I sat on a bench across from the CNN building, taking in the surreal scene around me: harried, concerned people walking purposefully on a beautiful spring day. Now what? I looked at the cell phone the Communications Assistant had given me. There were 151 voice messages—so many that it seemed pointless to return any of them. Tie Guy had left me a text on my secure phone: “Call me ASAP.” I had not spoken to him since the news broke. I figured he wanted to hear firsthand what was happening, or maybe he wanted to critique my CNN performance. (No one appreciates how difficult it is to stay on message in a very short conversation with a host who is working hard to steer the discussion somewhere else.) Or he might be angry, given that I had been less than forthright with him. In any event, I was not eager to have any of these conversations, so I did not call him back. Instead, I sat on that bench in the sunshine, watching people in face masks scurry by while I waited for someone to tell me what to do next.
Tie Guy sent me a second text on the secure phone: “Call me ASAP. It’s important re: Capellaviridae.” This time I decided to call him back, but as I was searching for his number in my contacts, the Communications Director called. I answered immediately: “Hey, I’m sorry about the cancer comparison—”
“It’s over,” he said quickly. “Don’t do it again. The President is speaking in about thirty-five minutes. Get someplace where you can watch the speech. You’re going to do a satellite radio tour—all the drive-time shows. They’ll give you the details when you get there. Stick to the talking points,” he said, hanging up before I could answer. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he texted me an address for a studio about fifteen blocks away. I would be able to watch the President’s speech there, but I would have to hustle to get there in time. There were far fewer cabs on the street than usual; the safest option was a brisk walk. I should have called Tie Guy back as I was walking, but my mind was already on the President’s speech and the radio interviews I would have to do immediately after he finished.
48.
LIKE ALL SUCCESSFUL WRITERS, TONY PEREZ STUCK TO A DISCIPLINED schedule. He awoke early, both because his writing was sharpest in the morning and because his stories did best when they appeared early. Many of us had developed the habit of perusing the headlines on our devices when we woke up in the morning, or after settling in at the office with a hot cup of coffee. Perez was not just a gifted writer of fake news; he was also a sophisticated consumer of data. He spent his afternoons studying the metrics for his masterpieces: who read them, who shared them, what stories did best with different kinds of readers, and so on. Real news outlets do not have the luxury of changing the news to suit the tastes of their readers. New York Times readers would no doubt prefer sunny weather and a balanced federal budget, but if those things are not really happening, the editors have no choice but to report the less pleasant stuff. Tony Perez, on the other hand, woke up every morning to a blank canvas. What would most fascinate or captivate a housewife in Atlanta or a bored software executive riding a bus to work in Silicon Valley? Perez drew laughter during his testimony before Congress when he described himself as “an artist,” but he was not necessarily wrong. He was clearly a creative writer.[13] Not that I have anything but contempt for him and his ilk: if I had seen him walking on the road the morning he wrote his first Capellaviridae story, I would have run him over with my car (if I owned a car). But even I have to concede that he was very good at what he did. Advertisers loved him; at the time the Capellaviridae story broke, Perez was earning over $700,000 a year from online advertising—not bad for an unemployed PE teacher who had been living in his parents’ attic just two years earlier.
Perez had seen that first Capellaviridae story posted by The New Yorker, as well as the early follow-ups generated by the consortium of news outlets reporting on the story. Those pieces were scary and incomplete. For Perez, this was a gift, as it allowed him to fill in the details. He knew from experience that his best stories, like successful Hollywood movies, needed a villain. He also knew that his readers hated politics, but they lapped up political conspiracies. As Perez sat at his kitchen table in sweatpants and a T-shirt, he immediately recognized Capellaviridae as an opportunity to weave together a scary pathogen with political intrigue. “I write fiction that feels like news,” Perez told the Outbreak Inquiry Commission. “It has to be nested in reality.” Perez was lambasted for portraying himself as some kind of cross between Edward R. Murrow and Picasso, but his testimony was fascinating. His genius, if I dare use that word, lay in taking events people knew to be true, introducing layers of fabricated but intriguing detail, and producing a compulsively readable story that felt accurate to his most loyal readers. As he would later testify, “Nobody really knew what was going on. I offered one possibility.”
His “possibility” was this: An Arizona-based Latino separatist group had genetically engineered the virulent strain of Capellaviridae. He could explain to his readers what we scientists were unable to explain—why an innocuous virus suddenly became deadly. This separatist group, the so-called Latino Liberation League (LLL),[14] had also engineered an effective antidote for the virus. According to Perez’s initial story, the LLL was offering the antidote to the President and Congress in exchange for the creation of an independent, Spanish-speaking nation to be carved out of parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and West Texas. Perez’s story had two graphics: a map showing the proposed borders of the new independent nation, Estado Latino Nuevo, as well as a larger map of the United States with eleven red dots indicating where the virus had been deliberately introduced.
For all the fiction embedded in the story, there was one pillar of truth sufficiently strong to keep the story alive: There had been talk in previous years, mostly among fringe groups on the far right and far left, about a Latino independence movement. One Arizona community, some little town with 350 residents, had voted to make Spanish its official language. Never mind that no one had ever articulated what an “official language” really means at the town level; this quirky development was enough to inflame the imaginations of both right-wingers (who feared the country was being hijacked by Mexicans) and left-wingers (who were advocating for more explicit political rights for the nation’s Hispanic population). When Perez tossed Capellaviridae into this political maelstrom—a fake news grenade—he hit the readership jackpot. For the President, who was preparing to address the nation from a military base in Honolulu, it meant that a shockingly high proportion of Americans believed the country was under bio-attack from a domestic terrorist group.
The President was scheduled to address the nation at noon Eastern Time, six a.m. in Hawaii. He and his principal advisers were not the only political leaders for whom the crisis was top of mind. In China, Premier Xing had been huddled with his senior staff since the Capellaviridae story broke. It is not hard to infer what they were discussing: What ought to be the price for the Dormigen that America was now desperate for? And when exactly should that offer be made?
13
Perez’s conviction is still winding its way through the courts. He was originally convicted of reckless endangerment, but that conviction was overturned on appeal on First Amendment grounds. Perez continues to maintain that “alternative news” is a form of freedom of expression. Nearly every legal scholar I have spoken with on this topic believes that the Perez case will ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.
14
Perez told Congress that he came up with this name, the LLL, while waiting for his burrito to heat up in the microwave.