amused her in a dark way to think about how prissy she had been in the old days, when government secrets were sacrosanct and not traded about like baseball cards. Her reticence had been enforced by the stain on Russian Jews like herself, going back to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who betrayed the United States by handing over nuclear weapons designs to the Soviets. And not just the bomb. They also gave away the secrets to sonar, radar, and jet-propulsion engines—all the most important military secrets on which America still held a monopoly. For that they were sent to the electric chair. Ethel, less guilty than Julius, had to be shocked five times. Smoke rose from her head. The image was seared into Tildy’s imagination: that’s what happens to traitors—especially Jewish ones. And yet, from an early age, Tildy knew she too was capable of crossing the line. The difference between her and Ethel Rosenberg was that Ethel had harmed America, and Tildy wanted to save it.
Her ambition was her greatest secret. She was not the kind of Washington personality that people normally recognized. Nobody in this town turned their heads for the deputy secretary of homeland security. She was occasionally rolled out as a guest on CSPAN and the PBS NewsHour, and even a couple times on Fox. The unsexy policy bits. Infrastructure needs. New TSA requirements. Yawn. She suspected there were times when she was put in play simply because the department wanted its response to be ignored. At least she served a purpose. They would have a hard time finding someone else so authoritative and uninteresting. She was the nerdy bureaucrat that people steered away from at dinner parties, but also the one whose advice in a moment of pressure was the calmest and most reasoned. At those times, her superiors valued her because of her antiseptic reasoning and implacable sense of duty—qualities that, at other times, were her most annoying traits.
No one would ever suspect her.
She took a cab and paid with cash. She left off her glasses and wrapped a scarf around her head, very plausible with the late freeze. Gloves. Buried her face in a Brookings report on sustainable development. She could be anybody in this big stew of policy wonks, the least memorable person you almost never saw. Just being herself was a kind of disguise.
She went into Politics and Prose and pretended to browse—her cover for being in the neighborhood, in the remote possibility she was spotted. She purchased a book on gardening—although she lived in a condominium—then pulled her scarf over her head again and walked to the end of the block, to a green-fronted pizza parlor festooned with Christmas lights, Comet Ping Pong. A family spot. Kids playing foosball in the back room. Red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. Middle America, distilled innocence, the farcical opposite of a James Bond venue.
And yet Comet Ping Pong was a battlefield in the war over the future of the country. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a young family man from North Carolina, had come here. He might have brought his two daughters along had the family been on vacation. But Welch was on a mission. Like Tildy, he was trying to save America. “I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupt by evil without at least standing up for you,” he explained in a cell phone video for his children as he drove up from Salisbury.
Welch had been fed a story. Shortly before the presidential election that year, the Twitterverse was consumed with a report that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, was part of a satanic cabal of pedophiles who were preying on children in the basement of the pizza parlor. Welch listened to Alex Jones and other conspiracists who propagated this bizarre smear. He took it upon himself to find out the truth one way or another. To protect his daughters. To save America.
It was a Putin gambit, Tildy suspected from the beginning. All the hallmarks. A preposterous notion arises on the dark web where the sociopaths manufacture their memes. It is picked up by the spiky-haired punks in Moscow. “Fancy Bear,” they were called, although they were affiliated with military intelligence. They were pioneers of the Russian hacktivists, who would include Cozy Bear, Turla, Sandworm, and the criminal known as the Russian Business Network—all of them sponsored or condoned by the state and given the power not just to meddle but to wage a new kind of war. They disrupted