Page 19 of Dead Fall

“There’s no way the answer is that simple.”

“Of course it is. People see themselves as the heroes of their own stories. Nobody wants to live in a boring timeline. Conspiracy theories offer a heroic adventure; a sense of excitement, the feeling that you’re privy to some sort of secret knowledge that no one else sees.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“And,” he pressed on, “the more people ridicule you, the more you revel in your superiority over them. To you, the uninitiated are sheep. They’re sleepwalking while you’re fully awake—aware of the ‘real’ world and everything that’s happening within it. No matter how many actual facts get launched at you, no matter how much data gets presented demonstrating how wrong you are, it doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because conspiracies, by their very nature, are unfalsifiable. That’s what makes them so dangerous and why the Russians love them so much. They’re experts at weaponizing them against the U.S. and derive a huge return on an incredibly small investment. It’s like injecting the population with an aggressive form of societal cancer. Once it’s in the body politic, all the Russians have to do is sit back and watch as our country eats away at itself and gets weaker and weaker.”

“Which is what you think the Russians are attempting to do with Burman’s death.”

Carolan nodded. “An old Soviet disinformation specialist dubbed it the ‘Potter’s Wheel.’ You pick a central point for your audience to focus on and then start things spinning. Once you’ve captured their attention and have them mesmerized, all you have to do is drop a lump of wet clay onto it and you can shape it into anything you want.”

“Meaning any sort of conspiracy.”

Carolan nodded again. “In this case, the wheel is the yacht club. It’s the perfect jumping-off point for a Russian conspiracy. It’s members-only, which means the general public is not going to be able to get inside and there’s only so much information people can dig up about it online. The club itself would be completely naïve when it comes to information warfare, so they’d have no clue as to how to fight back once they found themselves in the conspiracy crosshairs.”

“Hold up. How do you know the Russians even have an interest in it?”

“Because we keep a close eye on several of their most prolific troll farms. Over the last six months, we watched one of those farms gathering information about the club, its employees, and its membership.”

Fields shook her head. “The Russians must vacuum up a ton of information, on a ton of weird subjects, every day. Why would you care about this one?”

“You’re right. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t have the time or manpower to follow up on. The Commodore Yacht Club, however, is different. Among its membership are six Senators, fifteen members of the House, a Supreme Court Justice, and multiple other prominent D.C. personalities. It’s no accident that the Russians have been looking at it.”

“Agreed. But how do you go from them looking at it to assuming they’re building some kind of information operation around it?”

“It helps to know where to look.”

“Meaning?”

“The troll farms divide up the work. No single operation is conducted under the same roof. While a farm in St. Petersburg may be doing the initial research, another in Rostov-on-Don will be creating and populating blogs with disinformation, while a third farm in Kazan or Vladivostok will be pushing bots and fake accounts out onto social media to amplify whatever messaging has been decided upon. As much as they try to mix things up and cover their tracks, there’s still a pattern to their behavior. Although this time, it was a bit harder to catch.

“Three years ago in Tampa, a homeless man named Alejandro Diaz, naked and high on bath salts, was found in the act of eating another homeless man’s face off. Tampa PD shot him eight times, at which point he turned and charged them. The responding officers fired seventeen more rounds, stopping Diaz and dropping him to the ground. They described it like something out of a zombie movie.

“As you can imagine, it made for pretty spectacular headlines, which were picked up across the country. Then, the story faded.

“A couple of weeks later, theTampa Bay Timeshad a short follow-up piece. Diaz had an aunt all the way up in Pensacola who came down toclaim the body. There was just one problem. The corpse that was presented to her wasn’t that of her nephew. Someone had screwed up. Alejandro Diaz’s body had mistakenly been cremated.

“Thankfully for all involved, the aunt didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. She was deeply ashamed of what her nephew had done, but as his only living relative had felt obliged to see to his remains. She left Tampa with his ashes and a stream of apologies.”

“That’s a horrible story,” said Fields, “but what does it have to do with a D.C. yacht club and Russian troll farms?”

“In the last two months, a blog popped up—allegedly based in Florida—calledThe Public Truth, which was looking into what ‘really happened’ to Alejandro Diaz. It was posing a lot of outlandish questions, like, if there was no body, how can anyone be sure he’s really dead? Did Diaz wear the face of his victim in order to escape just like Hannibal Lecter inThe Silence of the Lambs? Could the killer cannibal still be on the loose? And on and on with that kind of absurd nonsense. Not long afterThe Public Truthwent live, the Commodore Yacht Club was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Fields’s eyes widened. “They got hit by ICE?” she asked. “What for?”

“Apparently, the club was using alotof undocumented labor.”

“How come I never heard any of this?”

“With six Senators, fifteen members of the House, a Supreme Court Justice, and a host of other D.C. muckety-mucks on the membership roster, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest someone called in a favor to keep it quiet. The story did, however, break on one blog in particular.”

“Lemme guess.The Public Truthblog; the one dedicated to Alejandro Diaz.”

“Bingo,” Carolan replied. “But you’re going to love this because it goes even further. One of the employees rounded up that day is named Gustavo Alejandro Diaz.”

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