been a ski chalet prior to 9/11. The office was never warm and she could hear gunfire all day long.
Circe spent most of her day on the Internet, cruising Web sites and social networks, reading thousands of posts, making notes, updating lists, and fighting the onset of early cynicism. At twenty-eight she still believed it was possible to remain idealistic and optimistic about the better nature of the human species despite all of the evidence that filled her daily intake of information.
“Knock, knock,” said a voice, and she turned to see her boss, Hugo Vox, standing in the doorway. He held two chunky ceramic mugs of steaming coffee and had a box of doughnuts tucked under his elbow. “You ready for a break?”
She pushed her laptop aside. “Like an hour ago. My eyes are falling out.”
“You look as tired as I feel,” said Vox as he handed her a mug. “I’ve been doing Webinars all day with the DOJ and there’s only so much red tape I can eat before I want to shoot myself.”
He hooked a visitor chair with his foot and dragged it in front of her desk, then lowered his bulk into it.
Hugo Vox was a big man, son and grandson of Boston policemen, though he did not wear a badge himself. His father had been wounded on the job and retired early to write novels, and the second one had become an international bestseller, spawning a Robert De Niro movie and a TV series that ran for six years. His next eleven novels had made the family rich. On the day the elder Vox, who had single-parented Hugo, won an Emmy for his show, he drove out to the estate of the mother of his son and proposed. They had been lovers in college, but her wealthy and aggressively classist parents had forced her to give up their baby. Now, as young forty-somethings (she had inherited millions after her parents—the computer fortune Sandersons—died in a plane crash), they settled down to form the family that fate and the class system had once denied them. As a result, Hugo had been able to afford Yale, and while still an undergraduate he formed a staffing agency, specializing in security guards. He hired many of his father’s retiree cop friends. By the time Vox was out of grad school his company was providing security for the United Nations in New York and thirty other organizations with government ties.
By the time Vox was thirty he was a multimillionaire in his own right and his company, SecureOne, had begun taking contracts from military bases, partly to provide private security contractors and partly to screen employees applying for positions in sensitive areas. The catchphrase “vetted by Vox” identified personnel who had passed SecureOne’s ultrarigorous screening process. He received a number of large military contracts to screen personnel for special operations and was soon putting the Vox seal of approval on operators for Delta Force, the CIA, and similar covert organizations.
The day after Vox’s father died from lung cancer, the planes hit the Towers. Vox was asked to head the team that investigated the flight schools in which the Al-Qaeda operatives had earned their pilot’s licenses. Vox’s report put people in jail and it crushed several companies whose standards for security were deemed “criminally lax.” If some people had previously wondered if Hugo Vox was too strict before 9/11, he was thereafter seen as a role model.
In 2002 Vox created his first think tank. He reached out to a select number of thriller writers—friends of his father—and brought them together to dream up the most dreadful and unstoppable kinds of carnage that human minds could concoct. Bombings, exotic bioweapons, covert takeovers, dirty bombs, plagues, and more. The authors gave him everything he wanted and then some, and Vox put it all in a report and brought it to the White House along with a proposal for a training camp in which the top counterterrorism teams in the United States and allied nations would run the scenarios over and over again until they had discovered or invented adequate responses.
The response from Homeland and the Oval Office was not exactly a blank check but close enough. Homeland leased land in Washington State and Vox bought the old White Trails Resort. Terror Town was born.
That was more than a decade ago, and now T-Town was the centerpiece for counter- and antiterrorism training. And now many key players in the War on Terror could boast of having been “vetted by Vox.”
As online social networks flourished over the last few years, all manner of fringe and splinter groups had begun using resources like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and message boards for anonymous communication. Vox wanted someone to monitor these networks, someone with the credentials and the intelligence necessary to find even the most obscure clues that might reveal the presence of tangible threats. When Circe O’Tree’s resume had crossed his desk, Vox knew that he had found a perfect fit. Her reports had stopped a number of attacks and put some dangerous people in jail.
“So,” Vox said, gesturing to her laptop with a jelly doughnut, “who’s being scary today?”
“I’ve been tracking some spooky stuff with Israel and Islamic key words.”
“Anti-Semitic stuff?”
“Not exactly. It’s militant, but it
Vox grunted.
“And another one: ‘As David did to Goliath shall Israel do to the giant of Islam.’” She adjusted her glasses. “On the surface these are anti-Islamic statements couched in pseudobiblical phrasing, but they have an—oh, I don’t know—a sense of
“Who’s posting this stuff?”
“That’s the thing; most of these are anonymous posts on Twitter, but they’re from accounts started at places like cybercafes. They create an e-mail account, use that to open an account on a social network, and then either abandon it or log in from a different site. We’ve seen that kind of behavior before, Hugo. Remember all that ‘war in heaven’ and ‘Armageddon in the shadows’ stuff from a couple of years ago? This has the same feel. Careful and anonymous.”
He grunted and nodded. “Yeah, sounds like it. Have you checked with our friends in the Bureau?”
“I did, and I got the usual ‘we’ll look into it’ reply, which translates as ‘ignore the rantings of the crazy lady.’”
Vox grinned. “How about Homeland?”
“Same thing, dammit.” She cocked an eye at him. “Any chance we can bring it to the DMS? Maybe let MindReader—”
“Too soon,” Vox said firmly. “Deacon’s been very clear that he doesn’t want to hear anything from us unless it’s actionable.”
“Okay.” She felt deflated. “Let me collate what I found first. If I’m going to make a report even the DMS will accept, then I’ll want to bring all of it.”
“There’s more?”
“Like this? Hundreds of postings, and thousands of places where these posts have been reposted and retweeted.”
“Re
“Tweeted. A post on Twitter is called a ‘tweet.’ When someone likes it and wants to pass it on, they ‘retweet’ it.”
“Good God.”
“I know it sounds silly, but Twitter has become the most powerful tool of business on the Net.”
Vox smiled like a tolerant bear. He had coarse, thick features, a bulbous nose, and rubbery lips, but his smile was charming. “Tweets by terrorists. You can’t say that this job isn’t interesting, kiddo.”
Circe nodded but did not smile. Unlike her boss, she was very beautiful, with dark eyes and foamy black curls; also unlike him, she seldom smiled. As much as genetics had been generous to her, life itself had not. Less than a year ago her mother had been killed in a car accident, and Circe’s younger sister had died in combat in Afghanistan the previous summer. She felt alone and adrift in the world, and except for a father she almost never saw, Circe had no family. T-Town had become her home and Hugo Vox had become a second father, but Circe was still adrift in the shadows of loss and grief.
“There’s something else,” she said, and pulled up another file. “Some key words have popped up in these postings. Not all of them, but enough of them to make me pay attention.” She touched the screen and ran a plum fingernail down, pausing at different entries as she scrolled with her other hand. “‘Goddess,’ or some variation of it, shows up in a lot of the entries. In the text, but more often in the usernames of the original poster or people
