Against All Enemies (26 page)

At the bottom of the stairs, Jonathan button-hooked to the right, and there they were. Venice Alexander and Roleplay Rollins were having a happy conversation across the bar-height kitchen counter. If they heard him approaching, they made no indication.

“Good morning,” Jonathan said as he crossed the threshold from hardwood to stone floor.

Venice and Rollins turned in unison, she from her work at the stove, and he from his lazing at the bar. “Good morning,” Venice said. Her voice was three clicks too jovial, telling Jonathan that she probably realized that Rollins’s presence had crossed a line.

“Hi, Digger,” Rollins said. “I know I’m a surprise, but Venice was nice enough to let me in.”

“I don’t believe you wouldn’t let him in last night,” Venice scolded. “How juvenile.”

Jonathan felt a ball of anger in his belly. “Maybe he’s a terrorist and I kept him out for a reason.”

Rollins recoiled, but Jonathan ignored him.

“That’s still no reason to be rude,” Venice said.

“Did it occur to you that I might have reasons for not wanting him to be here?”

“You know I’m sitting in front of you, right?” Rollins said. “Is this the part where you kick me out?”

“No, that’s for me to do,” Boxers’ voice rumbled from behind them.

“He would have me shot,” Rollins said. “Yes, I heard.”

“As far as I know, it wasn’t a secret,” Boxers said. He nodded toward Venice. “Smells great.”

She waved. Historically, Big Guy and Mother Hen had not gotten along very well, but recently, Boxers seemed to be trying harder. “How many eggs do you want?”

“Let’s start with three,” Boxers said. “We’ll negotiate from there.”

Venice sifted her gaze to Jonathan. “Dig?”

He held up two fingers, a victory sign. “I’m not sure I’ve seen you be this . . . domestic.”

“That’s because you’re never up in time for breakfast,” Venice said, turning back to the stove. “I send Roman off every morning with a good meal.” That was her son by an otherwise disastrous marriage. He was a middle-schooler now, with all of the angst and attitude that came with it.

“He’s with Mama this morning?” Jonathan asked. Venice’s mother had been Jonathan’s default mother after his own had died when he was a kid, and everyone with half a brain treated the woman with equal parts love, respect, and abject terror.

“And loving every minute of it, I’m sure,” Venice said. That brought a chuckle from both Jonathan and Boxers.

“Where’s the guest of honor?” Rollins asked. “And don’t tell me he’s not here.”

Dylan Nasbe emerged from the second guest room from off to the side of the kitchen. “I’m not here,” he said.

Rollins’s expression hardened. This was not the face of a man who was happy to be reacquainted. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

Dylan held out his hand for Venice. “We haven’t met. I’m Dylan. You must be Venice.” He over-pronounced the word as if to show off that he understood.

“Pleased to meet you. I’ve certainly heard a lot about you. Will two eggs do for you, too?”

“That’d be great. Thank you.”

Rollins sighed loudly. “You know, as much as I appreciate this pantomime of domestic bliss, I’d appreciate it if we could get down to—”

“Shut up, Colonel,” Jonathan said. “This isn’t your meeting. You’re the party crasher, and we will proceed along the lines that I dictate. It’s really important to wrap your head around that.”

Rollins turned red, but he didn’t say anything.

Jonathan walked to the coffeepot and poured himself a cup. “Dylan,” he said, “I think it would really help if you caught everyone else up to where we already are.”

Jonathan ate while Dylan talked, keeping his eyes on Rollins. If, in fact, a coup were in the offing—a wild thought at its base—who better to involve than a leader from the Unit? The colonel possessed many skills, but he’d always been a terrible poker player. Jonathan bet that he’d know if his former commander’s expression of surprise was genuine. As it turned out, there was no expression of surprise at all. There was merely an expression of utter disbelief.

It seemed genuine, though.

“You have these drives with you?” Venice asked when he was finished with the first round of the story and the parrying of objections.

“Actually, your boss has them.”

Jonathan recognized his cue. He rose from his chair, walked to the wall nearest the stairs, and revealed a safe by sliding a picture out of the way. He spun the dial, turned the lock, and pulled open the rectangular steel door. Inside sat a Glock 23 .40 caliber pistol, five 13-round mags, three fragmentation grenades, and the two hard drives Dylan had given him the day before. He removed the drives then closed the door to the safe.

“Paranoid much?” Rollins asked.

“Prepared much,” Jonathan replied.

He handed the drives to Venice, who walked them into the living room. “The connections are in the coffee table, right?” she asked.

“Nothing’s changed since last time you were here.” That last time was the occasion for a sleepover-picnic for the Alexander family—Mama, Venice, and Roman—along with Jonathan’s good friend Father Dom D’Angelo and JoeDog, the black Labrador retriever who had adopted Jonathan as her occasional caretaker. After significant debate, Mama had granted Jonathan permission to introduce her grandson to the pleasures of killing targets in the woods. Back then, the camouflaged computer connections had been employed for video games and movies.

Three minutes later, Venice had a laptop booted up, the images from which were visible to all on the 55-inch flat screen that dominated the space over the fireplace. When everyone was seated, the group looked like they might have been watching a football game together.

“Okay, Dylan,” she said. “Walk me through it. I know what you think. Now show me why you think it.”

When you’re working in a vacuum of information, random events can shape themselves into patterns that develop into assumptions that lead to obvious conclusions that, while self-apparent, are also wrong. Given the nature of the work performed by Security Solutions, those incorrect assumptions were the event that Venice dreaded most. Digger Grave depended upon her and her analyses to make judgments that often led to situations resolved by gunfire. The
obvious
was no more than a wild-ass guess if the underpinning facts were not correct.

When starting her analysis with so preposterous a notion that the military structure of the United States was emulating the failed strategies of the Third World, her bull-fritters meter was dialed up to its highest gain. She pushed back against Dylan’s attempts to bully her thorough the step-by-step analysis of the information he’d gleaned, telling him no less than five times that she was not interested in the conclusions he had drawn for himself. “You’re here to answer my questions,” she said at one point, “not to offer your opinion. If I want that, I know exactly where you are sitting, and I will ask for it.”

After about twenty minutes of sifting through the various random threads of data, though, she reached out and asked Dylan to reveal the connective tissue he saw between websites and e-mails and blog postings. She realized that while she could probably have done it on her own, the sorting effort would have taken hours, if not days.

Dylan led her through his thought process. It started with a group called The Uprising, which at its surface sounded like any one of a thousand nutjob militia websites that called for the reclamation of lost rights recently seized by the federal government. What set this one apart from the others, it turned out, was the fact that it attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

“It can’t be too right wing,” Boxers quipped. “It hasn’t attracted the IRS.” He laughed, but no one else did. Given the fallout, it was just too soon.

“And here’s where it gets complicated,” Dylan said. “This should have just been accepted as rantings from those who rant. But this one—this
one
—blog rose to the attention of the CIA. Now if you dig a little deeper . . .” He directed Venice down the communication paths. “Look at all the respondents to what the Commander has written. Read the syntax of the postings. These are educated people, people who know how to construct sentences. If you scroll through these, pay attention to the words and phrases that are used.”

Dylan clicked on one from DsgrntldAgt. “Look at this. Disgruntled Agent uses the phrase National Command Authority. Who uses that phrase outside of the Community? And here. And note the handle. ‘Agent’ is at the very least provocative.” He directed Venice to another contributing account. “There. WarFighter writes, ‘I lost too many friends to see it all be for nothing.’ ”

“You’re being generous with the spelling,” Venice said. The actual post talked about “two menny freinds.”

“But there are dozens of instances like that,” Dylan said. “This site is attracting the attention of not just people who have a capability to organize and do harm, but also the attention of the government.”

“Isn’t that what the government is paid to do?” Jonathan asked. “Pay attention to those who make threatening gestures toward the underpinnings of the nation?”

“You can’t pick at this,” Dylan said. “You can’t pull it apart piecemeal. There is clearly a trend. And we’re talking about hundreds of posts. Maybe a thousand or more. Dozens of posters.”

“Dozens of crazy people among three hundred million tired, jaded, but arguably sane citizens,” Jonathan said. “Given the sample size, I don’t hear the alarms you’re hearing.”

“That’s because you haven’t spent as much time with all of this as I have,” Dylan said. “Here, let me have the mouse.” He took the tool from Venice’s hand—he was lucky to have not lost an eye in the process—and he started plowing through the evidence. Over the course of the next forty minutes, he conducted a guided tour through his paranoid world.

As Jonathan watched, he saw a pattern emerge. So many of the angry posters projected an insider’s view to the world of warfare and clandestine operations. There was talk of friends lost to IEDs and of sources who were burned—spook-speak for betrayed and executed. This was not just a select few, but dozens of posters, all with separate handles and avatars. If Jonathan read the syntax and the sentiments correctly, they were looking at agents of the Secret Service and the CIA and the FBI, whose participation in such a blog would have resulted in immediate termination and potentially even criminal prosecution. By far the most prevalent poster profile, however, resonated to Jonathan’s ear as current or former military. They were pissed that a near-victory had been surrendered, and that the sacrifices of so many had been squandered by a president who, in their estimation, had never sacrificed anything for anyone.

The anger registered with Jonathan as very real, as did the vows for revenge. But this was the stuff of crazy talk everywhere. There had to be dozens—hundreds—of websites just like this one in every corner of the Blogosphere. What made this one—this
one
—the subject of so much concern to Dylan?

“It’s the organization of it,” Dylan explained. He continued to manipulate Venice’s mouse. “As I go through these next pages, notice the Commander’s subtle but very real call to action.” He moved his mouse to a threaded conversation between the Commander and Darmondcide4. “Look at this exchange,” Dylan said. “Darmondcide—no points for being subtle on the handle, eh?—spouts hateful stuff and alludes to special violent skills. Now look at the response. The Commander writes, ‘you should read Sun Tsu’s
Art of War
on March 25 on booksrock.com.’ ”

Dylan clicked some more. “Now look here. Booksrock dot com shows a lot of book reviews from thousands of titles. But if you look up
The Art of War
and scroll to March 25, look at what you find. This rave review for a forgotten book is signed ‘National Truth Teller 3-23-27.’ ”

“I think I’m getting dizzy,” Rollins said.

“Then hang on to your ass,” Dylan responded. “Because this ride is about to get really wild. The National Truth Teller is an online e-zine with a few thousand followers.”

“Never heard of it,” Jonathan said.

“That’s because you can read without moving your lips,” Dylan said. “It’s a site that is one hundred percent antiestablishment, one hundred percent anti-mainstream media, but only about twenty percent wrong in their reporting of facts. They’ve never smelled a conspiracy they didn’t buy, if only for stroking their sales base.” He clicked away from Booksrock and over to the National Truth Teller.

“If we go to the March twenty-third issue—the ‘three twenty-three’ from the Booksrock signature line—and then to page twenty-seven, look what we find.” He navigated to the spot, a classified ad, and then magnified the image to make his point. He read the text aloud. “ ‘Freedom isn’t free. True patriots know that. Coffee Central, Shepherdstown, WV 4/1. You’ll know if you make the cut.’ ”

After reading the ad, he looked up, as if expecting a round of applause. The others gaped.

“I’m not following you,” Venice said. Jonathan thought it was good that hers was the first voice to be heard. His assessment would have been harsher.

“He’s recruiting an army,” Dylan said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Of course he is,” Boxers said. “I see it plain as day.”

“You’re being sarcastic,” Dylan said.

“A little bit, yeah.”

“It’s a pattern that plays out over and over again,” Dylan said. “Now, if we go back to the Uprising page and do a search for Sun Tsu, look how many times it shows up.” He clicked and revealed a list of at least two dozen mentions. “But the references to the book review for
The Art of War
cover all kinds of whack-job publications, all on different dates, and all referring to different public spaces in and near West Virginia. All of them low-key. Several independent coffee shops, several independent bookstores. He never repeats the locale, either.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s recruiting an army,” Rollins said.

“In context, it’s a pretty good guess,” Jonathan countered. “Not conclusive, but certainly intriguing.” He turned to Venice. “Okay, wise mistress of electrons, what can you do to help us out here?”