Blue Warrior

“Do we know if Myers has any interests or concerns in Mali?”

“Part of my contract with you is to monitor all of President Myers’s communications—”

“Just ‘Myers.’” The Angel visibly stiffened, took another sip of his Old Fashioned. “She’s a former president who quit the office. She doesn’t deserve the title.”

“It’s funny you should ask me about Myers and Mali. She made a recent phone call that seemed harmless enough.” Bath had run a search of all of Myers’s e-mails, calls, and texts, sniffing out references to Pearce and Mali after The Angel’s little bedroom chat with his powerful wife. It paid to be on top of these things, to appear omniscient when really one needed only to be proficient. Only one reference popped up a few days ago.

“A call to whom?” he asked.

“Pearce. He was in Mozambique when he took it. Sounded like he was in the cockpit of a plane when he spoke with her. Myers was sending him to exfil Mike Early out of Mali. That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Nothing about Mossa?”

“No.”

The Angel jiggled the ice in his glass, thinking. “The call makes sense. Myers would send Pearce to Mali to fetch Early, because Early worked for Myers, too. One of her security advisors, as I recall. But Pearce never left Mali.”

“How do you know he’s still there?” Bath knew the answer was Zhao. She had to feign ignorance; otherwise, The Angel might suspect she’d listened in on his call.

The Angel smiled. “I have my sources.”

Bath frowned, thinking. “Maybe Myers was speaking in code. Maybe she wasn’t really sending Pearce in to rescue Early, but was really sending him in to help Early.”

“Help Early with what?”

“Mossa.”

“If that’s the case, then they’re both in Mali at Myers’s behest and now they’ve both been seen helping Mossa. That means she must have ties to Mossa, too. When you find out what those ties are, let me know. But for now, at least, I’ve got Myers connected to Mali and to Mossa. That’s all the ammunition I need. One more thing: I want you to begin seeding the blogosphere with stories and pictures about Mossa, the Tuaregs, terrorism, Africa — you get it. I want to push the themes the senator raised on Finch’s gawd-awful show last Sunday. In fact, here—”

The Angel forwarded a video from his phone sent by Zhao. It was an edited version of the video shot by Guo’s hawk drone, showing Tuaregs shooting helpless, wounded Mali soldiers.

Bath pulled it up. “Oh my God. This is terrible.” Of course, she didn’t tell him she had already seen it, having captured it from his phone earlier.

“Use it. Turn it viral.”

“No problem.” Bath wasn’t kidding. She ran one of the world’s largest virtual click farms. Her operation could generate up to three million fake “likes” per day on any given YouTube or Facebook page by deploying malware that hijacked legitimate IP addresses and using them to “like” the page, thus making the fake “likes” look real to the site managers. She justified her actions, in part, because she didn’t resort to the click-farm “sweatshops” in Third World countries like Bangladesh, where human drones pounded away for hours at keyboards registering thousands of “likes” per night for a dollar or two. Thanks to The Angel, the Department of State recently paid her $630,000 to get over two million automated fake “likes” on its Facebook pages.

For a hefty fee, Bath could turn almost anything into a viral hit. It was well known that Twitter and Facebook had millions of fake users, so she clearly wasn’t the only one doing this kind of thing, but nobody did it better. Her malware programs could also boost the “star” ratings of products offered by online vendors like Amazon or iTunes, blasting her clients’ sales through the roof and tanking their competition with equally bad reviews. Two best-selling authors and one Grammy-nominated musician had hired her in just the last year. For wary consumers of all stripes, it was becoming increasingly difficult to trust the ratings systems.

“You saw my e-mail about Myers?” Bath asked. “That she’s still sniffing around the Tanner issue?” Bath saw Myers’s pursuit of Tanner’s suicide as a far greater threat to both of them than the sideshow in far-flung Mali.

“Yes. That’s a problem.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

Bath wanted Myers dealt with, soon. She wondered if The Angel had the guts to pull the trigger if it came to that. If killing an ex-president had to be done, she preferred his fingerprints be on the corpse, not hers. But then again, it might provide CIOS with a very lucrative billing opportunity.

“I want you to dirty the water,” he said. “Let’s roll out a campaign against Myers and her lapdog Pearce. Link them to Mossa and AQS, but discreetly. That should keep her distracted, and keep her away from Tanner.”

“Audience?”

“The national security establishment, of course. The usual suspects. CIA, NSA, FBI. But do that thing you do. Make it look like legitimate chatter from the bad guys.”