NNA FISCHER WAS a remarkably intelligent woman with multiple degrees from world-class universities. Yet she had just committed a critical mistake. In her defense, the woman would have had no way of knowing it was a mistake. Which are often precisely the sort of errors that come back to haunt you.

The blogger she had e-mailed with her own misgivings was not who he seemed to be. It wasn’t even a person. It was essentially digital smoke and mirrors.

Dick Pender and his people had been monitoring the goings-on within several thousand chat rooms spread across the world. The rapid-fire repartee bounding kilobyte by kilobyte across his massive computer screens rivaled anything the agony columns of late-nineteenth-century British newspapers had ever inspired. The Red Menace was of course the topic on everyone’s mind, and Pender smiled as he toted up those convinced the Russians were behind it as opposed to those who weren’t sure. The tally ran nearly ninety-eight percent in his favor.

He noted with glee that as soon as anyone said something against the “truth” he had established they were electronically “piled on” by armies of chatters. Across thousands of discussion sites, Pender posted prewritten responses spouting fact after fact, which actually had no basis in fact, and grinned as he was hailed as a hero and a speaker of supreme wisdom by the chat hordes.

God, Pender thought, it was so easy to support a popular—if completely wrong—position. It required not a scintilla of courage.

A minute later his smile grew even wider. He had just checked what he termed his online bear traps. One of them was the blogger Anna had sent her query to. Pender’s people had set it up, along with several others, to gauge the interest of anyone who might believe the whole Red Menace campaign was a sham. It was critical to know if there was a reverse wave of doubt about the horrors perpetrated by the Russians.

If Pender detected any such movements he had numerous strategies he could employ to dispel this belief. One of his favorites was crafting an outrageous event that drew everyone’s attention from a problem area. He’d been retained on short notice to do this for administrations in Washington, London, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo over the years. Such things were usually needed around elections, scandals, wars, and budget fights.

Not many people had sent e-mails to the planted Web sites. The vast majority of the world seemingly had accepted on faith that everything being said about the Russians was true. Most people were perfectly fine with being sheep their whole lives, and this suited Pender’s business well. There were, of course, some who wanted to know everything about the R.I.C. and were digging deeply to get there. Thus, Pender was feeding them bits and pieces to appease their hunger. It wasn’t that hard to stay ahead of them, actually. The media had many stories and fronts to cover, whereas Pender had only one agenda to worry about: Nicolas Creel’s. This technique he referred to as “timing the tap,” turning on and off the info tap at the most optimal times. He had the media right where he wanted them—in a purely reactive state.

The limited number of people who had made inquiries on the planted sites had already been checked out by Pender’s folks and deemed to be unimportant. Unlike the basic chat rooms, one had to really search to find these online bear traps. That hinted of a more determined effort than most casual chatters would ever muster. Pender had no idea who Anna Fischer was, but the name on her Web address intrigued him.

“The Phoenix Group,” he said to himself as he sat at his desk in the war room. He’d already electronically run to ground the geographic origin of the message. The Phoenix Group was located in London. He had a file on his desk that he’d quickly assembled. The Phoenix Group was a think tank located in Westminster near Buckingham Palace; its precise ownership was unknown.