The Voter File

by David Pepper

  Cassie took another sip. It was actually better if he remained in denial.

  “So how does someone become world-class?” she asked calmly.

  “What do you mean?” He leaned backward, a beam from the ceiling light reflecting off his thick glasses.

  “You said it would take a world-class hacker to pull off something like I described undetected. Who could do that?”

  “Undetected? Almost no one.”

  “But if anyone, who? Where would they come from?”

  He fumbled his cup, spilling latte onto the small table.

  Cassie prodded further. “If you wanted to hire the best of the best to do something like this, where would you go?”

  He laughed, swatting his hand forward. “We can’t afford the best of the best. We’re a political party.”

  “Fair enough. But if you could afford them, where would you get them?”

  He paused again, stroking his mustache.

  “You’re talking the best in the world?”

  He took a sip, some foam ending up on his chin. “Well, militaries and intel agencies around the world are a great training ground. Ours as well as other countries’. Russia, China, Israel.”

  “Yeah, I’d assumed that as well.”

  She motioned to her chin, and he wiped away the foam with his sleeve.

  “Thanks. But I can assure you Kat Simmons was not military.”

  Although she shared his hunch, Cassie held up her hand, annoyed with his obsession with the young woman.

  “Stop worrying about her. Just tell me where I’d find the world’s best. Outside of the military.”

  “Well, the best of the best can make a boatload of money in the private sector.”

  “So who hires them?”

  “Major companies, the ones with massive amounts of data that need protection. Online giants like Facebook and Google. Banks and credit card companies. Insurance companies. If data security is central to their existence, paying top dollar for the top talent in the world is worth it.”

  Made sense. “And where do they hire these people?”

  “From each other. It’s a seller’s market.”

  “Before that.”

  He bobbed his head, following her train of thought.

  “Well, I guess the best of the best are coming out of top PhD programs. Computer science. Engineering. Places like MIT, Stanford, a few others. A small crop comes out every year, and some get nabbed even before they graduate.”

  “Could you make me a list of the best schools?”

  A cynical smile twisted his lips as he slapped the table’s edge. “So crazy Kat Simmons got a PhD from Stanford? Good luck with that.”

  Cassie ignored the after-the-bell jab at his ex-employee.

  “Can you make me that list?”

  “Sure. Let me talk to a few tech buddies and see what we come up with.”

  CHAPTER 63

  MADISON, WISCONSIN

  Unintelligible arguing erupted into angry yelling. Then, like a wave flowing across the room, the mass of bodies started tumbling and shoving, grunts and shouts filling the cell amid the smacks, cracks, and thuds of wildly thrown punches.

  Before I saw it, a haymaker slammed into the left side of my jaw, knocking me to the floor.

  With my head pounding, I huddled in the corner, hands and arms shielding my face. But the brawl spilled over into every corner of the confined space. As bodies lunged my way, I had no choice but to fend them off—a push here, a kick there, desperate to keep a safe distance. It helped that I was one of the largest people in the cell and likely the only one in full possession of my faculties.

  The stakes of the brawl changed when a high-pitched shriek pierced through the more muffled sounds of the fracas, followed by cries of agonizing pain. Pain far greater than even the hardest punch could cause. A second inmate screamed out with equal intensity. My heart pumped faster.

  Someone in the cell had a weapon—and was using it.

  The cell door’s lock clicked. Like an army of robots storming a spaceship, guards charged in wearing brown helmets and full body armor and wielding long black sticks.

  “Break it up!” the first one through the open gate yelled. “Everyone down on the ground!”

  A staticky crackle of high voltage sparked more yelps of pain. To my right, near the open gate, a guard jammed the end of his black stick against a prisoner’s abdomen, triggering tiny flashes of white light and another burst of crackling. The inmate doubled over and crashed onto the cement floor.

  Not wanting to be shocked—I’d been tased once for a police training story and didn’t need to endure that again—I threw myself to the ground, facedown, and put my hands over my head.

  It first struck like a hard punch, square into the back of my left thigh, a few inches above the knee. Not as bad as the fist to the face. But then came a searing heat, burning narrowly at first before enflaming my entire lower thigh. An intense pressure shot through my leg from deep within, so paralyzing I couldn’t find the air to even scream out.

  I reached down to the site of the pain, finding a narrow rip in my jeans surrounded by a sticky ooze.

  “Put that hand back over your head!” A guard was standing directly over me, wielding the studded end of his black stick only inches from my neck.

  “Hold on!” I yelled back between short breaths, hoping my words came out clearly through the pain. “What did you do to my leg?”

  As I pulled my hand back over my head, my palm and fingers were coated in the watery crimson of fresh blood.

  The guard glanced down.

  “I didn’t touch you. You got knifed.” He sounded amused. “We’ll get you help as soon as we clean this mess up.”

  After another five minutes of yells and commands, interrupted by the occasional zap, the room settled down. Inmates lay on the floor in a mishmash of positions, many of us moaning in pain, while a dozen guards stood over us, sticks poised to shock anyone who moved.

  Five minutes later, two other inmates and I were hauled out on stretchers.

  * * *

  • • •

  “How the hell did someone get a knife into that cell?”

  Lying on a cheap cot in the jail’s medical unit, I’d woken up to find Tori and a barrel-chested, bearded guy staring at me. He wasn’t in full uniform, but a silver star on the man’s black shirt indicated he was the sheriff. Then I noticed the salt-and-pepper hair of Chief Santini a few feet behind them, prompting my second question.

  “And, Chief, why the hell did you leave me in there for so long?”

  By the time we’d arrived at the medical unit, my left thigh blazed like it was roasting over an open flame. As I wailed in agony, they’d laid me down on the cot and shot me up with some type of painkiller, sending me in and out of consciousness ever since. My left leg was now wrapped in a large bandage, no longer on fire but numb and tingly. The only pain I felt now was a tight pinching on my right calf.

  The sheriff spoke first. “I’m Sheriff Tucker. And it wasn’t a knife, it was a rudimentary shiv, and we have no idea how someone got it in there. But we’re damn glad he didn’t get you a few inches higher on that leg or you might’ve bled out on the spot. Doc?”

  A short bald guy in light blue doctor’s garb stepped around the sheriff.

  “We’ve now cleaned, stitched, and bandaged it up, so beyond some throbbing for a few days, you should be good to go. But keep your weight off it. Like the sheriff said, that was a close call.”

  The details of the fight replayed in my mind.

  “Two others were also stabbed. How are they doing?”

  The doctor answered. “In and out quick. They should be fine. Your leg wound was the worst by far.”

  “That’s good, I guess.” I looked back at the sheriff. “Did you catch who did it?”

&
nbsp; “Not yet. We found the shiv after we cleared the room, and there were no prints on it. And we couldn’t see what happened from any of our cameras. That was as much mayhem as we’ve had around here for a while. Any idea what started it?”

  “None at all. It exploded from argument to all-out brawl in about five seconds. Too many wastoids in one place.”

  “Yeah, that’s our customer base.” The sheriff’s smile faded as he got down to business. “Mr. Sharpe, most of the guys in there are regulars, and we know the violent ones. So we’ll push ’em hard to see who knows what.”

  I lifted myself to a seated position, cringing as my right calf throbbed with pain. “What happened to my other leg?”

  The doctor responded. “It also had a gash in it, but not as serious as the leg. And not caused by a knife. You might’ve cut it up when you fell. We bandaged it and it should heal quick.”

  Satisfied that I was not on my deathbed, I looked past the sheriff.

  “Chief, why’d you leave me in there so long?”

  Chief Santini stepped forward.

  “Because we never saw him leave the farm.”

  My head pulsed with pain. “I’m confused.”

  “We got there early like we’d agreed and sat at the end of that driveway for hours. His car was still there and never left. We assumed he was waiting you out, seeing if you guys blinked. So we were stuck waiting there, unable to pull you out.”

  “So why are you here now?”

  “Well, we finally stormed the place, right around the time of your little knife fight. He had abandoned the place hours before.”

  “Really? He was gone the whole time?”

  “Yep.”

  Scary. He’d left before we’d even feigned the arrest and left his car in the driveway to fool us. This guy was way ahead of us.

  “So he left on foot?” I asked.

  “Must’ve.”

  The pictures of old Lute flashed in my mind.

  “And your dad?”

  “Beaten up badly,” Tori said. “But alive. And free.”

  The chief spoke up. “Jack, this asshole pounded the hell out of him. We thought he was dead when we first got in that kitchen. But he was breathing, and we got him off to the hospital before heading up here. He’s going to recover.”

  “And he’s safe?”

  “Surrounded by four cops as we speak.”

  “Good. Did he say anything? Describe the guy?”

  “He wasn’t in any condition to pump for information. And now they’ve got him under heavy sedation.”

  Tori wiped tears from both eyes.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “And don’t worry, I know why you did it. You probably saved all of us, including Dad, with that crazy plan. I’m just glad he’s free of that monster.”

  Chief Santini cleared his throat. “Hey, Jack, I meant to tell you one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those dental records came back on the girl. Ya know, the one with the Albanian?”

  “And?” I asked.

  “She was Syrian. Even more dangerous than your Albanian friend. Interpol listed her as one of the top assassins in the world, but no one could ever nab her.”

  “Right,” I said, taking that information in. “Until her jaw met Tori’s right shoulder.”

  CHAPTER 64

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Subject line: Wild-Kat Chase

  While Cassie rolled her eyes at Emmett Lanning’s attempt at humor, the email itself provided an unsurprising list of elite schools.

  MIT

  CIT

  Stanford

  Berkeley

  Princeton

  Carnegie Mellon

  Cornell

  Harvard

  Duke

  Georgia

  Good luck!

  With the list in hand, Cassie got back to work.

  LinkedIn offered the easiest way to search people based on their alma mater. By typing in each school’s computer science department, she created a spreadsheet of students who’d attended any of the ten schools’ computer science programs over the prior decade. Her goal was to find at least five to ten students for each class, and after an hour she’d surpassed that number for all ten schools.

  She then switched over to Facebook. If experience was any guide, a number of these students would allow strangers to see photos they’d posted, along with photos in which they’d been tagged by others. And odds were also good that many of these students would’ve posted photos of their time at these graduate schools. Some of the students would’ve posted a formal class photo of some sort: orientation, graduation, or something similar.

  Those class photos were the gold she was digging for.

  Helpfully, a number of the graduates behaved exactly as she’d hoped. Over the next hour, Cassie tracked down a photo for each class of each school, going back ten years.

  The classes were typically small, usually a dozen, two dozen at most. The men outnumbered the women, often overwhelmingly. And the students were a kaleidoscope of ethnicities.

  These patterns made it easy to scrutinize the handful of Caucasian women photographed. Cassie flipped back and forth between the photos she’d collected of Kat Simmons and Natalie Hawke and the women from the class photos. Several women four years back at Duke warranted a close look, as did women from a few years back at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. From chins to eyes to hairlines, she scrutinized every attribute, knowing that plastic surgery and hair dye could mask even the most distinct features of a human face.

  In the end, only two women were even close, but they ultimately weren’t a match. Disappointing, but this had always felt like a long shot anyway.

  As Cassie shut her laptop, her phone rang.

  “Hi. This is Professor Miguel Mercurio, from Princeton. I’m replying to the voice mail you left for me a few days ago.”

  Holding her phone up to her ear, she was stumped.

  “I’m the one who writes about monopolies. You called about that study I did a few years ago.”

  Now she remembered—and she again felt the thrill of possibility. “Of course. You’re the anti-monopoly expert.”

  CHAPTER 65

  NEAR WATERLOO, WISCONSIN

  All who’d come into contact with the hit man had ended up dead. Save one.

  Clearly not a coincidence.

  This brutal reality set me on edge as we drove to visit the one survivor: Lute Justice, recovering in a small rural hospital near Waterloo.

  “He’s out there, probably lying in wait near your dad’s hospital,” I said to Tori as we sat in the back seat of Chief Santini’s unmarked Chevy Suburban.

  Marked sheriff’s vehicles drove ahead of and behind us.

  “Jack, I’m not going to let my dad recover all by himself. He needs me. Plus, he’s surrounded by cops, and so are we. Toughen up.”

  I sat in silence for a few minutes. In addition to the danger of it, this detour led us further away from the story. Every day we wasted driving around rural Wisconsin was one day closer to an election someone was trying to rig.

  So I focused on what we could do in the meantime.

  “Tori, early voting starts soon in a lot of states, right?” I knew the answer but wanted to pivot gingerly.

  “It’s right around the corner. Why?”

  “So if you were going to mess around in elections these days, you’d start with early voting, right?”

  “As much as possible. In most states, the early vote has become a huge chunk of the total. Which makes the voter file more important than ever.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s when you’re pushing your sporadic ‘ones’ and ‘twos’ out.”

  I rolled my eyes at more
voter file manager lingo. “Sorry. Slower.”

  “A smart campaign uses the early-vote window to expand their total number of voters. A not-so-smart campaign only pushes their most loyal voters out early without actually netting any new votes.”

  A woman’s voice crackled through the chief’s radio. “Chief, Deputy Conklin here. The same car’s been behind me for a few miles now. Solo driver. Keeping real close.”

  Tori and I both looked out the back window, but the deputy’s car blocked out everything behind it.

  The chief stared in his side mirror. “Okay. Keep an eye out. And don’t let him pass.”

  “Ten-four.”

  The chief looked our way through the rearview mirror. “No worries, guys.”

  I downed most of the bottle of water the chief had bought for us.

  “So what exactly is the smart campaign doing to expand their total number of voters?”

  “In a year like this? You’re banging away at your sporadic voters—the ones who vote regularly in a presidential year but rarely in a midterm. You use the early-vote window to bank as many votes from those sporadic voters as possible—at least the ones you’ve identified as likely to support you—”

  “Because,” I interrupted, catching on, “the most regular midterm voters are going to show up either way.”

  “Exactly. If someone votes in every midterm no matter what, getting them to vote early doesn’t gain you a thing.”

  “But if you get a whole lot of sporadic voters to cast their vote early, you’re expanding your total.”

  “Right. That’s why—”

  The radio crackled again.

  “Sir, he tried to get around me.” The deputy’s voice had an edge to it this time.

  I whirled around. The deputy’s car now straddled both lanes of the highway.

  The chief replied sternly. “Deputy, do not let him pass you. Stay right where you are. Call to get someone else to pull him over.”