Beyond the possible flaws in the system itself, I was aware that most of the data I was working with had been personally and selectively mined: and from such reputable sources as Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter and Sym.PTic0, no less. But while this made my results seem questionable – and by ‘questionable’ I mean ‘probably bullshit’ – my gut instinct told me that I was right. Or, at the very least, on the right track. Not really reassured, so much as encouraged by that belief, I began to examine the new breakdown.
It was, essentially, a heavily a refined version of what I’d been looking at before. Refined enough, that is, to make all the difference. Now it was obvious – near-undeniably obvious – that the cases fit neatly into a series of clusters, each of which spanned a specific period of time, and a specific geographic area. The areas were always comprised of one or more adjacent States, and there didn’t seem to be any overlap at all between Disappearances specific to a given area. The difference that the exclusion of between five and six hundred names in thousands made was startling. It was the difference between a blurry outline and a scale model. I was aware that I’d probably missed some, or excluded some that I shouldn’t have...but honestly, it didn’t seem to matter. I knew, looking at it, that this was what was there to be found.
Let me walk you through it.
The first area, chronologically speaking, had been the tight, concentrated collection of states in the north-eastern region of the U.S.A. known as New England. Well over two hundred of the Disappearances that had made my list occurred there over the space of five days. The cases from the rest of the Atlantic coast had followed over the course of about a week. Then there’d been a lull of about a week where no new Disappearances had made the cut. This lull had been broken by a spate of fresh cases spreading west into the eastern continental interior – first a northern and then a southern group of states – with all the Disappearances in a given group occurring over no more than three days. Florida was next, followed by Texas.
Next had been the rest of the landlocked interior, with the exception of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. This was, by far, the most concentrated cluster – in terms of how many cases occurred over a given period of time – with three hundred and forty nine new Disappearances making my list over a single, massive, three-day flurry. After that, a single day passed before the Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico cases – only twenty-two in all – which had taken place over two days.
Then there was another lull: a quiet period of almost exactly a week, followed by a dozen listings for Sacramento, one hundred and twelve in Los Angeles and ninety seven throughout the rest of California, Oregon, and Washington over the space of two days.
Finally, three days later, there were a handful of cases in Hawaii and Alaska, and, possibly – there were rumours, but the information was still classified – several high-ranking naval officers from an unspecified Pacific Island command centre.
If the revised data was taken at face value, it showed an unbroken, highly regimented geographical and chronological progression: Eastern Seaboard, Centre-Eastern States, Centre-Western States, Western Seaboard, and, finally, Alaska and Hawaii. To me that suggested...tactics. Organisation. Purpose.
The thought occurred to me that it also seemed far too obvious to not have been noticed by virtually everyone who had access to the documents. But then I took the information I’d started with and compared it to what I’d come up with. There was no bread-crumb trail linking the two; just a tenuous, extremely conjectural hypothesis, stretched almost too taught to be plausible. Still. I wasn’t a rocket scientist. I couldn’t have been the only one. There should have been others.
If so, why wasn’t it being mentioned? It should have been old news. Literally. Of course, there was always the possibility that it was being actively dismissed, and the more I thought about it, the more sense that made. After all, the simplicity of it all gave nothing useful away, and, in all the important areas, the revelation raised a number of new questions while failing to provide remotely satisfying answers for old ones. Looking at my own reactions, I found myself even more overwhelmed by questions of ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ than I had been before I’d had a clear vision of the ‘who’, ‘when’, and ‘where’.
Ultimately, beyond a statement in the direction of the completely obvious – that there was definitely some kind of ‘long con’ being played out – the new information was useless. Potentially terrifying, sure...but essentially useless. On the other hand...for many journalists, all around the world, ‘obvious and unhelpful’ was the bread-and-butter of their contribution to the news cycle. So the question remained: had it somehow slipped under the radar? Was it just...hidden in plain sight?
As it turned out...the answer to my question was a resounding ‘no’. It had been noticed. And not just by the other journalists. Adjacent to the fractious, factionalised groups of squabbling, posturing hacks, disseminating their neat, rigorously edited and stylistically adherent – but, in this case, uncharacteristically avoidant – articles, were three other groups showing an equal degree of interest. Therein lay the problem. It took a little while to get to grips with the politics of it all, but it turned out that – while I’d been doing the minimum possible to not get fired, and focussing all of my attention on Naithe and the wedding – a silent standoff had been playing out between the journalists, the tabloid journalists, the bloggers and hacktivists, and the US Government.
§§§
So this is what I found at the heart of it:
The involvement of tabloid journalists was...tricky. Like many journalists, the ‘line in the sand’ that I drew between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was a very different one than most of the general public would have. On the one hand, there were the traditional tabloid journalists, whose articles were, by and large, lowbrow and sensationalist enough that no one took any of them remotely seriously. But then there was the ‘Murdochracy’.
Even though Rupert Murdoch himself – a long-time front-runner in my personal list of assholes who made me embarrassed to be an Australian – was dead and gone, his legacy remained: a monolithic, internationally enabled cacophony of sneering sell-outs who were constantly underfoot, and constantly making the professional lives of real journalists much, much harder. Like cockroaches – like rats – they hung back in the shadows, skittering forth to greedily scoff down the mouldering remnants of the remotely newsworthy; the scraps that were left untouched by the rest of the media.
Back when I’d been working in Melbourne, they’d been a constant frustration. News Corp Australia and its various subsidiaries dominated the Australian media landscape, and, on a good day, the bulk of their output was sensationalist trash, riddled with gratuitous hyperbole and conservative bias. On every other day? Well...I don’t want to use the term ‘propaganda network’, but hey: I guess I just did.
When it came to The Disappearances, these kinds of organisations had produced a decent proportion of the early coverage. There was no real political agenda to push, and so the unifying trend had been thinly veiled fear-mongering. Any and all remotely possible explanations had been touched on at some point, with the clear majority falling somewhere between ‘flimsy’ and ‘fanciful’, replete with equally dubious quotes and ‘expert’ sourcing. It was depressing. It was unprofessional. It sold. And, more importantly, it raised eyebrows just as efficiently as it raised sales. So, when real evidence – or ‘less completely ridiculous’ evidence – began to appear that supported the proposition that The Disappearances did, in fact, reflect a staged and highly organised process...the likelihood of producing copy that would just be lumped in with the tabloid coverage was significant enough to give most journalists pause.
The evaluation and analysis from the ‘blogosphere’ had made this situation ten times worse. Beyond the one-off contributions, there were a handful of bloggers who had actively devoted themselves to following the story. It was pretty common to see little cliques like that forming around big stories; passionate amateurs, mo
stly, peddling an ‘open-source’ alternative to the professional coverage. Normally, in my experience, they were kind of just there: doing their thing online. Sometimes they did good work. Good enough, every so often, to threaten the hell out of a few professional journalists. More often, though, their output was sloppy at best. Whatever the case...the extent of their involvement with the rest of the media, was – more often than not – being laughed at by them while their backs were turned.
In this case, atypically, the bloggers were front and centre. Unfortunately, it was almost entirely to do with a number of them having made the catastrophic – if accidental – mistake of picking a fight the US Government.
See...outside of the occasional smattering of experimental bullshit, the tabloid press knew better than to actually start gunning for the national authorities. There was a definite line, demarcating what and how much a journalist could – or, rather, should – be saying about The Government, and that line was usually respected. It really had a significant amount more to do with good taste and professionalism than it did with any sense that it might invite retribution.
That said: if there’d been any actual evidence linking the US Government to The Disappearances, it would have been a very different ball game. From Al-Jazeera to the Washington Post, it was an open secret – and had been from day one – that the ‘big hitters’ all had dedicated divisions laying in wait – patient and eagle-eyed – for any real proof to surface on that front.
But the US Government, it seemed, despite their near-universally acknowledged clean hands in the matter...were, for some reason, determined to play the role of the black-hats. To be realistic...it shouldn’t have been all that surprising to me, because it was an idiom in which they were singularly well versed. One that they defaulted to, on occasion, when unsure of how to proceed.
No doubt, though, their attitude had everything to do with wanting to solve the puzzle themselves, away from prying eyes, for the sake of maintaining public calm. As such, they were willing to put a figurative – or not so figurative, as it turned out – gun to the temple of anyone stupid enough to even look like they were reaching for a soap-box, high-horse, or pedestal.
Enter Anonymous.
This particular segment of the overall drama reached its peak with alarming speed. First, one of the bloggers got their hands on – and published – a revised listing of Disappearances several days before it was publicly released. It shouldn’t have been an issue. And, in fairness...it initially wasn’t. No one really raised an eyebrow over the blog being shut down. Wordpress cited a violation of its service terms, which was probably a completely fair reaction...and that seemed to be the end of that. No one really gave it very much thought at all.
Until, that is, seemingly out of the blue, a group calling themselves ‘Neo-non’ – a branch of Anonymous, ostensibly – hacked Netflix. For sixteen minutes and thirty seven seconds, every single piece of streaming content accessible to any Netflix subscriber redirected to a fifty-nine second announcement, where the ‘Anons’ of Neo-non summarised an important distinction between the leaked listing of Disappearances and every previous publicly released listing. The distinction was as follows: the leaked listing contained twenty-three names that had been previously omitted. Names that were, no doubt, deliberately removed from the publicly disseminated document. Names of individuals with top level Government, Military, and Intelligence clearance. Names of people that the American Government would have almost certainly preferred dead, than on a list of the potentially kidnapped.
The retaliation was immediate and shocking. Behind closed doors, a new list of names was drawn up. This one was put together by the NSA. I’d heard about the FBI raids that followed. Everyone had. I’d known that they had something to do with The Disappearances, but I’d never connected them with the additions to the data, even though the two things had occurred around the same time.
Of the FBI targets, around forty had been known participants in Anonymous activities. It was never specified how many of them – if the NSA or FBI even knew – were specifically associated with Neo-non. The rest of the targets, save for one, were believed to have been involved in the leaking of the document that started it all. That ‘one’ – that final target – was the blogger who had published it.
In total, forty-six people were detained; most of them Anonymous. In a press conference following the arrests, FBI representatives confirmed that the properties of a further eight ‘persons of interest’ had been raided, including the blogger in question, but that they had, and I quote: ‘not been able to locate these persons’. It was strongly implied that the FBI considered them to be among the growing list of Disappearances. The complication was that, as the FBI openly admitted, there had been signs of forced entry at each of these locations. This set off alarm bells for me. There had also been blood – and more than a little of it – confirmed to belong to the targets in question. In response to that little revelation, the alarm bells became air-raid sirens.
§§§
My eyes narrowed as I paused for a second to flick back through my revised list and make sure those names weren’t on it. It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened. It was, as warnings went, about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. And it had definitely been deliberate, so far as I was concerned...unless, of course, you wanted to try arguing that the FBI couldn’t make someone disappear without blood and forced entry if they wanted to.
Assuming I was right on that front...the raids had achieved precisely their desire effect. Regardless of what the general public had to say about The Bureau’s conduct in the privacy of their own homes...in the streets, citizen solidarity was palpable. The public seemed to have broadly accepted that The Government’s actions had been both in their best interests...and a necessary response, given the stakes, to the situation in general.
It was, however, the symbolic underpinning of the deafening public silence that followed the raids that had journalists terrified. Anyone who knew anything about Americans would have assumed that there’d have been lynch-mobs heading for Quantico, and rioting in the streets of Washington DC. The near-universal public support of The Government and – more specifically – the FBI, sent a very clear message to the media; professionals and amateurs, alike: The Government wasn’t in the mood to tolerate bullshit...and the public were willing to trust The Government to keep them safe in whatever way that they saw fit. There hadn’t been such an obvious, implicit, and broad-based public mandate handed up to The Government from the streets since the invasion of Afghanistan, a little over twenty years prior.
The unspoken agreement arrived at by the journalists amongst themselves seemed to have been that the only intelligent position to take on discussing The Disappearances was to continue investigating and reporting the play-by-play. Commenting on the larger structure of it was worthless until there was something more solid to say about it; the public would almost certainly respond badly to revelations of the scope and scale of The Disappearances...and, as I told Meg: ‘if nobody gives a shit; don’t write about it’.
Aside from which: nobody wanted to provoke a follow-up ‘lesson’ from the Government. So, from there on out, everyone had toed the line. No more leaks. No more hacking. No more games.
Until a few days before the wedding, that would have been the end of it. But the most recent development – the reports of fresh Disappearances outside the US – seemed to be changing the nature of the story. There were reports of vanishings in Canada and Mexico, as I mentioned...and, beyond that – potentially – Japan and Australia. When I tried to apply the previous formula to the new Disappearances – though, of course, it was still early days – it seemed to match, and reveal the beginnings of similarly geographical and chronological ‘staging’. Of course, again, when the single thread of definitive connectivity was ‘eerily sudden disappearances of high-profile individuals gradually spreading east-to-west’ it was hard to really define them as anything more than ‘possibly related’.
If the latest developments were connected, though...well, to start with, it meant that the list of potentially responsible groups had to be revisited. Whoever was doing this had to have massive international reach, and be organised enough to kidnap thousands of wealthy, powerful, and in some cases, brilliant people without ever slipping up or leaving any evidence behind. It didn’t seem to fit with the profile of any known organised criminal enterprise...or even with the kinds of objectives such a group might have.
A terrorist organisation with that sort of scope – something like a global coalition of anti-western groups – was a terrifying idea...but one that, thankfully, didn’t make much sense. Even just for the simple reasons that, were they terrorists, they were either getting incredibly bad Public Relations advice, or they were plotting to change their image and become ‘tense-confusionists’. Because that was a much more accurate description of what they were spreading. And besides that: what kind of terrorists didn’t want their actions connected to a manifesto or statement of intent? Didn’t claim responsibility or issue demands? And, more to the point...how would such a diverse coalition of extremists operate so systematically? How would they have made so few mistakes? How would they not have – realistically – imploded by now, destroyed by fractious internal differences?
And The Government? Any suspicion of a conspiracy on that front had basically evaporated from my mind. It would have made even less sense than it had before.
For a brief moment, the thought crossed my mind that...maybe...the crackpot-kings of the conspiracy-frontier were actually right: maybe it was aliens. But putting aside the complete and utter stupidity of that theory for a second...even if it were true: why? And how would attracting so much attention be, in any way, helpful to any kind of long-term play that might be on the horizon?
Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Page 14
