            I kept a close eye on his reaction. He seemed to take me at my word. We made small talk, and then his secretary announced his next appointment. We shook hands, and I left. I felt satisfied with the outcome.

            As I was walking home, I called Ken and told him what I had done.

            “Eventually we’ll be able to quit altogether,” Ken said, “but your hunch was right. This isn’t the time to make enemies. For now, we need to stay out of Pike’s crosshairs. I saw the way he went after your friend Larry.”

            “Let’s talk soon,” I said, then we both hung up.

I was still listed as one of the founding members of Outreach Analytics, and my name was in the corporate papers for Pike Enterprises, but I no longer did any work. I managed my portfolio. Susan and I went out often. We talked about a vacation, but it just never happened.

            One evening when Charlie and I met for drinks in Manhattan he told me, in a confidential whisper, “We’ve been busy moving loyalists into all of these agencies. Our people are getting jobs as agents and officers. It’s not enough that he can appoint the people in charge of the agencies. We need our people at all levels.”

            My internal alarm flashed red. “Pike is supposed to be dismantling these agencies,” I said, “not weaponizing them.”

            “He wants control,” Charlie said. “Complete control.”

            I felt a chill. How was this not worse?

            Charlie said, “Soon we will have thousands of loyalists who take orders directly from Pike at all levels of the federal bureaucracy.”

            “Why?” I asked. “What do we get from that?”

            “We get protection,” Charlie said.

            A beat of time passed. Then another. “Protection from what?” I asked. “Who protected Larry?”

            Charlie gave me an astonished look as if the answer was obvious. “Larry will be fine. There are bigger issues than any one person’s job. Pike is making sure law enforcement agencies are packed with loyalists, which protects us from the liberals weaponizing the agencies for their purposes.”

            Wait, I wanted to say. We’re talking about Larry Raskins, my friend since kindergarten and your college roommate. Did Charlie really feel nothing at seeing Larry’s career ruined?

            “Are you going soft on me, buddy?” Charlie asked.

            “Of course not,” I said, but I felt sick.

            “Here’s the thing about Pike,” Charlie said. “Unlike Nixon, he’ll never back down. That’s why he’s our guy. He’s a fighter.”

            Charlie continued talking, but I had trouble focusing. I forced myself to nod as if I agreed—but Charlie’s logic wasn’t making sense to me anymore. A few times I caught him giving me a curious look. I was happy when we finally parted company.

During the week before my arrest, I didn’t go out much. Most of the time, I sat in my living room and read books. I went back to the classics of government I had read in high school. I read Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbs. I read the classic sociologist like Max Weber and was stunned by his wisdom. What I couldn’t see while I was in high school was crystal clear to me now.

            “Why are you reading all those books?” Susan asked once.

            “I’m trying to figure out where I went wrong.”

*  *  *

I concluded my story by telling Jessica the story of my arrest, the discussion I’d had with Phillip early during my first morning in the prison, and how I had made the decision to call her. “Now you know the whole story,” I told her. “I was framed. But I’m not innocent.”

            “The solution,” she said, “is to get rid of Pike somehow. Maybe if his financial crimes are known, he can be impeached and removed.”

            “He can’t. He’s being shielded by a major political party and major news outlets. They want someone just like him. They are not the majority of Americans, but they wield power beyond their numbers.” I realized I was saying theyinstead of we. “Besides,” I went on, “get rid of Pike, and another like him will rise up to take his place. Pike taught them how.” I drew in my breath, and added, “We taught them how.”

             “Then how do we solve the problem?”

            “It won’t be easy. You have to restore truth and a shared factuality. What we did was shatter the public sphere—”

            “The what?”

            “The public sphere. Sociologists talk about a place where ideas are discussed. It’s essential to a working democracy.”

            She smiled, “Did you just say democracy? I didn’t think you believed in rule by the people—at least not all the people.”

            “I thought I was choosing the lesser of the two evils: Create a disinformation machine or go with the majority and live with Jocelyn Heller and the kind of America she wanted.”

            “You knew most people preferred Jocelyn Heller to Arnold Pike. To keep her from getting elected, you were willing to get behind an autocrat.”

            “I was willing to do more than that. I was willing to torpedo truth. What I didn’t understand was that a disinformation machine takes on a life of its own. Once truth is undermined, it’s hard to get it back. You see, there are not many forms of government. Sociologist Max Weber says there are only three sources of governmental authority. The first is traditional. A king derives his authority from tradition. The second is a form of democracy where the underlying source of authority is rule of law. The third is a form of authoritarianism when the sole authority comes from a person in the form of a dictator. Here’s the problem: Rule of law requires truth. Get rid of truth, and all that is left is authoritarianism.”

            I waited to see if she had any other questions.

            “That’s why you wanted to tell me your story,” she said.

             She pulled a stamped postcard from her prison-issue bag and handed it to me. It was addressed to a post office box. “Drop this in the mail when I can print the story.”

            We stood up and shook hands. Her grip was strong and warm. She squeezed my hand a moment longer than she needed to.

           “Good luck,” she said warmly.

She left the room and closed the door softly behind her. I looked around one last time at the scuffed cinderblock walls in this room smaller than the span of my arms. If all went well, this would be my last time in this room.

            If walls had ears, the cinderblock walls in this room had heard my entire story—or most of it, anyway.  What remained to be seen was how the story would end.

            I heard footsteps approaching, and stood up. The warden opened the door and said, “Come on.”

When we reached my cell, I stepped inside. There was an envelope on the table. I waited until the door locked behind me. First, I turned and looked out the spy hole. I couldn’t see the warden who had escorted me back, but I heard his footsteps receding.

Then, I went to the table, picked up the envelope, and turned it over. It was sealed and addressed to me. I tore open the envelope and pulled a slip of paper on which was printed:

This is a friendly warning to let you know that we are watching you. Buck up and keep your courage. Sign the damned confession. Don’t be a softie.

 

I felt a chill. Are you going soft on us? Charlie had asked. I recoiled from the thought. No, it couldn’t be. Not Charlie.

             But my mind was spinning. I wondered how common it was to use a word like ‘soft’ in this context. Then I wondered if I should try to reach Susan—but I knew what she would say. If they were ready, we had to go for it. She’d flat-out refuse to leave without me. Even if someone like Charlie was behind this, we had to take our chances.

            My stomach was jittery and my chest felt tight. Because I had nothing else to do, I found myself repeatedly going to the spy hole and looking out. Each time, the corridor was empty. Wild thoughts came to me. Any time I heard a noise, I thought someone was coming to kill me and plant a suicide note next to my body.

            I remembered the woman who had approached me in the lobby, and the call from my angry brother. Maybe I had been thinking about this all wrong. Maybe whoever had it in for me right now and was playing these games was partly motivated by hatred of Pike and all I had done. I pushed the thought aside. How could Phillip and Potato Face possibly team up with an idealist? Idealists don’t do things like imprison their enemies on false charges.

            I paced but there was a limit to how many hours I could spend pacing the cell. I went to the window and leaned my forehead against the metal grille of the window. In the courtyard was an organized exercise regime: At least twenty-five men were jogging the perimeter while another group did pushups in the center.

            Storm clouds were gathering in the sky. Rain would not be the worst thing this evening. It would help cloak us in the darkness.

            When a warden came to ask if I wanted exercise time in the courtyard, I said yes. Anything was better than pacing this cell or lying on the cot looking at the ceiling. By the time we reached the courtyard, the exercise regime had ended. About a dozen inmates idled around. I alternated between sitting on a bench and walking the perimeter. When it started drizzling, a warden returned me to my cell.

            I had nothing now to do but wait.

Sometime later, a key turned in the lock I knew a warden was coming to bring my dinner tray. To my complete astonishment, Potato Face entered, carrying the tray. I watched in terror as he set the tray on the table. Wasn’t he supposed to be on his way to Manhattan to meet with Pike by now?

            I took a few deep breaths to make sure my voice would be steady, then said, “Don’t you ever get a day off, Dylan?”

            “I’m always on the job.”

            He paused to give me a chilling smile.

            Quietly I said, “I’ll tell Phillip you’re doing a good job.”

            He looked perplexed—as if confused that I’d figured out something so obvious.

            I said, “Phillip must have forgotten to tell you that I graduated at the top of my law school class.”

            “I hate smart asses,” he said.

            He reddened a bit and his facial muscles tightened. I could see he meant it. He hated smart guys. I felt his anger—I literally felt it—and knew I’d gone too far.

            “I don’t know why you would hate smart guys,” I said smoothly. The cajoling flattery helped. He softened a bit.

            “I’m not such a bad guy, Dylan. Did you know I work for Pike?”

            “I don’t believe it. Phillip says I gotta watch you because you’re dangerous.”

            “Do I look dangerous?”

            The question threw him. He looked me over. From his viewpoint, a man like me was anything but dangerous. To him I probably looked eighty. He was fit and young.

            “Did you try looking me up?” I asked.

            “No.”

            “You weren’t the slightest bit curious? You know my name. Robert James Martin. Why don’t you look? When you get off work, look me up.”

            He took a phone from his pocket and started pressing keys with his thumbs. I assumed he was doing Internet searches.

            “There is nothing here about you. Nothing comes up.”

            “Now search for my name, ‘Pike Towers’ and these numbers.” I gave him the transaction number of the deal in which I’d sold units in Pike Towers.

            I could see from his expression that he found it.

            “I was the broker. See. I work for Pike. Phillip is jealous because Pike favors me. Pike has been moving me up into positions of more authority. You are not keeping an eye on me at Pike’s direction. You stepped into a power struggle between me and Phillip. He’s using you for a stooge.”

            He looked at me as if trying to decide if I was lying. I was, of course, lying through my teeth.

            “When are you seeing Phillip next?”

            “Maybe tonight. I have an appointment to see Pike himself.”

            “Perfect. The moment you talk to Pike, ask him, ‘What’s going on with Robert James Martin, the communications guy? The friend of Charlie Rocklin. Is he a good guy?’ I can assure you Pike will tell you that I am.”

            More precisely, as soon as Potato Face showed up at Pike Towers and tried to get through the lobby to the private restaurant he’d know someone had been playing him for a fool.

            “I’ll do that,” he said.

            “Let me know tomorrow what you find out.”

            “Yeah,” he said. “I will.” With that, he swung around, marched from the cell, and slammed and locked the door.

            I looked at the meal tray on the table. I had no appetite. My stomach was too jittery. I had even less of an appetite when I saw that the meal was a hot dog and fries and potato salad, but I forced myself to eat. I would need the energy. If there was a book entitled Jail Breaks for Idiots, I was pretty sure it would include the advice not to try a jailbreak on an empty stomach.

            I ate slowly and carefully. When I finished, I put the tray by the door.

            The warden who came to get my tray was, fortunately, not Potato Face. By now, Potato Face should be on his way to Manhattan. The warden who entered was one I’d seen before. He had eyes that reminded me of a fish. Once he was gone, I got ready to leave. I changed into a fresh jogging suit and brushed my teeth. I put on my shoes and hid my prison I’d under the stack of towels.

            I went to the window and looked out. The sky was almost completely dark, streaked with a deep purple. The moon, covered mostly by clouds, was just above the buildings.

            Time ticked by. I went to the cot and lay down. Each time I heard a noise, my chest tightened. I breathed deeply and rhythmically to calm my racing heart.

Sometime later, I heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor. I sat up so quickly that the bed springs groaned. I held still and listened as the key turned in the lock.

            The door swung open, and there was Ken and a man about fifty years old. The man wore small rectangular glasses, had gray hair and a thin graying mustache, and a friendly, open face. Instantly I was on my feet.

            “Mr. Miller?” I said quietly and respectfully.

            “Yes,” he said. He held the door open for me. This was happening just as I had imagined it.

            We went down the stairs, but instead of heading toward the front of the prison, as I expected, we took a different turn and went into a corridor in which I’d never before been. At the end was a metal door. Miller entered a code on a keypad, inserted a metal key from his ring, and opened the door. We walked through and he closed the door behind us. The corridor was lined with what appeared to be executive offices. At the end was a door with a frosted glass window and the name “Carson Miller” stenciled in black lettering. Miller opened the door and gestured me inside. Ken handed me a bag.

            Miller said, “You can change in there,” and pointed to a private restroom.

            I ducked into the restroom and opened the package. Susan had packed a change of clothes for me: khakis, an undershirt, a pullover sweater, street shoes, and socks. I changed quickly.

            When I emerged wearing street clothes, Carson led me back into the corridor. At the end was a metal door.  He pressed a security code and keyed open a door. The door led to yet another corridor, this one lined with security cameras. The glowing red lights told me we were being watched.

At the end was a door with a small frosted window. I knew from the dark window that the door led to the outside.

            We reached the door and Miller went through three steps: He keyed in a code, he pressed a badge to an electronic lock, and he used a regular key in the deadbolt. He swung open the door to what I assumed was a staff parking lot.

            “Thank you, sir,” Ken said. “You’ll receive a bonus directly from Pike Enterprises.”

            “It’s already been deposited,” he said.

            I said nothing. My knees were weak with relief. I felt such gratitude I was afraid if I tried to speak my trembling voice would give us away. Ken and Carson shook hands. I extended my hand to Carson as well. His handshake was firm, brisk, and friendly.

            Ken and I stepped into the cool night air and Carson closed the door behind us.

            “This way,” Ken said.

            A sidewalk hugged the building. The parking lot to our right was flooded with light, but parts of the sidewalk up ahead were in shadows. Ken and I walked briskly.

            We turned a corner and came face to face with a man pointing a semi-automatic pistol at us. “Oh no you don’t,” he said.

            The man was Nathan Graham, my engineer. I was stunned.

            “What the hell are you doing, man?” Nathan asked. “Didn’t you get my notes?”

            His notes?

            A strange thing can happen in an emergency: You can find a strength you didn’t know you had, and—despite a rapidly beating heart and suddenly trembling hands—you find you can keep your voice steady.

            “Nathan,” I managed to say in a strangely calm voice. “You don’t understand what you are stepping into.”

            “I know more than you think I know,” he said.

            “Do you know that the charges against me were invented out of thin air?”

            “Of course, I know that. I was the one who hacked the court website and put the notices there. Now. You’re listening to me. Got it? I need both of you to walk over to that car.” He pointed his gun vaguely toward the parking lot.

            Ken started to move in the direction Nathan pointed. I remained where I was.

            ‘Ken,” I said. I saw the terror on Ken’s face. Ken looked at me. I shook my head to indicate that Ken should stay where he was.

            “I don’t think you heard me,” Nathan said to me. “I need you both to walk over to that car.”

            Speaking very slowly to give myself time to think, I said to Nathan, “You haven’t thought this all the way through. Do you realize what will happen to you if you murder me in cold blood in the parking lot of a prison? This place is swarming with armed officers. The minute that gun fires, they’ll be all over you. Kill me and not Ken, and there’s a witness. Kill Ken, and you kill an entirely innocent man. I’m as innocent as he is—no charges have ever been filed against me—as you well know.”

            Nathan was a smart guy, but he tended not to think things all the way through.

            I went on, “If you think Pike will offer you a presidential pardon to save you from criminal charges, you don’t know Pike. This is too close to him. I work for him. I’m connected to his inner circle. If he pardons my murderer it will raise all kinds of alarm bells and make him look bad. Pike is not about to do something that makes him look bad.”.

            “Phillip said—“ Nathan began, then stopped.

            “Do you think Phillip will be able to help you? Phillip is a thug. He needed you to hack into a website to stage this charade.”

            “Yes. Phillip is an idiot,” Nathan said.

            “What did Phillip tell you?” I asked.

            “Phillip didn’t tell me anything. I told him. I told him everything.”

            “What did you tell him?”

            “I told him you secretly funded Larry Haskin’s campaign, even after Larry turned against Pike. I told him that you were turning against the organization. I could see it. I told him Sam had called you from Riyadh and you were planning to meet him at the airport.”

            “You were the one spying on me,” I said.

            Of course, it was him. Nathan was a professional hacker. He knew how to break into places. Keeping track of Susan and getting into our apartment had been child’s play to him.

            “Phillip didn’t understand how much of a danger you are, even when I told him that you’re talking to that journalist. But I knew. You know too much. You can blow the lid off the whole operation. You might say I did a little freelancing.”

            “You turned against me,” I said, to keep the conversation going to buy some time while I tried to think up with a plan for getting past him.

            “No. You turned against the organization. I knew you weren’t loyal anymore to Pike. You’d become a traitor.”

            “Okay,” I said. “So you were spying on me. You heard me tell Susan that I was on my way to the airport. You called Phillip and you hatched a plan to arrest me with Sam. Phillip got that thug, Dylan Biggs, to help you out. Phillip pulled some strings, probably called in a few favors, and got me booked into the prison.”

            At that point—with access to the apartment under ours—it wouldn’t have been hard for him to keep an eye on Susan and figure out what we were up to.

            Meanwhile, we were at a stalemate. He was pointing a gun at me, which he didn’t want to use. He wanted us to get into the car willingly, which I was not going to do.

            “When you broke into our apartment,” I asked, “what were you looking for?”

            “Your insurance.”

            I was slow with that one. I couldn’t think of how he would have known about that. It took me a moment to remember that I’d told Phillip that I had insurance of my own.

            “The insurance you wanted was in a file marked D.C.,” I said. “It’s still there. You missed it because you were looking for evidence of financial crimes. Nobody cares about financial crimes, Nathan. Do you know what D.C. stands for?”

            I waited. He narrowed his eyes to small slits.

            “It stands for disinformation campaigns,” I said. Then, in as gentle and soothing a voice as I could manage, I said, “I think you deserve the truth. Do you agree? Do you want me to tell you the truth?”

            He didn’t move, so I went on. “I’m telling you the truth because I care about you. I hired you. You’re like a son to me. Remember that Heart of Texas rally you attended just before the election?”

            He looked at me blankly. To trigger his memory, I said, “You told me you follow a group called Heart of Texas. Your parents had been bugging you to go home for a visit. You went that weekend so you could go to the rally. You wanted to be there because an Islamic event was being held nearby—”

            “Yeah? So?”

The organization, Heart of Texas, was invented by a troll farm in St. Petersburg. Those Muslims didn’t crash the rally. The clever troll farm in Russia invented two competing organizations and scheduled them for rallies in the same place. That Muslim group in Texas thinks you crashed their rally. The Russians set one American against each other.”

“You fell into the trap. You took the bait.”

            He stood still, watching me.

            To drive home the point, I spoke quietly. “You were manipulated, Nathan. By Russians. They played you like a fool. There’s more.  Remember the Heller pedo ring you were riled about during the election? It was all a lie.  I can prove it. The evidence is in the file. Charlie invented the story out of whole cloth. He posted it on social media under a fake name, Isabella Abrams. He gave her hometown as Fort Smith, Arkansas. First, he made sure there wasn’t actually an Isabella Abrams in Fort Smith. He included a link to a story about stolen yard signs. The account has now been removed.”

            “There was no pedo ring?” he said.

            “No. You can read all about it in the file marked D.C.”

            “How do I know you’re not lying now?”

            In a quiet, soothing voice, I said, “You can check it out. I’m sure you can figure out how to get into our apartment. I can give you the key if you want.”

            “I don’t want your key,” he said.

            “Do you want more examples of how you fell for lies? Remember when the Republican running for city council in Arizona lost that special election? Pike claimed the loss was due to fraud. There was no fraud. He made it up. He might have believed it himself. I gave up trying to figure out whether Pike was a true believer who believed his own lies, or whether he was a master manipulator. At any rate, he sent out a fundraising email. You donated half your salary. That was noble of you. But there was no election fraud. Pike invented it all for a fundraising ploy. The money went to fund a private security detail for Pike. Now, maybe if Pike has told you what he wanted the money for, you would have given it anyway. I didn’t know until after you donated the money or I would have tried to warn you.”

            A cold wind rustled the leaves overhead. I tightened my chest muscles to keep from shivering. He seemed to shrink a few inches in height.

            “I wanted to tell you sooner,” I said. “I wish I had. You were what is known as a useful idiot.”

            In fact, it had never occurred to me to tell him the truth. But it should have.

            We all three stood still. Nathan and I were looking at each other. Nobody wanted to be the first to move.

            “Now,” I said softly. “This is federal property. If you shoot me and Ken in cold blood on federal property you will be guilty of two murders under federal law. That’s a capital offense.”

            I could tell from the sudden hardness in his eyes that he knew just what I meant. To  make sure, I said, “That means the electric chair.”

            Both he and Ken were watching me.

            “It won’t be worth it, Nathan. Nobody will hail you as a hero. Phillip will pretend that he doesn’t know you. You will be a criminal and you’ll die an ugly, ignoble death. It’s a quick death, but it isn’t painless.”

            He shrank another few inches.

            I turned my back to Nathan. “I turned my back so that if you shoot me, it will be clear it was a cold-blooded murder.” Then, quietly, to Ken, I said, “I’m going. Are you coming?”

            I walked away from Nathan deliberately, without haste. A moment later, Ken was at my side. Neither of us looked back. I thought about the physics of a semi-automatic pistol, and I wondered if we would even hear the sound, or whether, if Nathan shot us, we would die instantly.

            But he didn’t shoot. We got to the next corner and ducked out of his sight. We then ran the rest of the way to Ken’s white Mercedes, which was idling with the headlights on. Eliza was in the driver’s seat. Susan was in the back. I slipped in next to Susan. After Ken was in the passenger seat and both doors were closed, Eliza put her foot on the gas.

            We were out of the prison parking lot on a dark road when my heart stopped racing enough for me to speak. “Where are we going?” I asked.

            “North,” Susan said, “To the John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport in Ontario. If we drive straight through, we can be there in eight hours.”

            “So what took you so long to get out of there?” Eliza asked.

            Ken told them how I had talked our way past Nathan Graham.

            “I never liked that guy,” Susan said. “He seems shifty.”

            “Now it all makes sense,” I said. “Phillip didn’t stage my hearing—something that had always seemed beyond his abilities. He fooled me into thinking a case was pending against me by having Nathan hack the website and post the notice. Sam’s was probably fake, too.”

            Susan said, “More information about the Middle East scandal came out today. We think you were right. Someone in Pike’s immediate circle was trading American secrets for a lucrative licensing deal and Phillip needed someone to take the blame.”

            “So he set up Sam to take the fall. And I stumbled into the scene by going to meet him.”

            “It looks like that.”

            I pressed the button to lower the window a few inches. I wanted to feel the wind. There is nothing like the rush of wind in a car on a highway to make a person feel free. I breathed in the night air, then rolled the window back up. I watched the trees as we whizzed by them. The sky overhead was still cloudy, but in the distance, I saw stars.

            “Where are we going from Ontario?” I asked.

            “I thought you’d never ask,” Susan said. “From Ontario, we’re flying to Sidney, Australia, and then to the tropical island of Efate, which houses Port Vila the capital of the nation of Vanuatu.”

            I had literally never heard of the place.

            Ken turned around and explained. “Vanuatu is one of the few nations that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. We don’t think anyone will come after us, but we’re not taking any chances.”

            “Eliza and I picked Vanuatu of the available choices,” Susan said. “We always wanted a tropical vacation.”

 

Epilogue

The swimming pool sparkled in the sunlight. The sky was the clear translucent blue you only see in the tropics. I sat in a chaise lounge and sipped a glass of chilled wine. Just beyond the pool was a stretch of white sand, and beyond that was the ocean—a brilliant green blue. The whisper of the sea was a comforting lull, like a faint heartbeat. The air was salty and pungent.

            The door to the pool house opened and Susan came out, wearing a bathing suit, large sunglasses, and a floppy straw sunhat. She carried a small stack of magazines and newspapers. She sat down on the chaise lounge and opened one of the newspapers. We had no Internet access. We got our news the old-fashioned way—through newspapers and magazines that came through the mail. They were generally at least a week old.

            We’d been here now about two months. Within days of our arrival on the island, we purchased two neighboring beach-front bungalows. We all four felt the same way: If we never returned to the United States, we were fine with that, too. Why not spend the rest of our days on a beautiful island paradise?

            Within two weeks of our arrival, the scandal of someone attempting to trade nuclear secrets for personal gain was no longer in the news at all. There was some lingering coverage about how Sam had misunderstood his orders, but the matter was pretty much dropped. That means that it grabbed headlines for about the same amount of time as Pike’s porn-star-payoff-scandal, and a bit less than Pike’s threat of nuclear war against North Korea.

           The disruption of our lives was just one more casualty in Pike’s wake of destruction. Meanwhile, Sam was trapped by his lie. It would always be attached to him, like a permanent, ugly stain.

* * *

One morning after we’d been on the island for about three months, I walked to the post office to pick up our newspapers. Lest you think that living on a remote island changed the nature of my mental focus, I can assure you that I remained vigilant. I scanned the streets and the horizon for anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t exactly fear that I felt. It was more like a watchfulness, the feeling I’d had since childhood that lurking just beyond my vision were evil forces.

            Here, on the island, the unseen dangers no longer frightened me quite as much. They were there, like drawings of dragons on the far reaches of medieval maps—more like cartoons than actual threats.

            I suspected the day would come when I’d let people like Larry and my immediate family know where I was, but for the foreseeable future, I liked being entirely anonymous and far away.

            The post office was the kind of flat-roofed, glass-and-aluminum structure built in the United States in the 1950s. The metal trim on the exterior was pained pumpkin orange. There were two signs in the windows, and both were in English. The first said “Vanuatu Post,” and the second said, “Western Union: Money Transfer.” Just inside the window was an ATM machine.

            Susan and I had our own post office boxes. Ken and Eliza had theirs. Once each week, I walked to the post office for our mail. I opened our mailbox. Inside was the usual stack of newspapers and magazines. Newspapers and magazines were our only contract with our previous life and the world beyond the island. I tucked the stack of newspapers and magazines into my satchel.

            I didn’t take any of them out again until I was back in my lounge chair facing the swimming pool. Susan was at a table near the swimming pool with Eliza. I could hear the hum of their voices, but mostly I heard the whisper of the ocean.

            Rochelle had once said that she could live her life on a sunny beach with a book. At the time, I had been unable to imagine such a life. And here I was.

            I started with The Washingtonian. After I’d gone through each newspaper, I pulled a copy of City Life magazine from the satchel. The lead story splashed across the front of the magazine was, “The Memoirs and True Confessions of a Disinformation Warrior.” The author was Jessica Harris. My heart pounded. I flipped through the story, skimming quickly. Then I turned back to the beginning and read more closely. There it was—the story I had told her but boiled down to the essence and written in beautiful, searing prose.

            The article concluded by promising an upcoming three-part series on disinformation tactics and how they work.

            Would it make a difference? It remained to be seen whether enough people would pay attention. The problem, of course, was how people got their information. Social media meant people were bombarded with a constant stream of headlines, snippets, opinions, and declarations by experts, many of whom were not actually experts, but most people didn’t know how to tell the difference. The result was that droplets of truth were lost in the cascade of irrelevant information and outright lies.

            Maybe there had been advantages to the old-fashioned, boring, Walter Cronkite way of getting the news.

            In her story, Jessica referred to me as Anonymous, and for that, I’m grateful. I hate publicity. Eventually, someone may figure out who I am, if anyone cares enough to bother, but for now, I’m still anonymous. You see, my name isn’t really Robert James Martin.

            You didn’t expect me to tell the whole truth, did you?

 

 

I may decide to make this available more widely. If you get to the end, and you liked the story enough to write a review, email me at tkanefield@gmail.com.