THE INVISIBLE HAND
Chapter 1: Bleed for It
There’s a smell in rich men’s sweat.
It’s not the salt.
It’s the fear of fading.
Jackson Brandt reeked of it.
We were parked on the back patio of a private estate in Ojai, California, shielded from satellite view by eucalyptus trees and offshore shell corporations. Brandt wore a golf shirt tight across his gut and a hat embroidered with “Jackson Brandt! America’s Back!”
Simple. Effective.
He was bitching about the polls.
“They’re not scared of me anymore, Vic.”
In a sea of self aggrandizing typical narcissistic bullshit, that was the first honest thing he’d said all day.
All politicians are narcissists on some level. But Jackson Brandt turns it into an art form. If he weren’t so goddamn malleable, I never would have backed his political ambitions.
I lit a cigarette. I’d promised his handlers I wouldn’t smoke around him. They could fuck themselves. I do what I want.
“That’s because you haven’t bled for them,” I said, tapping ash into his heirloom koi pond. “Not lately.”
He looked at me sideways. Waiting for the punchline. There wasn’t one.
“You want back in?” I growled. “You want to own the moment again? You want the whole country screaming your name like it’s Revelation Sunday? Then you bleed.”
He snorted.
“You’re talking metaphorically, right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m talking about getting shot in the fucking head.”
He laughed. Until he didn’t.
I let the silence do its work. The guy can’t handle silence. Needs cameras, music, yelling—anything but his own thoughts. So I just sipped my bourbon and watched him spin.
He leaned in, whispering like we were at war. Maybe we were.
“You’re saying fake an attempt?”
“No,” I said. “I’m saying survive one. Big difference.”
He went quiet.
And I knew—I fucking knew—I had him.
We laid it out in brutal math.
“JFK’s approval hit 80% after Dallas. Reagan’s bounce was ten goddamn points. Even Gabby Giffords got a second act, and she was nobody. You? You take a bullet onstage and stand back up, and you’ll be King of the Fucking Rubble.”
He swirled his drink.
“And what? We rig blanks? Hire some kid to play Patsy?”
“No, Jack. We make it real. Real blood. Real screams. Real shooter. Real dead hero in the crowd—big guy, military haircut, throws himself in front of a kid. Boom. Instant sainthood.”
“And me?”
“You get nicked. Just a graze. Dramatic, not fatal. Enough blood to baptize the moment.”
That’s when he flinched.
“Wait—you’re saying someone’s actually gotta die for this?”
I leaned forward, smoke coiling from my nostrils like the goddamn devil.
“Do you want to run for Paradise Valley dog catcher, or do you want to own the fucking United States of America? People die for lesser men every fucking day. At least these ones’ll get statues.”
He rubbed his temples.
“Who?”
“Imagine this. The shooter’s gotta’ be some burnout misanthropic ex-Marine with debt, rage, and no exit strategy. Someone life has truly shat upon from great heights.”
His face registers amusement, but he’s leaned in. I have his attention. He’s interested.
I blow a puff of disrespectful smoke his direction—a subtle way to make sure, without saying so, that I can make him or I can snap him like a twig. The smoke cloud wafts over him. I continue.
“We give him a cause. Then we kill him before he figures out he’s not the hero. The ‘rescuer’ is a schoolteacher with a Savior complex. He’ll jump the barricade the second he hears gunfire and cover the kid we plant up front. The bullet drops him. You bleed. The world mourns. And by sundown, they’ll be screaming for revenge and redemption—with you as both.”
He stared at me for a long time. He sits back in his chair and takes an uneasy swig of the 40 year old Glenfiddich on ice that he swears in public he’s never touched.
“You’re a fucking lunatic,” he said.
I smile and watch him take another swig—on ice! Who the fuck waters down such a perfect scotch with ice?
“Lunatic? I ask? You’re the one who wants to be president! That’s the real lunacy!
He laughs an uneasy laugh. I pretend to join him.
He finished his drink and walked inside.
I stayed where I was, watching the wind stir the trees like stagehands adjusting the lights. And I waited.
Ten minutes later, he came back out.
No hat. No pretense. Just a man who’d finally accepted the price.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s bleed for it.”
Chapter 2: It’s All About Planning
“You don’t build a resurrection without a couple of graves.”
That’s how I opened the planning meeting in the basement of a defunct opera house in San Diego—thick velvet curtains, stripped stage, dust on everything but the blueprints.
We were seven in total.
Me.
Two Black Ops logistics guys I’d used in Venezuela.
A contractor named Laird who used to work cleanup for NATO—retired early with five faked deaths to his name.
A wet-eyed little doctor from Cleveland who’d forged more death certificates than prescriptions.
And a pair of burnouts from tech who ran one of those AI voice generator companies by day and deepfake psy-ops for me by night.
At the head of the table sat Jackson Brandt, would-be Messiah, sipping on mineral water like he wasn’t about to order real human blood into the dirt.
I tossed a stack of file folders on the table. They struck like a thunderclap from Thor’s own hammer. Jackson was the only one who flinched. I turned up the corner of my mouth in a condescending smirk and lost it just as fast.
The other men huddled over the files and began to do their work.
I sat back and lit a cigarette. I had picked my people well.
1. The Shooter
Tim Callan.
Thirty-nine. Ex-Marine. Chronically underemployed. Twice evicted. Diagnosed with PTSD but refused VA treatment. Online, he wrote long screeds about “real patriots” and “false flags”—exactly the type of guy that, once dead, would get absorbed into a thousand conflicting conspiracy theories.
We groomed him through a burner alias posing as an old Marine buddy.
Fed him fantasies about sleeper agents in the government.
Gave him money.
Gave him purpose.
Told him he’d be extracted post-operation.
What he didn’t know?
He’d be shot dead by one of ours three seconds after firing blanks in the air.
And not just him.
2. The Hero
This part hurt—but not for the reasons people think.
Luis Ortega.
Single dad. Former firefighter. Fresno native. Solid jaw. Soccer dad. Once ran into a burning house to save a cat. Seriously— dude literally saved a mother fucking cat!
He didn’t know it, but my team had been watching him for months—since long before I ever convinced Jackson Brandt that it was his idea to run for president, and long before I’d told him it was time to bleed. Ortega’s psych profile said he’d intervene if a child was threatened—even under gunfire. All we needed was to put the kid there and the shooter on the opposite line.
He’d leap.
Shield the girl.
Take the real bullet.
“He’s not political,” Brandt said when we showed him Luis’s file. “Feels… off.”
“That’s why he works,” I snapped. “They need a real hero, not one of your people. Some shitlib normie laying down his life for a kid. That’s the emotional superglue that holds this whole opera together.”
He stared at the screen.
Saw Luis pushing a stroller through a Wal-Mart parking lot.
“Shame,” Brandt muttered.
“You gotta crack a few eggs if you wanna’ make an omelette,” I replied.
3. The Location
San Ardo, California.
Little ag town off the 101, where the flag still flies on every porch and ICE raids come once a season. Hot, flat, poor. Perfect optics.
We booked a high school football field.
Tore down the security fence and claimed it was “grassroots access.”
Built the stage under the goalpost. Seating on three sides, sun behind the audience—meaning everyone would be squinting toward the messiah.
We planted our people. Cameras at every angle. Mics disguised in potted plants. One drone. Three fake EMTs.
And a girl—Mariah, age 7—cute as a fucking button. I didn’t need a psych evaluation to know she would scream and duck at the right moment. Right out of central fucking casting! She’d be fine. It was Luis who wouldn’t. The trick with her was finding some bullshit reason to honor her enough to put her on the stage. So, we rigged the local science fare. Done.
4. The Squib
The blood rig was flawless.
We molded a microcapsule into Brandt’s right ear canal, fed a blood line down his collar to a pressurized pack on his back. Triggered by remote. Timed to go off 0.4 seconds after Callan’s first shot.
Blood would spatter across his cheek and shirt. Not too much. Just enough.
Brandt practiced falling three different ways. He liked the forward stumble the best. Said it felt like something out of a movie.
“That’s because it is a movie,” I said. “It’s just the kind where someone actually dies.”
5. The Security Detail
Secret Service? We couldn’t fake them all. So we split them.
Three were reassigned via a planted intelligence report from an allied agency. Something about a credible threat in Reno. Two more had their hotel rooms fumigated the night before and woke up vomiting from a “carbon monoxide leak.” They didn’t make it to the rally.
The rest? Replaced by our own.
Uniforms matched. Earwigs active. They were ex-Agency, ex-Mossad, and one Georgian ex-gangster who now ran high-end security for billionaires in Macau. They looked the part and they moved like wolves.
One real agent remained. His name was Hollis. And we gave him just enough truth to keep him complicit. After the fact, he’d tragically drown in his pool.
6. The Doctor
Dr. Elaine Brooks.
Plastic surgeon turned offshore consultant. Once stitched up cartel lieutenants in Guatemala under threat of death. She owed me a favor.
We gave her the report.
Ear laceration. No bullet fragments. Moderate blood loss. Clean bandaging.
She’d perform the post-event press conference.
She’d praise Brandt’s “calm under pressure,” his “will to survive,” and the “miracle” of a non-lethal wound.
We even drafted a phrase she’d use twice:
“A lesser man wouldn’t have stood back up.”
7. The Cleanup
There are always loose ends.
Tim Callan’s girlfriend? Plane crash.
A deputy who caught wind of the security shuffle? Suicide note, hanging from a bridge.
A camera tech who noticed the squib during rehearsal? Heart attack in the gym. Forty-two years old.
Laird’s crew handled all of it.
Quick. Clean. No patterns.
They don’t get medals. They get silence. Laird and his people don’t get dead. I may need them for future missions. And the only cause they serve is money.
8. The Narrative Flood
Before the shot was even fired, we’d planted:
Four TikTok influencers to film the moment from different angles.
A conspiracy thread on Truth Social about Brandt wearing prosthetics.
A deepfake of a rival candidate saying, “He finally got what was coming.”
A Reddit post timestamped for release 15 minutes later titled, “Guys… this is fake. Watch the blood pop too early.”
We seeded both sides—truthers and loyalists, deniers and zealots.
The goal wasn’t belief.
The goal was chaos.
Two nights before the rally, Brandt got cold feet.
He called me drunk from his ranch.
“Vic… this is real, isn’t it? Like really real.”
I didn’t lie.
“Yeah. A man’s gonna die for you. Another one thinks he’s saving the world. And you? You get to be the goddamn phoenix.”
He was quiet.
“Will I be hated?”
“Only by people who already hate you,” I said. “But the ones who love you? They’ll carve your fucking face into Mount Rushmore.”
He exhaled.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s light the match.”
Chapter 3: It’s Go Time!
If you plan it right, war looks like choreography.
The cars arrived at San Ardo High School by 8:14 a.m. sharp. Rows of minivans and rusted trucks wrapped around the bleachers like a noose. Evangelical rock music crackled through the speaker system. Merch tables sold “America’s Back” caps next to churros and lemonade. The temperature: 91 degrees and climbing. The scent: sunscreen, sweat, corn dogs, and something electric in the air—expectation.
At 9:27 a.m., the cameras were in position.
At 9:31, the Secret Service perimeter was “secured.”
At 9:42, Jackson Brandt stepped onto the makeshift stage to a frenzy.
He knew the lines. He knew the marks. We’d rehearsed the arc of it like a Broadway show written in gunpowder and blood. The music cut. The crowd rose.
And backstage, I lit a cigarette, leaned against the equipment van, and whispered into my mic:
“Let’s fucking dance.”
09:46 a.m.
Tim Callan was in position, thirty-two yards from the stage, tucked behind a row of folding chairs beside the restroom trailer. He wore a red windbreaker, sunglasses, and a worn out hat with a blue line flag in it. Law enforcement loves those guys.
His weapon—an AR-15 modified to fire blanks—rested inside a guitar case. The crowd around him didn’t know, didn’t care. He looked like any other burned-out vet here to scream about the Second Amendment and eat a hotdog. One of my people switched the ammo, hours earlier when I had taken Callan aside for a heart to heart. None of this worked unless he pulled that damn trigger, and I wasn’t taking any fucking chances.
The kid was already up front. Mariah, seven years old, Hispanic, pigtails, big nervous eyes. She was holding her mother’s hand and looking straight at Brandt with the kind of reverence adults don’t even pretend to believe in anymore.
Right behind them stood Luis Ortega—our hero.
We’d shuffled the crowd with free VIP tickets, raffled through a church. Luis had accepted. Jackson met them both and shook their hands before they filed into the stands. They were elated. Completely star struck.
At 09:50, I saw him scan the perimeter.
Ten out of ten on the readiness scale.
I gave the nod.
09:52 a.m.
Brandt was mid-sentence.
“They tried to silence us in D.C… they tried to censor us in courtrooms…”
CRACK.
A single shot in the air.
Brandt flinched hard. The squib fired.
Blood sprayed from his ear in a perfect arc—down his collar, across his jaw, catching the sunlight like a goddamn miracle.
Screams.
Gasps.
Panic.
Then—
CRACK CRACK.
The second and third shots rang out. One was blank. One was real.
Luis Ortega lunged.
He didn’t even hesitate. Not for a second. He wrapped his body around Mariah, turned sideways, and—
POP.
A real bullet punched into his spine. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, arms still around the girl.
The shooter—Callan—was still raising his weapon when the real kill team put one in his neck and another through his sternum.
He collapsed backward into a plastic chair and died with his finger still curled around the trigger.
09:53 a.m.
Brandt staggered. Hands out.
Blood dripping down his neck.
Camera One caught the wide shot. Camera Two caught the close-up. Camera Three, the drone, tilted just in time to see Luis on the ground and Mariah sobbing over him.
Brandt stood tall.
“They tried to stop us—” he shouted with an angry roar we had practiced until it felt natural.
“And. I. Am. Still. Standing.”
The crowd lost its mind.
People screamed.
People prayed.
A woman collapsed on the grass and began speaking in tongues.
And I, Victor, demon of strategy, exhaled.
10:12 a.m.
Dr. Elaine Brooks stood behind a podium, flanked by Brandt’s press secretary and one terrified sheriff.
“The presidental candidate sustained a superficial wound to the outer ear. No bone damage. No concussion. He is alert, he is steady, and he is asking about the little girl in the front row.”
Cut to the image of Mariah—tear-streaked, clinging to her mother, blood on her dress.
Cut to Brandt, wrapped in a flag, bandaged ear, nodding solemnly.
Cut to Luis Ortega’s body, already zipped into a bag and being loaded into an unmarked van.
10:47 a.m.
Twitter exploded.
#StillStanding
#OrtegaTheHero
#FalseFlag
#FakeBlood
#GunGrabHoax
On 4chan, someone uploaded “proof” the ear blood fired too early.
On MSNBC, a pundit sobbed: “This is the moment America comes back together.”
On OANN, a blurry video claimed Brandt was wearing a wire.
We seeded all of it.
I had my team post the conspiracy theory before the rally even began. Then we released “rebuttals” from Brandt-friendly influencers. Then a “leaked” text from the DOJ promising a “coverup.”
Flood the zone.
Smother the truth with so much noise that the truth chokes.
1:42 p.m.
Cleanup.
Callan’s apartment caught fire during a “routine search.”
Luis Ortega’s family was flown to D.C. for a private meeting with Brandt and quietly handed a military-style funeral fund. They were too heartbroken to ask the right questions.
A reporter from Fresno Bee who’d gotten close to the wrong details OD’d on fentanyl inside her own bathroom. She was three years sober.
Three of the fake Secret Service agents flew to Manila that night. The fourth? Laird gave him a “retirement plan” in the Mojave.
I paid Laird in bearer bonds.
10:31 p.m.
Brandt called me from the plane.
“Was it too much?”
“It was just enough.”
“What about the little girl?”
“She’ll be onstage in Dallas next week, hugging you while the anthem plays.”
He paused.
“He really tried to save her, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. He did.”
“Goddamn.”
“God doesn’t blink, Jack. And neither do we.”
Chapter 4: Victory
The best lies aren’t the ones people believe.
They’re the ones they can’t afford not to.
Day One
I watched from a blacked-out suite in Sacramento, bourbon in one hand, remote in the other, as the networks spun the wheel of prophecy.
CNN: “BRANDT SURVIVES ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT—STILL STANDING.”
MSNBC: “HERO FATHER GUNNED DOWN PROTECTING CHILD AT RALLY.”
FOX: “DEMS SILENT ON ATTEMPTED MURDER OF GOP NOMINEE.”
OANN: “FALSE FLAG OR PATRIOT BLOODBATH?”
And the chyron that made me grin like a hyena:
“MARIAH’S MIRACLE.”
The little girl—covered in Luis’s blood, crying in her mother’s arms—was the new face of America. They played her sobs on repeat. Played Brandt’s bandaged, defiant silhouette like it was the Gettysburg Address.
He bled.
A man died.
A child lived.
Try running against that.
Day Two
We flooded the zone.
Bot farms posted shaky videos showing Brandt “winking” before the shot. Others accused Mariah of being a trained crisis actor. A faked “leak” revealed a memo titled Operation Phoenix—total bullshit, but buried in enough real-looking documents to ignite a three-hour podcast spiral.
On the other end, we pumped out glossy, emotional ads showing Brandt wiping blood from his brow, carrying Mariah to safety, saluting the flag while tears welled up in his eyes.
Two realities.
Both reinforced.
Both curated by us.
And the truth?
The truth choked to death in the middle.
Day Four
Luis Ortega was fully canonized.
His widow gave a tearful eulogy on Good Morning America.
The GoFundMe we launched in her name hit $3.2 million.
Brandt gave her a medal. Hugged Mariah. Said “Your father saved us all.”
A thousand cell phones captured the moment. A million hearts ate it up.
Luis was buried in Arlington. Brandt personally lobbied for the honor. Wrote the speech himself—or rather, he read what I sent him and added the words “God’s grace.”
One Week Later
Three more people were dead:
Jenna Torres, local journalist. She was digging. She found some discrepancies in the EMT logs. Was halfway through a draft called “The Lie That Won the White House.”
She died in a car crash on the PCH. Head-on. Drunk driver. No brake marks. her two children were in the car with her.
No foul play suspected.
But I sent Laird a bottle of scotch anyway.
Two Weeks Later
Brandt was everywhere.
He stood at the pulpit in Tulsa and said, “I took a bullet for this country. I’ll take a thousand more.”
They went wild.
He said, “Luis Ortega is the soul of America. I’ll fight every day to be worthy of his sacrifice.”
They wept.
He said, “No one will touch a single hair on our children’s heads ever again.”
They handed over their votes like love letters.
Three Weeks Later
The Democrats held a press conference condemning “the politicization of a tragedy.”
Brandt’s PAC aired a commercial showing that exact clip—slowed down, black-and-white, overlaid with “THEY NEVER CARED ABOUT YOU.”
He was up 18 points nationally.
Even New York was polling competitive.
We began talks with foreign affiliates. France. Brazil. India.
They wanted help engineering “controlled sympathy events.”
We sent over a consulting deck titled:
“Controlled Chaos: Weaponizing the Wound.”
One Month Later
I met Brandt in a private cigar room in Palm Springs.
We sat across from each other in leather chairs, the air thick with smoke and ego. He sipped from a rocks glass like he hadn’t just built a presidency out of a grave.
“You think we crossed a line, Vic?” he asked.
I smiled.
“Lines are for people who plan on turning around.”
He nodded. Stared into the fireplace.
“Do they know?”
“They know something,” I said. “They just can’t prove it. And they won’t try. Because they’re terrified of what happens if they’re wrong.”
He exhaled.
“You think Ortega’s kid will remember it?”
“She’ll remember the medal. The photo. The check. And the way the whole country called her dad a hero.”
“I should probably visit her again.”
“You should,” I said. “Next week. Texas. Cameras on. Flags waving.”
I left before the Scotch hit him.
Walked out into the desert night, my phone buzzing with cable hits, trending hashtags, and whispers of Pulitzer ambitions from journalists too cowardly to look under the hood.
And I thought:
We didn’t just win the news cycle.
We killed the idea of objective truth.
We replaced it with a shrine soaked in manufactured blood and genuine tears.
Two dead bodies.
One child.
One bullet that never existed.
And a nation too confused, too divided, too desperate to stop applauding.
And Brandt? Well Brandt went on to be president. Because that’s how it works in a Democracy.
Author’s Note
The story above is a work of fiction.
All characters, events, and organizations depicted in this story are entirely fictitious or used in a purely fictionalized manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental—unless you’re looking for a conspiracy, in which case, of course it looks like someone you know.
This story is not an accusation. It is not a confession. It is not a theory.
It is a story.
A story about power.
A story about narrative.
A story about the terrible things men will do when they believe the ends justify the means—and the terrifying silence of a crowd that applauds them for it.
If you saw yourself in it, that’s between you and your reflection.
This is fiction.
And like all good fiction, it only feels true because you already suspect it might be.
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Sev
OMFG that is exactly what, how and why it happened.....there are so many who know it was a bunch of BS when it happened.....