He could hear her in his head even now, the paranoid rants he’d tried so hard to tune out, the desperation that bled into her insistence that he listen and learn, as if what he believed or didn’t had any bearing on reality.

But it made sense now, all of it.

She’d known this day would come, and needed him to understand. “Democracy isn’t perfect,” she’d say, “but it’s better than the alternative. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, due process, a government of the people by the people, everything that makes us strong makes us weak, and the Russians are experts at exploiting that weakness.”

“Masters of the long game” was what she’d called them.

They were fully vested in American politics, but not the way most people thought. They didn’t care which party won or lost or who lived in the White House.

They didn’t have a “side.”

Their goal was to erode trust in elected officials, to erode trust in democracy itself, their target was the American voter, and their wet dream an ungovernable America, because what better way to convince less powerful nations that democracy was dangerous than to point to its beacon as it tore itself apart from within?

Political warfare.

The Russian intelligence apparatus had been at it for years.

“Active measures” was what she called it, a term that combined the ideology with the methods—propaganda, disinformation, deception, assassinations, counterfeit documents, political front organizations, nonprofit research. Anything and everything that targeted the human condition was fair game.

“Vietnam,” she’d said. “The protests you see in old news footage don’t do justice to the anger and unrest on the ground at the time. The energy was raw and electric, felt organic . . . hundreds of thousands of people fighting for a cause. The Soviets were pouring millions into activist and political organizations to keep the antiwar movement going, but who would want to believe that? It’s psychological suicide to admit this thing you were willing to die for wasn’t actually yours. That’s what makes the Russians so successful, so dangerous. They’re experts at finding divisive issues and feeding and fueling fear and anger until they take hold, and once they have taken hold, a person would sooner attack someone trying to save them than admit that their beliefs weren’t their own.”

Legerdemain.

According to Clare, Russian psyops were responsible for all the biggest conspiracy theories running amok in antigovernment communities. Fluoride in the water as a plot to control the population? Russian psyops. Moon landings as a hoax? Also the Russians. “Don’t even get me started on AIDS as a CIA-manufactured virus,” she’d said. “For that one, they forged documents, turned that paper trail loose in academia and political circles, and let democracy give it wings.”

He’d listened, but he hadn’t really listened.