“Uh huh. That broad green lawn was perfectly placed to do some special effects against it in post. And I don’t think it was picked by accident, or through incompetence either, regardless of what the pundits claim.”
He dragged the video over to the side and pulled up a still of McCain with that backdrop. “Then this vid’s just your way of making a point?”
Leslie nodded.
“Consider it made. But who would set up such a thing, and why?”
She leaned forward, warming to the subject. “Now you’re starting to ask the right questions. I kept asking myself the same things the whole time I was assembling that gem. But the more I thought about it, the more I wished I’d never even noticed. Look. On the surface, it’s just a picture. Everyone’s supposed to be watching McCain, so it’s just noise. He wouldn’t care what was behind him, either. So if I’m right, and it was done on purpose, then someone in the RNC --.”
“In particular,” he interjected, “someone involved in crafting the message.”
“Yeah. That’s one of the leads I want to follow up. Someone in the RNC has some rather nasty plans in store for their candidate.”
“What do you think they’ll do?”
“One thing I don’t think they’ll do is risk losing power. Not after all they’ve done to seize it and expand it for the past seven years. No. I think someone in this country is planning a very high-profile terrorist act, a false flag attack on their own boy. However they stage it, and wherever it takes place, it’ll end with John McCain in the hands of ‘evil doers’. And the way he keeps hovering over Sarah Palin, it wouldn’t surprise me if they knocked her off in the process. That would remove an embarrassment, create a martyr out of McCain, add more accelerant to the fire, and give Cheney and the rest an excuse to have Bush bring their Continuity of Government operation out into the open. Martial Law. Suspend the election. Game over.”
Greg sat very still for a long moment.
Leslie went back to counting heartbeats. An accusation like that, she knew, was a sure-fire way of having the whole community of citizen journalists swept up in a paroxysm of patriotic zeal and disappeared. It wasn’t just dangerous for her, but remaining silent was even worse.
“Okay,” he said at last, “I understand where you’re going with this, and we’ll hold onto your video for later if we get wind of any confirmation. But for now, I think we need to address this on a much wider basis.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Clues. It’s about clues. Recognizing things that seem a bit off, and seeing how they might be used as part of something bigger. They planted that picture in plain view of everyone, and nobody but you thought any more of it than that maybe is was a stupid error. These guys play a deep game of chess. They lay out their pieces ahead of time in ways that don’t attract attention, and then, when it’s time to act, put them into play. That’s how intelligence operations are planned out.”
“Wait, wait,” Leslie said. “You think this looks like the work of some intelligence agency?”
“Either that, or people trained by one. Either way, if you’ve stumbled onto something real, there’s a lot of money at stake as well. Operations like that aren’t cheap. This could lead to all sorts of places. That’s why I want to be cagey about how we alert people. We’ve got to play their game in a way they hadn’t intended.”
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
