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FBI H EADQUARTERS

O nce they were in the car, it was a straight shot up Seventh Street. They made a left at the National Archives onto Pennsylvania Avenue and then a right onto Ninth, passing through security and pulling into the Bureau’s underground parking garage only eight minutes after leaving the Wharf.

Considering D.C. traffic, they’d made excellent time, largely due to the fact that Carolan had rolled through more than one red light in order to get them back so quickly.

A bonus of the new basement office was that they were able to bypass the main lobby. Gallo had updated their electronic access cards so that they could enter directly from the garage. It not only saved time, but it also cut down on bumping into other agents and having to make small talk.

Back at his desk, Carolan removed a ruggedized laptop and plugged an Ethernet cable into it.

“Is that your personal computer?” Fields asked, knowing that the IT division went apeshit over personal devices being connected to the FBI’s network.

“Negative,” said Carolan, powering it up. “It’s technically a loaner from Cyber Crimes.”

“Why do you say technically ?”

“A, because they don’t know they loaned it to me. And B, because I’ve got no plans to give it back.”

Fields smiled. “Look at all the rules you’re breaking today. I’m really liking this one-foot-out-the-door Joe Carolan.”

“Don’t get too excited,” he admonished her. “Gallo swung the notebook for me.”

“Why not just requisition one from tech services? Why the subterfuge?”

“Because these are used for surfing the Dark Web. They’re loaded up with a bunch of special software to prevent them from being tracked and they access the internet via a completely separate system than the Bureau uses for its day-to-day operations.”

“So what’s this have to do with an MMA fight in Vegas and the tattoo you saw in the morgue?”

“Almost everything the Russians have been doing to influence the United States has been online.

Troll farms, bots, websites made to appear American, etc.

Last summer, in a suburb of Dallas, they established an online content creation company and spent over ten million dollars in a scheme to create and distribute media to U.S.

audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.

“They spent a good chunk of their cash on high-profile, online political influencers—running ads on their podcasts and paying them to amplify certain Russia-friendly messages.

They also paid them to take stances on various political issues, as well as having them advocate for and against a range of political candidates.

The more water they carried, the more they got paid.

TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, you name the platform and it was awash with Russian propaganda cooked up by this group.

“Eventually, they got nailed and were shut down by the DOJ. The company’s principals were arrested and brought up on federal charges—the bulk of which asserted that they had been running a covert Russian operation meant to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.

“Ultimately this effort failed, but it was an evolution. Like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park learning how to operate the doorknobs. They had gone from trying to appear like Americans in order to spread their propaganda, to just paying Americans to do it for them.

“No matter how you look at it, it was a huge step forward. The Russians had hit upon a new strategy and were eager to capitalize on it. We, however, were on to them.

“They couldn’t run the same scam again, at least not right away, because they knew we were going to be watching for it. So they needed to figure something else out. They needed to find another way to reach American ‘influencers’ who would not just embrace but unwittingly spread Russian propaganda.

“In this push, political influencers were out. They wanted culture-war influencers. But they didn’t want typical social media influencers. They wanted culture warriors.

“And instead of casting a wide net, they decided to microtarget members of a specific, pissed-off cohort. Like the old Pentecostalist saying, their plan was to meet these people where they were and then take them to where they ‘needed’ to be.”

“So who are these people?”

“According to the Behavioral Analysis Unit,” Carolan replied, “the Russians are fishing in a pond made up largely of young men, eighteen to thirty-four, who feel completely left behind by the system. These young men see themselves not only as overlooked, but also abandoned by their government.

“The opportunities that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed, whether it be career-wise, family-wise, you name it, no longer exist for them. They contend with drug abuse and suicide at unprecedented levels and are the first generation since World War II to not only not advance, but to be driven backward. They’re angry and I can’t say I blame them.

In the rush to maximize shareholder value by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, no one, least of all our politicians, stopped to wonder what would happen to all those people in all those towns when their factories were shuttered. ”

“I can understand,” said Fields, “why the Russians would see them as fertile soil, but what’s the mechanism? How are they going after them?”

“Fight clubs.”

“What?”

“They’re channeling their anger into underground, no-holds-barred fighting matches.”

“In the United States?” Fields asked.

“They started in Russia, spread to Western Europe, and have begun to take hold here. Whatever country they’ve popped up in, they have a very isolationist undercurrent to them.

These men train in gyms together, building their combat kills, with the belief that eventually they’re going to fight in the streets to protect their way of life, which is being stolen from them.

The fight-club-style matches are simply dress rehearsals for the ultimate showdown they believe is coming. ”

“How come I have never heard of this?”

“It’s way out there on the fringe. And they purposefully keep it quiet. If you’re not consuming extremist content, you’d never know.”

“How’d you find out about it?” she asked.

“The face of the whole thing is a rabid Russian nationalist named Sergey Gryzlov. Internationally, he’s connected with the absolute worst of the worst, particularly White supremacist mixed martial arts networks.

Their tournaments and gyms serve as recruiting centers for disaffected young men who then enter in a pipeline preparing them to commit political violence.

The fitness market and combat sports market help serve as on-ramps.

Algorithms and old-fashioned word of mouth do the rest.

“As to how all of this ended up on my radar, the State Department flagged a visa application by a business associate of Gryzlov. It got kicked to Gallo, who kicked it to me. I’d never heard of the guy and had no clue about his international string of fascist fight clubs.

I did some digging, wrote it up, and Gallo sent my report back to Foggy Bottom.

They denied the visa and put Gryzlov and the associates in question, along with several others, on a no-entry list.

“In the meantime, I’ve been keeping an eye on the movement here. Almost all of their activity happens in the darkest corners of the Dark Web. Hence the laptop from the Cyber Crimes unit. And as far as their fights go, they’re pretty brutal. I’m surprised nobody has been killed yet.”

“And that’s where you’ve seen the tattoo of the sword with a tree growing out of it?”

Carolan nodded. “Twice. Two months ago at a club in Riverside, California. Then about a month later at a club in Laredo, Texas. One guy had that tattoo on his arm, another on his chest. Once I remembered the context, it all came back.”

“The Coke probably didn’t hurt either.”

“Probably not,” her boss agreed as he pulled up video of both fights and then froze the pictures to show her.

“That’s definitely the same tattoo,” said Fields. “Now what?”

“We need to have a tech run all the fights through facial recognition. I want to see if any of our six dead shooters at the D.C. morgue were in attendance.”

“And if they weren’t, then what?”

“Then we track down any fighter with that tattoo and, if we can establish leverage, we sweat them for information. All that matters is that we keep moving.”

“Because an investigation that’s in motion tends to stay in motion.”

Carolan nodded.

Privately, however, his gut told him they were headed straight for a brick wall. And with every hour that passed, whoever was responsible for last night’s attack was drifting further and further from their grasp.