by A. C. Fuller
Her head spun. She called Gabby—straight to voicemail. She called Warren. Five rings to voicemail. Unsure what to do, she sat down to write.
She checked her email for a message from Frias, who'd promised to follow up with an Ana Diaz interview transcript. She didn't know what it would be, but she was certain she'd find a connection between Diaz and Ibo Kane there.
She had an email from Frias, but not the promised transcript. The subject line read: WTF. The email was a link to an article on a website called Crush Cycle, a celebrity gossip site that blurred the lines between made-up tabloid journalism and accurate reporting. Their motto was Crush Cycle: We CRUSH the news cycle.
The article was only a few lines long and led to a video.
The video was surveillance-cam footage and it took Cole a moment to orient herself. Three people walked down a dark path, houses on either side. The shot was from above, as though a camera had been mounted high on the side of a building.
But the buildings on either side of the walkway weren't houses. They were too small to be houses. They were rectangular boxes, all the same height. Ten or twelve feet tall. Two men and a woman. Something about them was familiar.
They reached a door and one of the men opened it. She recognized that door. Now she recognized the people.
She nearly fell back in her chair. "Oh, no."
The other man was Warren. The woman was Cole herself. The video was surveillance camera footage from Michael Wragg's storage unit in New Jersey.
"Oh, God, no."
10
Warren wandered through foggy streets, unsure where he was going. The late-afternoon chill had set in, and the sliver of sun that had peeked through the clouds earlier was gone.
He'd lied to Cole. He had an hour before his meeting with his old professor. Punching the dumpster had released some of his rage, but it was creeping back. He stopped in front of a coffee shop called Calm Brews and took a few deep breaths. His AA sponsor's voice echoed in his head, repeating one word over and over. "Trauma."
Warren inhaled the cold, coffee-scented air. He opened his eyes wide, scanning the buildings. "Trauma." He wasn't fond of the term PTSD, but that's probably what was going on.
He'd known right away that the man in the trench coat was a suicide bomber. He'd seen plenty of them in Afghanistan. Women, men, even a nine-year-old boy. A boy who'd strapped a bomb to his chest and killed one of his buddies. He never thought he'd see the same thing in London.
His AA sponsor told him that recognizing trauma when it resurfaced was the first step. In Warren, the trauma often came with rage. Historically, he'd either numbed the rage with booze, or tried to outrun it with coke. He didn't want to do that again.
He stepped into the coffee shop and ordered a black coffee. "Burnt, if possible."
The woman behind the counter gave him an odd look, like he was joking. "Two quid, ninety."
He was surprised by her British accent and immediately felt stupid. Of course she'd have a British accent. He fumbled with coins and paid.
She handed him the coffee. "American?" she asked.
"How'd you know?"
"You didn't give me enough." She reached into his hand and took another coin, allowing—or making—her fingertips brush his palm as she pulled her hand away. "We do take cards, you know."
Warren glanced up. Her eyes met hers immediately. He hadn't been looked at this way in a while. "From California, originally. Now I'm in New York."
"Fuhgeddaboudit."
He smiled. "Where'd you hear that?"
"Friends, maybe. I can't remember. Do people actually say that in the States?"
"No one I know. White dudes from Jersey, maybe?"
"Where's that?"
"Across the water."
A man stood behind Warren, craning his neck to read the menu.
"You going to drink that here?" the woman asked. "I get off in an hour. I could show you around the city."
"Yeah, maybe…"
"You should stay." She delayed a moment before moving her eyes to the man in line behind him.
The woman was about ten years younger than him, pretty, and shockingly forward. He thought of Cole back at the hotel, then of Sarah. He'd been with a few women since Sarah made him move out, but nothing serious and nothing that didn't make him feel empty afterwards. The attention felt good, distracted him from his darker feelings.
His phone rang and he checked the caller-ID. Cole. He sent it to voicemail.
The man who'd been behind him took his coffee and left. Warren leaned on the counter. "You get a lot of Americans in here?"
"A few. Hold on." The woman pulled a cellphone from her apron, sat on the counter, and leaned back, resting her head on Warren's shoulder. Before he knew what she was doing, she flashed a peace sign and took a selfie.
He stepped back. "Why'd you… oh, wait… did you see the video?"
"They're calling you The Rock, Jr., ya know. Duane Johnson. He's huge on this side of the pond, and you look a little like him. Slightly darker, maybe, but you've got his build. I'm an aspiring TV host. You should get an agent."
Warren sipped his coffee. It was weak. And not burnt. He threw it in the trash and walked out.
11
The shot cut to an interior via a different surveillance camera, this one aimed at the face of the young front desk clerk. Cole recognized his greasy red hair. Warren's face entered the frame, then hers.
Watching herself gave her an eerie, creeping feeling. Hollow and full at the same time. Unreal and extra-real.
They reached the end of the hallway. Warren looked straight into the camera. Next to him, the kid tapped a code into the keypad on the door of Michael Wragg's storage unit. Cole stood with an intense look on her face, as though she could will herself into the storage unit. Did she really look like that?
As the door to the unit rose, the shot changed.
She recognized the location immediately. She knew what was coming. The footage was much clearer—a large hotel lobby, marble floors, a pale yellow runner leading to a section of colorful sofas and vases of flowers. The hotel in Miami where The Truffle Pig shot Ana Diaz. The video from the storage unit wasn't timestamped, but this one was. It was shot only minutes after Ana Diaz was killed.
For an instant, she allowed herself to believe this wasn't what she thought it was, allowed herself to believe she'd see The Truffle Pig hurrying through the lobby. But she knew better. This video was a frame job. After a moment, Warren appeared. A second later, she appeared and followed Warren out a glass door. That's where they'd stolen the airport shuttle van to follow The Truffle Pig through southern Florida.
The shot didn't shift to an exterior of them stealing the van. Instead, the footage played again from the beginning. The dark path in the sea of storage units. But this time there was a voiceover.
"An international brotherhood, united by General Ki for a singular mission: to end the great replacement, to restore the sovereignty of nations, to birth a new era of freedom."
Cole listened once, then rewound fifteen seconds and listened again.
"An international brotherhood, united by General Ki for a singular mission: to end the great replacement, to restore the sovereignty of nations, to birth a new era of freedom."
She thought she'd seen it all. Heard it all. But the recording broke her. As though all the energy had left her body at once, she crumpled and fell to the floor.
The voice on the recording was her own.
12
Warren followed his phone's GPS, passing through multiple business districts before reaching a section of tree-lined blocks and row after row of three-storey homes. His professor lived in a posh neighborhood called West Brompton, and the area looked as pretentious as it sounded.
Professor Simon Smith taught political and legal history Warren's freshman year in college, but now worked at a think tank in London. Smith had sparked Warren's fascination with history and, even though Warren had gone into law enforcement, he'd always
told himself he'd go back to school to get a PhD in history. He knew he probably wouldn't, but it was the lie he told himself to keep going.
The home had a white marble facade and two black Mercedes parked out front, a station wagon, and a convertible. It wasn't what Warren expected from the man he remembered as a left-leaning radical professor.
Warren's phone rang just as he knocked on the door. Cole again. He silenced it and shoved the phone back into his jeans as the door opened.
Simon Smith looked nothing like Warren remembered. Around fifty now, he sported short white hair and a dark brown suit. Expensive, but bland. Smith had been a pony-tailed thirty-something when Warren knew him, always raving about "smashing the power structures that shape history."
Smith peered over his lowered glasses. "Come in, Rob. Punctual, as always."
They entered a small study—dark wood, brass fixtures, and antique furniture. Smith took a seat behind a desk and gestured to a small wooden chair that looked likely to snap if Warren sat in it. "Don't worry." Smith had noticed Warren's look of concern. "Oak, from 1721. Solid as they come, that chair! Three hundred years old. Can you believe that? A slice of Europe's history."
Warren sat cautiously. Behind the desk, a large framed photo displayed a smiling Smith shaking hands with Boris Johnson, the conservative Prime Minister.
Life imitated art as Smith flashed the same smarmy smile from the photo. "You're wondering what happened to me?"
He must have read Warren's confusion. "Seems like things have changed for you, yeah. His and hers Benzes, Boris Johnson, that suit. What happened to smashing the system?"
He ran a hand through his hair. "I'm still doing that, but the system has changed, Rob. The good guys are now the bad guys, and the radicals like me have, well, we've grown up." He smiled again, then clapped his hands as though remembering something suddenly. "I didn't know when I took your call that I'd be welcoming a viral video sensation into my home. What happened?"
Warren looked away. "That was nothing."
"Nothing, he says. Look at your hand! You're a hero. And the bombing?" He shook his head sadly. "Terrible thing, that."
Warren's phone rang again. He silenced it without glancing down. "Sorry about that. Look, I don't have long. And really, the saving-the-kid thing was nothing. Right place at the right time. I didn't know there'd be a video."
"Humble, too? You're such an… American, Rob."
He wanted to remind Smith that he was, too, but instead said, "You have a theory about the nine murders?"
"You're investigating?"
Warren didn't want to get into it. "Sort of." He leaned forward. The chair creaked, but felt solid enough. Smith had been right about that, at least. "How do you make sense of all this?"
Smith stood and put his hands in his pockets. He walked to a bookshelf and, back to Warren, cleared his throat. "Not long ago, America and other western democracies were celebrating the triumph of liberalism. The Soviet Union had fallen and China—we all believed—would eventually be forced to adopt a western-style democratic system. Right?" He paused, smiled at Warren briefly, then turned back to the bookshelf. "Wrong! The country with one-fifth of the world's population invented a new route, and their economic rise over the last thirty years is without precedent in human history. I mean that literally. Their economic power is broad enough to change every industry in every country on earth. Hollywood studios recut their films for the Chinese market, essentially allowing Chinese censors to dictate the output of American artists. American companies limit the speech of their employees to avoid offending their Chinese partners. Their economic power is subtle, but immense."
He spoke like Warren wasn't there, like he was recording a video lecture for a class. He had an affected air, like the uptight British guy in a movie. As a young professor, he'd talked about his childhood in Florida. He'd worked hard to get rid of the accent, Warren thought. He didn't have a British one yet, not exactly. Instead, his voice was more like an American doing a bad impression of a snotty British person.
"And—unlike America and certain American politicians—the Chinese ethos doesn't allow for boastfulness. Quite the opposite. Their strategy is to grow steadily, bide their time—to be stealthy. Their single-party system is one of their greatest strengths. In America, politicians are moved by a news cycle, by elections every two, four, or six years." He swiveled to face Warren, as though only now remembering he was there. "In China? No elections. The president is president for life. Don't like something he's doing? Too bad. So he can think long-term, strategically, in ways most western democracies struggle with."
"So how would you define their economic system?" Warren asked.
Smith shrugged. "It can't be compared to much. They're sort of airbrushing the Communism out of it, but they still use the old lingo in public. In reality, it's a kind of centralized, ruthless capitalism."
"The Beijing Consensus?"
Smith smiled and turned back to the bookcase. "Very good, Rob. You've done the reading. When Mao died forty-four years ago, that's when The Beijing Consensus started. That's their policy, though it's not really a policy. It means 'anything that happens in China.'"
"How does what's happening in China relate to the murders or the manifesto? Where are you going with all this?"
"It's so different from what we have in the West. With a one-party system, things run more smoothly. Anyone gets out of line, they're eliminated. If a nail sticks up, they hammer it down. Here in Western Europe—and it's similar in America—there are too many competing interests. For centuries, our openness and diversity and ideas got us ahead. Now they're tearing us apart. And they'll continue to do so. You see, if the manifesto is to be believed, the terrorists, whether they know it or not, are battling real economic and social forces. After World War Two, democracy flourished in the west and, by all measures, improved the world. In 2005, a decline began. Wages stagnated in many places. Illiberal tendencies crept back. In 2008, the global economic crisis laid bare the truth for many. Right now, the twenty-six richest people on earth own more than the bottom half combined, more than the poorest 3.5 billion people. That's a simple fact. The fascinating thing is the wildly different things people want to do with that fact. Some, traditionally known as the left, want to seize a percentage of that wealth and redistribute it. Another group, often thought of as the right, assume it will trickle down and everyone's standards will go up over time. But there's a big pocket—made up of what used to be the left and right, the ones who actually make up that 3.5 billion—who just want to, and pardon my language here, blow shit up. They're pissed, and who can blame them? In China, they never would have been allowed the freedom to dissent. The openness of the western system will be its downfall."
"So you sympathize with the aims of the terrorists?"
"Their aims? Yes. Their methods? No." He continued earnestly. "It pains me to see people trying to make sense of these assassins without a full understanding of the complexity of the economic and political forces at play. Americans always think it's about them, forgetting that Europe has a much longer and more complicated history. After the financial crisis of 2008, austerity ravaged Greece, but it also hammered Italy. Now imagine you're a grandma in Tuscany and one of the great prides in your life is the ancient culture in your little village. A culture that existed for five-hundred years before the founding of the United States. Food, espresso, quiet afternoons on a stone street drinking wine. One day a boat of Syrian refugees shows up because your government—in partnership with the European Union—told them they could. Maybe you don't like them because you're racist. Or maybe you don't like them because you're attached to the tiny slice of life you're trying to hand down to your grandkids. And, by the way, your grandson had to leave Italy to find a job because of thirty percent youth unemployment. Now, after eighty years in your little village, the European Union is telling you, 'Guess what: the Italy you know and love is over.' Look, is splitting the EU apart going to save the world? Probably not. But I
'm not the rural Frenchwoman who can't afford gas. I'm not the British worker whose factory moved to Hungary or Poland. And I'm not that grandma in Tuscany wondering who all these new people are."
Warren opened his mouth to object, but Smith raised his hand as though silencing a crowd. "I know you're gonna say it's racist, but before you do, put yourself in the shoes of that grandma in Tuscany."
Warren's phone vibrated with a new text. When Smith turned back to the bookshelf, he glanced at it.
Jane Cole: I know who's behind the murders. Get back here.
Smith was still going. "Is it any wonder you'd embrace a far right, nationalist politician? Is it any wonder that, deep down, you'd support these terrorists—and they are terrorists—who say, 'Enough of this shit, we're taking our countries back.'"
He said it like a professor, a sort of open ended question. But it was no question. Smith agreed with the group behind the murders. On the phone he'd told Warren he had a theory. This was no theory; it was a socio-economic justification for their manifesto.
Another text arrived.
Jane Cole: Also, I'm freaking out. PLEASE get back here.
Smith noticed him reading the text. "The invention of those infernal devices is why I got out of teaching. I make a profound statement about the future of democracy and you're on your screen."
"Sorry… um, sorry. I—"
"I'm only teasing."
Warren read the texts again.
Jane Cole: I know who's behind the murders. Get back here.
Jane Cole: Also, I'm freaking out. PLEASE get back here.
He stood to leave. "Thanks for your time, Professor Smith. You've given me a lot to think about."
13
By the time Warren arrived, Cole had watched the video six times, closing her laptop each time and promising herself she wouldn't watch it again.
She'd called Gabby three more times, desperate to talk to someone who could tell her where the video had come from or how to get it taken down. The very idea was ridiculous—the video was already on a hundred websites and all over Twitter and Facebook. It had passed "Viral" and gone straight into "Break the Internet" status. More than the previous articles, the video implied that Cole and Warren were connected to the murders.