The Cellist by Daniel Silva

63Capitol Hill, Washington

Rebel, the Russian asset who did not know she was a Russian asset, awoke the next day at six fifteen. The bedroom of her tiny basement apartment near Lincoln Park was in its usual morning disarray. She opened the blackout shade, and a bit of gray light seeped through the opaque safety glass of the room’s only window. A pair of women’s Nikes hurried along the sidewalk of Kentucky Avenue, followed a few seconds later by a well-dressed terrier. This was the view of the nation’s capital to which Rebel was entitled for the sum of $1,500 a month, lower extremities and canines, the occasional rat for a change of pace.

Life was different in the small town in southeastern Indiana where Rebel maintained her primary residence. A hundred and fifty thousand bought you a nice house, and for two fifty you could have a couple of acres. The median income was a bit above thirty thousand, with a third of its residents living below the poverty line. There was an old distillery in town, but otherwise there weren’t many jobs, only a bit of retail-and-restaurant work along High Street or, for a lucky few, a job as a teller at United Commercial. A lot of the town was wasted most of the time—eighty percent had prescriptions for painkillers—and crime was the one growth industry. At the height of the opioid crisis, Rebel’s Indiana county, population fifty thousand, sent more people to prison in a single year than did San Francisco.

It was understandable, then, that folks in Rebel’s town were angry. The educated urban elites—the Wall Street bankers, the Connecticut hedge fund managers, the Silicon Valley software engineers, the ones who went to Ivy League schools and made millions pushing buttons—were prospering as never before while the people in Rebel’s hometown were falling farther and farther behind. The elites bought their clothes at Rag & Bone, the folks in Rebel’s town at Dollar General. On summer weekends they took their kids to the Water World splash park, except at the end of the month, when almost everyone was broke.

Thanks to the enigmatic Internet postings of a former government official known only as Q, Rebel now knew the reason for her town’s plight. It was the cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking, liberal pedophiles who controlled the financial system, Hollywood, and the media. The cabal raped and sodomized children, drank their blood, and ate their flesh in order to extract the life-extending chemical adrenochrome. Q was the prophet, but the president was a divine being sent by God to destroy the cabal and save the children. His battle would culminate in the Storm, when he would declare martial law and begin arresting and executing his enemies. Only then would an age of salvation and enlightenment known as the Great Awakening begin.

Rebel, one of Q’s earliest adherents, was now regarded as an expert in the field—a Qologist, as she referred to herself on social media, where she had a half-million followers. Her pages were pseudonymous; no one knew she was a follower of Q. She called herself the Q Bitch. The beautiful blond woman in the profile picture looked nothing like her.

There were many followers of Q who were disappointed that the Storm did not begin after the insurrection at the Capitol—or, as Q Bitch referred to it, the Qsurrection. They were disappointed, too, by Q’s long silence. He had made only a single drop during the final two months of 2020, and none in the new year. But Rebel had kept faith with Q, mainly because Q had kept faith with her. For much of the last year, they had been in direct communication using the encrypted message service Telegram. Q had warned Rebel not to publish what he was saying, or to tell anyone that she was in contact with him. She had followed his instructions to the letter, if only because she feared he might vanish. She was Q’s dirty little secret.

Some of their conversations were quite lengthy, hours long, late at night, Rebel in her bed, Q in hiding. Sometimes he divulged a great secret about the cabal that he had not shared with his other followers, but usually they made small talk or flirted. At Q’s request, Rebel had sent several nude photos. Q had not reciprocated. Prophets did not send pictures of their private parts over the Internet.

In mid-November, after the fake news declared that the president had lost the election, their conversations turned serious, dark. Q wondered whether Rebel was prepared to engage in violence to bring about the Storm. Rebel assured Q that she was. And what if her act of violence resulted in her arrest? Was she prepared to face temporary imprisonment until the Storm had passed and the cabal had been punished? Was she prepared to trust the plan? Yes, she answered. She would do anything to save the children.

It was then, in late December, that Q revealed to Rebel that she was the chosen one—the one who would commit the act that would bring about the Storm. She was not surprised by the nature of Q’s order; it was the only way to prevent the cabal from seizing control of the White House. Nor was she surprised she had been selected. She was uniquely positioned to carry it out. She was the only one.

Q had ordered Rebel to make no changes in her life that might raise a red flag. With the exception of the handwritten letter explaining her actions, she had maintained strict operational security. It was lying on her nightstand, the letter, beneath her compact Glock 32 .357.

In the apartment’s galley kitchen, she started the Krups and skimmed a few patriot message boards while waiting for the coffee to brew. She was wearing her favorite nightshirt, a football jersey bearing the number 17—Q being the seventeenth letter of the alphabet. The patriot threads on Reddit were pretty tame, but on some of the hard-core sites there were posts about attacks on government buildings and the coming civil war. Rebel added an incendiary post of her own—anonymously, of course—and then tossed out a few thoughts on her Q Bitch account, which met with a quick response from her Q-starved followers. Finally, she switched to her real-name account and railed against the incoming administration’s plan to rejoin the Paris climate accord. Within the first minute, she received more than a thousand likes, retweets, and quotes. The adulation was like a drug.

She carried a cup of coffee into her bedroom and dressed for the gym. It seemed a prosaic thing to do, given the fact she had been chosen to bring about the Great Awakening, but Q had been adamant about keeping to her usual schedule. She worked out religiously for two hours each morning, one hour of cardio followed by an hour of resistance, and then showered and changed for work in her office. Even a mild case of Covid, which she had hidden from her colleagues, hadn’t disrupted her routine. A variation now would be noted by her staff. Besides, she needed to clear her head. She was spinning again, hearing voices.

Trust the plan . . .

Her phone pinged with a message. The tone told her it was Telegram, and Telegram meant that it was Q. He wanted to know whether she had a minute to talk. Breathless, she typed a response.

For you, my love, I have all the time in the world.

Are you alone?

She told him she was.

The plan has changed.

How?

He explained.

Are you sure?

Trust the plan.

With that, Q was gone. Rebel dropped her phone and the Glock 32 into the gym bag and went into the frigid morning. She headed up Kentucky Avenue to Lincoln Park, then made a left at East Capitol. The voices were whispering in her ear. Trust the plan, they were saying. Enjoy the show.