Geek Mafia (28 page)

Inside the large white conversion van parked less than a block away, the signal reached Chloe. "All right troopers. On the bounce." The van's rear doors swung wide and out came five sad-faced clowns wearing bright yellow knee-high rubber boots and neon green jumpsuits with biohazard symbols sewn onto their backs. Chloe led the way, wearing a clown mask and an astonishingly large purple afro-style wig. She brandished a bullhorn in one hand and a sign proclaiming "FREE TRADE = BLOOD TRADE" in the other.

Behind her came Paul and Popper, who were wrestling with a six-foot tall papier-mâché Starbucks coffee cup that had a bent straw poking out of the top of it. The final two clowns, Filo and Kurt, unfurled a long canvas banner strung between two wooden dowels that they used as handles. As soon as they cleared the van they lofted the banner above their heads and revealed its entire ten foot long message: "BEANS BREWED IN

BLOOD - OIL DRILLED FROM FLESH." Paul had been very insistent that the slogans have a very visceral tone.

Chloe put the bullhorn to her mouth as she led her squad of protestors straight for the gap between the crowd and the front of the stage. Four blocks away, two other Crew members were staging a boisterous "domestic dispute" that had already drawn the full attention of the nearest police officers.

"Ladies and Gentlemen!" shouted Chloe, "Boys and Girls, Children of All Ages! Welcome to the Bourgeois Festival of The Exploited!" Everyone from the mayor on down turned towards the bizarre troupe. Expressions ranged from startled puzzlement to startled anger, with little in the way of friendly smiles except from some of the kids.

"We are the Harlequins of Hegemony! The Clowns of Corporatocracy! The Jesters of Justice! We're here to bring you all the news that's fit to spew! Everything you were afraid to ask about the startling link between the black bile you pour down your throats and the black bile you pour into your gas tanks!"

The mayor, being a take-charge kind of woman, stepped up to the microphone and said, "Excuse me, you need a permit to..." Which was all anyone heard once Bee hit the switch that remotely shorted the stage's sound system. Without electronic assistance, the mayor couldn't compete with Chloe's magnified verbal screed. That's ok, thought Paul, it would all be over soon enough.

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Under the cover of Chloe's shouted ravings, the team had reached the front of the crowd, all of whom were more than eager to make way for them. Fear of the unexpected intimidates large crowds of yuppies with ease.

Plus, five of the crowd members were part of the Crew, planted there right up front to help direct the assembled yuppie mob in the right direction.

Chloe continued, "You fuel your bodies with the fruits of wage-slave labor! You drive your SUV's with liquid drawn from the body of Mother Earth without any concern for her or even your own well-being!"

Paul and Popper raised the coffee-cup contraption onto their shoulders, the bent straw pointed directly at the crowd. Paul reached under the cup's bottom with one hand and found the pump switch.

"This festival of the damned you've all come to! This desperately contrived, false, feel-good affair is sponsored by two of the world's most despicable and hateful criminal cabals!" She gestured with her sign towards the corporate logos on the stage backdrop. The mayor was yelling for security, but no one could hear her. "This is a festival of death, oppression and, most of all, BLOOD!"

Paul hit the switch and Bee's ingenious pump mechanism sprang flawlessly into action. The straw atop the coffee cup concealed a nozzle that shot forth a jet of blood red liquid that arced out over the crowd. Paul and Popper swiveled the coffee cup back and forth, spraying as much of the suddenly screaming and retreating yuppies as possible. Urged on by the crew members in their midst, the crowd began to retreat back towards the craft tents.

After thirty seconds the blood reservoir was empty. Chloe was just shouting wordlessly into the bullhorn now, ululating madly to further rile up the crowd. When she saw the blood run empty, she paused for the briefest moment to turn towards her comrades. "Ok, ditch and run. Now." She then started screaming again as she turned towards the van and took off at a full run.

They heaved the coffee cup forward towards the retreating crowd. With the reservoir empty it was pretty light.

No one had ever touched any piece of the contraption without wearing latex gloves, and none of the common parts used in its construction could ever be traced back to them. Even the tools used to put the pump together had been disposed of, lest some ambitious policeman someday try to compare tool marks. The long banner fell to the ground as well, and the four clowns raced off after their leader.

Behind them the police had finally arrived on the scene, but there was too much going on for them to even make sense of what had happened here. The mayor was screeching at them from up on the stage, so naturally their first instinct was to make sure she was OK. As the two cops fought through the crowd towards the stage, Chloe and company were already piling into their van.

Across the park, perched on the porch of a nearby restaurant, a lanky diner watched the whole scene unfold through the viewfinder of his camcorder. He didn't manage to catch the van's license plate as it sped off towards the highway entrance, but that was by design. As order once again exerted itself in the park, Raff shut the camcorder off and put down $20 to cover his lunch. He wanted to make sure he got on the road before this crowd decided they'd had enough excitement for one day and headed home. He had at least one TV station to visit before the evening news.

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Chapter 23

"Fuck Yeah!" hooted Paul in the back of the van as he clawed the clown wig from his head. "Whoooo!" The rest of the crew couldn't help themselves from laughing at Paul's enthusiasm. "That was awesome! I can't believe that actually worked! The blood! Did you see their reaction?"

"And let's not forget the all-important getaway," Chloe chimed in. She was watching out the van's tinted back window, alert for any sign of police pursuit. They'd gotten off the highway just a few miles down from where they got on and were now driving at a sensible, circuitous pace through the streets of Campbell, working their way towards San Jose proper where they could ditch the van and transfer to separate vehicles.

"Right!" said Paul. "The getaway! Very important to the whole plan. Fuck! I still can't believe we pulled that off, can you? They're going to be talking about that for YEARS!"

"So, what's next Paul?" asked Chloe. "This is your show."

"Well, first we see how good Raff's videotaping skills are," said Paul, his mind racing forward through the next steps of the plan. "I checked out the Web site this morning and that all looked great. So as soon as we get Bee's pics we can upload those to the site along with our communiqué."

"Sounds like you've got a handle on everything."

"I think so. You'll let me know if I'm screwing up too badly, I'm sure."

"No, I won't let you screw up at all." Chloe turned back and smiled at him. "You're doing great. Just keep your head and everything will come together for you."

"Thanks. I hope so."

"It will, but first you've gotta get that fucking clown makeup off."

Paul laughed. He had forgotten all about the white face paint. Chloe had worn a mask so she could change back to 'normal' quickly and do the driving. The other four had gone for the full on make-up. "Really? Just when I was starting to like my new look."

"Your choice hotshot," she said as she tossed him a damp towel. "But I'll tell you one thing - no way I'm kissing that face."

Paul started to wipe his face clean, "Well, the clown look is so last season. Perhaps I should reconsider."

"Good choice," said Chloe.

Three of the four local TV stations led their early evening newscasts with the Los Gatos protest story. Raff had managed to quickly cut up his video into different bite sized chunks so that each station could have its own "exclusive." Even with the video, it might have been a minor human-interest story or even gone unnoticed. Instead, it had been catapulted to the lead by the mass e-mail that Paul sent out to every media outlet in the Bay Area.

The anchorwoman on Channel 4 said, "Shock and dismay today in Los Gatos as radical anarchist protestors calling themselves the Global Freedom Army disrupted a community event with a grisly display. As this exclusive video shows, although they were dressed as clowns, these protestors were anything but funny."

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This particular clip showed a wide shot of the five clowns standing before the crowd and then cut to a closer in shot of the giant coffee cup spraying blood over the surprised onlookers.

"Channel 4 has just received a message from the group claiming responsibility for the disruption in which they claim that they sprayed Mad Cow infected blood on the unsuspecting fair goers. Channel 4 has not been able to confirm this with local health authorities but we are urging everyone exposed to take appropriate precautions."

"Perfect!" exclaimed Paul from the couch in Chloe's living room. "They'll have the story right in a couple of hours when they find out it's just food coloring and water, but that Mad Cow meme is going to make it around the internet and back before the real story gets out. We've got our first impression!"

"And we all know how important those are," said Raff from the easy chair. "Great job, Paul. I can't believe they bought it."

"It's local TV news. They'll show anything as long as it sounds exciting. What's the saying? If it bleeds, it leads."

They flipped to the other news channels and saw similar stories. Everyone was leading with the Mad Cow angle and Raff's videos were the stars of the show.

"How's our Web coverage going?" Paul called out.

From the Server Room, Chloe shouted back, "Ready to go now. We're hitting all the big time right-wing blogs as soon as the news finishes their coverage."

Paul, a long time blog reader, had created a dozen or so personas for the Crew to use as they posted on the message boards and comments sections of some of the most popular conservative Web sites. They'd been using these false identities for two weeks in order to establish some bona fides with the other people who regularly visited the sites. Each persona had a different but decidedly right-wing point of view, ranging from the radically religious to the ultra-free market conservative. The crewmembers would post a wide range of comments that Paul had prepared about the "horrible happenings" in Los Gatos, stirring up the pot of outrage with as many different spoons as possible.

As the last of the news casts finished its coverage, the Crew sprang into action and posted the first comment.

Over the next two hours, they spread the word to every conservative corner of the Web. Paul himself logged on to post one of his favorite concoctions:

So-called "radicals" (read, leftwing whackos) are at it again. They sprayed Diseased Blood over families and
CHILDREN in a park in California. Diseased like there own blood but supposedly from a cow with Mad Cow
sickness. Can you believe these traitors?!?!? They don't deserve to breath air in the USA much less have
rights and vote (not that they're ever smart enough to do that probably). We need to do something to help stop
these people and help the good people they sprayed diseased blood on.

_

Paul thought the awkward writing and grammatical errors more than captured the hurried phrasing of an
incensed right winger. He'd written a couple hundred of these things, including complete dialogues between
different on-screen identities. Thus armed, the Crew could control the direction of conversation and steer
things their way.

They stayed away from chat rooms, where the dynamic flow of conversation was harder to monitor and shape.

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Besides, all the best debate (and flame wars) took place in the comments sections of political blogs and on a
few select message boards. Within just a few hours, several of the sites had whole comment threads devoted
exclusively to the outrage in Los Gatos. The Crew was actually having a hard time keeping ahead of the
conversation - although they'd hacked some of the sites so they could control the discourse with even more
precision.

The six o'clock news repeated the same story as an hour before, although they'd inserted an extra bit
affirming that authorities denied that anyone had been exposed to Mad Cow disease and that the blood was
fake. Nevertheless, in the service of sensationalism, the newscasts left enough qualifiers and doubts in their
news copy that a panicky viewer might still suspect that something truly awful had happened. It would be
another five hours before the local news would come out with a more forceful (and truthful) view of what had
actually happened. By that time, the Internet version of the story would become an almost unstoppable force.

At seven PM, Paul gave the signal for the Global Freedom Army's Web site to go live. Hosted out of the
country and through a series of blinds that made tracing it back to them impossible, the site featured video
clips taken by Bee's hidden camera along with the full text of the group's anti-corporate, anti-free trade
manifesto. The front page featured a large pic of a man in a polo shirt and Dockers getting drenched in

"blood" as he stood in Los Gatos park earlier that day. Above it was the headline: THIS IS ONLY THE

BEGINNING, while below it said WE WILL STRIKE AGAIN FOR FREEDOM!

As soon as the site went live, the Crew started linking to it on all the blogs they'd spent the last few hours
prepping for this very moment. Even without their further intervention, the right-wing readers would have
exploded into outrage at the site, but with Paul and company leading the way, the self-righteous calls for
action reached a fevered pitch.