“The whole world has been looking, and nobody seems to have found it yet.”
“I’m not sure the whole world really has been trying to find out the source. They’ve just accepted that it was true, sort of a rush to judgment. Or if they did look it wasn’t very hard. And then events kept happening and kept people jumping. After awhile, the story didn’t become who was behind it, but what the hell are we going to do about the evil Russians. I think the whole world was basically snookered.”
Shaw looked at her with new respect. “That’s sort of what Anna was thinking.”
“I’ll take that as a big compliment.”
“Any ideas?” he asked.
Katie pulled her chair closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve actually been giving that some thought.” She dug in her purse and pulled out a battered notepad. “When I was in Anna’s office that day she had to step out to see someone and I sort of looked around.”
“You mean you were snooping,” Shaw said a little angrily, instinctively defending Anna’s right to privacy.
“Do you want to hear what I found or not?”
“I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“I looked through some of the Red Menace stuff on her desk and some notes she’d jotted down. One was a list of Web sites or e-mail addresses. Maybe she’d contacted them. Anyway, one stuck with me and I wrote it down.”
“Why’d it stick with you?”
“It was called Barney’s Rubble-Land. You know, The Flintstones? It was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. Anyway, it was a blogger page. I didn’t check it out then, but while you were showering back at the hotel after Dr. Doom worked on you, I accessed the site from my laptop.”
“What’d you find?”
“This blogger, apparently his name is Barney, had some questions about the Red Menace too. From his postings he didn’t think it was legit.”
“How does that help us?”
“Well, quite frankly, I didn’t think the blogger site was legit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think Barney is a sham. I have lots of friends who’re bloggers. You get obsessed with them, write stuff all the time. There’s really nothing regimented about them. Free association, spur-of-the-moment stuff. And you usually have a place for people to discuss things. I mean, that’s one of the main reasons to have a blog in the first place. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, this blog didn’t have that. I checked the dates of the postings. They come out every other day at the same time. That doesn’t sound like Barney’s Rubble-Land to me. It sounds like it was on some sort of preset spit-out-a-blog mode, bi-daily pattern.”
“Why would someone set up a system like that?” Shaw wondered out loud.
“They might if instead of a real blog, it was a way to test the waters.”
“Test the waters?”
“Yeah, people in the entertainment and ad fields do it all the time. I actually did a story on it years ago. You put out a product and you want to gauge people’s reaction to it. You can have focus groups, opportunities to phone in opinions, Web site discussions. But some companies go a step further. They use blank drops, like a façade to get people to really let them know how they feel without feeling pressure. It can be a fake Web site, 800 number phone bank, or a questionnaire put out under a sham company’s name.”
Shaw looked very interested now. “So you’re saying this Barney Rubble might have been a façade to test how people were reacting to the Red Menace campaign?”
“And since Barney’s blog was highly critical and suspicious of the campaign…”
“They might have put that carrot out there to see if anyone else felt the same way. But you said there was no forum on the site to leave your opinion.”
“But if you e-mailed the site, which Anna did-”
Shaw finished for her. “Then they get your e-mail address. And Anna’s e-mail was [email protected]” He looked sharply at Katie. “That may be how they found out about The Phoenix Group. Not through you.”
“That’s probably something we’ll never know for sure.”