by A. C. Fuller
"I need a listicle," I said. "The greatest listicle of all time. A listicle that will go so viral it will take over the world conversation for a few days. Can you do that?"
"Well, what's the topic? I mean, what's the story?"
I slid the plastic chair around to his side of the desk, opened his laptop, and pulled up The Dissident Blog.
He scanned the two stories about Gunstott, then said, "This is from the binder? From the drive?"
"Right."
"And this is real? I mean Operation Mockingbird was real?"
"Yup."
"And Gunstott, that's the real Dewey Gunstott. Of IFMH?"
"Yup."
He smiled, relishing the challenge. "Just to be clear, you want me to create something that will get people paying attention to this story?"
"Right now, I just want something that will get the whole country talking about Dewey Gunstott and his deal with China. That will be enough to get the ball rolling."
Bird took a long, slow sip of his Red Bull, then cracked his knuckles one by one. "Come back in a half hour," he said, smiling.
I opened my laptop, only to find it running a program I'd never heard of. One I hadn't installed.
It was called Collude, and seemed to be just a white text box surrounded by an orange frame. As I stared at the white space, trying to figure out what was going on, words began appearing.
Quinn did a good job upgrading your computer security, but it was nothing I couldn't get around.
The words were disappearing as I read, almost as though I was erasing them as I scanned.
From now on, this app is the only way you'll hear from me, and the only way I'll hear from you. Messages are protected by military-grade encryption. They are as untraceable as messages get.
Amand will not bother you again. I've uncovered enough dirt on him to keep him quiet for good. And he knows it. That's why they let you go.
I have left the country, and there will be no funeral for James. But there will be revenge.
Stay safe,
Innerva Shah
After sitting in stunned silence for a few seconds, watching the last of the words disappear, I tried to look up Tudayapi's phone number, but of course she wasn't listed under that name. I managed to reach the young man at the front desk of the motel in Owyhee, who remembered me and gave me her number.
It was all surprisingly easy until he said, "What's the deal with your friend?"
"What?" I asked.
"The woman you were here with."
He was talking about Quinn. "Wait, she's there?"
"You mean you're not with her? Well, she…I probably shouldn't say anything more."
He hung up and I dialed Tudayapi, who picked up after three rings.
Before I could say anything, she said, "I thought you'd be calling."
"Because you knew I'd found out that you sold us out?"
"I helped you, Alex. I could have done much worse."
I didn't have time to feel betrayed, so I said, "Look, I need to know something."
"Sure, Alex, anything for you." She said it like I should just forget her monumental betrayal.
"What's in your loft, behind the curtains?"
"Quinn said you'd figure it out eventually. Yeah, I leaked the story to China for her."
"Is she there?"
"She's here, or, well, she was. She left a little while ago."
My mind was racing. "Start from the beginning," I said.
"Apparently, Quinn and you—you bad boy—snooped while you were here. Quinn discovered my offline servers in the loft. She assumed, rightly, that they were my China servers."
"Your China servers?"
"I work with a few businessmen in China."
"Hackers?"
"Call them what you want, but it's important to them to be able to store information in a way that is only accessible at certain times."
"And she brought the binder back to you to upload?"
"Well, as you may have heard, I already had the contents of the binder backed up. But she told me what to send. She was embarrassed, too, that she'd missed the backup drive connected to my logic board. Anyway, she showed up in a broken-down old Ford F-150. Carjacked some poor grape farmer in Oregon. Showed up at three in the morning, saying all sorts of stuff, but basically implying that the fate of the world rested on scanning and uploading the binder and sending it, along with an explanation, to some resisters in China."
"And you just did it? And she forgave you for—"
"Look, Alex. She and I have lived similar lives. We've lived on the outside looking in. Lived in a place where you do what you need to do to survive. Where you know that everything can be taken away at any time, so you do what's necessary. Quinn knew that I'd done what I had to do when those two ladies showed up at my door, but that I'd done the bare minimum to help them."
I had a thousand questions, but no time to ask them. "The guy at the motel. I called him to get your number and he mentioned Quinn. Where is she?"
"She stayed around for a day, but left early this morning, don't know where she was going."
"She didn't say anything or do anything about—"
"I don't know what she was planning. Only thing she did was make me crack her new cellphone, so it couldn't be tracked."
"What kind of new phone?"
"Not sure. Samsung or something. But brand new. She had it when she got here. Only other thing was, she asked me how to use Facebook Live. Told me you said it was going to be the next big thing."
I thanked her and hung up after promising to be back in touch soon.
A minute later, Bird was in my doorway. "Alex, it's done."
Chapter 34
The story he'd come up with was the finest clickbait I'd ever seen. And it was a shame we were going to run it advertisement free. Ads slow down the speed at which a story loads, and decreases the chance that someone will click through. And I wanted as many people as possible to see his masterpiece.
The headline read: Communist Censorship: Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You
Actually, that was one of five headlines Bird had written to appear on different users' phones, depending on location, age, gender, and other demographics. He was using every tool in the box to maximize the chances someone would click. About fifty percent would get the main headline, but five to fifteen percent would see one of the following gems:
Did Mao Hate Jesus?
Who Ya Gonna Call? Not the Ghostbusters if You're in China.
Why There Will Never Be a Gay Kiss in Star Wars.
China Won't Air Duck Dynasty Because They Hate Freedom.
Of course, the headlines had been optimized to hit all sorts of keywords that our subscribers had clicked on before, as well as the Google, Facebook, and Twitter algorithms.
But no matter which headline you clicked, the same article appeared. The article consisted of ten slides, basically photos with a small caption under them and a little control bar to make it full screen.
Slide number one was a picture of Gunstott, standing in a group with three Chinese men, all wearing matching dark suits. "Is that him making the deal in China?" I asked.
Bird chuckled with a little more disdain than usual. "You still think like a newspaper person. I couldn't find a recent picture of him actually in China, so I just grabbed one from a few years back. It really doesn't matter, and the story doesn't say when the picture was taken. It's all about what it signifies."
I read the caption under the image. Dewey Gunstott, the CEO of International Family Media Holdings, is about to partner with the leaders of China in a deal that may kill your favorite TV shows.
I could see where this was heading, and I scrolled through the next images more quickly.
#2: A graph comparing the revenue from movies and TV in China and the U.S., which showed a rapid increase in Chinese spending and a flat line in U.S. spending. The caption: By 2022, China will be the biggest customer of U.S. media holdings on earth.
#3
: A black slide with no image, just covered in red text: As China becomes our biggest customer, U.S. TV and movie studios will engage in self-censorship to protect their business interests.
#4: Another black slide with red text: And it's not just liberals who will suffer.
#5: Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty, his gray and black beard taking up half the image, with a snippet of one of his speeches about democracy and freedom and communism across the lower half. The caption read: Yup, they even banned Duck Dynasty for being "Overly supportive of capitalism and critical of China."
#6: Mel Gibson, long haired and suffering, a still image from The Passion of the Christ, a big red X across his face. The caption under the image read: Religious freedom? Nope. Banned for being religious in secular China.
#7: Another black slide with red lettering: And we saved the best for last.
#8: An image of the two male leads from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Finn and Poe, sitting in the cockpit of the fighter jet. The caption read: Despite assurance from JJ Abrams that Star Wars will soon see its first gay romances, we expect the bottom line to win out. If these guys kiss, China won't air the film. Therefore, these guys will never kiss. Because…
#9: Another black slide with red lettering: IF THIS DEAL GOES THROUGH, DISNEY WILL BE NEXT INTO CHINA.
#10: A white slide with phone numbers, addresses, and some official-looking seals of government agencies. The caption: Speak out today! Let your congressman and the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance know that you oppose the IFMH deal.
When I'd finished reading I walked a small circle around Bird's desk. "Once we publish this, things could get ugly," I said, already dialing our legal team in my mind.
"It's nothing that new. I mean, writers have questioned this deal before, and for some of the same reasons. Most people didn't notice, but—"
"That's what I'm saying. People are going to notice this. Plus, because we're not reporting anything new, it's like a late hit when the guy has gone out of bounds. Gunstott is going to sue the hell out of us."
"Maybe, but he won't win."
Bird could tell I was apprehensive. He said, "Alex, you asked me to put this together."
"It's just…I just wish I knew where Quinn was. There's a chance this could endanger her, as well as us."
Bird was staring at his laptop, the way he sometimes did when I was using his office to think out loud. He looked up at me suddenly. "Wait, what did you say her last name was?"
"Rivers. Quinn Rivers."
"Curly black hair, kinda tall, smoking-hot in an I-haven't-bathed-this-month kinda way?"
"Yeah."
Bird spun his laptop around on the desk so it faced me. "I don't think you're going to have to worry about her."
Chapter 35
Quinn was streaming live on Facebook.
The video was of her face, but I could see the top of a seatbelt and the back seat of a truck in the background. After a few seconds, it became clear that she was driving. She wasn't speaking, but the audio was on and I could hear the unmistakable whoosh of tires on highway.
Bird said, "There are two hundred thousand people watching this live stream. It's being shared all over Facebook."
"The phone must be on the dashboard, propped up somehow."
"This is the woman you just spent five days in a car with?"
I didn't respond because I was scrolling through the comments on the video, trying to figure out what was going on.
But Bird was faster and he'd already found it on his phone and figured out the context. "Basically, she started the feed twenty minutes ago by announcing that she just killed two people and is going to take her own life."
My stomach twisted, hardened. "Did she say who she killed?"
"Checking."
I watched Quinn's face, her striking eyes and freckles, trying to read her through the screen. I couldn't tell right away whether she was bluffing, or lying, or if she'd gone over the edge. If she had killed someone, maybe it had been in self-defense.
I said, "Did she say where she is?"
"Northern Nevada. Heading toward Vegas."
"See what else you can find out."
But I was already imagining what had happened. Quinn returned to Owyhee to have Tudayapi upload the contents of the binder behind the Great Firewall. My hunch was that Amand, or possibly people who worked for him, had followed her. Maybe Bonnie and Holly had chased her after letting me go.
"This says she went live outside an Indian Reservation in—"
"Owyhee."
"Right, and she's being chased by the CIA, she says, and possibly others. She gave out her name and social security number, as well as the name of a couple of the group homes she grew up in. Said she dropped out of MIT and was institutionalized for a while. She basically gave her whole bio. Her Facebook name is Smedley Vegas, and she has no posts and doesn't even have a profile pic."
"She's new to social media," I said with a chuckle, trying to calm my fears.
"It's up to four hundred thousand viewers."
Quinn started speaking, and Bird and I huddled over his laptop. "If you missed the beginning of this, my name is Quinn Rivers. I just killed two armed, extra-military or possibly CIA operatives at a gas station outside the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. I killed them in self-defense, but I am now being pursued. I am on the run, driving south toward Las Vegas. I will not be taken alive."
Her eyes darted up to the rearview mirror.
Bird said, "If she's being pursued, why aren't there sirens?"
"She could be imagining it."
"Is she that nuts?"
"Yeah, but that doesn't mean she's wrong."
Every few seconds, Quinn checked her rearview mirror, and I wished she'd angled the camera a little differently so we could see out the back of the truck.
"This is gonna end badly," Bird said. "I'm on Twitter right now and people are saying that the shooting happened at the Fuel Stop gas station, police are pursuing her."
"Publish your listicle," I said.
"Why now?"
Bird was right. There was no good ending to what Quinn had started, but I wasn't going to sit back and watch. "Quinn is at the edge of the cliff, and we might as well jump off with her."
Chapter 36
Back in my office, Bird was leaning over my laptop. He had made the listicle the lead story on our homepage and app. Within minutes, it had been shared across our social media feeds, our newsletter, and in every other corner of the Internet. He'd sent a message to every Barker employee, encouraging them to make sharing his piece their priority. It was on its way to going viral.
"Done," Bird announced.
I sat in the swiveling chair next to him and turned the laptop toward me. It now showed Quinn's video in the upper left and a browser tab open to a blank page on the right.
"Just type in blank box," Bird said. "Then click 'Post' each time you're done with a thought, and it will post."
"Good, let me see how it'll look on our site."
He pulled up another tab, a special page he'd created that had three elements. On the top left was Quinn's live video. On the top right, a blank text area with the header, "Live Commentary from Barker CEO Alex Vane." The bottom third of the screen had links and previews of the listicle he'd just published and the story from The Dissident Blog, plus links to a few summaries of Gunstott's China deal.
"How'd you get the Facebook video onto our site?"
"You don't want to know."
"Is this going to get us shut down?"
"Probably not in the next hour, but it's bad. You can't just get the video to show up, so I had to set up a screen capture on my personal laptop, and beam it to our site. There will be a second or so of lag time since what you're seeing on our site is essentially a live video of my laptop screen, which I've set to full screen playing Quinn's live stream."
We could deal with the fallout tomorrow, but now Quinn was speaking again. "What are all those little blue th
umbs and hearts going across my screen?" She was staring at the phone and I smiled, knowing just how clueless she was about the impact she was having.
The video was now being watched by 700,000 people, and growing. I tried sending Quinn a private message to the account she'd used the day before, but I knew she probably wouldn't see it.
"I'm heading down a long stretch of straight, flat highway," Quinn said. "I'm about six hours outside of Las Vegas, and I drove the opposite direction on this road only six days ago. Until then, I'd been living quietly and happily—well, not exactly happily—but living, anyway, dammit, in a small house in Las Vegas. That's when Alex Vane, the CEO of The Barker showed up on my doorstep with a hard drive."
From that point on, she spent about twenty minutes telling the story, step by step, of our trip. While she did, I added notes, essentially a running commentary on her narrative, hitting "Post" after every comment. When I clicked "Post," the text would go live to the page with a little time and date stamp. Usually I just confirmed what she'd said, sometimes I added details she omitted. It was when she got to her disappearance that I had to listen out of one ear while typing my story.
"Outside of Allied Regional Data Security, I came apart. All the stuff that had happened to me since 9/11—and really since birth—just came crashing down. Sitting outside of the embodiment of the secret security state, I just lost it. Alex dropped me at a coffee shop and I went in, fully intending to stay there, to ride it out. But I couldn't. I had someone bring my dog, Smedley, into the coffee shop. Then I bolted."
I hadn't even thought of Smedley, but he must've perked up at the mention of his name because I heard a little whimper and Quinn glanced up at the rearview mirror and smiled slightly. I thought of him fondly, slobbering in the back seat, keeping Quinn company.
"I came back to the home of Tudayapi, and convinced her to upload the documents behind the Great Firewall. I sent ten minutes of audio to CNN, the ten minutes you've no doubt heard already. And I'd planned to leave it at that. The next day, as I refilled my tank on the way out of town, two plainclothes officers or CIA agents or gestapo goons approached me. Well, they didn't actually have time to approach me. I shot them before they got close. Up until the shooting, all of it had been orchestrated by Dewey Gunstott to protect his deal with the Chinese government."