By the time Vox was thirty he was a multimillionaire in his own right and his company, SecureOne, had begun taking contracts from military bases, partly to provide private security contractors and partly to screen employees applying for positions in sensitive areas. The catchphrase “vetted by Vox” identified personnel who had passed SecureOne’s ultrarigorous screening process. He received a number of large military contracts to screen personnel for special operations and was soon putting the Vox seal of approval on operators for Delta Force, the CIA, and similar covert organizations.
The day after Vox’s father died from lung cancer, the planes hit the Towers. Vox was asked to head the team that investigated the flight schools in which the Al-Qaeda operatives had earned their pilot’s licenses. Vox’s report put people in jail and it crushed several companies whose standards for security were deemed “criminally lax.” If some people had previously wondered if Hugo Vox was too strict before 9/11, he was thereafter seen as a role model.
In 2002 Vox created his first think tank. He reached out to a select number of thriller writers—friends of his father—and brought them together to dream up the most dreadful and unstoppable kinds of carnage that human minds could concoct. Bombings, exotic bioweapons, covert takeovers, dirty bombs, plagues, and more. The authors gave him everything he wanted and then some, and Vox put it all in a report and brought it to the White House along with a proposal for a training camp in which the top counterterrorism teams in the United States and allied nations would run the scenarios over and over again until they had discovered or invented adequate responses.
The response from Homeland and the Oval Office was not exactly a blank check but close enough. Homeland leased land in Washington State and Vox bought the old White Trails Resort. Terror Town was born.
That was more than a decade ago, and now T-Town was the centerpiece for counter- and antiterrorism training. And now many key players in the War on Terror could boast of having been “vetted by Vox.”
As online social networks flourished over the last few years, all manner of fringe and splinter groups had begun using resources like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and message boards for anonymous communication. Vox wanted someone to monitor these networks, someone with the credentials and the intelligence necessary to find even the most obscure clues that might reveal the presence of tangible threats. When Circe O’Tree’s résumé had crossed his desk, Vox knew that he had found a perfect fit. Her reports had stopped a number of attacks and put some dangerous people in jail.
“So,” Vox said, gesturing to her laptop with a jelly doughnut, “who’s being scary today?”
“I’ve been tracking some spooky stuff with Israel and Islamic key words.”
“Anti-Semitic stuff?”
“Not exactly. It’s militant, but it appears to be more pro-Israel militancy. Let me read some of them.” She opened a Word document and brought up a file. Circe wore half-glasses perched precariously on the end of her Irish nose. “Here’s one. ‘Why would God put a sword into the hand of Israel and forbid him to use it? It makes no sense to sit by while Jihad is waged against the Chosen People.’”
Vox grunted.
“And another one: ‘As David did to Goliath shall Israel do to the giant of Islam.’” She adjusted her glasses. “On the surface these are anti-Islamic statements couched in pseudobiblical phrasing, but they have an—oh, I don’t know—a sense of meanness about them. It doesn’t feel like simple rants.”
“Who’s posting this stuff?”
“That’s the thing; most of these are anonymous posts on Twitter, but they’re from accounts started at places like cybercafes. They create an e-mail account, use that to open an account on a social network, and then either abandon it or log in from a different site. We’ve seen that kind of behavior before, Hugo. Remember all that ‘war in heaven’ and ‘Armageddon in the shadows’ stuff from a couple of years ago? This has the same feel. Careful and anonymous.”
He grunted and nodded. “Yeah, sounds like it. Have you checked with our friends in the Bureau?”
“I did, and I got the usual ‘we’ll look into it’ reply, which translates as ‘ignore the rantings of the crazy lady.’”
Vox grinned. “How about Homeland?”
“Same thing, dammit.” She cocked an eye at him. “Any chance we can bring it to the DMS? Maybe let MindReader—”
“Too soon,” Vox said firmly. “Deacon’s been very clear that he doesn’t want to hear anything from us unless it’s actionable.”
“Okay.” She felt deflated. “Let me collate what I found first. If I’m going to make a report even the DMS will accept, then I’ll want to bring all of it.”
“There’s more?”
“Like this? Hundreds of postings, and thousands of places where these posts have been reposted and retweeted.”
“Rewhat?”
“Tweeted. A post on Twitter is called a ‘tweet.’ When someone likes it and wants to pass it on, they ‘retweet’ it.”
“Good God.”
“I know it sounds silly, but Twitter has become the most powerful tool of business on the Net.”
Vox smiled like a tolerant bear. He had coarse, thick features, a bulbous nose, and rubbery lips, but his smile was charming. “Tweets by terrorists. You can’t say that this job isn’t interesting, kiddo.”
Circe nodded but did not smile. Unlike her boss, she was very beautiful, with dark eyes and foamy black curls; also unlike him, she seldom smiled. As much as genetics had been generous to her, life itself had not. Less than a year ago her mother had been killed in a car accident, and Circe’s younger sister had died in combat in Afghanistan the previous summer. She felt alone and adrift in the world, and except for a father she almost never saw, Circe had no family. T-Town had become her home and Hugo Vox had become a second father, but Circe was still adrift in the shadows of loss and grief.
“There’s something else,” she said, and pulled up another file. “Some key words have popped up in these postings. Not all of them, but enough of them to make me pay attention.” She touched the screen and ran a plum fingernail down, pausing at different entries as she scrolled with her other hand. “‘Goddess,’ or some variation of it, shows up in a lot of the entries. In the text, but more often in the usernames of the original poster or people reposting.”
“Oh, Christ … not her again.” Over the last few years various groups ranging from the CIA to the DMS had tracked a series of online comments from a person, or perhaps a group, called the Goddess of the Chosen. The posts were heaviest before and after catastrophic events. If there was a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, a terrorist bombing, or an airline disaster the Goddess would make a post claiming that the event had happened according to her will. So far the identity of the Goddess had not been established, and because she tended to comment on all disasters it was hard to qualify her political leanings. Vox rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Are you sure it’s her?”
“Sure? No, but there are a lot of posts and most of them are using name variations: Goddessofthe7, SacredGoddess, Queen_of_ All, which is a goddess reference; and posts are using various names of goddesses from world myth. Demeter, Mazu, Mami Wata, Mórrígan, Nemain, Macha, Badb, and scores of others. Hundreds, really.”