“Dios mio,” Rudy murmured.
Interlude Eight
T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State
Four Months Before the London Event
Circe O’Tree chewed on a plastic pen cap as she scrolled through the recent postings on Twitter. When she refreshed the page she had been watching, a new tweet popped up.
The Elders of Zion are not a myth. They live … they wait. They will have justice.
She chewed her lip.
It was posted by one of the new accounts Circe was following. Enyo. Circe opened a browser and hit a saved link that took her to an online reference database of mythology. She typed in the name. The entry came up at once.
Enyo.
A Greek goddess of war. She often accompanies Ares into battle. During the fall of Troy, Enyo inflicted horror and bloodshed alongside Phobos (“Fear”) and Deimos (“Dread”), the sons of Ares. Enyo is responsible for orchestrating the destruction of cities.
Circe frowned at the screen for a few seconds and then reached for the phone. Hugo Vox answered after four rings.
“Jesus Christ, woman, don’t you ever sleep?” Vox growled, sounding like a sleepy bear.
Circe glanced at the clock and realized with a start that it was four twenty in the morning.
“I’m sorry, Hugo … . I completely lost track of the time.”
“The White House had better be in flames,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, flustered and suddenly embarrassed by her impetuousness. “It can wait.”
“No,” he grumbled, “I’m awake now. What is it?”
She told him.
“Ah … Christ. Okay, I’ll be right down.”
While she waited, Circe toggled back to Twitter and refreshed the page. The comment had been retweeted 41 times. When she refreshed again a minute later there were 153. An enormous amount of posts, even for a social network as active as Twitter. Most of the posts were negative, decrying the comment and disputing the existence of the so-called Learned Elders of Zion. But more than a hundred posts offered support of the comment. Of those, only a third were goddess names. Circe did track-backs on many of them. Half were known agitators among the violent fringe of the conspiracy community. Some were frequent posters of anti-Islamic comments. The rest appeared to be ordinary people.
There were so many things about this that bothered her. First, the choice of a name that was clearly tied to violence and destruction. Over the last few weeks the Goddess had made a clear shift toward militancy, though choosing the name Enyo suggested a much more aggressive leap. The other troubling point was the Elders of Zion reference. Circe was sure she had something on that.
Ten minutes later Hugo Vox came into her office wearing gray T-Town sweats that were water stained. His hair had only been finger combed. He looked at her and then more pointedly at what she was wearing. The same blue skirt and blouse from yesterday.
“You didn’t leave here all night, did you?”
“I got caught up—”
“Look, kiddo, while I admire the dedication you have for your job, you’re young and pretty and smart and you should be out on dates on Friday nights … not locked up here with a computer and the kind of junk food I eat.”
She made a face.
He sighed. “I know, I know … you don’t like dating guys in the service. How come, though? They’re all good guys. Top of the line.”
“And vetted by Vox,” she said with a grin.
“Well … not vetted for dating you, but I could look into that.”
“Thanks, Hugo, but I don’t need a matchmaker. Besides, the guys here at T-Town pretty much ooze testosterone. They spend all day long shooting things and beating each other up. What would we talk about over dinner? Muzzle velocity and choke holds?”
“What about some of those bookworms you meet at signings? That literary agent of yours has a case of the hornies for you.”
“Oh, please. He’s a wiener.”
Hugo grinned. “So … soldiers are too manly and the artsy crowd is too effete. Let me know when you find someone in the middle. I’m serious. You ever get off your ass and go out to have a real night off, I’ll pay for dinner for both of you.”
She mumbled something awkward and waved him to a chair. He was chuckling as he settled his bulk into it.
“Okay,” he said, “you obviously found something. Thrill me.”
She launched in, but before she was finished he held up a hand. “‘Elders of Zion’? What the hell’s that?”
“The full name is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was supposedly the secret master plan by a group of Jews outlining how they would take over Europe and dominate the Christian world.”
“How come I never heard about this?”
“Well, this is early-twentieth-century stuff. And it was proved to be a hoax.”
“Then why the fuck am I not still sleeping in my goddamn bed?”
“Please, bear with me, Hugo. The Protocols were a piece of propaganda intended to implicate European Jews in a conspiracy that did not exist. Henry Ford, who was a notorious anti-Semite, used the Protocols in his campaign against Jews, and even Hitler trotted them out to support his racist insanity. Much of the material was directly plagiarized from writings of political satire totally unrelated to the Jews. But hatred of the Jews in early-twentieth-century Europe was stronger than common sense; and later, following the establishment of Israel as a state, a renewed wave of anti-Zionism sparked new interest in the Protocols … and this hatred spread from Europe to the Middle East.”
“So what?”
“The Goddess has just started posting about the Elders of Zion.”
Hugo sat forward. “Okay, now you have my full attention.”
“No one credible defended the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” said Circe, “So … why bring them up now? The Goddess’s earlier militant remarks had been firmly directed at Islam on behalf of Israel. Maybe now she’s trying to build a case that the Protocols are real.”
“Yeah,” Hugo said thoughtfully, “and that could get ugly, considering the lunkheads who gobble this shit up.”
“Another possibility is that Enyo is someone else using the same tactics as the Goddess in order to redirect anger back at Israel.”
“Also potentially ugly.” Hugo rubbed his eyes, then cocked his head at her. “Tell me straight, kiddo … rate this on a scale of one to ten, one being harmless freaks on the Net and ten being we scramble the DMS.”
She chewed her lip some more. “Right now, I … I don’t know. Maybe a five? But this is the kind of thing that can lead to real violence.”
Vox snorted. “Violence against who? The Jews? The Muslims? I can’t tell from this shit who the Goddess is really mad at.”
“That’s just it,” Circe said. “Maybe it’s both. Maybe she just wants to start a fight.”
“To what end? She’s got to be rooting for someone.”
“Maybe not. Maybe she just wants to see things burn.”
He peered suspiciously at her. “Isn’t that a line from a Batman movie?”
Circe blushed. “It fits, though. Or it might fit. Some people groove on violence.”
Vox grunted.
Circe said, “Look, remember last year, when the white supremacist group in Alabama started using message boards to make threats against Jews? There were a half-dozen synagogues torched.”
“The people posting weren’t the same ones who torched the temples. They were idiots following a bad idea.”