Page 135 of False Flag

This was the one where the key players hung out.

The conversation was one long text file. She started at the bottom with recent posts and scrolled up, searching for timestamps of key dates, at last coming to where this had all started for her, the day she’d been attacked by a masked man with an obsidian blade.

There it was: the first mention of the assault that had changed her life. She, Drew, and Dr. Garrison were all mentioned by name. One glance at the first follow-up comment and she was dizzy with rage.

EarlGrey: This wasn’t us. Must be a FF operation.

These bastards even lied among themselves.

She scrolled up and down. The conversation on that date was short and not sweet. All the messages blaming her, Drew, and Dr. Garrison for the assault that could have killed her.

And now someone had killed Drew.

Her eyes returned to the name attached to that first message. EarlGrey.

EarlGrey. Why did that trigger a frisson of…who knew what?

She ran a search on the name. In the eighteen months of data they’d managed to download, EarlGrey had posted a mere three dozen times in this group. Not a lot compared to the other fourteen chat members, but not a lurker either.

She’d check the chats to be certain, but she guessed from Vicki’s notes on this username, he was more active in the other forums.

For now, she’d focus here, where there were only fifteen chat members. This was the core group of active Truthers who’d carried out the attacks that had terrorized the archaeological community for two years. The person who assaulted her was here. The person who’d killed Drew was probably among the fifteen screen names.

She was certain every person on the expedition was in this chat, including Dahlia.

But no one on the team could have killed Drew. They had all been on Letora Island when he died.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember the faces of the twelve apostles seated with Gerard at the fundraiser.

Excepting Jake and Lloyd left her with ten men to identify. She was fairly certain Riley, Phillip, and Stephen had all been there. But there had been other dinners in other cities. Surely, they hadn’t all attended more than one, given the cost of the tickets.

Beau had attended each one, but as an employee. She’d bet he didn’t even get to eat the dry chicken breast entrée at any of the events.

Staci made a note for Vicki to see if she could find data on the events, including the seating charts. Lloyd had received comped tickets for the big table in exchange for bringing his brother the SEAL.

Had others received comped seats for similar reasons?

Vicki had identified Beau as Bmil, in these early conversations, and Staci agreed with her conclusion. At the time the chat began, he was in the US Army, and given that he’d shared classified data with his Archaeology Truther friends, his role in the military had been valuable to the group.

But this wasn’t the group where the data had been shared. That had been a splinter chat where they discussed conspiracy theories. The conversation devolved as they worked each other up and spiraled into an abyss of paranoia.

Vicki’s notes stated that after an eight-month absence, Beau had returned to the chats with the username exBmil last December. That must have been after he was released from confinement. He didn’t waste a minute getting back on the conspiracy wagon.

She opened the conspiracy chat group, which had a hundred active users and probably five times that in lurkers. They didn’t have lurker data, just transcripts of the conversations.

Staci searched on EarlGrey. Once again, he didn’t post often. When he did, he asked a question about a recent podcast. Speculated on the lies of Big Archaeology.

A post from the night of the December fundraiser caught her attention.

EarlGrey: attended the event in DC. Food was crap and there was only free wine with the meal. Cash bar for everything else. Campbell barely mentioned the ancient bioweapon he’s been hinting about. Frankly disappointed.

This was followed by people asking if EarlGrey still wanted to join the expedition, before the bioweapon tangent took over the conversation.

The speculation went wild from there. Conspiracy theorists had a field day as a suggestion became fact in five easy steps. The people most invested left the main thread to discuss the bioweapon on their own server.

Vicki had captured some of those chats too, but none of the key players were present. It was pure, unfettered conspiracy theories spun by minds that had been primed by a master.

Staci returned to the AT group where EarlGrey said her attack had been a false flag, looking for a familiar cadence in his words. Gerard spoke for over an hour to his audience at least two times a week. They had hundreds of hours of recordings to check for word matches and cadence, except these forums were used to discuss his podcast, so familiar terms were useless here. Everyone used Gerard’s words in their posts.