Trust Me Read Free Page A

The Shawcross Group. They studied and wrote about psychology and the role it played in governance, in terrorism and extremism, in international crime and in a host of other topics. His clients were the movers and shakers in Washington, London, Paris and around the world: key government decision-makers and multinational companies who wanted to protect their operations from terrorist and extremist threats.
    ‘I can’t tell you. Not now. I’m sorry.’
    ‘I just think … we should give this information to the police. Or your client should.’
    ‘Have you found evidence of actual criminal activity?’ Henry took off his wire-rim glasses.
    ‘Um, no.’
    ‘But you’ve found the potential for criminal activity?’
    ‘Come see the latest from the Night Road for yourself.’
    Luke sat down at his computer.
    He had a list of more than a hundred websites, discussion groups and online forums to survey, where he would try to draw in and talk with people who had extreme and even violent responses to the world’s problems. A window opened to report on the responses to his many varied comments from before he’d gone on his run. He kept his user names and passwords in a text file on his Mac because he could not remember them all. He logged onto the first online discussion group, where topics ranged from immigration reform to privatization of Social Security. This one tended to be far right wing and multiple retorts to his mild comments had sprouted up since yesterday. Luke scanned them; mostly, the contributors agreed with each other, but they fueled each other’s anger. He signed on as MrEagle, his pen name, and posted a far more moderate view of the immigration issue. It would not take long for venomous arguments against his position to flow in for him to collect and measure. He would also post under other names, agreeing with those who attacked his initial postings, seeing if they were interested in violence as a solution.
    Sometimes they ignored his prods; other times, they agreed that violence was the answer.
    Luke jumped to another forum, found another pot to stir on a farleft discussion group. His middle-of-the-road comments, left last night on the issue of military contractors, had produced everything from abrasive disagreement to incoherent fury that practically blazed fire through the computer screen.
    ‘The Night Road?’ Henry asked. ‘Oh, yes. Your nickname for these people.’
    Luke had been using the nickname for weeks, but typical of absentminded Henry to forget. Henry had been traveling a lot in the past few days and apparently the jet lag weighed hard. ‘I used to call them the Angry Bitters but that sounded like a punk band. I dreamed one night that an angry mob of extremists of every stripe were chasing me down a long road into an endless night. So I call them the Night Road.’
     
    ‘The Night Road. Right. Rather dark of you.’ Henry had an odd look on his face, as though a light had suddenly shut off behind his eyes. Then he smiled.
    ‘So far this evening my masculinity, my patriotism and my intelligence have all been called into serious question.’ Luke shrugged, let a smile play across his face. ‘Then the ones I pretend to agree with, I have to get them talking to see if they really are interested in violence.’
    ‘The troublemaker, as always.’ Henry flicked a smile. ‘So you’re continuing to get a lot of responses.’
    ‘Fifty per cent more than when I started back in November. I think it’s the anonymity of the net; people express themselves a lot more strongly. And these people, they’re looking for others to reinforce their views. So the anger, the perceived injustice, ratchets up, higher and higher.’
    ‘How much data do you have so far?’
    Luke glanced at a screen. The most interesting and extremist ravings on the websites and forums were scanned, copied and uploaded into a database. ‘Close to ten thousand comments now, from roughly six thousand individuals, over the past four