The Blackmail Review

Chapter 2 — The Machine

Danny Park ran an army from a room that smelled like energy drinks and overheated routers.

Jess found him there at nine the next morning, cross-legged in a gaming chair, three monitors glowing against the dark walls of the back office. On the left screen, a spreadsheet: forty-seven rows, each one a restaurant, each one a monthly tribute. On the center screen, a map of Chicago dotted with pins. On the right, a terminal window scrolling too fast to read, lines of green text like rain.

“Talk to me,” Jess said, dropping her tote on the spare desk.

“Reyes is stood down,” Danny said without looking up. He was twenty-four, thin as a wire, with the kind of focus that made him forget to eat. “Bots are already shifting to maintenance mode. I queued twelve five-stars from his real regulars — scraped their names from his Facebook page, made them look organic. He’ll be back at four-four by Friday.”

“Beautiful.” Jess pulled up a chair. “What else?”

“Torres on Devon paid on time. The pho place in Uptown is two days late — want me to send a reminder?” A reminder meant fifty one-star reviews in an hour, each one mentioning a different disgusting detail. Danny had a whole library of them. He called it the menu.

“Send thirty. Keep it light. They’re good payers, just slow.” Jess studied the map. Forty-seven pins, clustered thickest in the neighborhoods where the restaurants were busy enough to afford her and small enough to be scared. “We need a bigger fish, Danny. Forty-seven is great, but the condo association just raised my HOA and I have taste.”

Danny spun his chair around. “Define bigger.”

“High profile. High traffic. The kind of place where two thousand a month feels like a rounding error and they’ll beg to pay five.” She zoomed the map toward the North Side. “Somewhere with a line out the door. Somewhere the owner thinks they’re untouchable.”

Danny was quiet for a moment. Then he reached past her and tapped a pin on the map — or rather, a blank spot on the map, because there was no pin there yet. Lincoln Square. A corner bakery with a striped awning she’d seen in a dozen Instagram posts.

“Benedetti’s Bakery,” he said. “Forty years in business. Family owned. Lines around the block on weekends. Four point nine stars, twenty-two hundred reviews. They do wedding cakes for half the North Side.”

Jess raised an eyebrow. “Twenty-two hundred reviews? That’s a lot of armor.”

“That’s the thing.” Danny pulled up the bakery’s Google profile. Photos of golden croissants, a glass case full of cannoli, an old woman with flour on her apron smiling next to a girl who had to be her granddaughter. “It’s a fortress. Which means when it falls, everybody notices. And the owner — Rosa Benedetti, sixty-one — she’s old school. No website guy, no social media manager. Just her and the granddaughter doing TikToks or whatever. She won’t know what hit her.”

Jess looked at the photo of Rosa Benedetti. Flour-dusted hands. Deep smile lines. The kind of woman who probably knew every regular by name and slipped extra cookies into kids’ bags.

For half a second, something flickered in Jess’s chest — something she didn’t have a name for and didn’t want.

Then she did the math. A place like that, with that kind of traffic? She could charge five thousand a month. Maybe more. The “enterprise tier.” She’d been meaning to invent an enterprise tier.

“Forty years,” she said slowly. “You know what forty years means, Danny?”

“What?”

“It means forty years of not knowing the internet can kill you.” She stood up, and the chair rolled back across the concrete floor. “Start the research. I want everything — suppliers, staff, family, the granddaughter’s TikTok, all of it. Soft launch Friday. I want two hundred reviews by Saturday morning, and I want the word ‘rat’ in at least twenty of them.”

Danny’s fingers were already moving. “Rats in a bakery. That’s cold, Jess.”

“That’s the business.” She was at the door when she stopped. “Oh, and Danny — this one’s special. I want the full menu. Food poisoning, health code, rude staff, the works. I want Rosa Benedetti to feel like the sky is falling by Monday.”

“Got it.”

It took Danny three days to build the case file, and Jess had to admit the kid was an artist. He scraped the bakery’s tagged photos to learn the staff’s names and the regulars’ faces. He mapped Rosa’s suppliers from delivery truck logos visible in the background of the granddaughter’s TikToks. He found Sofia Benedetti’s public accounts — sixteen, all big braces-filled smiles and behind-the-scenes dough videos — and catalogued her posting schedule, her friends, her school. He even pulled the bakery’s health inspection history, which was spotless, going back decades, and laughed when he showed Jess. “Cleanest record I’ve ever seen. Which just means nobody will believe the reviews are real — at first.”

“They never do,” Jess said. “At first.”

The bot army needed preparation too. Four thousand accounts sounds like a lot until you need three hundred of them to look like real Chicagoans with a sudden, passionate hatred of one specific bakery. Danny spent Thursday “warming” a fresh battalion — having them review pizza places and parks and the Art Institute, building little human histories, spacing their activity so no algorithm would flag a pattern. He’d built a randomizer that varied posting times, review lengths, star distributions, even typos. Karen M. always forgot apostrophes. Dave from Naperville overused exclamation points. Priya wrote in careful, furious paragraphs.

“You’re a novelist and you don’t even know it,” Jess told him, watching the accounts come alive on the center monitor.

“I’m a novelist who gets paid,” Danny said. “When do we start?”

“Friday, two a.m.” Jess picked up a dry-erase marker and wrote BENEDETTI’S on the war board in big letters, then underneath it: ENTERPRISE TIER — $5,000/mo. “Soft launch. Two hundred by dawn. Then we let her wake up to it.”

She capped the marker and stood back, admiring her handwriting.

Jess walked out into the main office — her office, with the exposed brick and the view of the L tracks — and stood at the window with her coffee. Somewhere across the city, in a little bakery in Lincoln Square, an old woman was probably pulling trays of bread out of an oven, humming, not knowing that Jessica Lane had just put her on a list.

Jess smiled into her coffee.

She loved this part. The choosing. The moment before the storm, when the target was still happy and the whole thing was still hers to command.

It never occurred to her to wonder why Danny had found Benedetti’s so fast — as if he’d been waiting for her to ask. It never occurred to her that some fortresses have walls you can’t see from a Google profile.

It never occurred to her that this time, the storm might blow back.