Page 35 of Edge of Honor

“In this push, political influencers were out. They wanted culture-war influencers. But they didn’t want typical social media influencers. They wanted culture warriors.

“And instead of casting a wide net, they decided to microtarget members of a specific, pissed-off cohort. Like the old Pentecostalist saying, their plan was to meet these people where they were and then take them to where they ‘needed’ to be.”

“So who are these people?”

“According to the Behavioral Analysis Unit,” Carolan replied, “the Russians are fishing in a pond made up largely of young men, eighteen to thirty-four, who feel completely left behind by the system. These young men see themselves not only as overlooked, but also abandoned by their government.

“The opportunities that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed, whether it be career-wise, family-wise, you name it, no longer exist for them. They contend with drug abuse and suicide at unprecedented levels and are the first generation since World War II to not only not advance, but to be driven backward. They’re angry and I can’t say I blame them. In the rush to maximize shareholder value by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, no one, least of all our politicians, stopped to wonder what would happen to all those people in all those towns when their factories were shuttered.”

“I can understand,” said Fields, “why the Russians would see them as fertile soil, but what’s the mechanism? How are they going after them?”

“Fight clubs.”

“What?”

“They’re channeling their anger into underground, no-holds-barred fighting matches.”

“In the United States?” Fields asked.

“They started in Russia, spread to Western Europe, and have begun to take hold here. Whatever country they’ve popped up in, they have a very isolationist undercurrent to them. These men train in gyms together, building their combat kills, with the belief that eventually they’re going to fight in the streets to protect their way of life, which is being stolen from them. The fight-club-style matches are simply dress rehearsals for the ultimate showdown they believe is coming.”

“How come I have never heard of this?”

“It’s way out there on the fringe. And they purposefully keep it quiet. If you’re not consuming extremist content, you’d never know.”

“How’d you find out about it?” she asked.

“The face of the whole thing is a rabid Russian nationalist named Sergey Gryzlov. Internationally, he’s connected with the absolute worst of the worst, particularly White supremacist mixed martial arts networks. Their tournaments and gyms serve as recruiting centers for disaffected young men who then enter in a pipeline preparing them to commit political violence. The fitness market and combat sports market help serve as on-ramps. Algorithms and old-fashioned word of mouth do the rest.

“As to how all of this ended up on my radar, the State Department flagged a visa application by a business associate of Gryzlov. It got kicked to Gallo, who kicked it to me. I’d never heard of the guy and had no clue about his international string of fascist fight clubs. I did some digging, wrote it up, and Gallo sent my report back to Foggy Bottom. They denied the visa and put Gryzlov and the associates in question, along with several others, on a no-entry list.

“In the meantime, I’ve been keeping an eye on the movement here. Almost all of their activity happens in the darkest corners of the Dark Web. Hence the laptop from the Cyber Crimes unit. And as far as their fights go, they’re pretty brutal. I’m surprised nobody has been killed yet.”

“And that’s where you’ve seen the tattoo of the sword with a tree growing out of it?”

Carolan nodded. “Twice. Two months ago at a club in Riverside, California. Then about a month later at a club in Laredo, Texas. Oneguy had that tattoo on his arm, another on his chest. Once I remembered the context, it all came back.”

“The Coke probably didn’t hurt either.”

“Probably not,” her boss agreed as he pulled up video of both fights and then froze the pictures to show her.

“That’s definitely the same tattoo,” said Fields. “Now what?”

“We need to have a tech run all the fights through facial recognition. I want to see if any of our six dead shooters at the D.C. morgue were in attendance.”

“And if they weren’t, then what?”

“Then we track down any fighter with that tattoo and, if we can establish leverage, we sweat them for information. All that matters is that we keep moving.”

“Because an investigation that’s in motion tends to stay in motion.”

Carolan nodded.

Privately, however, his gut told him they were headed straight for a brick wall. And with every hour that passed, whoever was responsible for last night’s attack was drifting further and further from their grasp.

CHAPTER 17

CAPITOLHILL

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