1
WASHINGTON, DC
It had been raining for three days when Ben Butler tried to kill himself. Evan Ryder let loose a string of expletives as she raced through the blessedly light early morning traffic. Part of her mind was in shock. Ben—her Ben, her patron, her control, her partner in the field. Her rock. She could not wrap her mind around this new reality.
She had received the call from Isobel at just after 5 A.M. and, like receiving news about a death in the family, could not believe what Isobel was telling her. It was a mistake; it must be. Ben would never attempt to take his own life. Her eyes filled with tears as she hurriedly dressed and slammed out the door of her apartment. And here she was not fifteen minutes later almost at her destination, after having hit 100 mph, slewing and, once, fishtailing around corners, and shooting through every red light in her path. Trying to keep her emotions in check, she slowed to a more moderate speed as the downpour sluiced against the windshield. The wipers, even at max speed, couldn’t get rid of the rain fast enough. Her thoughts were in turmoil and it was all she could do to keep herself together.
As she turned onto California Street NW, the Italianate villa became plainly visible. Though Isobel Lowe enjoyed a high-ranking position in Parachute, she worked out of her home in DC, this three-story cream stone and butterscotch stucco villa near the corner of California Street NW and Massachusetts Avenue, near Rock Creek Park, rather than in Seattle, where the Parachute main campus sprawled across countless acres. With good reason, almost no one knew of her existence or of the directorate she ran. Outside of her own meticulously vetted people, only Marsden Tribe and a pair of his trusted assistants were aware of her and her team, and even those two knew only that she was in charge of corporate security. Which was true, but merely one small facet of her overarching remit.
Parking on the street, Evan raced through the gray downpour, up the steps to the villa’s side door. The key she used fit into the conventional Yale doorknob lock, but just inside was an inner door locked in an altogether different manner—it used an algorithm derived from each individual’s biorhythm. This ultra-secure mechanism, developed by Tribe himself, might have seemed a tad over the top for Parachute, a Platform as a Service company, a pioneer in quantum cloud computing and cross-application services, but it was right on the money for Isobel Lowe’s directorate.
Evan and Ben had been recruited by Isobel over five months ago while Ben was still recovering from the bullet wound that had shattered his hip. Back then, his prognosis wasn’t bad—the surgeons had assured them that he’d be able to walk, albeit with the assistance of a walker and then a cane.
But it was not to be. A month ago, when Ben still couldn’t even stand, further tests revealed that the hip bone had shattered with such force that several slivers had acted like internal shrapnel. So deep were some of them that it was deemed too dangerous to get them out. For the rest of Ben’s life he would be confined to a wheelchair.
That’s when the real difficulties began.
Evan was through the inner door, flying into the kitchen, where Akiva, ex-Mossad and one of Isobel’s security people, stood waiting for her. He was a deceptively slender man with a thick black beard and blue eyes. He led her up the narrow back stairs that once served as the kitchen staff’s access to Isobel’s quarters.
On the second floor, she found Isobel in one of her half-dozen studies. This one was ringed by flat-panel TVs, each tuned to a different news net.
“How is he?” Evan said as Isobel turned away from the screens.
“The doctor’s in with him,” Isobel said in her soft but commanding voice. A former Mossad operative herself who knew Ben since long before Evan ever met him, Isobel was as willowy as she was toned, with devilishly wide-apart tawny eyes and an enigmatic smile.
Evan’s mind whirled in this room filled with so many voices: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC, RT—the Russian News net, Al Jazeera, Sky News, Firstar 24/7, Newsmax, One American News, and TNSC-Titan News and Streaming Corp, the ultra-conservative network owned by Samuel Wainwright Wells, multi-billionaire, media mogul, and most importantly for Isobel, major magnet for right-wing fringe groups, believers in conspiracy theories, the more outlandish the better. The Earth is flat. Democrats are socialists, Democrats are fascists, Democrats are under the sway of the Deep State, controlled by Jews, the Moon walk was a Hollywood fake (Jews again), 9/11 was perpetrated by the American Deep State as an excuse to invade Iraq, Democrats engage in Satanic rituals attempting to melt all the guns owned by the faithful, in human trafficking of young girls, babies, cannibalism, alien lizard-men. You name it, they had a conspiracy for it. And, for the love of God and Wells, don’t you dare try to confuse them with facts. Facts did not exist; neither did science. Jewish inventions all. “I’d rather live in Russia than under Democrats” was one of their rallying cries.
Isobel saw the distressed look on Evan’s face and with the push of a button on her console muted the sound on all the feeds, though her staff downstairs continued to scrutinize their own screens, even slowing them down to ID facial tells, inadvertent mannerisms, and the like. Blessed silence emptied the room, allowing Evan to breathe again.
“What happened?” Evan was too anxious to sit down.
“He slashed his wrists.”
Evan’s heart contracted and she felt tears trembling in the corners of her eyes. Angrily, she wiped them away with the back of her hand. “He hasn’t been able to come to terms with losing the use of his legs.”
Isobel regarded her sadly. “If this response is any indication, he never will.”
When Evan pointed out that it’d only been a month since he’d gotten the worst-case news, Isobel said, “I’ve known Benjamin longer than you have. He’s not cut out to be a cripple.”
“Can I see him?”
“As soon as Dr. Sheren gives his okay.” Part of Isobel’s attention was on the Titan 24-News Hour. The Breaking News banners scrolling across the bottom of the screen detailed the chaotic scenes of an Omega rally outside the Texas state capital.
“How they adore Omega,” Isobel said.
“Worship it, really,” Evan added. “The outlets owned by Wells are allowing this shit full rein.”
“It’s even worse on 27chan. No one knows who controls that internet posting board.”
“My money’s on Wells.”
“Proof?”
Evan shook her head. “Bits and pieces. Wells is a media mogul. He knows how to manipulate the media.”
“So do several other multi-billionaires,” Isobel pointed out. “Plus, these days you hardly have to be a billionaire to manipulate the media.”
Of course Evan knew that, but she had a specific reason why she suspected Wells—his wife, Lucinda; she just wasn’t ready to share her suspicion because Lucinda happened to be one of her sisters. “Yes, but I’ve discovered that Wells is a student of propaganda history. He knows the word from its origin in 1718, when a committee of cardinals in charge of foreign missions of the Catholic Church had its name changed to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
“More to our point, he is specifically fixated on the Big Lie, a clever technique employed to great effect by Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler wrote about it in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.”
Isobel nodded. “An infamous political strategy so simple it’s virtually infallible: make the lie big, outrageous even, keep saying it, and eventually the people will believe it.”
“It’s been used by dictators and presidents here and abroad every decade since,” Evan said. “Ben and I identified the string of Big Lies Omega was disseminating. That’s why we made Omega our top priority. We’ve been putting out its fires for over two years. But until we take care of that disease at home, our work will continue to be undermined.”
Copyright © 2022 by Eric Van Lustbader
