She retreated from that world and expanded her search until she focused on one obscure blogger in a far-off galaxy of the cyberworld. He was raising some of the same questions and doubts that Anna had. She sent him a detailed e-mail and hoped she would get an answer back soon.
She would, but not in any way she could have possibly imagined.
CHAPTER 27
ANNA FISCHER WAS a remarkably intelligent woman with multiple degrees from world-class universities. Yet she had just committed a critical mistake. In her defense, the woman would have had no way of knowing it was a mistake. Which are often precisely the sort of errors that come back to haunt you.
The blogger she had e-mailed with her own misgivings was not who he seemed to be. It wasn’t even a person. It was essentially digital smoke and mirrors.
Dick Pender and his people had been monitoring the goings-on within several thousand chat rooms spread across the world. The rapid-fire repartee bounding kilobyte by kilobyte across his massive computer screens rivaled anything the agony columns of late-nineteenth-century British newspapers had ever inspired. The Red Menace was of course the topic on everyone’s mind, and Pender smiled as he toted up those convinced the Russians were behind it as opposed to those who weren’t sure. The tally ran nearly ninety-eight percent in his favor.
He noted with glee that as soon as anyone said something against the “truth” he had established they were electronically “piled on” by armies of chatters. Across thousands of discussion sites, Pender posted prewritten responses spouting fact after fact, which actually had no basis in fact, and grinned as he was hailed as a hero and a speaker of supreme wisdom by the chat hordes.
God, Pender thought, it was so easy to support a popular – if completely wrong – position. It required not a scintilla of courage.
A minute later his smile grew even wider. He had just checked what he termed his online bear traps. One of them was the blogger Anna had sent her query to. Pender’s people had set it up, along with several others, to gauge the interest of anyone who might believe the whole Red Menace campaign was a sham. It was critical to know if there was a reverse wave of doubt about the horrors perpetrated by the Russians.
If Pender detected any such movements he had numerous strategies he could employ to dispel this belief. One of his favorites was crafting an outrageous event that drew everyone’s attention from a problem area. He’d been retained on short notice to do this for administrations in Washington, London, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo over the years. Such things were usually needed around elections, scandals, wars, and budget fights.
Not many people had sent e-mails to the planted Web sites. The vast majority of the world seemingly had accepted on faith that everything being said about the Russians was true. Most people were perfectly fine with being sheep their whole lives, and this suited Pender’s business well. There were, of course, some who wanted to know everything about the R.I.C. and were digging deeply to get there. Thus, Pender was feeding them bits and pieces to appease their hunger. It wasn’t that hard to stay ahead of them, actually. The media had many stories and fronts to cover, whereas Pender had only one agenda to worry about: Nicolas Creel’s. This technique he referred to as “timing the tap,” turning on and off the info tap at the most optimal times. He had the media right where he wanted them – in a purely reactive state.
The limited number of people who had made inquiries on the planted sites had already been checked out by Pender’s folks and deemed to be unimportant. Unlike the basic chat rooms, one had to really search to find these online bear traps. That hinted of a more determined effort than most casual chatters would ever muster. Pender had no idea who Anna Fischer was, but the name on her Web address intrigued him.
“The Phoenix Group,” he said to himself as he sat at his desk in the war room. He’d already electronically run to ground the geographic origin of the message. The Phoenix Group was located in London. He had a file on his desk that he’d quickly assembled. The Phoenix Group was a think tank located in Westminster near Buckingham Palace; its precise ownership was unknown.
Pender had a lot of things on his mind. The Wall Street Journal was running an article soon that would cast a bit of doubt on the tens of thousands of Russian dead. Pender knew the journalist who’d done the piece. He was a good reporter but a bit lazy and had a reputation for not following up on a story if things got tough or his angle became publicly unpopular. Pender instructed his staff to issue four stories on the Web that would strongly imply that while some of the thousands of dead Russians’ past might be incorrect, that was due to faulty government records and should in no way dilute the significance of such an indisputable holocaust against the Russian people. To do so was to besmirch the memories of murdered people. Pender would also arrange for several “experts” to go on national shows and remake this point in the strongest possible terms.
Pender was certain that the Journal reporter, not wanting to be branded a cynical, dictator-loving pig, would never go near the story again. He’d also gotten wind of the BBC doing a piece but the producer being unsure what angle to take. Pender had an anonymous note and three “published” articles penned by his ghostwriters sent to the harried producer, giving the woman an inspired take on how to do her show that dovetailed nicely with Pender’s and Creel’s goals. He looked forward to watching the program.
Yet Pender instinctively knew that this “Phoenix Group” might be precisely what Creel had instructed him to keep a lookout for. Thus he electronically forwarded all this information to his client.
Then he went back to doing what he did best: selling the truth to a gullible world.
There was no more exhilarating game ever invented.
CHAPTER 28
NICOLAS CREEL SAT in the lavish home movie theater in his estate on the French Riviera, watching the end of Saving Private Ryan. He loved this film, not because of the first-rate acting and directing or the moral message inherent in this classic war story. No, he loved seeing the world at war because it made dying so noble.
Creel had made his fortune building and selling machines that could kill thousands, even millions of people, and yet he was a peaceful man. He’d never struck anyone in anger; never even fired a weapon of any kind. He detested violence. He made the most money while the world was at peace – a very specific type of peace. It was really only a sense of peace laced with fear that at any moment war could break out. For Creel a peace based on lurking terror was the best kind of all.
Creel loved Saving Private Ryan for another reason. World War II was the classic conflict of good versus evil, a noble war that had enabled a deserving generation of Americans to fulfill their destiny and become the “greatest” generation. Whether the world was aware of it or not, such a conflict was occurring now. And Creel was positioning unsuspecting global players to rise to the occasion, to crush the evil and make the world safer than it had been in decades. The short term would be a bit bumpy of course, but there were always casualities. In the long run it would all be worth it.
He rose, went to his bedroom, and gave Miss Hottie a peck on the cheek as she lay passed out on the bed after performing her usual service for him.
Even as he gazed down at her, he knew it was coming to an end. Hottie liked her newfound wealth, social status, and also her drink a little too much. She routinely screamed at the servants, put on airs she had no business going near, and managed to terrorize Creel’s grown children from his previous marriages whenever they stopped by to visit. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Creel wasn’t overly enamored with any of his children. Still, the rages could be awkward.