“Sure,” Jeanie said. This was so exciting.
Jason handed her a scrap of paper. “Here is a password to our system. You’ll see the POI list there and can get started formulating a message.”
Jeanie nodded. Wow. This was amazing.
“I need to take the Auditor and his Chief of Staff to go meet with the others in the line of succession,” Jason said. He took them with him. There was Jeanie in the big conference room with a bunch of other civilians and some military people. OK, time to get to work.
Jeanie logged on and opened the POI file. It was very interesting to see who was on that list. She didn’t recognize any names, of course, until one jumped out at her on the screen.
“Matson, Grant.” Near his name was “Foster, Tom,” “Trenton, Benjamin,” and “Jenkins, Brian.” The next column said “Wash. Assn. of Business” and “‘Rebel Radio.” What the hell were WAB people doing on a “Persons of Interest” list?
She suddenly felt like she might be on the POI. She searched for her name. Nothing. She wasn’t on there. She started panicking. The government was going to try to arrest her friends. There must be some mistake.
She wondered about her boyfriend, Jim. He was really conservative and had mentioned to friends that he thought the people would start a revolution soon. She hadn’t thought about him much today. There had been too much excitement. He was off on Guard duty and was probably fine. He was surrounded by many well armed men. He would be busy doing his computer job for the Guard. She missed him. It would be so great to be home and with him if all of this wasn’t happening. But it was and she had a job to do. She tried to do it. But she couldn’t think. Her boyfriend was away from her, possibly in danger, and she was being asked to help the government round up her friends.
A female plainclothes cop came over to her. “Are you Thompson, the one working on getting the POI list out?” She asked Jeanie.
“Yes,” Jeanie said.
“I’m Sergeant Winslow, WSP,” which meant Washington State Patrol. She looked at Jeanie’s screen and saw the POI list was there. “Pretty interesting list of characters, huh?”
“Yeah,” Jeanie said. “So how did you create this?”
“There were some troubling groups out there,” Winslow said. “As things got bad with the economy and the political situation became more heated, these groups got more vocal. We used some informants for the secretive ones. For the vocal ones, we used Facebook and similar social media.”
“Facebook?” Jeanie said.
“Oh, yeah,” Winslow said. “When we found one person of interest, we’d look and see who his or her friends were on Facebook or other social media. We’d check the ‘mutual friends’ thing and, poof, we had a really good start to the list. And all their contact information was there. That’s how most of these people got on the list. Facebook. It’s a wonderful tool for us.” She was smiling.
Oh crap. Jeanie started to wonder if she was a Facebook friend with any of the WAB people? No. She remembered that Menlow had asked her to unfriend them after he decided to run for governor. Whew.
“OK,” Jeanie said, trying to focus on doing her job so she didn’t look suspicious. “How do you want to get these names out to the media? Is the internet still working for the outside world?” she asked. They talked about how to the get the list out. The whole time Jeanie wondered if she was betraying Grant and the WAB guys, and who knows how many others of her conservative friends? But what was she going to do? Walk away? She was stuck on a military base surrounded by chaos. She had to stay. She had to do what was being asked. She told herself that she would do whatever she could to alert Grant without getting caught, herself.
Chapter 64
“Why are you hurting us?”
(May 7)
The morning after the first neighborhood meeting, Nancy Ringman was going around to each house trying to convince them that they needed to go along with her plan of looking to the police to secure the neighborhood. Nancy, of course, would coordinate all of it. She found many of the people receptive to her no-guns message. But they were questioning whether it really made sense not having an armed guard at the entrance to the Cedars subdivision.
By now, things were starting to get out of hand in Olympia. People were slowly starting to react to everything going on around them. Shelves in the grocery stores were getting bare. People were arguing in the parking lots and in lines. Some had even seen some fights. The lines at gas stations were becoming long and unruly. A rumor was spreading about someone in the neighborhood being shot during an argument at the gas station.
Nancy had one more cul-de-sac of households to talk to before the meeting later that night. It was Grant Matson’s. She was getting tired. She hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep in two days; the excitement of these events kept her awake. She kept having the feeling that finally the good people like her would be in charge. Finally.
Nancy had run out of her anti-depressant, Prozac, when all of this started. “Anti-depressant” was a misleading term, she thought. The Prozac didn’t make her feel less depressed; it helped her get along with people. It curbed what her doctor had politely termed her “aggressive impulses.” Without it, she was mean. Really mean. She didn’t have time to go get a prescription filled right now. There was a crisis and the neighborhood was depending on her for leadership.
Most of the people in the neighborhood were weaklings, Nancy thought. She needed a little extra meanness to lead people. It’s called leadership, she told herself. She’d been mean her whole life and got a lot accomplished that way. People were wimps and needed someone to tell them what to do, she had found.
Nancy’s phone vibrated. It was a text from Brenda, a former co-worker at the State Auditor’s Office. It’s first few letters were “POI!!!” It said that the Governor had created a list called “Persons of Interest” and had a link. The text went on: “Grant Matson is on it!!! He’s POI!” She looked at the link, which loaded very slowly on her phone. She looked at the background on what the POI list was. Fabulous!
Grant Matson was officially a terrorist and a wanted man. Nancy was standing outside his house now. Finally, her government was doing something about people like Grant Matson. Finally, the cavalry had shown up. She was part of the solution to all of this chaos. She would help the effort by going to his house and finding out where he was hiding. She felt a surge of adrenaline. It felt so fabulous. She loved a good fight. Especially against a teabagger like Grant Matson and his obnoxiously pretty doctor wife.
Nancy felt so alive. She confidently walked right up to the Matson’s door and knocked on it. It took a while for someone to answer. She saw Grant’s wife looking through the blinds before she opened it.
“Yes,” Lisa said. “Can I help you?” She vaguely recognized Nancy as someone from the neighborhood.
“Oh, yeah, you can help me,” Nancy said in a very excited voice. Then Nancy yelled, “Where is that terrorist piece of shit husband of yours?”
Lisa was scared. What was this “terrorist” thing? And why was this woman yelling at her? Lisa could tell that Nancy was agitated like some of the people that came into the ER.
“What?” Lisa asked. “And please keep your voice down. My children are here,” she said firmly.
“I don’t give a shit who’s home, except Grant Matson,” Nancy yelled. “You need to tell me where he is. He’s on the POI list and I’m here to find out where he’s hiding.”