Her Secret Service (Jane Roe 1) by Jason Letts (sites to read books for free TXT) 📗

the name of Heath Bastion who we’re working with, but I gather from your message that you have some new information for us that might be important.”

Blinking, Jane realized this was her moment.

“Right. He’s the Washington Post’s technical assistant, I believe. What we’ve been able to do is connect his partner, the journalist Oliver Ip, to a history of threatening remarks against the president that he then amplified and repeated in his news stories. We’ve come to the conclusion that he’s the one behind the bombing,” she said.

Agent Greer scratched his chin.

“We have video evidence of Bastion carrying the bomb through the airport terminal at Andrews. All of the fingerprints we found at the truck and Post building suggest that he was the only one to touch anything. I’ll be honest that we haven’t yet determined how he built the IED or knew how to smuggle it through the X-ray scanner, but we’ll get there, no matter how adamantly he denies he had any involvement.”

Jane’s eyes widened as she came to understand how close they were to charging the wrong man with such a heinous crime.

“I’m not saying they couldn’t both be involved in some way, but I think we’ve locked onto proof that Oliver Ip had been using fake Facebook accounts in the same way that the threat he promoted was made, and that this pattern of behavior fits with what we know about what people do after making credible threats against the president based on historical data. Let’s not forget that the threat was a perfectly clear intent to blow the president up, using those exact words and specifically suggesting the use of a bomb,” she said, calm but serious.

Nora and Travis looked at each other without saying anything in a way that Jane found curious. Either the FBI had mastered the art of intuitive communication, or something was going on there. Finally, Nora turned back to Jane and Nathan.

“Fake accounts are something of a specialty for me,” Nora said with a smirk. “Looks like we’ll have to let the daycare know that we’ll be a little late to pick up Amber.”

“I don’t know why we don’t just bring her here,” Travis said. “She’d be more useful than you think.”

Jane laughed despite herself, a hand covering her mouth.

“Wait, you two are married?” she gasped. Without a doubt they were talking about their kid.

“Things in the FBI are looking a lot like they do in the Secret Service,” Nathan added.

Nora shrugged and leaned against Travis, who put his hand over her shoulder. They looked like a cute couple, and Jane couldn’t help but wonder when she’d have someone like that to lean against.

“Yes, we got married. I don’t know how it happened. Long story,” Nora said. Travis squinted at her.

“Seemed to go by fast to me.”

Nathan crossed his arms over his chest.

“Unless you want me to start sharing stories about my personal life—and believe me, I have some good ones—maybe we should start giving you more of an idea of what Oliver Ip has been up to,” he said.

“Let’s get right to it then,” Nora said, whirling around her desk to her chair.

They began pulling up the pages Jane had shown Nathan, the Facebook profiles and the Washington Post news articles. It wasn’t long until Jane noticed that Nora was branching out into things she hadn’t noticed and places she hadn’t gone to. The scope of what they were looking at kept growing and growing.

“This size of the schemes he was running are really starting to look breathtaking in size. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were enough fake people to fill a plane. And they’re performing all kinds of tasks, promoting his articles, commenting supportively on the Washington Post’s social media pages, and of course providing unverifiable quotations for his articles.

“He’s clever and tried to hide everything, but running a troll farm of this size all by yourself means there are going to be some loose ends. It’s not just some of the creation dates that are dead-ringers. Linguistic analysts would have a field day matching up common phrases, speech patterns, and favored words.”

The more they looked at, the more disturbing what he was doing appeared.

“Check this out. These two profiles, ostensibly of different people in different parts of the country, both have profile pictures featuring the same setting taken at the same time. I’m pretty confident that he has some real people that he works closely with, people who may not be entirely with it, and he’s harvesting their personal family photos to populate his fake profiles,” Nora said.

“Reminds me of the person who allegedly tipped off Ip about the threat in the first place. She couldn’t recall doing it and sounded very old,” Nathan said.

“Connecting him directly to the threat on one particular profile that wasn’t used for any other purposes and has since been deleted would be a challenge, but based on this we have enough to go on,” Nora said.

“As serious as all this is, I’m much more interested in tying him to the more serious crime of bringing a bomb in proximity to the president anyway,” Travis said.

Jane agreed, and an interesting thought floated through her mind. If she was an instrumental part of identifying the culprit of the Air Force One bombing, that would have to carry some weight with the Office of the Inspector General investigation, possibly saving her job.

“The easiest way to do that is to have him admit to it. I’m ready to move in. Let’s pay him a visit,” Nora said.

“Looks like he’s over in Capitol Heights. Won’t take long to get a unit over there. I’ll get them going now,” Travis said, exiting the room.

That left Jane and Nathan with a few minutes to talk to Nora, who seemed just as disturbed by the bombing and hungry to put it to rest as they were.

“This whole situation really casts Heath Bastion in a different light. With this level of deception and manipulative tendencies, he may have been