The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “I think the thing to do is work a different story,” Gordon had said. “Something no one else is working on.”

  Bishop had to agree that made sense.

  It amused Gordon that reporters always seemed shocked when you could see things from a distance they missed up close.

  “What’s the biggest hole in the Oosay story?” he asked her. “What’s the missing piece that makes other pieces suddenly fit?”

  “The whole thing is a missing piece,” she said.

  “I often find it’s what we stopped looking at that’s important.”

  “Beg pardon. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, there is usually something we wonder about a lot at the beginning of a story. And then we may lose sight of it when we get into the middle. For me, it was the question of who was the mastermind behind the Oosay attack.”

  “The man on the roof?” Bishop said, referring to a report in the early days that someone had seen a man on a roof near the Oosay compound looking through binoculars. That had never been confirmed.

  “I know he might have just been a guy with binoculars up there by chance,” Gordon said. “But the question of who was the mastermind is still actually more important than anything Congress seems focused on. Who did this, and how, and what does it portend about ISA in Africa? Not what the kindergarten on the Hill is looking at.”

  Gordon was becoming animated the more he thought about it. “Morat has slipped further into chaos since the attack,” he said. “Who gained by doing this? What are the best theories? Where’s the evidence point?”

  Bishop had to smile. Gordon was not entirely useless, even if he was an editor.

  “What questions mattered at the beginning that we’ve begun to forget about in the middle?”

  Then Gordon stopped talking. It was better, he found, just to point his best reporters in a direction—not insult them with a lot of instruction about what to do after he’d pointed.

  He stood up. “Just keep going, Jill.”

  Back at her desk, Bishop thought awhile.

  Then she called Avery Holland.

  Thirty-Four

  Avery Holland had been just twenty-four years old when he began to perfect using artificial intelligence to track what everyone in the world said on the Web.

  The idea had come to him when he was social media editor for the ABN-TV network, where he was given the lowly job of promoting the old TV channel’s news stars and programs on a growing list of social media platforms like Y’all Post, Little Bird, and Me, Myself and You.

  During the Arab Spring in 2010, Holland began to realize he could track the revolution online by monitoring the social media posts of influential activists and triangulating their conversations. He knew more, and knew it faster, than journalists working on the ground where the protests were occurring. He learned how to weight each voice he heard based on their influence—the number of followers they had—and their reliability—whether their past digital conversations turned out to be true, thus weeding out the fakes, the spoofers, and the blowhards.

  He began to write computer code that could identify which accounts were “organic”—meaning real people—and which were bots—meaning either machines posing as people or actual people being paid to run multiple fake identities. At twenty-six Holland coined the term “Little Bird Revolution” to describe the protests in Egypt—which six months later he repudiated when he discovered most of the “sparrow tweets” posted on Little Bird were either military spoofs designed to catch protesters or protesters putting out fake tweets on Little Bird to deceive the soldiers.

  By then, however, his discredited term was misunderstood, and he had become one of the most recognized interpreters in the world of social speech on the Web—though ironically he was now becoming one of its skeptics.

  Holland left ABN for a Ph.D. in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he began to write more sophisticated code. He began creating maps of great depth and detail. He could take any topic in the world and know who was saying what about it, eliminate the fake traffic, and identify down to the person, either in the Dark Web or the open Web, what they said and who listened to them. Or he could map a city and everything that was said online inside that city. He knew better than most residents of those places what their neighbors thought, liked, and in secret kept from their family members. He began predicting elections and even crime. He could track the reputation of a corporation or a person and know everyone who liked them, everyone who hated them, and everyone who talked about them.

  The CIA was the first to come calling, visiting Holland’s graduate dorm at MIT to talk about his algorithms. He created a company, VoxMapia, that the CIA helped finance indirectly, and then they hired Holland and his company to track dangerous extremists online. In time, the CIA had learned enough from Holland that it began to try to emulate his work itself, though he still spent some time as an occasional advisor. But Holland was considered a little too idiosyncratic for the CIA. Gradually his company moved into more commercial areas, which were also more lucrative. Food conglomerates and consumer product giants hired him to track what was being said about their shampoos or deodorants, and how to shape that conversation. There was a lot of damaging corporate sabotage and espionage now. Candy turns up in a convenience store in Ames, Iowa, with a trace of arsenic. Twenty-four hours later, a campaign of hate could rise up online costing the candy manufacturer a billion in stock valuation overnight. Avery Holland could identify that it was a rival candy manufacturer behind the social upheaval. He never engaged in such behavior himself. But he could spot others doing it, and he was paid a good deal by brands to know about it, though they were not always able to stop it.

  On the side, Holland still had an interest in news, and there were a few reporters in town who understood what he did and for whom he was willing to work. It was her intelligence source Talon who originally had told Jill Bishop about Avery Holland.

  “This boy can zero in on what the head of ISA is saying, even if the man is using anonymous accounts in some part of the Web we didn’t even know existed. He has figured out the real identities of these extremist voices online. He knows who the person is doing the sparrow tweeting, where they actually live, and their real name. It’s pretty amazing.”

  If anything, Holland was a lot more cautious than most actual spooks, Bishop had discovered. He operated with cash, rarely used credit cards, and met Bishop face-to-face only on those rare occasions when she sought his help on a story.

  This time she said only that she needed something. It wasn’t until she arrived at his brownstone on Capitol Hill, where he ran his company and also lived, that she explained what she was after.

  “I want to figure out who masterminded the Oosay attack,” she said.

  Holland stared at her a long moment. “I thought we did this already. We said there was a lot of social traffic that night in Oosay. The U.S. government should have seen it.”

  Holland had been her source for that aspect of the original Oosay exposé.

  “This is different. A different story. This time we need to go deeper and find who was directing things. Who was behind the Oosay attack. If you get me that, I can pry loose what the intelligence community thinks.”

  Holland looked like an overgrown boy. He was pudgy, had a round face, a hipster’s beard, and friendly, soft green eyes. Yet Bishop sensed a sadness in him, as if Holland knew he would spend his life looking at how anger and hate would spread, not the liberation he thought the Web would bring. At age thirty-three, he seemed to her a weary soul.

  “It will take a day or two,” Holland said. “And I will need five thousand dollars.”

  “Do it.”

  As far as Bishop was concerned, Will Gordon had given her a blank check.

  “I need some clues to get us started,” Holland said. “Some people to look at.”

  Bishop handed him the pieces she had collected, most of them written early, speculating on who had
been behind the attack. There was a piece by Roland Garth in the New York Times that mentioned eyewitnesses recalling men who seemed to be observers supervising the attack from adjacent buildings, including the so-called man on the roof. The Guardian in England had surfaced some names, too. The Guardian also had reported that the Nash administration wasn’t keen on trying to talk about who it thought was responsible for the attack, lest the man vanish. That had led the conservative online media to condemn the Nash administration for not having a clue about who it was. Bishop tapped her tablet and grabbed the pieces from her file and emailed them to Holland.

  “What do your intelligence sources tell you?” Holland asked.

  Bishop scrunched her nose in frustration. “They’re pretty quiet about that,” she said. “I wonder if the masterminds of Oosay actually are people who began to disappear online as the attack got closer.”

  Holland smiled. That was the kind of thing he would wonder. He would track Oosay months before the attack and then look for who began to get quiet.

  Bishop came back two days later to check on Holland’s progress.

  As he began to show her what he found, Holland made a kind of humming noise.

  “Is that a good noise or a bad noise?” Bishop asked.

  Holland shrugged. “Got four or five suspects,” he said.

  He turned on his computer—which Bishop marveled was usually turned off when he wasn’t using it—and opened a document with pictures and short bios, a little digital dossier he was building.

  “If someone is trying to hide and isn’t on social media or trying to be public, how do you know anything about them?” she asked.

  “Everyone leaves breadcrumbs,” Holland said. “Even when they think they don’t.”

  A picture came up of a bearded man with a gun, from a blurry Internet photo.

  “This one is an ISA commander who works mostly in Tunisia. Name of Abdul Hassan. But he wasn’t in Morat that night. I know that for sure from tracking some of his aides, who you can locate. So if he was the mastermind, there was someone else on the ground in Morat doing his bidding who isn’t usually one of his regular deputies.”

  “Who else?”

  The next picture showed a man in front of a microphone giving a speech, another bearded man in a robe.

  “This is a radical cleric named Ibrahim Ramzi. He held protests outside the compound. Exhorted people to resist the Americans. A lot of talk.”

  “So he’s either hiding in plain sight or he’s too obvious to be guilty?”

  “I leave that analysis to you. I just provide the evidence,” Holland said.

  The next picture was of a younger man, maybe in his twenties.

  “This is a local thug, a low-level Moratian gangster named Yousef Samir. He was coy in his comments after the Oosay attack. Powerful in the neighborhood of the compound. A suspect certainly. But I’m skeptical he has what it takes. He’s on social media a lot. But he has no density.”

  “No what?”

  “I’ve explained this to you before,” Holland said. “Density is my measure of how many important people, or connections, follow a given person in various social realms and how much they respond to or pass on what that person posts. How much of a ripple someone makes if they throw a rock in the pond. This Samir tries to connect with powerful people. They don’t usually connect with him. If he did this, it was a step up.”

  Click, and instead of a picture, a question mark appeared on the screen.

  “And someone I know less about,” Holland said.

  “Who is he?”

  “Well, he could be a couple of people. He could be a former carpenter or construction worker, who claims to be the head of a small militia group in Oosay. This man is not on social platforms himself. And he goes by several names. Mahmoud. Ghada. And Assam Baah. But I think, based on the location of a cell phone that might belong to him, he may have been around the compound a good deal for about a week before the attack. Staking it out, possibly.”

  “Was this the supposed man on the roof?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How do you know where he was? Especially if he is not on social.”

  “Cell phones ping off cell towers continually if they’re on. You know location, even if people aren’t doing anything online. The phone is communicating. That’s how platform companies know where you are all the time. We know people who have phone numbers associated with this man. One of those numbers was around the compound a lot.”

  Bishop was reminded of the degree to which Holland, the master of tracking people digitally, rarely used a cell phone, or did much else online that wasn’t from his secure computers.

  “Or it could be another man named Amin Assani, who I think is this man’s friend. Amin is the more visible presence.”

  “Why don’t you think it’s Amin then?”

  “You know how in old war movies there is a radioman who moves with his commander? The commander is always telling the radioman, ‘Tell headquarters this. Tell headquarters that.’ But the officer himself is not on the radio?”

  “You watch too many movies.”

  “You have no idea,” Holland said.

  Thirty-Five

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2

  The rest of Bishop’s thread came from intelligence sources. She met with Talon and two others and ran the names by them. In a couple of days she had what she considered enough. At least enough for the kind of speculative story that would shake the tree a little more. The kind Gordon thought would help.

  “While the Nash administration and law enforcement have not identified a suspect in the attack in Oosay that killed American army general Brian Roderick and three others, intelligence sources and evidence gathered independently by the Tribune have narrowed the search down to five men,” her piece begins.

  It walks through the different characters, naming Amin Assani as one, and his unnamed friend as another.

  “The unnamed suspect is the leader of a small militia group in Oosay that has emerged in the last two years as claiming credit for different acts in the name of ISA.”

  The story runs big, leading the paper’s evening briefing that Sunday night. It would run on page one in print the next morning and be the second story in the paper’s morning lineup online.

  THE SECOND HEARING on Oosay is scheduled for two days from now in closed session.

  After dropping Vic at the airport, Rena reads the Tribune story and considers what Vic had said about Congress—how it was focused on the wrong things. Perhaps any public inquiry should focus on the larger war on terror and how to conduct it—not on the Oosay incident.

  The story contained a subtle message to Washington, Rena thinks: stay on what matters. He wonders what hand Will Gordon might have played here. He is decoding the news the way Washington insiders often find themselves doing.

  He plays Go by Dexter Gordon and mixes a Grey Goose and Dolin martini, but after the first sip he loses his taste for the alcohol.

  He picks up his phone and begins to type a message for Vic, who is still in the air en route to California: “I miss you already.” Then he hesitates. She would appreciate the sentiment, he thinks. But he wonders if she will think the message is manipulative, a form of pushing her away when she is here and pulling her back as soon as she leaves. And why does he think she would suspect that? Is that what he does? Vic is so honest, he thinks, she deserves better than that. She deserves the truth. What does he want? Certainly he wants Vic, but what does he want for himself, and what is he willing to give? He erases the message, and then, unsure of what to write in its place, he sends nothing.

  Thirty-Six

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3

  QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

  The next morning, Rena calls Tommy Kee, the man who taught him how to be a military investigator.

  Kee, now in his fifties and close to retirement, is still in uniform, a sergeant—high as he will go—and perhaps wondering if he has stayed too long. Tommy is investigating crimes by soldiers th
e age of his children.

  He is stationed in Quantico, Virginia, nearly halfway to Richmond. Rena drives the Camaro, stuck in traffic on 95 both ways.

  They go to a frozen yogurt stand on base and sit outside in the cold, the only customers.

  “How you doin’, Pietro?” Tommy says, using Rena’s Italian name, the way Peter’s father always had.

  “We can’t get what we need. We’re being frozen out,” Rena says.

  Tommy nods. “Whatever they’re hiding, they’re keeping it deep. And maybe from the boss, too, and you’re working for the boss.” Kee means the president.

  He is a small, hard man with leathery skin and small watchful eyes. Tommy looked old when Peter met him fifteen years ago and doesn’t seem to have aged. He speaks in a hybrid English of his own, part his Korean parents, part East L.A. where he grew up, part military—a staccato syntax that Rena thinks a kind of poetry.

  “It’s always the same story,” Kee is saying. “The president asks his generals, ‘How do I win this war?’ They tell him, ‘Give us more men on the ground. Don’t tie our hands.’ Then he asks the foreign policy people and they say, ‘Don’t get trapped in a ground war. Only the people of the country can win it.’ The president goes halfway, it doesn’t work, and the generals say they must now fight the war their way but in secret. Eventually they begin to hide the worst from the president himself. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq One. Iraq Two. Afghanistan. It is always the same.”

  Kee is telling Rena he may never know what he is looking for.

  “What do you know about Brian Roderick?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I need to know what he was doing there,” Rena says.

  Kee tosses his frozen yogurt into the trash.

  “I know him by reputation. He was one of those Technicolor generals. Everything bright, big—his heart, his brain, his stubbornness. Half visionary, half crazy. Saw the warrior thing as destiny.” Tommy pauses to examine his friend. “Brave as a superhero and just as absurd. Did something like six tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.”