Page 7 of Dead Fall

WASHINGTON, D.C.

FRIDAY

FBI supervisory special agent Joseph Carolan fumbled on the bedside table for his phone. The worst calls always came in the middle of the night.

He was a big man who stood six foot four and weighed in at two hundred and fifty pounds; a lifer who’d been at the Bureau longer than anyone could remember.

Carolan was known for his investigative skills, as well as for his zero-tolerance policy when it came to bullshit. People who wasted his time pissed him off. His coworkers referred to him as “Bear,” both because of his size and because of his demeanor, which could swing anywhere from Gentle Ben to a rip-your-face-off grizzly, depending on how his day was going.

“Go for Carolan,” he growled as he activated the call and pressed the phone to his ear.

The person on the other end had been well trained on how to deliver breaking news, especially to a superior whom you had just awakened. Make it quick, stick to the facts, don’t speculate.

After listening for several moments, Carolan broke in, “Any press on scene yet?”

Once the question had been answered, he sat up in bed and began giving orders. “Have Metro PD fully tent the area around the body—no windows. Then have them push the perimeter out as far as they can. And if they haven’t already begun canvassing the building, get it started. In themeantime, I want someone assigned to start pulling all the CCTV footage we can get our hands on. Got it? Good. Text me the address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Disconnecting the call, Carolan placed the phone back on the nightstand and rubbed his stubbled face. Yet another morning he was going to have to skip his workout. At this rate, he was never going to shed the twenty-five pounds his doctor had been hounding him to lose.

“Coffee to go?” his wife, Margaret, offered. She had been a Bureau wife long enough to know not to ask questions. What’s more, as a highly accomplished trial attorney who had known her husband since they’d both been in law school, she could read him better than anyone.

While he wouldn’t publicly admit it, Joe was under tremendous stress. He had been promoted to his current position because the previous agent in his chair had suffered a massive heart attack. If there hadn’t been an AED in the office, the woman would have crossed over right there.

She had gone on to flatline once more in the ambulance and then again upon arrival at the hospital. All of this in a fit, health-conscious forty-two-year-old with no underlying conditions, nor family history of heart disease, who ran four half-marathons a year.

Had it been brought on by the demands of the job? Or had something more nefarious been to blame? That’s what headquarters was looking into.

So far, all of her toxicology screens had come back clean. That didn’t mean, however, that there hadn’t been an attempt on her life. What it meant was that nothing at this point was being ruled out. Carolan could be walking into the same set of crosshairs and had been told, in no uncertain terms, to watch his back.

The operation he had been put in charge of was codenamed “Quick Silver.” It was housed in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, specifically the Russia Operations section known in Bureau shorthand as CROS.

Operation Quick Silver had been created to root out Russian influence operations inside the United States that were designed to advance Russia’s goals in Ukraine.

It was a broad purview that had the potential to reach into almostevery facet of American life—the military, the media, the government… The possibilities were endless.

As such, the top brass at the FBI had been adamant that everything be done by the book and follow the exact letter of the law. All effort was to be taken to avoid embarrassing the Bureau. The last thing the FBI wanted was to hand its enemies a propaganda victory. Agents, especially those directly involved in Operation Quick Silver, were to maintain the highest levels of integrity at all times.

Carolan understood the solemnity of the situation. He didn’t care what Moscow’s endgame was: he didn’t like the Russians trying to manipulate America, its people, or its institutions.

The problem, however, was that the internet, coupled with a fractured media landscape, made it all too possible for people to silo themselves. Too many citizens got their “news” and information only from sources that supported their biases.

There was nothing the Russians loved more than injecting poisonous propaganda into the American cultural bloodstream. The return on their investment—as Americans turned on each other and their own institutions—was off the charts. And, despite all of Russia’s economic problems, it was the one area that the Kremlin was more than willing to keep pumping ever-increasing piles of cash into. As long as Americans had a bottomless, and easy-to-influence, addiction to anger, Moscow would continue serving it to them.

All of this made Carolan’s job exceedingly difficult. He not only had to battle the Russians, but he also had to contend with some of his own countrymen and -women—American taxpayers—of whom he was a servant.

The fact that so many were acting as repeater stations for anti-American propaganda was a difficult pill to swallow. These otherwise good and patriotic people simply couldn’t be bothered to do even a modicum of fact-checking.

While disheartening, there would always be a percentage of disengaged citizens who didn’t live up to their societal responsibilities. The people who knew better, however, were the ones that really got his blood boiling.

Next to corrupt politicians, the media grifters and digital con artists were the worst in his book. These people made their living not by telling people the truth, but by telling them anything and everything they wanted to hear. No lie was too outrageous. No conspiracy too corrosive. Collectively, there was no bottom with them, no line they wouldn’t cross.

What was worse, the outrage they supplied was akin to hits of heroin. Like any addictive substance, it constantly needed to be delivered in stronger and stronger doses. The moment any grifter or con artist failed to provide an ever-more-potent product, the audience would migrate to someone else who did.

It was slow-motion cultural suicide; an arms race of weapons-grade stupid, which tens of millions of people were lapping up daily. Carolan worried for his grandchildren and what the country would look like by the time they reached adulthood.

He had always seen his duty as a citizen to be a steward of the Republic. No generation “owned” America. Instead, it was each generation’s responsibility to do everything they could to make sure the next generation coming up was handed a freer, more prosperous, more secure United States than had been handed to them.

This was why Carolan had joined the FBI and had spent his life in service to his country. He believed in America and wanted to be of service to the nation that had given him, and his family, so much opportunity.

---