“Alix,” Dad called out to her. “Come inside. I don’t want you on the news.”
Like that will change anything.
Alix kept watching as Lisa begged the cops to bar access, but the locals didn’t seem to care. Some of them were grinning and shaking their heads at the newspeople’s arrival, and Alix had the feeling that whatever clout Lisa had had, it had evaporated in the face of failing to notify them that she had set up a raid.
A fire chief laughed and waved the cameras inside while Lisa shouted at him to stop. The camera guys didn’t wait for a second round of permission. They scrambled for the doors, jostling for the first shots of the building’s interior, before some other authority changed its mind and dragged them out.
Alix watched, bleakly amused. Nobody seemed to know what was going on or who was supposed to be in charge. More Williams & Crowe personnel were arriving now, trying to get through the clots of emergency vehicles.
The newspeople were cracking up as they filmed the Williams & Crowe assault team.
“This is proprietary!” Lisa kept saying to them from behind bars. “You can’t film faces without permission!”
The cameras ignored her. One of the talking heads got down on her knees, trying to get some of the trapped Williams & Crowe people to give her a quote.
“What were you doing in here?” she kept asking, as all the security people turned away.
“This about enough mayhem for you?” Kook asked Moses.
Moses had been watching Alix, and it took him a moment to realize that Kook was talking to him. “What? Oh, yeah. Go ahead.”
“Let’s blow this shit up,” Adam with a laugh.
Kook popped open a terminal window and sent a series of encrypted commands to a server on the other side of the world.
That server would communicate with another server, and then another, as bots and zombied computers that she’d picked up over years of hacking chained the signal together.
She’d explained it all to Moses once. She never did anything directly. One encrypted signal embedded in noise and other communications bounced from place to place until, at last, a burst of commands launched itself from Estonia and landed—boom—on a local wireless network that bounced the instructions to the factory’s private network and…
“Here we go,” Kook muttered.
Bang.
The explosions were so loud that everyone hit the floor. A whole carpet of people diving for cover in instinctive reaction to the booming that came from all sides of the factory.
Alix hit the floor with them.
They’re shooting?
But no, instead of violence and gunfire it was…
Canvases unfurling, canvas after canvas all around the warehouse. Images and info-graphics, spilling down the walls showing—
Dad?
Simon Banks’s face cascaded into view, done in the stylized form of old communist propaganda. Beside him, another canvas unfurled, revealing George Saamsi, and between them, a stylized logo of a factory, generating question marks that puffed up and up and up, and below the image, the words:
More canvases spilled open. Banks Strategy Partners, with links to the names of different organizations and companies. Americans for Innovation. The Institute for Competition and Prosperity. Oil companies. Petroleum associations. Household products associations. Dozens and dozens of companies and organizations, and each one of those connected to more info-graphics with a variety of headings.
LEGAL: A spiderweb of doctors’ and scientists’ photos with numbers beside them representing how much money they had taken from the associations for their research, and how many court cases they had testified in on behalf of companies.
GOVERNMENT: Lists of company-paid people who also worked at government agencies. USDA. FDA. Atomic Energy Commission. EPA. Department of Agriculture. Minerals Management Service. Bureau of Land Management. Federal Communications Commission. Office of Management and Budget, and that was followed by long lists of laws and regulations that they’d consulted on.
SCIENCE: Lists of scientists and research paid—with a web of lines linking back to the companies and associations… and all those lines made more connections back to her father and George Saamsi.
CHEMICALS: Diacetyl, Azicort, phthalates…
It went on and on. Alix stared at the dizzying webwork of interconnections. In a way, it reminded her of Moses’s own breathless description of how he had dug into her father’s work, the wide-eyed sincerity with which he had described all the evils he claimed her father was involved in. So certain. So sincere.
The canvases read like the work of the insane.
The camera people were laughing and filming them.
Kook whooped. They all crowded around the screens, watching as their work unfurled. All the ideas that they’d laid down.
Moses watched Alix’s eyes widen as her father’s face unfurled on the banner and the newspeople started to film. The live Mr. Banks’s own expression was stony, taking in all the information they’d compiled about him.
“That’s right,” Moses muttered. “We got you all figured out.”
The man was staring up at what Moses considered to be the key banner.
COUNSEL AGAINST A RUSH TO JUDGMENT.
ATTACK THE SCIENCE.
BUY CONTRARIAN SCIENTIFIC RESULTS.
PUBLICIZE BOUGHT SCIENCE.
EMPHASIZE QUESTIONS, RATHER THAN ANSWERS.
TEACH THE CONTROVERSY.
ACCUSE OPPONENTS OF PRACTICING JUNK SCIENCE.
KEEP THE PUBLIC CONFUSED.
CONFUSION = DELAY = $$$$
Mr. Banks was frowning as he stared up at all the writings, his daughter not far off, staring up at the Doubt Factory laid bare.
Moses watched Alix’s expression change as she read.
“Dad? Dad?”
Dad turned to her. “They’re lunatics,” he said. He started to smile. “They’re just lunatics, that’s all. Conspiracy theorists.” He walked over to the news cameras. “You wanted a quote?”
He talked happily into the camera, and by the time he returned to Alix, he was smiling more broadly still. “We should go,” he said. “It will take a little while for all this to sort out. I’ll get a car for us.”
“But…” Alix waved at the banners and their web of connections and accusations. “What is all this?”
“I have no idea. Performance art, I guess you could call it.” He gave a little chuckle. “You have to give the deranged credit—they may not have a grip on reality, but they’re certainly industrious.” He shook his head sadly. “For their sake, I hope someone gets them help. There are medications that can help control this kind of mental instability.”
“So what is all this?”
“It’s nothing, Alix,” he said. “It’s just the rantings of a bunch of very passionate, very unstable Occupy Wall Street types. Corporations buy the government! These kinds of radical theories…” He laughed. “It’s what children and conspiracy buffs think. It’s a bit like the 9/11 truthers or the people who think the moon landing never happened.”
“Why is he laughing?” Cynthia asked.