Washington D.C.—The White House
The next morning Rosie is up early to go to her job at the White House. She dresses and leaves through the front door of the hotel. It will be just a short walk-through Lafayette Park and she will be on the north lawn of the White House grounds. Billy stays at the hotel. Rosie crosses the street in front of the hotel and enters the park. She does not notice the two men in dark suits following a short distance behind her.
Rosie has a lot on her mind this morning. Shane is going to set up a meeting for her with his analyst, Elena, for later in the afternoon—probably at Joe’s Cafe in Sterling, Virginia. It has been agreed that Billy will go with her to the meeting. Before the meeting in the bar ended that night, Billy asked Shane if he could arrange some practice time for them on the shooting range in the FBI (Hoover) building in downtown Washington not too far from their hotel.
“That’s no problem,” Shane readily replies. “I’ll set it up for tomorrow afternoon, after your meeting with my analyst.”
“Good,” Billy says. “Just so you know, Shane,” Billy smiles, “Rosie now goes by the name Fredricka Davis.”
Shane just grins and looks at Rosie. “Okay, I’ll remember that when I set up a time for your practice shoot. You’ll have to show them ID to get into the building.”
Rosie nods, “That’s no problem. I have a credit card, driver’s license, and passport to match the fake ID.” She looks at Billy. “And don’t forget, he’s George Jones,” she says with a smirk.
Shane makes a confiding smile and laughs.
Billy asks Rosie, “Do you have the Glock with you?”
Rosie opens her purse and shows the two men her gun. “It’s always here in my purse,” she says, “or else under my pillow at night. I am never without it now!” She nods toward Billy. “As per your instructions.”
“That’s good, Rosie,” Billy replies. “You need to be ready. You are still in danger. That’s why a little more target practice won’t hurt.”
Billy looks at Shane. “Rosie’s got a steady hand, and she is a dead shot on a target. She handles that Glock now like it is a part of her. Sam and I taught her how to shoot,” he says with a note of pride sounding in his voice.
Rosie has already been set up by her producer to do a live spot with Andrea Mitchell at 1:00 PM. First though she must call her boss in New York. Then she is scheduled to attend a White House press briefing at 10:00 in the Rose Garden. The president is going to El Paso for another border tour, and it has been planned that he will address the media and answer a few questions on the White House lawn before departing by Marine One for Andrews Air Force base.
Overnight, there was a race riot in Chicago after a young black man was killed by five cops in a bungled arrest attempt. Two people were killed and several injured in the ensuing violence. The actions of the police—in what was essentially a low-level drug bust—fit perfectly with the Chicago department’s past record for abusive force and police brutality. The black mayor is calling for an investigation, but the police commissioner is standing firm in defense of his officers. The Bad King seizes the opportunity, denounces in his Tweets the protesters in the black community for the violence, continues pushing his hate-driven border policies to gin-up his base in front of the primaries, scaring soccer moms in Middle America—evangelical religious hypocrites—to believe that they are either going to be attacked by ISIS or raped by Mexicans on their way to the pizza parlor. The president knows that race and immigration are issues that resonate with his supporters in rural America, and as well with many working-class Americans. They are also a convenient distraction away from the continued fall-out of the Mueller report. It has been a year since the AG’s severely redacted report to the Congress. Rosie wants to ask the president again (after multiple prior requests) why he still will not authorize the full release of a completely unredacted version of the report. Mueller himself—when he finally came before the House Judiciary committee—was cautious and circumspect in his testimony. He would not say that the AG had lied or purposely misrepresented his team’s report because the report had laid out evidence on both sides of the question, and purposefully left unresolved the important legal question—what the Special Counsel viewed as “difficult issues” of law and fact—whether the president’s actions and intent could be construed as obstruction. Mueller simply testified that what the DOJ had put out was not a totally complete or accurate—in some places intentionally misleading—description of his team’s findings regarding the president’s complicity in obstruction of justice.
Rosie also wants to ask the president again—following the Supreme Court decision in his favor—why he still will not release his taxes if there is nothing to hide. Among the White House press corps, this is just the type of provocative question that Rosie has a reputation for asking and it is sure to provoke a fiery response from a president who now feels himself every day under siege by a hostile press.
At 8:30 AM that morning, Rosie is at her desk in the White House press room. Her first call is to Chuck Todd, the NBC News politics director in New York. He has just finished up the Exchange, NBC’s name for the morning editorial meeting, a gathering of studio executives, show heads, producers, and bureau chiefs to decide the format for the day’s news. She had appreciated the helpful hints he gave her before her first interview with then candidate back in 2015 at the very start of his first campaign and hopes to seek out more helpful hints.
Today, at the brief White House lawn press gathering, Rosie expects the president to be his usual belligerent, obstreperous self—with her at least. NBC, after all, is the enemy (particularly the MSNBC cable affiliate) in the MAGA world, and Rosie has made herself, over the last four years, the peskiest of The Bad King’s inquisitors. She was the one journalist in the crowd who had relentlessly pressed with follow-up questions when he made his now infamous appeal for Russia to produce more embarrassing Hillary e-mails.
In a short call, Chuck Todd advises Rosie to press the president again on the question of the release of his taxes, and his continually evolving (hateful and inhumane) policy of family separation at the border which so animates his base. In the prior year, an always vindictive president had even considered sending whole groups of immigrant asylum seekers to sanctuary cities—like San Fernando in California, the California Speaker’s home, and other Democrat districts—to punish his political enemies. His morally compromised former secretary of Homeland Security, has—after her campaign of child abuse at Homeland Security, and her subsequent resignation—secured for herself a fat sinecure at a conservative Washington think tank.
At the briefing, Rosie tries to get the president’s attention, but he ignores her and her questions, refuses to engage with her—particularly on the question of his taxes. Rosie tries to query him on the latest twist in his immigration policy (his purposeful and illegal diversion of funds from FEMA to build his wall), but again he refuses to take her question.
Back at her desk in the White House press room, Rosie calls her boss in New York. Phil Nielsen, President of NBC News, is—in Rosie’s sometimes jaundice view—a rather ordinary, often insecure man with a powerful job. He had started at NBC thirty years earlier as a page/coffee boy working days while attending night-classes at NYU to become an accountant. Now he owns the power to shape the perceptions and beliefs of a whole country on events that impact not just national affairs but matters around the entire globe. Rosie has at times wondered privately to herself if he is up to the job.
A hard-charging and fiercely competitive workaholic, he is a dynamo of non-stop, hyper energy around the 30 Rockefeller Center broadcast empire in New York City. With his thinning hair combed straight back to cover an enlarging bald spot, he looks out through a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses at what he suspects and perceives to be a hostile, uncompromising world. Excitable and always nervous, when angry or upset, he is known to grab and harangue the nearest poor and unfortunate subordinate with a fiery fusillade of short, clipped questions. Phil is—in Rosie’s somewhat jaundiced view—tough but fair, and she has largely learned how to handle and deal with her bosses more manic moods. Before the “Me Too” movement, he had made a couple of untoward and unwanted advances that Rosie successfully (and tactfully) fended off. He respects her work, and now she feels that their relationship is on an even keel.
After a brief discussion about the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries and her schedule covering them, Phil confirms to Rosie what Shane had already told her.
Phil did his best to sound sincere. “I worry about you Rosie out there with those nut cases at the MAGA rallies. You and your crew need the extra protection.” He did not mention his meeting with Shane but told Rosie that he had brought on a “security professional” to work and travel with her team.
“He’s a former Army Ranger—a special ops kind of guy. He was highly recommended by a top CIA counterintelligence and counterterrorism official. He is first-rate. His name is Tidewater—Billy Tidewater.”
“Whose idea was this?” Rosie casually asks.
“Mine, of course,” Phil disingenuously replies.
Rosie laughs to herself. Yeah sure—she thinks. She did not say anything about her relationship with Billy, and neither did she mention to Phil that she had been with Shane the night before and already knew the plan for Billy to be her security force. Obviously, Shane had not told Phil any more than he needed to know (nothing involving the details of Project: Red Dragon) but had merely emphasized that it was a matter of national security and highly classified. Phil seemed to Rosie to have bought Shane’s line.
Rosie plays along. “How do I hook up with this security guy?” In the back of her mind though she wonders just how much Phil really knows. The TV business is a cut-throat world. Rosie had learned early not to really trust anybody.
“He’s in Washington staying at the Hay Adams.” Phil gives Rosie a room and phone number. “Call him and set up a meeting. He has his own plane. For convenience and added safety, I’ve arranged for you and your team to travel with him between venues.” Phil makes it sound like the network (and not the CIA) was footing the bill and he is doing her a big favor. Yeah sure, she thinks again to herself. When Rosie thinks Phil is being his usual ass-hole self, she calls him “boss.” When he behaves as a human being, she refers to him by his name, Phil.
“Okay, thanks, boss.”
Phil shifts back to the business at hand. “Super Tuesday is coming up and you and your team need to be ready to go. Like in 2016, he will be the number one story and we must make sure to have him covered 24/7.
Rosie nods. “I’ll give this Billy Tidewater a call and set up a meeting.”
Pleased with himself, Phil smiles. “Good.”
Later when they are alone together, Billy just laughs when Rosie tells him about the conversation with her boss. Rosie, though, is deeply concerned. “I’m afraid, Billy, about what’s going to happen to this country,” she confides. “The Bad King (Rosie likes the moniker) wants to undo everything that is American, tear down all the country’s institutions.”
“Yeah,” Billy agrees, “the world is a scary place. His right-wing extremism—with its divisive, hate-filled racial tropes, its bigoted, exclusionary, anti-immigrant policies, its nationalistic “America First” foreign policy—is a rot that will tear at the social fabric of our American society, and all Western democracies.”
Joe’s Cafe
That afternoon the two of them take a taxi out to Joe’s Cafe in Sterling, Virginia. Shane has set it up for them to meet with his analyst. On the phone with Rosie, he explains again the woman’s history.
“Her name is Elena Kutsayva. She is Russian, and she worked in St. Petersburg for the Internet Research Agency, the group responsible for the disinformation cyberwarfare attacks in the 2016 election. Disgusted by the Russian president and his policies, the murder, terrorism, and oppression carried out by his government, she became an anti-Tsar activist. She partnered with a foreign journalist living in St. Petersburg and provided him with the information he needed, including videos, to publish a series of severely critical articles. She was found out by the FSB, the secret police, arrested and put into the Lubyanka prison in Moscow for a year. She expected she would be killed like prior journalists who had been critical of the Russian president. We got her out in a formal prisoner exchange. Now she is in the FBI witness protection program, with a new identity, and she works for me in the cyber counterintelligence unit of my Russia House section.”
This last is said almost with a note of pride. Shane goes on. “She’s invaluable in her knowledge of Russia, cyber warfare—and the authoritarianism of the Russian president.”
Rosie likes her immediately. They are about the same age, and Elena is fully fluent in English.
“Call me, Elena,” she says. “I like to protect as much as possible the new identity that I live under here in America while in the witness protection program.” And, as Rosie soon finds out, she is grateful for her new life in America.
“This is a wonderful country. I love America. I have a good job, and I feel safe. Plus,” she smiles, “I am to be married in August. All I want now is a baby.”
Rosie explains that she is a journalist.
“Yes,” Elena says. “So, Shane tells me. He is a good man, and a patriot. He told me that I am to cooperate with you.”
Through the course of their discussion, Elena explains the ways that she can identify the Russian Bots on social media by the linguistic solecisms, social and cultural malapropisms that she identifies in their use of the language.
She makes a little laugh. “Sometimes it is just bad or fractured syntax, or the misuse of popular idioms in the language that gives them away. It is easy if you know what to look for.” Then to prove her point, she gives Rosie the pseudonyms of three Bots masquerading as real American personas that the Russians are exploiting to incite hatred and division in the American electorate, Bots that are currently the most prodigious and most successful on social media. The names are Alabama Lady, Southern Gal, and Confederate Friend.
Before they leave to cover the first Super Tuesday primary, Rosie writes a column exposing the three phony social media personas. As he said he would, Shane sees that the piece is run under Rosie’s byline in major American and foreign newspapers. Once exposed, the phony Russian Bots are immediately taken down.