Special Agent Jennifer Fields poked her boss when she saw that the valet for the Commodore Yacht Club had come on duty.

"We're on," she said, watching as the young man opened his stand.  Carolan looked up from his phone and replied, "Let's give it a few minutes.  We don't want to be the first ones in."

Fields readjusted her sidearm and settled back in her seat.  "Just so we're clear," she stated, watching the valet, "I think everything you told me about this place is next-level lunatic."

"Too bad your opinion doesn't matter.  Which goes double for mine."

"Are people that stupid?"

Carolan shrugged.  He was in a mood.

"So, you're telling me," she continued, "that I could start a conspiracy tomorrow, in which Martin Luther King, Coolio, and Flip Wilson weren't dead, but had been put into suspended animation, just waiting for the right moment to be brought back in order to convince the Black community to support something crazy, like the U.S. government going back on the gold standard?"

"I think you'd have better luck with Tupac and Bernie Mac over Coolio and Flip Wilson, but yes, with the right resources, that's what I'm telling you."

Fields shook her head.  "That's insane?"

"Life is complicated.  People want a sense of control over the uncontrollable.  They want easy answers, and conspiracy theories fill that need."

"There's no way the answer is that simple."

"Of course it is.  People see themselves as the heroes of their own stories.  Nobody wants to live in a boring timeline.  Conspiracy theories offer a heroic adventure; a sense of excitement, the feeling that you're privy to some sort of secret knowledge that no one else sees."

"That's ridiculous."

"And," he pressed on, "the more people ridicule you, the more you revel in your superiority over them.  To you, the uninitiated are sheep.  They're sleepwalking while you're fully awake - aware of the 'real' world and everything that's happening within it.  No matter how many actual facts get launched at you, no matter how much data gets presented demonstrating how wrong you are, it doesn't matter."

"Why not?"

"Because conspiracies, by their very nature, are unfalsifiable.  That's what makes them so dangerous and why the Russians love them so much.  They're experts at weaponizing them against the U.S. and derive a huge return on an incredibly small investment.  It's like injecting the population with an aggressive form of societal cancer.  Once it's in the body politic, all the Russians have to do is sit back and watch as our country eats away at itself and gets weaker and weaker."

"Which is what you think the Russians are attempting to do with Burman's death."

Carolan nodded.  "An old Soviet disinformation specialist dubbed it the 'Potter's Wheel.'  You pick a central point for your audience to focus on and then start things spinning.  Once you've captured their attention and have them mesmerized, all you have to do is drop a lump of wet clay onto it and you can shape it into anything you want."

"Meaning any sort of conspiracy."

Carolan nodded again.  "In this case, the wheel is the yacht club.  It's the perfect jumping-off point for a Russian conspiracy.  It's members-only, which means the general public is not going to be able to get inside and there's only so much information people can dig up about it online.  The club itself would be completely naive when it comes to information warfare, so they'd have no clue as to how to fight back once they found themselves in the conspiracy crosshairs."