The Voter File

by David Pepper

  Their plan had moved forward smoothly, even after his treatments started. The creation of the syndicate of oligarchs who had eagerly embraced the idea. Katrina’s masterful infiltration of the political parties and their voter files. The dry runs in special elections, allowing them to fine-tune their work. Even the high-level conversation he’d forged while in the States had gone well, ensuring that after November they’d get all the policy results they were seeking.

  And then Wisconsin had flared up. A small sore that, if allowed to fester, could destroy the entire enterprise. Katrina had not managed the problem as cleanly as he’d hoped, a reminder that she was still young. A reminder that he needed to be back in charge.

  Thankfully, this was his second-to-last day of chemo, and it appeared to be working. Then would come one more meeting, a final CAT scan, followed by surgery. If all went well, he’d return to London to reassert full control by Election Day.

  Just in time.

  That hopeful prospect eased Kazarov into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER 59

  I-80, OHIO TO ILLINOIS

  We arrived at the lake house at two in the morning. We slept for a few hours, showered, packed, then headed west again.

  Past Toledo and across rural western Ohio and northern Indiana, extreme exhaustion set in. I wasn’t simply tired in the way that, after a long day, your mind and eyelids politely request some rest. This exhaustion was sapping my whole body, wrenching my already empty stomach, wearing down the muscles of my arms and legs, playing tricks on my senses. Tori slept on and off, which kept me from unleashing my most proven tactics for staying awake on long drives: loud music, louder singing, and slapping my own face. So I plodded on, squeezing in a few short naps at rest stops and downing a constant flow of coffee and Diet Coke in between. Each cup or can of caffeine bought me a few minutes of relief, but the steady dosage also sparked a splitting headache.

  I fought through the fog of sleep deprivation to think through a plan. And one thing was clear: simply driving up Big Lute’s driveway was not the way to go. We would be dead within minutes of a front-door arrival.

  I first texted Chief Santini at 6:45, not long after we’d crossed into Indiana.

  Chief, we’re heading back to Wisconsin.

  He wrote back two minutes later.

  When?

  Now.

  Why?

  We’ve got a problem.

  Tori stirred, so I placed the phone on my right knee. She maneuvered herself in her seat, yawned, and rested her head back against her window. She began lightly snoring five minutes later.

  I picked the phone back up and finished my conversation.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Jack, I’m sorry you’ve had to do all the driving.”

  We were thirty minutes past Chicago, and the rising sun awoke Tori from hours of sleep. Her crackly voice startled me but, after my night of driving hell, it was good to hear.

  “You needed the rest. And I’ve always been a road warrior.” The droopy-eyed zombie staring back in the rearview mirror looked like anything but a warrior. “Want any breakfast?”

  Forty minutes later, an Egg McMuffin in each of our hands, we continued north amid the gray concrete of I-41. Even though the commute south was a parking lot, traffic was flowing smoothly in our direction.

  “So what are we going to do?” Tori asked.

  I finished my bite.

  “About what?”

  “When we get to my dad’s farm.”

  “I’m not sure. This guy’s clearly dangerous. But he won’t do anything until he has you. So maybe I’ll drop you off nearby and drive to the farm myself.”

  “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “Not as much as letting you get near him. That’s when we all die and he leaves the country on the next flight.”

  “So what are you going to do once you get there?”

  “Try to negotiate something. Size him up in the process.”

  We passed the last exit in Illinois. My GPS indicated we would enter Wisconsin in about a mile. I checked my watch. Seven forty-six in the morning. Not far off my prediction.

  I enjoyed the last morsel of the McMuffin and tossed the wrapper into the empty McDonald’s bag. I picked up the McDonald’s cup and took a sip, grimacing as the still piping-hot coffee singed my tongue.

  “Then what?” Tori asked.

  “Then we call some audibles depending on wha—”

  We blew past the large “Welcome to Wisconsin” billboard.

  “Hey, we’re home!” Tori said in mock celebration.

  “Getting there.”

  We passed the first median in Wisconsin. Nothing there.

  Moments later we passed the large Pleasant Prairie water tower. My tired mind wandered back to Rhonda in that bar. Our talk weeks ago felt like months back. Next time I’d drink a lot less and enjoy it more.

  “Jack, maybe we should try and draw him out. Tell him to meet us somewhere. That’ll make it harder for him to control things.”

  I looked her way. Definitely better than the nonsense I’d been throwing out.

  “Good point. You know the town. Where would you have him meet us?”

  “We have one main diner in town. Maybe that’d work.”

  A sign in the distance indicated we were approaching another median.

  “I’d hate to endanger other people. Anywhere else that wouldn’t put others at risk?”

  “Let me think for a sec.”

  I blew on the top of the coffee before taking a few more sips.

  As we neared the median, two gray patrol cars, one pointing in each direction, sat with their lights and engines on.

  We zoomed past.

  “There’s a local dive a few towns over,” Tori said. “It’s open twenty-four hours and crowded at night, but no one would be in there this time of day.”

  “Now, that might work.”

  My side mirror reflected both patrol cars pulling out a few hundred yards behind me. Moments later, sirens wailed behind us.

  Tori craned her head to look back. “Oh, no. Jack, were you speeding?”

  The speedometer showed only sixty-eight miles per hour. “Not me.”

  “They must be going after someone else.”

  I veered from the fast lane into the middle lane to let them pass. But one of the patrol cars maneuvered right behind me, and the other, still in the left lane, pulled up to our side.

  “Damn. They must’ve run our plates or something. Traced us back to the 911 call.”

  “But . . . my dad. We’ll have to explain it all to them.”

  I pulled into the right lane, then maneuvered into the narrow berm, coming to a complete stop as cars and trucks whizzed by only feet from my door. The two cars, sirens still blaring, pulled up behind me.

  “Tori, they’re not going to buy any of that right now. These guys think we’re on the lam after being involved in a kidnapping that ended in three deaths. Until we’re in the station, we should sit tight and not say a thing.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me.”

  I put my hands high on the wheel where they could see them.

  “Jesus, they have their guns out,” Tori said, observing the same thing in her mirror I had just noticed in mine.

  Two patrolmen were approaching the car, one from each side, guns drawn but pointed downward. Tori placed her hands up against the glove compartment.

  “Both of you,” the patrolman from my side yelled from a few yards behind me, “get out of the car and put your hands on the roof!”

  CHAPTER 60

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Kat Simmons.

  Natalie Hawke.

  Cassie sipped her Starbucks iced latte, stared at her keyboard, and mouthed both names.

  Kat Simmons.
/>
  Natalie Hawke.

  The only names she knew, if those were even their real names. They’d infiltrated each party, disappeared, then covered their tracks with an elaborate trail of social media footprints.

  Find Kat Simmons and Natalie Hawke and find who’s behind the entire scheme.

  She spent the next hour on her laptop digging. And, like a house of cards caving in when a single card is removed, every element of the two online profiles collapsed as pure fabrication.

  North Florida and Tufts, the colleges Kat and Natalie attended? Cassie’s deeper dive found that women with the same names had graduated from each school the same years as Kat and Natalie. But the photos of the actual grads looked nothing like the Kat and Natalie she was researching. And each had stayed in Florida and Massachusetts; one was now a paralegal and the other a med student.

  None of the other professional stints from their LinkedIn profiles checked out. The institutions were legit, but there was no trace that they’d ever employed two women by those names.

  As for their broader Facebook profiles, both teemed with life and spirited interaction. Back-and-forth chatter, good-natured ribbing, and birthday wishes, along with tagged photos and goofy emojis. Standard stuff.

  But a closer look revealed that most of the intense activity occurred in the past eighteen months, involving colleagues they had met while burrowing into the respective national parties. Fellow party staffers, Hill staffers, partisans from around the country, and the like.

  Prior to those jobs, their pages changed.

  Cassie had once done a story on “catfishing”—people, usually men, creating false online profiles to lure in women. The earlier years of Natalie’s and Kat’s profiles bore all the telltale signs, although they were sophisticated. Each woman had hundreds of Facebook friends, but that was misleading. Two attractive women could run up their roster of Facebook friends quickly, mostly with eager men, and that was who made up most of their friends. Those men did the majority of commenting and “liking” of everything Kat and Natalie posted. There was a lot less back-and-forth, less “tagging” of photos, and few comments indicating that the men actually knew Kat or Natalie at all. A small group of other “friends” interacted more regularly, but it still felt stilted. And no family members were listed on either Facebook page.

  Cassie took a final sip through the straw, slurping up the melted ice with a weak coffee taste. Discovering the twin trails of lies was equally unsatisfying. It confirmed what Cassie had suspected but left her with nowhere to go to find the two women.

  Was there anything about these women that she knew for certain? Amid their fabricated profiles and false friends, was there any trait or element that set them apart? Something they couldn’t hide?

  With nothing coming to mind, she shut her laptop and dialed Jack, grinning as the phone rang. It didn’t really matter whether he was the boss at Republic or a starving freelancer: the guy knew how to get to the bottom of a story. He always knew where to turn.

  His phone rang five more times, then went to voice mail.

  “Jack, I need your help. Call me back.”

  She put her phone down.

  Then it hit her.

  Kat and Natalie. They were just like Jack.

  There was one quality each possessed—an asset they shared—that none of their social media bullshit and fake names and job titles could conceal.

  She reached to the edge of her desk, where a bunch of reporter’s notebooks were stacked up. She grabbed the one on top and leafed back through its crumpled pages, searching for her notes from a few days back.

  There they were.

  She found the name she was searching for and picked up her phone.

  CHAPTER 61

  MADISON, WISCONSIN

  A cocktail of noxious smells wafted over the holding cell—body odor, alcohol, cigarette smoke, and weed—but the stench of rotten feet overwhelmed them all.

  Among a crowd of drunks and derelicts and druggies of all ages, I weighed who to keep the most distance from. The two who were talking to themselves topped the competition, edging out the beefy guy who kept pacing back and forth. The least threatening was a wiry albino huddled on the floor, shaking feverishly from what had to be opioid withdrawal. I sidled over to the corner next to him and waited.

  After cuffing us on the side of the highway, the two patrolmen had put us each in our own car. If the stiff-jawed patrolman who’d driven me in was privy to the plan that Chief Santini and I had concocted, he was one hell of an actor. Or maybe the chief hadn’t gotten through to the authorities after all, and this was a true arrest.

  Once at the Dane County jail, with cameras staring down at us from every corner, they’d processed me as gruffly as the others in line. Again, if this was an act, the corrections officers were a damn fine cast.

  The plan was to keep us detained as common prisoners until Lute Justice’s torturer left the farm. Then they’d nab him and pull us out immediately.

  But in addition to fretting that no one here knew the plan, I had a bigger worry.

  I’d been in this hellhole for four hours.

  Something was wrong.

  * * *

  • • •

  Every few minutes the echo of hard-soled shoes approached the cell, followed by the click-clack of the steel lock opening. And each time I’d sit up straight. Maybe, finally, the next visit would be my exit.

  But instead, repeatedly, that hope was dashed.

  First, a guard came for the albino. Then they dragged out one of the self-talkers. Then the other. Then the beefy guy coldcocked an inmate who’d gotten into his personal space, so four guards dragged both out screaming.

  I was quickly becoming the senior member of the cell.

  The parade of new inmates into the cell was as motley as those leaving. There was the giant whose heavy wheezing sounded like an unending asthma attack. Then came a man whose blond hair was so matted and filthy, it looked and smelled like an old, shabby rug. He was followed by a guy who barely topped five feet but whose every inch was filled with sadistic tattoos.

  Each time it became clear the visit was not for me, I’d slump back down, my mind racing through the possibilities. Had the hit man not left the farm? Why not? Even if he knew I’d orchestrated the arrest, I presumed he’d still come. He couldn’t get to Tori from fifty miles away. Had he somehow escaped, or killed Chief Santini and his small crew?

  Ten minutes after the short guy entered, two sets of hard-soled shoes echoed down the hallway, heading our way. One set of shoes paced steadily, as the guards always sounded. The other set shuffled unevenly, in shorter intervals, followed at times by the squeak of rubber dragging. This new inmate was struggling to walk.

  The lock clicked and the door slid open.

  Dark eyes half-open, head tilted back, leaning heavily against the guard, he was the drunkest one to enter yet. The guard shepherded him across the cell to the one vacancy left on the concrete bench. Short and trim, with close-cropped black hair and thick, dark eyebrows, he was the most normal-looking guy in the cell besides me. Good-looking, even. But his face and arms were caked with bruises and welts, several fresh with blood. He teetered gingerly, leaning against the guard to keep from falling.

  As the guard deposited him on the bench, the new inmate slumped down while whirling back toward the cell door. The new angle gave me the first glimpse at the right side of his face and its one prominent feature: a long scar curling down from his ear to his jaw, clearly a war wound. This poor guy was probably a veteran, fighting the demons so many faced when returning home.

  I slowly shook my head. Someone who’d fought for our country deserved better than being stuck in a place like this.

  CHAPTER 62

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  There’s no freaking way!”

  Not a single hair budged even as Emmett Lanning
jerked his head. He probably hadn’t taken a shower since their last meeting.

  It was the response Cassie expected to hear from the RNC’s data director. For the same reason ego-driven men got fooled in the first place, they were equally stubborn about recognizing it later.

  “How can you be so sure?” she asked, sipping on another iced coffee.

  They were huddled in a corner of a Starbucks near Chinatown, halfway between Lanning’s Capitol Hill office and Republic News. Cassie had explained her theory that Kat Simmons had infiltrated the Republican Party’s voter file.

  “I told you the last time. First, we have foolproof security and we’re always upgrading it. Second, we do security checks daily and we fend off hack attempts of every kind almost hourly. We would know if anything is amiss. And nothing is. Third—”

  “But she had months to set this up from the inside. Couldn’t she have—”

  “—third, there is no way Kat Simmons could ever pull something like this off.”

  “You sure about that? She faked her whole online identity. She went to real lengths—”

  “Listen, she was a misfit here. We’re talking serious problems. What do they call it? Borderline personality? Chemical imbalance? Something like that. So it wouldn’t surprise me if she was making stuff up about herself, her boyfriend, you name it.”

  “But you kept her on board for some time, right?”

  “We’re humane that way. We gave her every chance, and things only got worse.”

  His tone was so defensive, so emphatic, that Cassie sensed Lanning had been attracted to Kat Simmons. Maybe kept her on longer for that reason. So she decided to pick at that scab.

  “But if she enticed you into hiring her, and keeping her that long, maybe—”

  His cheeks turned bright red.

  “Listen, anyone can fake a résumé or make up an online profile. But not anyone can pull off the type of operation you’re talking about. That would be a world-class hack. Kat Simmons is anything but world-class.”