They finally landed back at the Freya’s Palace rooftop and a few minutes later, they were back in the van, stuck in traffic. Now that she knew about the canceled subway project, Zoey would silently curse her father every time she crept through Tabula Ra$a’s constipated surface streets. A few blocks from the hotel, a Threat Warning briefly popped up on the van’s monitor, noting that someone up ahead was concealing an assault rifle under their clothes, but that they were alone and did not convey hostile intent from their posture. This kind of thing wasn’t uncommon in the city and the van probably figured one person with one weapon didn’t pose much in the way of a threat, considering how many ways the vehicle could instantly ruin any assailant’s day.
They hit a stoplight and Zoey said, “Chobb isn’t just stirring up the mob. He either did Tilley, or knows who did.”
“Correct. And now he’s happy to sit back and see how it plays out.”
“Would he feel the same way if we put a bounty on him? Have Wu board his blimp via jetpack and chuck Chobb out of it, screaming?”
Wu said, “After all of these months, I feel like you still don’t completely understand what a bodyguard does.”
“This group, The Blowback, would just add that to their list of grievances,” said Will. “Chobb did this to light a fuse, killing him doesn’t stamp it out.”
He said it like he’d already considered it as an option.
“So how do we stop a lit fuse?”
“That depends on how far you’re willing to go.”
“You can’t just kill them all, Will. There are thousands of people in my personal hate group. Tens of thousands.”
“Well … yes and no. You remember the Goldstone building fire back in the spring? All those deaths because the alarms didn’t go off, and the office workers just sat there until it was too late?”
“I think so.”
“The victims smelled smoke. They all wanted to get out but they didn’t hear an alarm. The alarm, in that situation, wasn’t there to announce there was a fire—they knew there was a fire. The alarm was there to give them permission to get up and leave. Nobody wanted to be first, the social pressure kept them glued to their seats. Well, mass violence works the same way. It just takes one person to be the fire alarm, to give everybody permission to go wild. But probably half of the rioters back at the inn couldn’t pick you out of a lineup or even explain what they were angry about. It’s a core of obsessed true believers surrounded by a cloud of fence-sitters looking for a purpose to cling to. Most of those would disperse if the core were to … go away.”
“But taking them out would just turn them into martyrs, like Tilley.”
Will thought for a moment, a pause Zoey had come to recognize as Will deciding whether or not to share a piece of potentially upsetting history with her. Or, having decided, trying to figure out exactly how to frame it in the best light possible.
“There was a fundamentalist Christian group,” he began, “who was giving your father trouble, this would have been more than ten years ago. It was led by a guy who called himself Phinehas and when I say fundamentalists, I’m talking polygamy, child brides, didn’t believe in money or the right to own property because it all belongs to God … the whole thing. Maybe a hundred members altogether. So, first they started squatting in one of the under-construction hotels, claiming that a message from the Lord had told them it was their holy site and destined to be a temple. Then they started harassing sex workers and customers at nearby brothels, calling them sinners, filming them and saying they would tell their families back home, yelling to passing tourists about how we were spreading pestilence. One time, one of the girls started yelling back and some of these guys beat her up pretty badly. You know, to save her soul.”
Zoey braced herself. Will always played up the badness of Arthur’s enemies in stories like this, to make what they did in response go down easier.
She sighed and said, “And to deal with them, you did … what?”
The Threat Warning briefly popped up on the monitor again. Same guy with a gun, somewhere in the vicinity. Zoey noted that Wu was tapping his screen up front, tracking the guy. Just to be safe.
Will flicked his eyes over to the monitor before saying, “Now, in PSYOPS training they taught us that social norms exist to keep societies running smoothly over the long term. So if you have a splinter group with a belief system based on rejecting social norms—a cult, a gang—they’re usually destined to self-destruct because there’s a reason society has those rules, right? It’s like starting a motorcycle gang that doesn’t believe in traffic lights, you’re just counting down until the crash happens. That means that within those groups there are already fractures or contradictions ready to be exploited. Somebody in there is a hypocrite.
“Well, Budd did a little digging and found that the group’s second in command, a guy who called himself Malachai, had lost a daughter a couple of years before, when she was just nine. See, the group didn’t believe in modern Western medicine, they said all ailments could be cured by prayer or whatever weird purification ceremonies they were doing. It turned out those were ineffective at treating a respiratory infection in a child already suffering from asthma. Malachai and the girl’s mother begged the leader, this Phinehas, to take her to a doctor. Absolutely not, he says. So they all stand there and watch this girl suffocate and as a reward for this show of faith, Malachai gets elevated to his current role as Vice Messiah.”
“Okay, just how dark is this story going to get, Will?”
“So, there’s a device called a hypersonic projector, that can beam an audio signal like a laser, you can aim it at a person in a crowd and only they’ll hear it. Do it to a person who is alone, and they’ll perceive it as a voice in their head. As it happens, one day Phinehas’s favorite wife comes down with a terrible and mysterious illness. Something very much treatable in a modern medical setting, but impossible to treat at home. Her condition goes downhill very quickly, so much vomiting that she’s becoming dehydrated and has lost consciousness. The entire group is constantly praying for her recovery and, sure enough, they get an answer. Or, rather, one of them does. Phinehas, alone in his room, hears a voice as plain as day, telling him to take his wife to a nearby clinic, that the Lord is going to work through the doctors to see her back to health, that this exception is being made due to the important role said wife is going to play in fulfilling the prophecy and the building of the temple. Later that night, without telling anyone else about this divine message he’s received, Phinehas sneaks her off to the clinic and they immediately hook her up to an IV.”
“Who was operating the magic voice thing, to beam the message into his head?”
“Andre. So, just moments later, Malachai, the second in command, is awoken in his room by a vision of his deceased daughter, floating outside his window—”
“Oh my god. That was, what, a hologram?”
“And a replication of her actual voice, both constructed from what few videos we could find from when she was alive. The spirit directs him to leave the construction site he’s squatting in and to go down to the sidewalk. There, his daughter’s spirit points him toward the clinic, tells him to go to a certain room if he wants to see a false prophet in action, saying the man who sentenced her to a horrible death is now indulging his own wife with the very care the daughter was denied. Malachai bursts into the room with Phinehas and his wife, a fight breaks out, Phinehas winds up dead via a scalpel to the jugular. The next week, Phinehas’s inner circle murders Malachai and five of his most loyal followers in retaliation. The rest of the group takes sides and either kill each other, or flee the city to go find some other movement to get brainwashed into. Problem solved.”