Kill Decision(33)

Marta, as usual, stood behind her desk, no chair in sight, pacing as she listened to someone on the phone, interjecting with the occasional “No. Yes. Yes.” She glanced up at the far wall in measured intervals.

Clarke’s gaze wandered to a dozen flat-panel television screens occupying the wall across from Marta’s desk, in between bookshelves and framed vanity photos of her standing alongside senators, presidents, and celebrity CEOs. Every one of those television screens was tuned to a cable news channel with the sound turned down and closed captioning turned on. It was a collage with variations on the same story—the drone “discovery” in Karachi, and a rehash of the drone attack in Iraq.

Clarke wondered about that.

Marta edged closer to her phone’s base station. “Get back to me when the hearing ends. Yes.” Marta hung up the phone and stood staring at him.

Clarke spread his hands toward the footage from Pakistan. “Well, what a coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences.”

“I don’t think the Arab street’s going to buy it.”

“It’s not meant for the goddamned Arab street. It’s intended for Main Street.”

Clarke shrugged. “Personally, I would have leaked bootleg video onto the Web first—give it illicit appeal. Coming from mainstream media makes it look suspect to a younger demo.”

“Suspect? You forget that the only voting your generation does is of the up-and-down variety. It might seem like an ancient Kabuki dance to you, but traditional media is where actual registered voters get their information. In response to the discovery, we’ve got talking heads pushing for greater homeland security and funds for autonomous UAVs. And meanwhile I see this. . . .” She curled a finger at him and walked over to the windows.

Clarke sighed and followed her. They stood side by side looking down onto the green expanse of McPherson Square below. There, a few hundred protestors had gathered with signs and banners, the largest of which Clarke could just make out: America—The Biggest Terrorist.

“Comic Sans. Never a good choice.”

“It’s not their choice of font that concerns me. It’s that this attitude might spread.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised anyone still bothers to protest in the street. It requires so many people.”

Marta glared at him.

He held up a finger and walked over to his Dior Homme leather satchel and withdrew his iPad. With a few clicks he flipped it to show her a map of the D.C. metro area with clusters of thousands of red dots on it. “Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.” Clarke gazed down at the protestors in McPherson Square. “Meaning everything’s normal. I wouldn’t worry about them—they’re not the reality. Just a statistical outlier.”

She stared down at the protestors, unconvinced. “You’re the social media director. It’s your job to contain this shit, and here I am looking at a counter-messaging campaign in my own backyard.”

“If it makes you feel better, do it the old-fashioned way—have your guy hire a dozen drug addicts down at the train station to join the protest. A few dirty, scary people ranting and raving on television. It’ll reverse the message to a boomer demographic. Or just ignore it. What happens on the streets doesn’t matter anymore.”

Marta stood glowering. “Don’t these people have jobs?”

“Probably not. Some of your clients might have had something to do with that.”

She looked up at him and grunted, then returned to her expansive desk. “Don’t get too smug, Henry. You and your sock puppet army are just another tool. The basic principles of public relations never change.”

He slipped his iPad back in its case. “Perhaps, but you never had metrics like this before me. I can tell you moment by moment how your message is playing with not just a national but an international audience.”

“Part of the audience, Henry. Only part.”

“The part that matters, Marta.”

“I can’t remember if I was as self-important as you when I was your age, but I do know I never learned anything by talking.”