Chapter 4
Phoenix in September still carried summer’s weight. The heat shimmered off the tarmac as Sara’s plane descended, the city sprawling endlessly across the valley floor like spilled concrete, mountains rising sharp and alien in every direction. Even at six in the evening, the temperature gauge in the rental car read 104 degrees.
The GPS guided her through streets lined with palm trees that seemed to wilt despite their desert pedigree, past strip malls with Spanish tile roofs and subdivisions that stretched toward distant peaks. Everything felt temporary here, like the city had been assembled quickly and might blow away just as fast. The monsoon season was ending, leaving behind a sky the color of old brass and air that tasted of dust and distant rain that never quite arrived.
Sara had covered breaking news in a dozen cities, but Phoenix felt different. Maybe it was the heat creating a sense of urgency, or maybe it was the way the landscape itself seemed to suggest violence—all those sharp edges and stark contrasts, the beauty that could kill you if you weren’t careful.
The command center occupied the entire fourth floor of a downtown office building that normally housed insurance adjusters and tax accountants. Sara badged her way through three security checkpoints, each manned by increasingly serious-looking federal agents. The building’s central air conditioning fought a losing battle against the combined heat of bodies, electronics, and Arizona September.
Inside, controlled chaos. Twenty-four-hour fluorescent lighting turned everything pale and artificial. Dozens of agents and analysts hunched over laptops and whiteboards, their sleeves rolled up, coffee cups multiplying on every available surface. The room smelled like burnt coffee, printer toner, and human stress.
Wall-mounted monitors displayed feeds from local news stations, social media dashboards, and what looked like surveillance footage on endless loops. One screen tracked trending hashtags in real-time: #RileyAssassination, #FalseFlag, #DeepState, #CivilWar. The numbers climbed constantly.
“Sixteen million posts in the last eighteen hours,” said Agent Jennifer Martinez, appearing at Sara’s elbow. Martinez was compact and serious, her dark hair pulled back severely, her shirt already showing sweat stains despite the aggressive air conditioning. “That’s just Twitter. Add TikTok, Instagram, Facebook—we’re looking at maybe fifty million pieces of content.”
Sara watched the hashtag counter tick upward. #RileyAssassination: 16,847,293 posts. Refresh. 16,847,856 posts. “How much is organic?”
“Maybe thirty percent. The rest is bots, amplification networks, coordinated inauthentic behavior. Foreign actors jumped on this within minutes. We’re seeing signature patterns from at least seven different state and non-state operations.”
A whiteboard near the center of the room displayed photos of faces under a header reading “PERSONS OF INTEREST - CLEARED.” Sara counted at least thirty pictures, a mix of ages and ethnicities, some with large red X’s drawn across them.
“The misidentification problem?” Sara asked.
Martinez’s jaw tightened. “Started four minutes after the shooting. First false ID came from an anonymous Twitter account—guy who wasn’t even in Arizona. Then Reddit picked it up, enhanced the photo with AI, made it look ‘clearer.’ Within an hour, that poor bastard’s home address was circulating with calls for ‘justice.’”
She pointed to a photo in the top row: a middle-aged man with kind eyes and a slight smile. “Robert Williams. Seventy-seven years old, retired banker from Toronto. Someone thought his LinkedIn photo looked like a surveillance screenshot. He’s been in hiding since yesterday.”
More photos joined Williams in the cleared section. A college student in Michigan who’d never left his dorm room. A food service worker whose only crime was being in the wrong place when someone livestreamed near the rally. A Phoenix police officer who’d been misidentified by his own department’s facial recognition software.
“The automation made it worse,” Martinez continued. “AI-enhanced photos spreading faster than we could debunk them. People creating ‘clearer’ versions of blurry surveillance footage, adding details that weren’t there. By the time we catch up, three more false IDs are trending.”
A cluster of analysts worked at a bank of monitors showing social media feeds. Sara watched one young woman scrolling through TikTok videos, each showing different supposed “suspects” with increasingly dramatic music and text overlays. ASSASSIN IDENTIFIED!!! read one, featuring a grainy photo of someone’s high school yearbook picture. 47,000 likes.
“We’ve got people calling in tips about their neighbors, their ex-boyfriends, random people at grocery stores,” Martinez said. “Phoenix PD has fielded over 2,000 false suspect reports. The real shooter could walk into a police station and confess, and we’d still be chasing ghosts for weeks.”
The heat outside seemed to press against the building’s windows despite the tinted glass. Sara could see news vans lined up on the street below, their satellite dishes forming a technological forest against the burnt orange sky. Every major network had sent crews. She counted at least fifteen different media organizations, plus independent streamers broadcasting live from smartphones.
At the center of the command center, a large table displayed printed screenshots arranged like evidence at a trial. Sara recognized the format—the same kind of documentation she’d been collecting on the Groyper movement. Usernames, timestamps, platform cross-references. But the scale here dwarfed anything she’d seen before.
“This is just the first wave,” Martinez said, following Sara’s gaze. “False IDs, conspiracy theories, foreign interference—that’s the opening salvo. Wait until the funeral, the investigation updates, the trial. Every development will trigger new waves of disinformation.”
A technician called out from across the room: “We’ve got another deepfake. Someone made a video of Riley ‘confessing’ to being a CIA asset before his death.”
Martinez rubbed her temples. “How many views?”
“Three hundred thousand and climbing. Posted twenty minutes ago.”
The air conditioning cycled on again with a mechanical wheeze, fighting another losing battle against the heat. Outside, Phoenix stretched endlessly toward mountains that looked like sleeping giants in the fading light. And somewhere in that sprawling desert city, the truth about Marcus Riley’s death was competing with a thousand different lies, each more compelling than the last.
Sara pulled out her notebook and started taking notes. She had work to do.