Page 283 of Incisive

Apparently that’s considered “overkill” and Leo’s told me I’m not allowed to do it.

Party pooper.

Leo did throw me a bone—Jordan must have a Secret Service agent with him anytime he leaves the White House. With Jordan’s role as my body man, Secret Service agrees it’s wise to provide him additional protection. Meaning they’ll drive him around and protect him, and also meaning one less worry on my plate. So there is that.

Yay.

Over the next several days the three of us settle into a new routine. Not that I normally have the freedom to run around at will inside the DC metro area but I do miss going out to eat on occasion, or ordering takeout from our favorite places. But it’s too risky to chance ordering prepared food for from outside the White House right now.

Leo counters that by declaring Jordan will cook dinner for us on a regular basis. Works out fantastically since Jordan loves to cook and has missed doing it, and with me not leaving the building his job isn’t as taxing as it usually is.

I bring work up to the residence every evening so I can spend more time with my men. Leo’s supposed to go easy on his knee and keep his full weight off it for another couple of weeks before he starts PT, but he’s been cleared to use crutches instead of the wheelchair. I know he hates the restricted activity but at least I know exactly where he is, and that he’s safe.

Being able to curl up on the sofa with Leo every evening while he watches TV and I read a binder full of briefing materials, all while Jordan hovers and takes care of both of us, is nice, too.

It’s homey.

Domestic.

An eagerly tantalizing preview of what post-POTUS life holds for us.

Meanwhile, investigators have identified a total of thirty-two attacks, ranging in severity from the Sunshine Skyway Bridge attack, which was the deadliest and most damaging, down to someone driving three stolen cars into the Harrisburg Intermodal Yard, a rail yard in Pennsylvania, and setting them on fire. That attack did very little damage overall and there were no injuries or deaths associated with it. It almost went overlooked as nothing more than a crime of opportunity until one of the participants got drunk and threatened his ex-girlfriend that he’d get “his friends” to help him kill her family, all while insinuating they took part in the attacks.

There have been twenty-two additional arrests associated with the attacks but still no links to the identities of the organizers behind them. Tracing the financiers has been unsuccessful because the few suspects who will talk about what happened all say that they were recruited and paid by someone they knew from online and never met in person who’d spent at least a year gaining their trust. The money was paid either in cash via dead-drop or untraceable mail, or via crypto-currency.

Some of the attacks were conducted by a single person, but most of them were committed by teams with one local organizer. Some of the larger attacks appear to have separate cells of participants within them made up of no more than five people in each one, the participants’ identities kept secret from anyone outside of each cell.

Each attack appears to have been instigated and financed by one of thirty-two online personas, with the only commonality being the lead local organizer of each attack belonged to at least one of three right-wing discussion boards located on the Dark Web, which is where they were originally recruited from. None of the local organizers had any ties to, contact with, or knowledge of each other prior to the attacks.

The thirty-two online personas have zero traceable footprints outside those discussion boards. Efforts to trace those people have so far produced no results. Whoever organized the discrete attacks was technologically savvy enough to conceal their digital footprints from start to finish. Investigators tracing those accounts discovered that some of them were created as long as two or three years earlier, from the very start hiding their tracks with VPNs and using encrypted phone apps through burner or cloned phones.

This wasn’t some hastily assembled and half-assed plot.

This was thoroughly planned and thought out over several years, a sophisticated and tightly-knit conspiracy with no headquarters I can send drones to bomb. In fact, the only thing investigators think they can say with any degree of certainty is that all indications point to people within the United States being the lead organizers. That’s not because of evidence they’ve gathered but a lack of evidence that’s glaringly apparent.

The picture’s slowly being assembled from what evidence isn’t present.

Missing are any ties to overseas terrorist organizations or foreign powers. There was absolutely zero intelligence chatter anywhere ahead of or following the attacks that would point to a plan of this this magnitude being carried out.

Based on communications gleaned thus far from the arrests, the mysterious online personas seem to be either Americans, or are fluent enough in American English and have spent enough time living within the United States that they have a solid grasp of both idioms and political views, and how to capitalize on the blatant paranoia of some of the most extreme right-wing Q-unatics, white nationalists, and others swimming in that cesspool of misinformation. Some of the online personas use similar phrasing or misspellings of the same words that make investigators think one person was behind those particular personas.

The leading theory based on that evidence is that the core conspiracy group is likely made up of less than ten people because of the wall of silence surrounding it. They doubt it’s a sole organizer simply because of the sheer scope of the operation and the linguistic evidence. The profilers lean toward a consensus that most likely four to seven people formed the core group, all men, likely middle aged and white.

The nasty, tingling ball congealed at the base of my spin eventually fades over the next several days until I no longer notice it. I shove it out of my mind and discount it as another residual artifact of my anxiety that requires no further attention from me.

Which turns out is a mistake of gargantuan proportions on my part, because nine days after the attacks is when all hell breaks loose.

Correction—that’s when hell opens up and swallows me whole.

CHAPTERSEVENTY-FOUR

Just after lunch,I’m between meetings. Leo and Jordan ate with me in the small private dining room just off my study in the West Wing, and now both of them, along with Casey-Marie and Declan, sit on the sofas in the Oval Office as we all discuss a few items for next week’s agenda.

Since it’s a Friday we’re also discussing weekend plans.

Well, I’m listening to Casey-Marie and Declan discuss their weekend plans with us and getting vicarious pleasure from it.

Obviously, Leo, Jordan, and I aren’t doing anything except staying here.