by David Pepper
“I do, Madam President.” Cassie spoke quickly, clearly nervous. “How can you defend the policy of keeping visitors to the ranch secret?”
The president rolled forward in her chair, eyes gleaming.
“Cassie, you know what? I can’t.”
Cassie did a double take.
“You can’t?”
“No, I can’t. Your interview request challenged me to examine what we’ve been doing. None of our excuses pass muster. So I will be making an announcement next week.”
“Don’t tell me—”
“Every Aspen visitor will be reported going forward.”
“No exceptions?” Cassie asked.
“None. Whether I’m meeting with the Turkish foreign minister or a big donor, Americans are entitled to know it. And you’re going to get the credit.”
“Republic is?” Cassie asked.
“No,” said the president, “you.”
CHAPTER 130
YOUNGSTOWN
Even with my head throbbing, I tempered my tone as best I could. I respected Mary too much to yell.
“The entire explanation of what drove the plot has been cut out. What the hell?”
We were back in the Vindicator conference room one day after my interview with the president and three days before my story was scheduled to top the front page of twenty-eight newspapers around the country.
She frowned. “I know. We had to edit that part out.”
“But you were the one who pushed me to find that all out. I almost got myself killed answering your questions—which, by the way, were the right ones.”
“I know.”
Her dancing pupils gave her away.
“It wasn’t your decision, was it?”
“It wasn’t.”
“Let me guess,” I said, memories of my final days at Republic pouring back. “Corporate nixed it.”
She nodded.
“How does Corporate even review content like this?”
“Jack, this isn’t the old paper. You know that. They review everything these days.”
“So what did they say?”
“They love the story. They know it will sell. And they’re ready to run it big everywhere and promote it big, too. Jack, with your arrangement, you’re gonna make a mint out of this.”
I wiped my forehead as she continued.
“They just want the motivation behind the plot edited out. As well as any mention of the president’s anti-monopoly policy.”
I studied her sullen eyes. Unlike Bridget Turner at Republic, at least she openly disagreed with corporate’s demand. My guess was she’d fought back and lost. And in this new corporate model, her own job always on the line, she could take it only so far.
“So any discussion of monopoly and corporate power is out?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I wonder if it has anything to do with all the local newspapers they’ve been buying across the Midwest.”
“Try the entire country, Jack. They’re expanding aggressively. They’re precisely the type of operation the president is targeting, and your story draws attention to all that.”
I let out a deep breath, moving on.
“Mary, without this, the story is incomplete.”
“We can make it work, Jack.”
“‘We’? Don’t lump us into this, Mary. Corporate can make anything work, because they don’t care about the actual facts. But you and I are professional journalists. It wouldn’t be the whole story. We’d be knowingly manipulating the truth. If that’s ‘making it work,’ I’m not interested.”
I peered through the conference room window behind her, past the desks and chairs of the hollowed-out Vindicator newsroom, at the far wall where the front pages of my Abacus scoop from three years ago were framed. Despite the fanfare, I’d knowingly left key facts out of that story, and it had haunted me ever since.
I wasn’t going to let it happen again.
“You’re right,” she said, close to a whisper. “It’s a perfect story as is, but they’ve made their decision. This paper and the others have offered to run it with those edits. But, Jack, remember, you’re a freelance writer now. You own the story, and you have the last word on whether to sell it. Of course, you’ll be giving away a nice payday and the type of scoop that would make you relevant again.”
I stood and walked toward the conference room door, my limbs leaden with disgust. The pounding in my temples felt just as it did in early July, in Republic’s studio. I could still hear the producer’s panicked voice in my earpiece, yelling at me to stop talking about the president’s plan. I’d ignored him and lost everything.
Now I was being censored again.
“Just let us know what you decide,” Mary said, still in her chair.
The way she phrased it struck me.
What you decide.
One thing was wholly different from my last day at Republic.
This was my story. My decision. Not theirs.
I had been ducking the freelance label for a month. But in this age of corporate power and corporate media, it put me in the most powerful position possible: on my own.
Unlike Mary, and unlike Cassie, no agreements hung over my head. And I had little left to lose.
I controlled everything.
And unlike three years ago, I could stand on principle—on the integrity of the story. The whole truth or nothing at all. If they didn’t want that, screw ’em.
“Oh, I’ve decided,” I said as I stepped through the doorway. “You can tell Corporate I’m keeping my story.”
Mary picked up her phone as I shut the door behind me.
I trudged through the empty newsroom, walked down the lobby, and stepped into the elevator.
As it descended, I began making a mental list of where else I might shop the story. No major national paper like the Times or the Post would deign to run a freelance story. I couldn’t appear on the networks because of my non-compete. So I’d have to find a smaller independent paper with some level of national credibility. But there weren’t many of those left, and they certainly wouldn’t pay much.
Still, I’d have to try. The story had to get out.
The elevator opened on the ground floor. I walked out the building’s back door and into the parking lot, still thinking. The most likely papers would be in states where meddling was also happening, offering a natural hook for the story. I’d check with Milwaukee. Or Detroit. Or Pittsburgh. Maybe the Tampa Bay Times.
As I approached my Escape, my phone rang.
Mary, one more time.
“Jack? Are you still here?”
“Not for long.”
I took my keys out of my pocket.
“Turn around.”
“Mary, I’ve made my decision.”
“So have they. And you won. They still want the story. The whole thing.”
CHAPTER 131
GENEVA-ON-THE-LAKE, OHIO
Rain poured across the lake for the third straight day.
But just after sunrise on this second Wednesday in November, the clouds were breaking up off to the west. As the sun rose, rays of light beamed down through the gaps, shooting diagonally from the clouds into the choppy water.
Sitting in Dad’s old chair, I relaxed, rocking back and forth, savoring each sip of black coffee.
I hadn’t written a story in a month. But the voter file scoop alone had generated enough revenue to keep me comfortable for the rest of the year. Running on the Sunday front page of newspapers across the country, the story had whipped up a nationwide frenzy, opening every network news cast that evening. Days of cable television discussion followed, focusing on the parties’ voter files, their security, and the stunning attempt to meddle in American elections for the second time in four years. The president decried the plot,
and both parties claimed they had located and shut down the backdoors that had been built into their voter files. Politicians of both parties on Capitol Hill demanded hearings, scheduling them for after the election.
In the story, I had leaned hard into the concentration of corporate power, which led to a second and equally robust national debate. Independent newspapers, politicians, and activists advocated that the president’s plan move forward regardless of the plot and that Congress do something about the problem. And Professor Mercurio had taken his star turn, appearing on numerous national networks, inevitably hawking copies of his book, which shot to the top of the nonfiction bestseller lists.
But, like everything in American politics, the hype died down after a week. The plot foiled, the capital and its press corps soon moved on to the next topic du jour, and campaigns returned to the thirty-second ads and personal attacks that dominate the airwaves in the final months of an election year.
Poor Cassie. After a few weeks in the limelight, she, too, was back to covering the hamster wheel of Washington politics. At least her scoop had earned her credibility and better treatment at Republic—although they’d shut down her attempt to renegotiate her contract. She was stuck for another year.
For me, things had settled down just as quickly, except for the occasional paranoia that someone was following me.
Last night had been my first election night in years without an assignment, either on the air or in the newsroom. With no expectation of drama, I’d turned in early. Up at the crack of dawn as usual, I picked up some donuts and coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts in town, where I also bought a Cleveland Plain Dealer—the pint-sized version of the paper I still wasn’t used to but the new owner insisted on to save productions costs.
Back at the cabin, I sipped my coffee while glancing at the predictable main headline.
After Nasty Mid-Term, Speaker Paxton Nets Four House Seats
In the story, the president expressed disappointment about the outcome but committed to work with the Speaker. The truth was, the next two years promised nothing but rancor as she sought reelection, and her agenda would remain dormant the entire time. At the same time, it was not as strong an outcome as the Speaker would’ve hoped for. A ho-hum election indeed.
I was flipping the folded paper over to the bottom of the front page, when the phone rang. Tori calling from Appleton. She’d spent weeks in Waterloo, bored stiff as she helped her dad get back to full strength. And now she was hustling to earn her degree a semester early. After my story hit, word had gotten out of her digital wizardry, so she was fielding offers for top jobs across Washington.
While we talked every few days, it was around 6:00 her time. Earlier than she’d ever called.
“Jack, did you see the results from yesterday?”
“I was just looking at them. Sort of a mixed bag.”
“Jack! Read the whole paper.”
As she said the words, the headline at the bottom of the page caught my eye.
Ohio House Flips in Wake of Upsets
“Remember Kovak in Marblehead and Seitz in Cincinnati?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said as I scanned the details of upsets all over the state.
“They both lost!”
I jolted up, knocking my cup off the chair’s handle and onto the floor, splashing coffee everywhere, including on my sweatpants.
“Don’t tell me this also hap—”
“You guessed it. There were similar upsets in about a dozen states around the country. Votes are still being counted in some close ones, but it looks like the majority may have flipped in at least eight to ten statehouses, maybe more.”
“Did you look into where the losses happened?”
“Not completely, but a good many of them were right where you’d expect them.”
My mind spun, digging for explanations.
“Jack, the paper here is attributing it to great recruiting by the Democrats and the party’s advanced use of data. They’re also speculating that the late focus on the monopoly issue and districting motivated far more Democrats than usual to show up and vote in those statehouse races.”
I shook my head. That was the analysis the Plain Dealer story was presenting as well. The news was truly the same everywhere.
“Do you believe that, Jack?”
I looked up. The break in the clouds had now shifted halfway across the sky, a blanket of sunlight turning the water beneath it a stunning crystal blue.
“Jack?”
“Not for a second.”
EPILOGUE
BROOKLYN
Michael Molotov rapped the fingers of his left hand against the table, watching as the dark skeletons tattooed above his knuckles danced up and down. He was sitting in the back room of the small restaurant, the morning office where he’d conducted breakfast meetings for ten years. Next to a bowl of porridge, a small plate sat to his right. Using his fingers, he lifted the thin blin from the top of the small stack, folded it, dipped it in a small bowl of honey, and took the first bite.
“Did you release him?” Molotov asked as he chewed.
“Yes. We dropped him off in one of Baltimore’s worst neighborhoods,” John Kozlov said. “Shaken and bruised, but healthy.”
“And he knows we’re watching?” Molotov asked.
“He does. He won’t say a word. He’s made enough enemies in Baltimore; the story we gave him should suffice.”
Kozlov scratched his head, his thick gray hair hardly budging as he did. “I’m still confused by it all.”
Molotov dipped the remaining half of the blin back into the honey.
“By what?”
“All of it. Taking the councilman and now releasing him. Flying me down to D.C. to talk to the reporter, telling her the truth about your parents. All the new travel.”
“It was time to get on the inside of a much bigger enterprise.”
“What do you mean? You’re the king of Brooklyn. No one’s been able to touch you for years.”
Molotov stared straight ahead, ignoring the ex-detective’s inanity.
“No man should convince a teenager to kill his own parents, whatever the reason. So it was long overdue anyway. But, looking forward, I am now positioned to exercise power far beyond Brooklyn.”
“Is that why you flew to London a month ago?”
He nodded while downing his final bite, gesturing toward the television set. The chyron running below the talking heads summed up the day: “Speaker Gains House Seats.”
“Indeed. Yesterday’s elections were an overwhelming success. We’re on our way.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From my first email, in 2013, announcing that I had decided to write a novel, to publication of The Voter File in 2020, two people have read every chapter draft, every chapter revision, and every final draft, of all three books. And always wanted to read more. Mom and Dad, without your encouragement and support, none of these books would have happened.
At some point, I ventured out beyond my parents, learning from so many thoughtful critiques and perspectives along the way. Early readers were encouraging, while offering key insights on politics, writing, and journalism: Carson Miller. David Skolnick. Sherry Coolidge. Greg Landsman. Pete Metz. Jared Kamrass. My brothers, John and Doug, and my sister, Susie.
Then came countless other readers who provided support, encouragement, and perspective. Jennifer Granholm, Brendan Cull, Dennis Willard, Ted Strickland, Josh Galper, Jack Markell, JJ Balaban, Celinda Lake, Matt Waxman, Daniel Gotoff, Joe Rettof, David Betras, Greg Beswick, Colleen Lowry, Liz Shirey, Kevin Tighe, Tom Perez, Dick Rosenthal, Monica Detota, Jennie Berliant, Rachel Rossi, Sarah Celi, Laura McIntosh, Zack Space, Joe Fuld, Brian Wiles, Cindy Matthews, Scott Stern, Mallory McMaster, Daniel Tokaji, Debbie Bartling, Jerry Springer, Bill Bradley, Shawna Roberts, Taylor Myers, Andrea Canning. And many others.
Several pros weighed in at key moments early in my writing journey. Author Alex Berenson, a friend from college, pushed me to dive far more deeply into my characters than I initially had, critical advice as I developed Jack Sharpe and others. Later, another friend and writer, Daphne Uviller, gave me needed direction, including introducing me to Alissa Davis, a passionate editor who provided first-rate guidance in finalizing the first two books. And Lauren Sharp was tremendously helpful in fine-tuning The Wingman into a strong sequel.
A number of people were instrumental in the development of The Voter File. A longtime friend, David Fierson, pushed me to aim higher with my books, for which I’ll always be thankful. And I’m equally grateful to Theresa Park, who took David’s suggestion and guided an unknown and still new writer through the crucial steps of how to aim higher.
Then came Mark Tavani, of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, who saw the potential in my work, and intuited from one read the same spirited response I’ve been receiving at book clubs all these years. But Mark challenged me as well—to go bigger and bolder in my coming stories. To raise the stakes. To make things more difficult for Jack and his colleagues. It was Mark’s challenge that sparked the idea that grew into The Voter File.
Mitch Hoffman of the Aaron Priest Agency also took me under his wing, and provided wise guidance that converted the initial vision of The Voter File into the final manuscript.
And in Mark’s good hands, along with the vision and expertise of Ivan Held, Sally Kim, and Danielle Dieterich, the final story emerged. I also must thank everyone in sales, promotion, and the art department at G. P. Putnam’s Sons for their support, especially designer Eric Fuentecilla.
Back home, I’m also indebted to the dozens of book clubs that welcomed me into homes, coffee shops, workplaces, churches, and synagogues to talk through both books. That was where I first experienced the magic of having strangers read, discuss, and actually enjoy something you’ve written. There’s nothing quite like hearing insights about your work that you’ve never thought of, all while you’re still questioning: “Did you really like the book?” And just as rewarding, these book clubs have served as a good reminder that even in our divided political world, people of all viewpoints can come together and discuss our deepest political challenges civilly. Somehow, when a book kicks off the conversation, and it’s face-to-face, thoughtful conversations can follow without the rancor of cable news and social media.
