Open Secret

by Fiona Quinn

  She decided she might ask again someday, and then she’d assume the worst. After all, Twitter was all about the disposability of humanity. Mute. Block. Move on.

  Row_man: I didn’t really see what was going on. I was in a blind spot. I was on foot when I got knocked around a bit. I was in the back of some guy’s car where he couldn’t see me. Nothing’s broken. Not much in the way of blood. I’ve got some frozen peas on my bruises. I should be shipshape in a few days. Then we can do the exchange. Or maybe we could even Skype?

  Avery’s eyelids held wide. Skype?

  Row_man: Before I ask you to Skype with me, maybe I should introduce myself. I’m Rowan Kennedy.

  Did Avery want to let go of her own anonymity and tell him her name?

  It was a pretty unusual name.

  It would be easy to look her up. That reminded Avery that she needed to take steps to make herself into a ghost. If anyone found out that she was on the Taylor Knapp project, things could get bad. Very bad. She’d start by locking her Twitter account.

  As she opened the settings feature to make the security changes, the snores from upstairs turned into gagging.

  Avery raced up the stairs and flicked on the light. “Mom?”

  Chapter Seven

  Rowan

  Friday Morning

  Washington D.C.

  Rowan showed his badge as he made his way through the check point at FBI Headquarters.

  Lisa stood against the wall; Rowan saw her right away.

  As he made his way over, he saw anxiety tighten her facial muscles. His own brow furrowed in response. “Hey, are you okay?” he asked as he approached. “I got your text.”

  She squinted as her scrutiny ranged over his face.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.” He laughed. “As it turns out, black bags do a hell of a job of softening the blows.”

  “Don’t kid about this shit,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “It’s the job. You know what the job is. You knew me when I was a Ranger and this was an everyday thing. Now, it’s only every other month or so. It’s a good gig for an old man. What’s the ‘I’ve got to talk to you ASAP’ text about?”

  “Hey, Rowan.” Lisa’s supervisor, James Miles’ voice pulled Rowan’s attention around.

  “James.” He held out his hand.

  He gripped Rowan’s hand in a shake. “Lisa’s going to be talking to some folks from the Hill in ten minutes. These people have the ears of some big wigs connected to funding. Cyber is their first stop today. I’m hoping for more dinero to focus on our disinformation problem. Would you be willing to give us a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting? I think you can tie this into a bigger picture for them. Lisa’s going to be presenting. It would really help her out.”

  Rowan looked over at Lisa to see if she really needed to be helped out.

  “Ten minutes?” She cocked her head to the side. “You could help me make one of my points about the ever expanding scope. I’m focusing on Taylor Knapp as my example.” She turned her focus on James. “We need to get him out pretty quickly. He has a fire to douse, so let’s call a coffee break right after he freaks them out with what’s going on.”

  James clapped Rowan on the shoulder with a nod and walked off.

  “Do I really have a fire to put out?” Rowan asked, thinking that before he did this he’d need an Advil and a stronger cup of coffee.

  “First, I’m sorry about you and Jodie. She wasn’t my favorite. She was a bit of a stick up the ass kind of person, and I never could see how you two worked, but that’s not really for me to judge.”

  Rowan stilled. He’d broken up with Jodie last night. How in the world could Lisa be mentioning it twelve hours later? Rowan brushed a hand over his face. “What did she do?”

  “Jodie doxxed you. She put up a tweet.” Lisa lifted her phone to show him a screen capture.

  Rowan read: Well, that’s three years down the toilet. I’m drinking heavily tonight. Tomorrow, I burn all the shit that reminds me of my mistakes. Thanks for nothing @ Row_man or since you’re always at work @Dark_Matters.

  Rowan stared at it, stunned. Fear shot through his system.

  “She deleted it first thing this morning,” Lisa said. “Probably as soon as the Alka-Seltzer kicked in, and she realized what she’d done.”

  As soon as his heart started to beat again, Rowan muttered, “Too late.”

  Chapter Eight

  Rowan

  Friday Morning

  Washington D.C.

  “Thank you all for coming today. I’m Special Agent James Miles. I think most of us know each other, but let’s make a round of the table. Just your name, affiliation, and role, if you can.” He turned to his right to get the ball rolling.

  They progressed around the table. A dozen names were offered, representatives from the Pentagon, White House, and congress, a lot of suits and brass.

  Rowan sat to James’s left, last in line. “Rowan Kennedy, FBI, Eastern Europe.”

  Special Agent in Charge, Damian Prescott, gave Rowan a nod then turned to the rest of the room. “We’ll begin with information from Special Agents Griffin and Kennedy. Special Agent Kennedy is coming in from the field.”

  There was a shift of unease as the people at the table came to the understanding that his bruised face was probably the result of what happened in the field, and so the real dangers weren’t just a cognitive understanding but were physically evident.

  Lisa stood and moved behind her chair, pushing it in. “Again, I’m Special Agent Lisa Griffin, cyber.”

  Rowan and Lisa had known each other for a long time. They had each other’s backs.

  Lisa had been cyber support for Rowan’s Ranger unit, and after retiring from the military, they’d both found new careers in the world of intelligence and counterintelligence. But the thing that had kept their friendship solidly in place was their writing.

  Both of them found fiction to be a good valve for releasing pressure. They wrote for themselves; they shared their writing with friends; they’d both gained from Avery’s editorial eye. Sometimes, though, their writing was more realistic than might be palatable for someone who hadn’t experienced a ground war. So when they were describing the kinds of scenes that their psyches wanted out on paper, rather than swirling through their nervous systems, Rowan and Lisa shared those stories with each other.

  “My expertise is in computer gaming, smart phone apps, and their applications as communications devices for crime and terrorist organizations.” Lisa reached in front of Rowan to snag the computer remote and changed the photo on the large screen behind her head. Up came the art for the video game The Unrest.

  “I tell people that I play video games for a living,” she said. “Which is true. But the reason I play the games is to track terrorist and criminal behaviors.”

  Rowan watched the group. Their interest was piqued, but they were pretty confused.

  “Video games are an easy means of communication and building alliances that our intelligence communities cannot track,” Lisa explained. “If a criminal or terrorist wants to communicate via a video game, it is almost impossible to trace by any of our signals intelligence agencies. Signals intelligence is the government intelligence gathering done by monitoring, intercepting, and interpreting communications. This is done by the military and by the alphabets, including NSA, CIA, and here at the FBI. If our normal means of communications gathering doesn’t pick up an exchange then our enemies become invisible. And right now, we just don’t know how to thwart them.”

  “Slow it down,” a man in a gray suit said. “Some of us are dinosaurs who didn’t grow up with the computer. When I was a kid, I played Mrs. Packman. None of this blood and guts deal that I see my grandkids playing. How in the heck could a terrorist use a video game to communicate?”

  Lisa rested her hands on the back of her chair. “It started with low-tech gaming consoles. Many of those games allowed gamers to play with their friends remotely. My brot
her, for example, plays with our nieces and nephews while he’s on base in Germany, and they’re here in America. It keeps them connected. Other gamers enjoy the competition and the ability to interact with folks from all over the world. The games are fun. And the games naturally feed a part of the brain that makes us want to play more. Gamers often spend hours a day in these worlds.” She lifted her finger to focus everyone on the Knapp game from a Power Point presentation showing on the screen.

  “I was doing a simulation game once on the computer that had to do with animal populations,” an easily identifiable White House staffer said. “If I left the game to get something to eat or what have you, when I got back there was no water or there were too many predators. I remember playing that darned game all night, trying to keep my video game hippos alive.” He stopped and chuckled. “I got a case of carpal tunnel from it. That game grabbed me by my emotions and wouldn’t let go. The devil it was. I tossed it in the trash and won’t go near that kind of thing again. Addictive. Whatever you were saying, Special Agent Griffin, about feeding that part of my brain, you aren’t kidding.”

  “Yes, sir. And while I threw that information into the pot. It might have been too early in our discussion. Let me redirect our talk back to communications. As I was saying, the games are a more secure means of communicating than encrypted phone, texts, or emails. At first, gamers could send messages back and forth to each other through the game. Now, as the gaming systems have advanced, players can do things besides sending messages, you can now chat through the game, for example. The FBI, the NSA, the CIA, among other alphabet organizations and the military, have infiltrated online games where there were terrorist meet ups. In those meet ups, the game was being played, and the terrorists were discussing strategies and cell movements.”

  “This is common then?” the colonel asked. “We probably need people to play games all day and watch for this.”

  “Yes, sir, that is much of what I do,” Lisa said. “And even the Army, sir, though you may not be aware, has gamers. Their public facing function is to play in international gaming competitions as a recruiting tool. But that’s public facing. The Army doesn’t let folks know that they’re trying to monitor our enemies.”

  The colonel tapped his pen aggressively on a pad of paper.

  “You said terrorist meet ups,” a suit said. “I’m guessing that they decide on a time, and, wherever they are in the world, they can all get on their gaming platform and play video games together.”

  “Exactly,” Lisa said. “They all collectively join a multiplayer game, and then they might do something like, instead of shooting the bad guys, they’ll focus the shots on a wall to spell out words with the bullet holes.”

  “Within the game.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “So anything, coins, bullets, whatever thing they can manipulate in a game can be used as a method of writing words,” the colonel said. “No one could figure out how they’re passing the information.”

  “Unless they are an accepted member and are playing that game at the same time,” Lisa said, “that’s right. Our signals intelligence simply can’t find, collect, or stop it. But now things are evolving. And we see another terror use for video games…wide-spread social unrest. Groups who have anti-American sentiments are now discovering that they can use video games to create cells of violent activists. Backing up a step, a simple definition of terror is when an ideology uses violence to change society.”

  “And why are you in this meeting?” The colonel turned steely eyes on Rowan.

  “Sir, I work between Washington D.C. and Eastern Europe as an legal attaché,” he said, standing. “I am specifically involved with following and understanding the functions of crime families that operated in the former Soviet Union. These crime groups are thriving in countries around the world, including the United States. Their criminal enterprises are thought to cost the US hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year.”

  Rowan’s jaw was still swollen and stiff. He worked at projecting his voice and enunciating so people could follow him. But he really wanted to keep his portion of sharing to a minimum. The ache seemed to intensify with each sentence.

  “These crime family groups no longer conform to the typical structure one would think of when it comes to Russian mob activity,” he said. “They are now divided into cells of operation. These cells function independently of each other, each with their own task, but the cells have overarching goals.”

  “Why did they shift to this new organizational model?” a suit asked.

  “When the cells operate independently, there is limited connection to members of the entire organization and this protects high-level figures,” Rowan said.

  “So they’re functioning like terror cells,” the suit concluded.

  “In many ways, yes. They’ve been working with those the US has identified as terrorists for a long time now, and I’m sure that they picked up on those techniques that have helped keep the terror networks functioning. This includes the secret communication systems, which Special Agent Griffin is speaking about.” Rowan adjusted his tie and cleared his throat. “This leads me to the mission that I just returned from. It concerns one of the crime families based out of Bulgaria. They are connected by marriage to the Russian Orlovs and the Slovak Zoric families, both of whom have been in the news lately.”

  There was a shifting of bodies in their chairs as tension rose in the room.

  “What we know is that this Bulgarian family is launching a campaign in the United States geared to intensify the ‘us-them’ narrative that we’ve seen increase since our last national presidential cycle. The goal is to foment hate and hate crimes. It is this family’s objective to weaponize social media, producing the most damage to a unified United States citizenry over the longest period of time possible. Taylor Knapp’s work, that Lisa is using as an example, is supported by this particular crime family.”

  “And you’ve seen them up and functioning?” a woman asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” Rowan responded. “In the news today you’ll see that Facebook took down four channels. These channels were micro-targeted toward the millennial consumer and had tens of millions of hits. The pages pushed their agendas through posts on these channels. The pages didn’t disclose that they were owned by the Russian government. The company was registered in Germany by Fast Forward. Fast Forward is also the company that produces the Taylor Knapp video games that Special Agent Griffin is discussing. This is important. Truly.” He paused and let his gaze sweep the room for dramatic effect. “We are fighting a new kind of war. We know how to put bullets on a target. How to drop bombs from the sky. But here? This? The target is ideas, and you can’t just shoot them down.” He turned. “Special Agent Griffin, can you put a sharper point on this idea? Tell them why Taylor Knapp is so dangerous.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rowan

  Friday

  FBI Headquarters, Washington D.C.

  “Terror attacks are useful,” Lisa said. “But they don’t really change behaviors, not for long anyway. Propaganda, on the other hand, changes hearts and minds. Case in point, the Taylor Knapp video game.” She pointed up at the picture of The Unrest. “Taylor Knapp was a nobody three years ago. He is a coder and game developer. His game came out, and he married three components: a video game, ideological music, and a compelling narrative in the form of an action adventure novel. All three became wildly popular and vastly divisive. The novel hit the New York Times list for fifteen weeks straight. It’s a new genre of science fiction called ‘video game adaptation,’ and it’s huge with the teen population.”

  “Who are in their formative years,” a suit said. “This is looking bleak.”

  When Lisa looked at Rowan, he said, “Knapp’s work was discovered by Russian interests. They saw that this layered program—game, music, novel—was exactly the kind of thing they were looking for to drive the ‘us-them’ narratives.”

  “You keep saying ‘us-them.”
The colonel scowled. “Give me an example.”

  Rowan sat down.

  “Let’s look at some themes from the first Taylor Knapp game and novel.” Lisa looked up at the screen as she flipped through her slides. The bullet points came up:

  Pro-Israel v. Anti-Semitism

  Black rights to safety/equality v. white supremacy

  Common sense gun laws v. 2nd Amendment, guns without restrictions

  “Now let’s take a look at a picture.” She flipped to a new slide and used a laser pointer to highlight the items she was calling out. “This first picture is of a black man being beaten at a rally by a group of white men.” She clicked the fob to move to the next photo. “A picture of a man driving through a group of counter protesters, killing a female.” She moved to the next image. “This photo is from a recent rally, you all recognize it from the newspapers. There are the tiki torches bought in the outdoor section of their local hardware store. The white males who are marching obviously came up with a unifying dress code. If you look at all of the faces in these photos, and the aggressors in the previous two photographs I showed you, every single one of them has been identified by the FBI. Every single one of them plays the Taylor Knapp game.”

  “And that’s creating this atmosphere of hate violence?” a suit asked.

  “The identified individuals don’t play the video game a little. They play for hours each day. While there is some psychological literature that supports violent video games leading to violence, this game is a new and potent tactic that we’re still trying to understand. In Taylor Knapp’s video game, called The Unrest, the more the gamer creates conflict in the population and in the government, the more points they get. You cannot advance in this game without causing unrest. The Uprising, by the way, is the name of the game that’s about to be released.”