“Here’s the situation,” Bug said, trying to sound upbeat despite the sweat glistening on his face, “your name is out there, Joe. The photo is out there, and so is the video footage. So is the DMS’s name. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they haven’t ID’d Aunt Sallie, and she’s registered at Johns Hopkins under an alias no one is ever going to break.”
“That’s something,” I muttered.
I knew Brick always had a professional makeup kit with him, and he could transform me into someone who could ride in an elevator with my own brother without being recognized. That wasn’t the problem. The press was tearing themselves apart trying to figure out who and what the DMS was. The story was even competing with the mounting death toll in the nation’s second-worst earthquake ever.
“Who outed us?” I asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” said Bug. “The story broke on Fox and MSNBC within minutes of each other. Anonymous tips that came in on cell phones belonging to key news producers. I hacked both phones and verified that the calls originated from the same cell phone. Before you ask, the cell was a burner bought for cash at a Target in Virginia. I had Nikki go through the store’s video records and we have a good image of the man who bought it.”
An image flashed onto the screen, showing a man in jeans and a blue windbreaker moving away from a register toward the exit. The image froze and expanded to show his face.
“He looks kind of familiar…,” I said.
“He should,” said Bug. An overlay of facial recognition software isolating sixty-two unique points on the man’s face, head, ears, throat, and shoulders. A second window popped up to show the same man much more clearly. It was from an official ID for the United States Secret Service, and I knew him at once. It was my buddy Lurch from the cemetery.
“When was this video taken?” I asked.
“The day before you beat him and his buddies up,” said Bug. “So, this thing was in motion before you ever got to D.C. Oh, and Mr. Church already brought me up to speed with your theory. I wish I could say that it was too weird to be likely, but, dude, this is us.” He spread his hands.
“It’s fair to say that we are on the outs with the current administration,” Church said as he sat and studied the last piece of a cookie. “This is something we’ve seen coming. They want us gone, for whatever reason. Probably because it’s well known that our loyalty is not conditional. What troubles me, though, is the apparent clumsiness of it.”
“You’d rather they were sneakier?”
“I admire quality tradecraft, but this may be a mix of ham-fisted clumsiness and very sophisticated subtlety. I think the group behind this agenda — what you and Bug tend to call the ‘Big Bad’—has done its work with great skill. So great that we haven’t caught a whiff of it and even now only have a theory rather than facts. On the other hand, the task of taking you off the board was handled badly. That suggests that either we are still missing something about the nature of that pickup, or the skill of the Big Bad does not translate as it goes lower on the chain of command.”
“Leaning toward that last one,” I said, and Bug nodded. “We know for a fact that the Secret Service and some of the other agencies are not playing the same kind of pro ball they used to or should be.”
Bug raised his hand. “Um, I think the pickup on Joe was considered scut work, and they only give that stuff to the back-benchers. Look, we’ve run deep backgrounds on all the agents involved in the two pickup attempts. If we wanted to take the Secret Service apart, we could. They’re classic examples of job promotion based on favors rather than merit. Not exactly illegal, but unethical as all get-out. A lot of the better agents have either been transferred to other assignments or encouraged to change jobs. Some of the better ones have gone to work for private security firms. So, if the Big Bad influenced someone in the White House to pick you up, they didn’t have the best tools for that job.”
“The upshot of that, no matter how it was handled,” I said, “is that we, too, had our attention drawn to D.C., and as a result we may be looking in the wrong direction.”
“That is almost certainly the case,” said Church. He selected another cookie and tapped crumbs off it. “We are a secret organization created during an earlier administration. We’ve been instrumental in taking down corrupt politicians before, admittedly as side effects of other cases. We have MindReader. Perhaps this Big Bad has, directly or through agents positioned to appear as close and loyal advisors, convinced POTUS that if we lose our charter we will slink away, pull the plug on MindReader, and cease to be a threat.”
“But…?”
Church took a bite and munched for a moment. His eyes were steady as lasers. “We have not tried to be a threat. It would be unfortunate if we were forced to make that kind of play.”
That hung in the air for a moment. Bug and I exchanged a look. We were on the same side as Church, but he scared us both. That is not an exaggeration.
Bug cleared his throat. “And, there’s also the fact that a lot of people in Washington still don’t understand how the DMS works. MindReader isn’t government property. It belongs to Mr. Church. None of the DMS operations are funded by the United States government. Except for the access and freedom of action we get from the charter, we’re entirely separate. So, we could actually just up and leave.”
“Sure,” I said, “but if we take our dolls and dishes and leave the tea party, then what? It’s not like the war ends if we opt out.”
Church almost smiled. “No.”
“So, what do we do? Starting with the DMS being outed, I mean? And my face on every freaking news feed.”
“Bug…?” asked Church mildly.
“Okay, in the short term,” said Bug, “I’ve hacked into all of the news feeds and uploaded every bit of cell phone video data they’ve received. They’ve been playing fast and loose with how they’re reporting it. Probably based on the biased tip from your Secret Service buddy. If you watch all of the videos you can see that people were fighting in the streets and that you were defending yourself. And, once Auntie collapsed, anyone can see that you and Ghost are protecting her.”
“So, why isn’t that extra footage out there?”
“It is,” said Bug. “I mean, it’s out there now. I used a network of a couple thousand servers and fake accounts we have set up to seed the complete video files to YouTube and like a zillion other sites, including BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Politico, Snopes, you name it. It’s trending like crazy, and because it’s trending so heavily, the twenty-four-hour news services have had to pick it up in order to stay current. Fox and MSNBC started showing the unedited files an hour ago, and now Joe Ledger isn’t the bad guy. He’s kind of a badass hero.”
“Yay me,” I said listlessly. “What about the DMS?”
“I, um, tapped a few of Mr. Church’s friends in the industry to go on as talking heads. Turn on any news feed and three of the four talking heads are ours. Some of them are talking about the strategic importance of deep-cover covert ops. Some are talking about how the DMS has been key in those stories the general population already know — the Sea of Hope, the drone thing, the pathogen outbreak at the Liberty Bell Center in Philly, and how we’re part of the ongoing response to the Dogs of War rabies and nanites thing. We’ve got endorsements from the last four presidents, the past three secretary-generals of the U.N., and the who’s who of Nobel Prize winners. Plus generals, heads of state. We’re crushing the whole ‘DMS are bad guys’ thing.”
“Nice to know you still have friends in the industry,” I said to Church.
This time he did smile. “Don’t ever let yourself believe that political party affiliations, right or left, dictate everyone’s actions or inspire everyone to compromise their own ethics. The people it is my pleasure to call friends tend to go deeper into the concept of patriotism than that, and they do not play party politics. Not when that requires that they act against the genuine best interests of the American people.”