Open Secret

by Fiona Quinn

  “Maybe you can see I’m stuck and out of options? Windsor Shreveport isn’t my dream job, especially now, believe me. But I can’t police the world. I’m going to have to believe, that since God is the maker of Heaven and Earth, if any smiting needed to be done, then God could aim his lightning bolt and sit back laughing after it strikes Taylor Knapp down.”

  Avery watched anger brighten Curtis’s pale blue eyes.

  “Avery, be careful what you say.” He pitched his voice low, biting out each word. “Your soul is already tainted by your association with the Devil’s book. Don’t add to the sin by presuming God would have a sense of humor.”

  “Give me a viable option, hell, give me a quasi-viable option, and I’ll take it.”

  “I don’t want you to suffer the wrath of God. I don’t want your soul to fall into perdition,” Curtis shouted.

  In response, Ginny’s cracked screech of a voice rose in the den with an operatic Gloria in excelsis Deo.

  “Thanks,” Avery bit out, looking toward the den. “That’s bound to last for the next five hours.” She picked up the kitchen towel and swiped it across the counter. She lifted her chin to read the clock. “It’s almost lunch time now, so you’re heading home to do as you please. Meanwhile, I’m living my purgatory.” The cloth dangled from her clenched fist as Avery pointed to the cacophony in the other room. “Don’t you think?”

  Curtis stared at the table, an internal argument seemed to churn in his brain. Avery was too tired to deal with him. She grabbed up the glass of water and went to her mom, hoping to distract her with something to drink and nip a singing marathon in the bud.

  Avery found her sister gathering the boys for their departure. A fake smile spread across Fanny’s face. Her eyebrows lifted with nervous energy. “Gotta go,” she said brightly, as she shoved her magazine into her purse and bee-lined for the door.

  Avery caught her sister by the sleeve. “Listen, Fanny.”

  “Stephanie,” she hissed.

  Avery rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I have to fly to New York next week for three nights. You’ll need to pick up Mom and have her stay with you overnight. It’s Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights that I’ll be gone. Since Sally isn’t working today, she said she’d work that Saturday.”

  Panic flashed across Fanny’s face.

  “My flight should be back in time to be here before Sally clocks out on Saturday. But I’ll call you with a heads up if my flight gets delayed.” Avery pushed up against the wall as her nephews barrelled out the door.

  “Can’t there be another arrangement?” Fanny laced her fingers, holding them under her chin as she begged. “Can’t we hire someone for the night shifts, so she can stay at your house?”

  “Sure, if you can pay for it. It’s time-and-a-half, and my budget is stretched to breaking now.”

  "But you don’t understand. The last time she stayed with us, she sprinkled holy water around the doorframes like a scene from the Exorcist. Then the next night, Curtis found her in the boys’ room, standing on a chair reciting the rosary and trying to cast the demons out. He had to pull her bodily out of their room. I was down in the kitchen drinking the cooking sherry to get through it."

  Avery folded her arms. “Not my problem.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Rowan

  Friday afternoon

  Washington D.C. FBI satellite office.

  Arms outstretched, Rowan stood patiently while the guard ran a wand over his suit and checked his credentials.

  His colleague, Deputy Assistant Director Amanda Frost, waited for him on the other side of the check point. “Thanks for coming on short notice.” They moved together to the elevator. Their footsteps echoed in the empty hallway.

  “Slow day?” Rowan asked.

  “A lot of folks are at one of the offices for a presentation.” She tapped the button to call an elevator. “How was your flight back stateside? You look like shit, by the way.”

  Rowan chuckled. “The flight home was uneventful, thankfully.”

  As the doors slid open, they stepped on to the elevator. Rowan was glad they had it all to themselves. “I have some bad news.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Amanda said, jabbing the nine button.

  “Jodie and I broke it off.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry about that.” A frown of concern formed on her brow.

  “Yeah, that’s not the bad news.”

  “Oh shit,” she whispered, leaning her hips against the elevator wall and crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Jodie posted a tweet, tying my personal Rowman Twitter account that I use to talk with writers about the craft and so forth, to my Dark Matters account. She was drunk and angry. She erased it. But the damage is done.”

  “Maybe not. How fast did she get it down? Right away?”

  “Next morning. Lisa Griffin saw it and told me. When I checked the Dark Matters account, I was blocked by a good number of people I had been following.”

  “Wait, I don’t understand.” She came back to her feet as the elevator bounced to a stop. “Did you say you were FBI on the Rowman account? Why would Dark Matters followers worry about you and your writing buddies?”

  Rowan held the door for Amanda, then they started down the hall. “I didn’t identify my job as FBI anywhere. But it had a banner picture of me sculling in D.C. And Jodie said that Dark Matters was my work account. Since the Dark Matters IP address is in Bulgaria, the D.C. photos were a pretty big tell that I wasn’t who I said I was. I suspended both accounts to give myself time to make a plan.”

  She put her hand on the conference room doorknob and stalled. “Shit. That took years to build.”

  “I was afraid something might happen—some hacker with a high skillset could trace the account back to me, or what have you, so I built a parallel persona. Fornicate. It’s spelled f-o-r-n-i-c-then the number eight.

  “Nice.” She rolled her eyes.

  Rowan shifted on his feet. “I was trying to appeal to a certain kind of target.”

  “Understood.”

  A man came up behind them and paused. Amanda moved back from the door to stand at the corner of the corridor. Rowan followed her over and lowered his voice. “Fornic8 never spoke to Dark Matters. And is fairly quiet. But that account has been helpful to the participants, so it still has good standing. Its IP is in Poland.”

  “So all is not lost?” she asked.

  “All? No. Too much? Yes. I mean, I’ve lost relationships that Fornic8 doesn’t have.”

  “I’m really sorry. How did Jodie even know about this account?”

  He scrubbed both hands over his face and leaned backward as he remembered that fight. “I was working from home during that big snowstorm last year.” He focused back on Amanda. “Jodie saw it over my shoulder and asked about it, thinking I might be catfishing or having an affair. I explained it was a work account, she wasn’t quite convinced, so I showed her the followers list, which was long. It was full of symbols, flags, and men. She seemed convinced, and the subject was dropped. And I had hoped forgotten. I thought it was safer than having her go in and friend folks to spy on me.”

  “She’d do that?”

  “Who knows. This job makes me suspicious as hell. I always wonder about people’s motivations and try to predict possible outcomes. In my personal life, I try to check that to some degree, bring my alert level down to a more reasonable zone.”

  “In other words, you didn’t predict Jodie would doxx you.”

  “She respects the work even if she doesn’t respect me.”

  “On the train in this morning, I read how the El Paso Zoo will name a cockroach after your ex and then feed it to the meercats. That could have felt satisfying and not destroyed an FBI op.”

  “If only Jodie knew that was a possibility.” He offered what he hoped was a wry smile. “It might have saved the account.” Truth was, he had a headache brewing. There was nothing funny about this situation.

  Amanda slid her hands into her pock
ets. “And you told everyone who needs to know?”

  “Now that I’ve told you? Yes.”

  “All right, nothing to be done about that now. Before we just blow it up, though, I’d like us to get some others involved and strategize. It could be that we can come up with a cover story. They’d make you jump through hoops to get back into their good graces. It would mean that we had to give up something big to convince them. We’ll have to weigh this.” She glanced over her shoulder at the meeting room door. “The information you got off Sergei’s phone is being processed. They’re combing through his computer files, all of it. I have nothing to tell you in that regard. I asked you to come here to meet this guy who will be speaking. I think he’ll be an interesting person to have in your back pocket. The lecture is going to seem elementary to you. Bear with it. You’re here for the connection.”

  Rowan nodded.

  “You won’t be called on. You won’t be introduced. If someone tries to engage you, wave them off.”

  “Got it.”

  Amanda pushed through the door and held it wide for him.

  Rowan wended his way past knees and chairs to the back corner of the room and took a seat without making eye contact on his way.

  He huddled into the corner, still seething about having to wipe two of his Twitter accounts. Not only did it set him back years with his work, but it also ruined what he thought of as a positive in his life—the support of his writing community.

  He still had Lisa.

  He didn’t want to lose A_Very.

  Rowan was oddly unsettled by how much the possibility of that loss was affecting him. Up until now, when curiosity about A_Very filled his thoughts, he’d pushed those thoughts out of his mind. But now that he wasn’t in a relationship, he was free to think about her past the anonymity of a Twitter handle.

  He’d known that Lisa had met A_Very in person and had pointedly not asked Lisa a single thing about it, not even A_Very’s real name. Somehow, he’d felt like asking for information was invading A_Very’s privacy. It felt like some form of doxxing. But now that Rowan was single, he could see... He could test the water…

  Every few minutes, from the moment he suspended the account, he thought about her and not knowing who she was or how to contact her other than through Twitter. He had to admit to himself that he’d developed strong feelings about her. A strong connection. Which was ridiculous. She was a cartoon avatar on a Twitter account. She could be anyone. She might not like men. She might be too young or too old or…too many things.

  But none of that rang true to Rowan.

  He believed she was genuine.

  And kind.

  With a big enough heart to help writers hone their craft.

  He believed she had a sense of humor and playfulness that he enjoyed.

  As he sat here in yet another meeting about the evolution and impact of cyber connectivity, he felt the press of what he knew about Sergei Prokhorov and felt genuinely afraid for the future.

  Rowan had lain awake long nights trying to figure a way out of the dystopia he thought the world community was headed for. If people didn’t get off the computer and into real life with real person to person relationships, they were all doomed.

  A_Very and he had a Twitter relationship.

  That wasn’t good enough. He needed to meet her in real life and see if what he experienced on Twitter was his brain filling in the blanks to meet some need he had or if what he was feeling was the real deal. In the time it took this guy to make his way up to the lectern to stand next to Amanda, Rowan had convinced himself that meeting A_Very in the flesh was his step toward the exact thing he thought the world needed—face to face connectivity and less cyber.

  Lisa could tell A_Very that he was using a new Twitter name. He pulled out his phone and sent Lisa a quick text.

  Once they were reconnected, Rowan could take the next step forward.

  “Good afternoon everyone,” Amanda said from the lectern. “I know this is probably your last meeting of the day. The hour is late and the room overly warm, so there’s coffee and doughnuts with extra sugar up here to pump your system. Why don’t you help yourselves as we get going? Bathrooms are out the door to the right and up the hall, take your first left. Please don’t wait for a break, there will be none. Move about to the refreshments or to use the facilities or take calls as need be. Just with as little disruptions as possible if you please.”

  There was a general shift in the room as people settled in to listen.

  Rowan was back on the ramifications of the Twitter debacle, and the more he thought about it, the more his blood boiled. A short little tweet, and his work was blown out of the water. Maybe Amanda was right, maybe there was a way to right this ship. Maybe Lisa could help. She might be able to get into the networks and see what they were saying. If he could come up with a good enough cover story, he might be able to turn the Dark Matters account back on, and bitch about some slime ball who was trying to make waves. Post something threatening that would just skim under the Twitter police bots. Something about come after me with your attacks, and I’ll demolish you or some such crap. Better that he locked it all down. Yeah, he’d talk to Lisa about it.

  The speaker cleared his throat. “I’m Ethan Terry. Today, I’m here to talk to you about the role that mainstream media plays in the Cyberwars or vice versa.”

  The picture of a gorgeous woman appeared on the screen. “Meet Tania. She tweets an average of a hundred and fifty times a day and now has a Twitter following of over two hundred thousand.” He scrolled through some posts of her eating out and hanging with friends. “With a show of hands, who believes Tania is a real person?”

  Half the hands went up.

  “How many of you think that Tania is a social-media marketing account. That an agency hired a model for a week or so, they staged photo shoots of her with her dog, her ice cream, her walk on the beach,” he flipped through the photos, “her being sick, her singing into a hair brush, jumping on her bed in panties and a man’s shirt. Hands?”

  Almost all of the hands went up this time.

  “Does it matter?” Ethan asked.

  “That depends on what she does with this account,” someone said.

  Ethan pointed at the person who said that and nodded his head. He changed the image to a screen grab from a computer—Find an Influencer. Step One: Browse through hundreds of accounts in our Influencer Shop. Choose by category, follower size, niche. Step Two: Load your influencers into your cart. Once you’ve made your purchase, Step Three: Upload your picture or video and fill out the form.

  “So Tania was a low-level influencer. But it looks like she’s signed on with some click farms and some bot farms, and they have boosted her cred. She’s making a lot more money for her posts now. ‘She,’” Ethan stopped to do air quotes around the word, “is probably someone sitting in a cubicle somewhere developing several accounts. If this is true, that’s what we call a ‘sockpuppet.’”

  He put up a cartoon of a sock puppet. People offered up the required chuckle.

  “Now, many of you know how bot networks and sockpuppets make divisive materials go viral. It just takes a few bucks and an influencer. Tania’s account, which is listed as having an educated audience of twenty to thirty year olds, is a good choice.”

  A hand went up. “Isn’t that easy to track? Can’t we tell when someone is paying an influencer to, well, influence? Can’t we just find some mechanism to expose this ruse in real-time so consumers don’t accept this as fact but understand it’s fiction?”

  “Like a verifiability stamp? How would that work?” the person next to him asked.

  Ethan shook his head. “Usually influencer purchases don’t require anything that associated them with the buyer.”

  “Money trail?” he asked.

  “Bitcoin,” the guy behind him said.

  “Right, so we have an influencer who is trying to make a story go viral.” He flipped to another picture of the woman. “When Tania tweets t
hat photo out, the algorithms at Twitter lift the story up. Twitter gamifies the tweet by rewarding users who share the content. They get extra points for sharing emotionally charged content, and for sharing it quickly. When a story goes viral on Twitter, it sets an agenda for journalists. And that’s our topic for today: ‘Pseudo Events and Mainstream News,’” he read off his next slide. “Emotion is the name of the game. A journalist’s job is to present both sides of a story, even when there isn’t a ‘both sides’ to present. In fact, to make a story into a story, it needs two components—something to report on and a debate. Journalists emphasize the us-them of a subject matter. Our studies, and I’m waiting for your coffee to kick in before I pull out my stats and graphs.”

  He paused so a chuckle could run through the room.

  “Our studies demonstrate how journalists are rewarded by provoking the us-them narrative because their articles are picked up and discussed. I’ll give you an example—a reporter goes up to a politician and asks them a question. The politician answers. They go up to another politician in the same party, ask the same question, and get a different answer. Now the reporter has something to report and will make it a debate by saying something like ‘a rift is forming in the party.’ The more emotionally charged they can make that rift sound the better. Even if there is no rift.”

  “Stick to the talking points,” someone shouted.

  “Exactly,” Ethan said. “That’s why they developed talking points so that the journalists couldn’t develop pseudo-events. In the cyber age, reporters need the emotional component to drive the Internet algorithms so that their work can be seen. It’s built into the structure.”

  “Are you going to discuss the algorithms and filter bubbles? How social media filters people so they only hear from and interact with those who are like-minded?” the woman directly in front of Rowan asked.