“What’s the connection?”
“The vocabulary in the threats matches the vocabulary in the chatter you’ve been flagging for Patterson. Same constructions. Same phrasing patterns. Same hand.”
Wiley exhaled.
Cabot looked between them. “Patterson?”
“My senior editor at theGlobe,“ Wiley said. He didn’t take his eyes off Eamon. “I’ve been bringing him my Onyx Bay tracking for almost two years. Two weeks ago, I flagged a vocabulary shift in their channels. It was a new phrase showing up in places it shouldn’t.Symbolic event.”
“It’s the same language that’s in the threats,” Eamon said.
“Patterson’s my editor too,” Cabot said.
Wiley turned his head. “You file through him?”
“The Harcourt features. He pulled me in three weeks ago after the last piece ran. Asked what else I had on the family. He wanted to know if there was anything I held back from print.”
“Did you tell him?”
Cabot hesitated.
“We’re off the record here,” Eamon said.
“Off the record, I only told him the general context. He said he was considering a longer piece on legacy political families.” Cabot’s hand moved a fraction along the seam of his trousers and stopped.
“Which is why we’re sitting in this room,” Eamon said. “You got the call about coordinating.”
“I did,” Wiley said.
“Did he tell either of you why?”
“No,” Cabot said. “He only mentioned this meeting.”
“He saw an overlap,” Eamon said.
Farrow had been quiet through all of it. He spoke now, low and even.
“Is Patterson clear? How obvious is the connection? Does it make sense for him to make it?”
Eamon said, “We don’t know yet. We’re going to find out. For the moment, we treat him as compromised. Nothing passes through him.”
Wiley worked his jaw.
Eamon turned back to the room.
“Onyx Bay,” he said, “is not a business. They’re a domestic extremist group in the process of forming. Wiley has been tracking them for two years. Until recently, they’ve taken no action. They’ve done nothing you could put in front of a federal prosecutor.”
Cabot frowned. “Then how do you know they exist?”
“Pattern recognition. They show up in the right channels, use the right vocabulary, and organize the way other distributed extremist projects organize. They’re a shape Wiley recognized.”
“So, no actions until now?” Cabot asked.
“Four weeks ago their chatter shifted. The vocabulary tightened. The coordination got specific.Symbolic eventstarted showing up across their channels. As you know, two weeks ago the Harcourt letters started arriving.”
Wiley exhaled slowly. “Operational planning.”
“Yes.”