“I would eat clear Marmite in a heartbeat.”

Evan’s declaration was met with a chorus of disgust from his mates gathered around the pub table.

“What?” he asked, trying to keep a straight face. “No matter the color, it still tastes the same and it’s still chockablock with B vitamins.”

“And it’s still bowfin,” Robert declared, his face crinkled. “If it was clear-colored, you’d have no idea how much you’d put on your toast.”

“Thank God it’s just an April Fools’ joke,” Ben said. “Not that I ever eat Marmite to begin with.” He gave Evan a cheeky look and lowered his voice, “There’s much better condiments, right?”

Evan felt his face warm at the memory of their adventures with whipped cream and strawberry sauce from the previous night’s sundaes.

“The least funny joke today,” Andrew said, “was the rumor that the ball from the 1966 World Cup final had been given to the German National Football Museum after proof that it didn’t cross the line.”

“That was my favorite,” Robert said. “England never deserved that trophy. It was never a goal.”

Ben sat back in his chair and looked around at the pub. “It’s nice being here when it’s not pure crammed out with students.” He blanched. “Did I sound old just now?”

“A wee bit,” Robert said. “You and me, we need to enjoy our last spring vacation.” He clinked his pint of lager against Ben’s glass of diet Coke.

“Easy for you,” Ben said. “You’ve already got your own company, so your exams are irrelevant. And you’ve not got an honors dissertation to finish.”

“Naw, just crowdfunders breathing down my neck looking for results on the game I’m developing. I’ve got real-world problems now.”

“Gentlemen, please spare us the Stress Olympics.” Andrew waved his hand in a shooing motion. “We’ve all got difficulties. Right, Evan?”

“Right.” Evan looked past his companions at the television above the bar, where a news program was discussing the recent rise in acid attacks. He’d just reviewed the trend yesterday morning in a daily threat assessment.

“That’s so brutal,” Ben said, following Evan’s gaze to the TV. “How could anyone walk up to another human and just burn their face off like that?”

“In Scotland it’s mostly gang-related,” Robert said. “Liam got first-aid training on it last week at the pub, in case any Rangers wanks come busting in looking to burn Celtic fans.”

Ben gave a nervous laugh. “They wouldn’t really…over football?”

“Football and religion,” Evan corrected.

“Either side might try it, honestly,” Robert said.

“So what did they tell Liam to do if it happens at Hannigan’s?” Andrew asked.

“You gotta get the victim’s clothes off, pronto, he said. Then keep pouring cold water on them until the ambulance comes.” Robert grimaced. “The scars are nasty. People lose their noses, lips, eyelids. Imagine never being able to blink again.”

“Christ…” Ben adjusted his glasses, perhaps wondering if they’d protect him from acid. Evan squeezed his hand, then turned back to the television.

As the familiar red BBC breaking news graphic swirled across the screen, Evan felt his personal phone vibrate. He reached for it, noticing the others fetching theirs as well.

“What earth-shattering event are they pestering us with now?” Andrew said, pulling out his mobile. “Another celebrity breakup, or perhaps Poundland has once again reached record profits.”

Evan unlocked his screen to read a news notification:

Police Scotland thwart planned ISIS attack on gay weddings.

“What?!” Ben yelped, gripping his phone with a trembling hand. “Tell me this is an April Fools’ joke.”

“If it is,” Robert said, “it’s the sickest one ever.”

Evan looked up at the television, trying to keep his breathing steady. On the screen was a video of St. Andrew’s in the Square—the very wedding-evacuation video Evan had found on Imageo. The clip zoomed in on the reflection of the ISIS logo.

Oh God.

“That was mine!” Ben stood up and pointed to the TV. “That was my wedding. The evacuation, the false alarm, the—” He turned to Evan, eyes hardening with fury. “I need to go.”

“I’ll come with you.” Evan stood and reached for his wallet to pay for their drinks. As he did, his service-issue mobile rang in his other pocket. Hoping his friends wouldn’t notice, he switched his personal phone with his work phone and pulled out the latter. “Yeah?”

“Did you see the news?” Lewis asked.

“Aye. Just a second.” Opening his wallet, he saw Robert and Andrew waving him on. “Thanks,” he mouthed to them as he grabbed his coat and followed Ben toward the pub’s front door. Though it was only a fleeting glimpse, he was sure Robert was eyeing his service-issue phone with suspicion.

“Kay wants the whole team in the office now,” Lewis said. “Gonnae be a long night.”

“On my way.” He hung up, dreading the fallout at work but also anxious to start analyzing all the chatter that must be exploding across the internet. Luckily it was but a two-minute walk to the nearest subway station.

He hoped it would be enough time to make Ben understand.

“You lied to me.” Ben fought to keep his voice down as he and Evan hurried over the Ashton Lane cobblestones. “That bomb threat wasn’t targeting St. Andrew’s the venue. It was targeting my wedding.”

“I told you the truth.” Evan wiped his mouth. “At least, I told you the truth as I knew it that night. That was the provisional conclusion.”

“What about since then?” Ben hissed. “Did you find out I was nearly attacked by ISIS?”

“You know I can’t say.”

Ben’s phone rang, but not with the call he was expecting, from his mother. The number was unidentified, so he swiped to ignore it. “Probably a reporter, wanting to know what happened at that wedding.”

Evan stopped short. “You can’t speak to any media about it.”

“Why not, if the danger is out in the open now?”

“Because it’s—” Evan gave a frustrated growl and moved close enough to whisper. “It’s not what it seems. You have to believe me. But don’t tell anyone.”

“Tell them what? I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. You can’t.”

“I can’t even know whether I’m safe? What about my wedding in two weeks?” His throat tightened, making his voice pitch up in panic. “It’s in a public place. Anyone could—”

“Did you not see the headline? It said police have thwarted the planned attack.” Evan stepped back and held out his hands palms down. “Everything’s fine.”

“If it’s fine, why do you look so freaked out?”

“I can’t—”

“You can’t tell me. Right.” Suppressing a howl of frustration, Ben walked with Evan to the subway. They were silent as they went through the turnstiles and boarded the crowded escalator side by side.

“It’s always going to be like this, isn’t it?” Ben asked softly as they descended into the earth. “You’ll always say, ‘Believe me,’ and ‘Trust me.’”

“Sometimes, aye.” Evan took his hand. “I did warn you.”

Ben wanted to let go but didn’t. “When I told you I was doing the Rainbow Regiment wedding, were you afraid for my safety?”

“A bit. But I knew I’d be there to protect you if anything went wrong.”

Ben rubbed his face, trying to clear his thoughts. He knew he should tell Evan he’d seen his WhoWhatWhere searches about those British Values Party guys, David Wallace and Jordan Lithgow. Then again, Evan would need plausible deniability if MI5 asked him whether anyone on the outside knew about this investigation.

Besides, a crammed-out subway station was no place to discuss this matter.

They stopped at the bottom of the escalator, where Evan pointed behind him, toward the subway’s Inner Circle line. “I have to go…”

“Me too.” Ben took a step in the opposite direction.

“I’ll phone you when I can. Probably not tonight. Just remember—”

“I know.” Ben mimed zipping his lips.

The three-minute subway ride felt like an eternity, as Ben turned over this new revelation in his mind. As far as he knew, Evan’s operation didn’t concern ISIS but rather some far-right extremists. Then again, Evan probably worked on more than one operation. Ben was more confused than ever.

When he got off at Kelvinbridge and neared the station exit, his phone buzzed several times. With dread he pulled it from his pocket to see several missed texts and two more phone calls, including one from the number he’d expected. He dialed voice mail to listen to his mum’s message, bracing himself for a plea to quit the Rainbow Regiment wedding.

“I saw the news,” she said in a surprisingly steady voice. “I’m calling about the wedding on the eighteenth.” She took a deep breath. “Tell me how I can help.”

Ben stopped in his tracks. Someone bumped into him from behind.

“Out my road, man!” muttered an annoyed young woman as she continued around him.

Ben stepped aside from the flow of pedestrian traffic, then replayed his mother’s message from the beginning. He hadn’t heard wrong: She wanted to help with Michael and Philip’s wedding. She wasn’t planning to attend the actual event, but she would give Ben the preparation assistance he needed.

What had changed her mind? And what did it have to do with the news about—

Oh.

His brief elation faded into a blunt cynicism. Now that marriage equality might be under attack by the same people who’d oppressed her family, she was suddenly all in. No doubt her position was, If the Muslims want to destroy it, I need to protect it.

He sighed and continued on toward his flat. If this was what it took to get Mum onside, then so be it. Once she saw that same-sex couples celebrated their devotion as fervently as anyone else, she’d support it for the right reasons.

Assuming they all survived.

Evan had barely stepped out of the security capsule when he was greeted by Kay.

“You’re on troll patrol,” she told him as she swept past, heading toward the kitchen with an empty mug. “Enjoy.”

Evan sat at his computer and logged onto Twitter, pulling up D Branch’s list of 500 known Russian troll and “bot” accounts. Despite their avatars’ apparent diversity in age, gender, and nationality, the accounts had three things in common: a creation date from the previous summer, an obsessive support for the Syrian president (friend of Russia), and an equally obsessive opposition to the Ukrainian president (foe of Russia).

The Twitter feed created by this list came up on his screen. Though he’d been expecting it, the sight still took his breath away.

It was wall-to-wall #ISISGayWeddings. Tweet after identically worded tweet proclaimed “sovereignty with LGBT community”—Evan assumed they meant solidarity—against the “vial Islamic animals.”

Evan clicked on the hashtag, which was already trending #1 in the UK and #9 worldwide. The top-ranked posts were by celebrities who seemed genuinely concerned about the issue, and whose rhetoric was much more subdued—refraining from calling Muslims animals, for one thing—and whose spelling was for the most part correct.

He scrolled down the top tweets list until he came to one similar to those of the Russian bots and trolls, from the handle @Pr0udGayScot. The avatar was a model-perfect pic of a handsome young man, but a quick image search showed it to be a stock photo.

Interspersed with stereotypical tweets about men’s fashion and Merchant City nightlife were diatribes about not only Syria and Ukraine but also conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of last year’s Scottish independence referendum results.

Though @Pr0udGayScot had nearly two thousand followers, his interactions seemed to be nothing but @s to other gay men, asking them to follow him back so he could direct-message “something important”: classic honeytrap behavior that could result in the victim’s Twitter account being hacked.

“I found more than a dozen of these accounts in the last half hour,” Evan told his team in the meeting room. The group, which consisted of Operation Caps Lock plus Adira, had gathered for the first of what would no doubt be many conferences throughout the night. “They were all created mid-February, which suggests this operation, even if part of a bigger disinformation campaign, has been planned for only a short time.”

“I looked up the people who’d been asked to follow @Pr0udGayScot back,” Lewis said. “They were among those showing the copycat Islamophobic tweets. Which means their accounts got hacked.”

“Won’t they just tell their followers what happened?” asked Detective Inspector Hayward.

“Sure,” Evan said, “but you know the saying about how a lie travels around the world before the truth can get its boots on? That’s doubly true on social media.”

“Remember,” Kay said, “disinformation campaigns are about creating fear and uncertainty. They want our citizens to not know whom to trust, to eventually throw up their hands and think they can’t believe anything they see or hear.”

“Ooft.” Detective Sergeant Fowles sank back into her chair. “That’s depressingly postmodern.”

“What else have you all found?” Kay asked.

Evan held up the report he’d written, which he hoped wasn’t riddled with typos. “A lot of the accounts tweeted a link to the Imageo video of the St. Andrew’s evacuation I found a few weeks ago. But even more were linking to a new video in Arabic, claiming it showed a direct threat by ISIL. I sent that video to Ned and Adira to analyze.”

“Aye, here it is.” Ned hit a key on his laptop, and the video appeared on the conference-room screen. On it, a man wearing a black balaclava and brandishing a machine gun stood at a firing range ranting in what sounded like Arabic. Then he turned to face the human-shaped paper target: a rainbow-hued silhouette rather than the usual black.

The man opened fire, demolishing the target’s torso and head, all while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

The video ended.

“Unsurprisingly,” Adira said, “this video has the same issues as the one from the CENTCOM social-media hack. The accent is off, the understanding of Islam is cartoonish at best, and, as Ned can attest, it was posted to the same CyberCaliphate website used by the Russian hackers.”

“The real ISIL may yet take credit for these threats against same-sex weddings, even if they’re not responsible.” Kay turned to Evan. “And those threats may become real, now that the idea of such attacks is floating about.”

He nodded. Just because this episode was a likely Russian false-flag operation didn’t mean the danger to the LGBTI community hadn’t just risen—especially as the online troll army had found a brand-new regiment:

“I checked my XRW Twitter list,” Evan said, “to see if any extreme-right-wingers were taking part. Piling on Muslims seemed like something they’d enjoy. And sure enough, they were retweeting and sharing along with the bots and trolls. Which in itself doesn’t prove anything other than their prejudice, until you look at the timing.” He turned to the penultimate page of his team’s report. “Normally the Twitter population jumps on a hashtag over the course of hours—or maybe as little as half an hour in the case of breaking news like this. But tonight, these XRW accounts started promoting the hashtag mere moments after the Russian bots and trolls introduced it.”

“So they were waiting on Twitter for the signal to spread the word?” Deirdre asked.

“Maybe,” Evan said. “Like an army being sent into battle.”

“This XRW list you have,” Kay asked, “are they real people or just bots?”

Ned cleared his throat. “That’s the most unsettling part. A tweet’s source field shows which program was used to send it. The bots we track usually use a Russian mass-posting tool, and that was the case here—but only for the bots. Those accounts on Evan’s XRW list used everything from desktop browsers to Android and iPhone apps. Just like normal people.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lewis said. “We got an army of flesh-and-blood white supremacists mobilizing online on behalf of the Russian government?”

“I doubt they know who’s pulling the strings,” Evan said. “They may just think they’re turning public opinion against Muslims. And maybe some of them are getting paid for it.” He turned to Kay. “Surely this’ll help our case in getting a warrant to surveil David Wallace, Codename Alt-Tab?”

“Not unless you can find intelligence connecting him as an individual to these activities.”

“Someone’s got to be taking orders from Moscow on how to orchestrate all these trolls. Who better than the BVP chairman? He’s got influence, access, and motive.”

“So do many others,” Kay said. “Let’s all keep digging.”

The team discussed next steps, then everyone returned to their desks.

After stewing for a few moments, Evan got up and went to Ned. “Is there anything in your toy box that can access a phone’s settings remotely?”

Ned gave him a wary look. “You mean hack into a person’s mobile?”

“No, of course not,” Evan said, as that would be illegal without a warrant. “I’m not looking for the information inside the phone. I just want to switch on the device’s GPS and change some of the apps’ permission settings.”

“Why?”

“So that when they, for instance, post on social media, it leaves a geo-tag.” And I can see it on Ben’s WhoWhatWhere program.

“Ah.” Ned thought for a moment. “It depends on the phone’s make and model. Also, it’s not truly remote. You’d have to be within a few feet—and by you, I mean someone else. A specialist.”

Evan felt a pang of dismay, but he knew his strengths as an intel officer, and technological sleight-of-hand wasn’t one of them. “How soon?”

Ned lowered his voice. “This is for Alt-Tab?”

“Yes.” Evan crouched down, crossing his arms upon Ned’s desk. “I can tell you Wallace’s phone model, his number, and which crowded Birmingham pub you’re likely to find him in when Aston Villa are playing.”

Ned ran his hand over what was left of his sandy hair, no doubt contemplating the legality. The action he’d described, though close to hacking, hadn’t yet been strictly proscribed by law. It often took years for legislation to catch up to technology, and intelligence agencies happily took advantage of that time lag.

Finally Ned said, “It’ll be a delicate operation, so it might take a few attempts, but we’ll do our best.”

“Thank you!” Evan jumped up, barely resisting the urge to hug him. “You’re a god on earth.”

The Caps Lock team worked through the night, taking turns napping on the saggy couch in the break room. Every two hours they held a conference call with Thames House to update headquarters on the latest findings.

Heading back to his desk after a twenty-minute nap at ten a.m., Evan spared a brief worry for how his fatigue would affect his performance in Saturday’s quarterfinal. Forthside United would be their toughest opponent yet. He couldn’t let the Warriors down again like he’d done last year.

Kay met him at his desk. “My office, please.”

Evan followed her, wishing for an antacid tablet or six.

“Thames House just phoned,” his supervisor said as she sat behind her desk. “Apparently our conference calls provided more questions than answers. They want you in London tomorrow morning for an in-person debriefing. Your train ticket and tonight’s hotel room are being booked as we speak.”

“The whole team?”

“Just you.”

Evan thought of the quarterfinal. “When will I be back?”

“Hard to say. We’re making your hotel booking open-ended, just in case.” She lifted her chin to meet his eyes. “You’ve told me everything there is to know about this operation, right?”

“Of course. All of my reports are—”

“What do you know about Ben Reid’s work?”

“Erm, his dissertation’s got something to do with GIS systems and social media.” He decided not to mention he’d used Ben’s software to try and track the BVP duo.

“You never told me he’d committed to another same-sex wedding.” She glanced down at her jotter, though it was empty. “On the eighteenth, I believe?”

Evan knew his face said it all. He slowly sank into the chair across from her. “No, I never did tell you.”

“I don’t need to ask why. You probably thought you could protect him.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know. I trust you, Evan.” She leaned forward and pinned him with her gaze. “Now you must convince our bosses to trust you too.”