Intentional Consequences

by Charles Harris

  “Sounds like Civics 101 on a national scale,” said Dan. “Could be good in today’s toxic political environment. Are you willing for JPAC to use the new Crystal tools for other clients once we get your project underway?”

  “We can discuss that as we roll things out for my project. For now, I don’t want anyone else using the new tools or knowing what they can do.”

  “OK,” Dan said. “I’ll start looking at what we need to go live. Let’s go over some use cases as soon as we can.”

  “At a high level, focus on using the Crystal tools to support issues and influence favorable or negative reactions to social stereotypes and causes—everything from respecting freedom of speech and religion to the importance of equality, diversity and pride of country.”

  “I understand. With the Crystal tools, we can do that with a surprisingly high level of effectiveness. You’re going to be amazed at what we can deliver.”

  Rakesh said, “Before we break, how are you doing on staffing? With so many Democrats talking about running for President, I assume you’re going to be busy with new clients. Can you handle everything?”

  “We’re getting a lot of inquiries. We’ve already signed up some 2020 presidential clients, although a few are subject to final announcements. As usual, we’ve established separate client support teams and fire-walled them off from each other to be sure no candidate or support team knows anything about what another client or support team is doing.

  “Some of our prospective clients want an exclusive relationship, like other firms offer. But with all the candidates running, we can’t maximize revenue from the primaries with an exclusivity model. The smart politicians are realizing no one else can do what we can do, even without the new Crystal tools. We’re betting enough of them will be willing to accept our firewalled business structure.”

  “Can you do all that and still roll out Crystal?”

  “Yes. Your project team has been separately staffed and fire-walled for some time. None of our other clients will have access to the new tools we’re deploying for you without your consent.”

  Chapter 18

  While Rakesh was meeting with Dan, Valerie was working on an article in her faculty office at the University of Texas at Austin. Hearing a knock on her open door, Valerie looked up and said, “Hi, come in. What can I help you with?”

  The student said, “I’m Shaquille Bryant from your GOV312 class. I’m doing an article about you and wondered if I could ask you a few questions.”

  Valerie said, “Sure, I can take a few minutes. Please sit down.”

  The student said, “I was reading the address you gave to the political science conference at Columbia earlier this week. It was very interesting. I noticed your personal disclosures at the beginning. I looked at some of your other speeches and found similar disclaimers. I’ve seen those before, but you seem to place more importance on them than most.”

  Valerie said, “Yes, I really care about that, especially in today’s politically-charged environment. With all the concerns about biased media and fake news, I think we need as much transparency and disclosure as we can muster.”

  The student said, “I just recently realized you use your maiden name in your professional activities. Is it true you are married to Rakesh Jain?”

  Valerie said, “Yes. We’re coming up on our 25th anniversary.”

  The student said, “Wow, that’s more years than I’ve been alive. Is there a reason you didn’t change your name when you got married?”

  Valerie said, “Nothing more than a little independence on my part and our mutual belief we should both have the freedom to develop our own separate careers.”

  The student said, “Do you think being married to a billionaire taints your work? I mean, would people respect your work as much as they do if they knew you’re half of one of the wealthiest couples in America?”

  Valerie said, “Well, it’s hardly a secret. Most of the bios on me, like Wikipedia, mention my marriage. But in answer to your question, I don’t think our wealth keeps me from being objective in my work.”

  The student said, “I’m not sure everyone would agree with you, especially today. It’s like AOC’s chief of staff says, ‘Every billionaire is a policy problem’. Are we supposed to think your opinions aren’t affected by the progressive movement against the rich?”

  Valerie said, “So are you saying after 25 years I need to adopt my husband’s name in my professional work? Or are you saying I need to make some disclosure of who I’m married to? Or about our financial position?”

  The student said, “I think people need to understand your bias. You’re the one claiming to be big on transparency and full disclosure, you figure it out. I guess the real question from a career standpoint is whether people will still respect your opinions when they realize how rich you are.”

  Valerie said, “I’ve spent my career trying to be as objective as possible, so I’ll think about what you said. But for now, I guess we’ll have to disagree about your hypothesis. Do you have any other questions before I get back to my work?”

  Turning on his iPad and handing it to her, the student said, “Just one.” Pointing to the photograph on the screen, he asked, “Is this you?”

  She scanned the photo of her leaving her presentation at the conference at Columbia. Taken from the front passenger side of the car, the photo showed the driver pushing her into the car. It also showed the blue paint splattered across the front hood and windshield. She said, “Where did you get this?”

  The student said, “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. I found it on the internet when I was doing some research yesterday. If you like, I’ll send you the link.”

  She said, “Yes, that would be good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need to finish this blogpost.”

  The student smiled and walked out.

  Chapter 19

  Fred Billings looked out across the valley. In a few hours, the sun would be setting on the ridgetop, casting a golden glow on the range to the east and painting the western sky a deep orange. “Let’s go for a walk, Mr. Franks,” he said.

  Thin and tall but shrinking due to age, Billings had weathered skin, hazel eyes and a full head of silver hair. He was wearing khaki chinos, brown hiking shoes and a blue plaid flannel shirt over a dark blue tee shirt. Other than some indigestion that had been reducing his appetite lately, he was fit and mentally sharp, but still grieving over his wife’s death from breast cancer two years earlier. They had been married 61 years. He told friends he thought about her every day.

  They headed out the door, picking up the guard who was waiting on the front deck, armed with an AR-15 slung over his shoulder and a holstered Glock 20. He fell in well behind them.

  “There’s an old logging access road about 200 yards down the driveway,” Billings said. “It’s pretty flat most of the way, although a spur breaks off and runs all the way to the top of our mountain,” he said, pointing. They started walking. “So, Mr. Franks, tell me about who you are and how you got to be doing what you do. I have your bona fides. I just want to hear it from you.”

  Jason Franks was just under six feet tall, with short brown hair, brown eyes and a military bearing. At 52, he was trim and fit from working out and running 20 or 30 miles a week. As instructed when this meeting was arranged, he was wearing blue jeans, a light tan work shirt, boots and a Carolina Panthers ball cap. Although he didn’t look out of place in the North Carolina mountains, the locals would have pegged him as a summer resident from Florida until they heard him talk.

  Franks said, “As you can probably tell from what’s left of my accent, I was born outside of Boston. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a cop who became a political operative for the Kennedys and the Democratic Party. I attended Catholic schools, then went to Holy Cross on an academic scholarship, where I played football. After I graduated with a degree in accounting and a minor in political science, I got my law degree at UMass and went to work for the FBI in Washington as a forensic accountan
t.”

  “Are you married, Mr. Franks?” Billings asked.

  “Yes, sir. I’m 15 years into my second marriage. No kids. First one lasted three years. Wife was running around on me and I caught her.

  “Anyway, after a couple of years of working for the FBI, I realized doing forensic accounting the rest of my life would make me lose my mind. Having watched my dad’s political work, and using his network, I decided to look at political options, which is easy to do when you’re already in Washington, D.C. and your dad used to work for the Kennedys. I spent two years as a Congressional staffer for a Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, and then watched him lose unexpectedly in the primary for his first re-election. That got me interested in how people win and lose elections. Since then, I’ve been a hired gun of some sort. I started out doing individual campaigns at the state legislative and congressional levels. As I gained experience and got more victories under my belt, I graduated to being a political strategist for better and better candidates, mostly standing behind the curtain. About 12 years ago, I caught the interest of the DNC and some of the large contributors to the Democrat Party. My timing was pretty good, because the doors blew off after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United in 2010.”

  Franks continued, “Although that case doesn’t do anything close to what the Democrats like to claim when they’re bashing rich Republicans, it did bring huge amounts of money to the electoral process. As you know, the case didn’t affect the Federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates or political parties. But it did say the First Amendment prohibits government restrictions on independent expenditures for communications by corporations, labor unions, and other organizations. This opened up the floodgates for PAC and issue ads and provided a lot more money for guys like me to work with.”

  “People were scrambling to get paid for managing those expenditures,” Franks said. “What made my career was recognizing politics is war that needs a theater-level, military-like campaign to win. I didn’t serve in the military, although I always loved military history. Whether you read Sun Tzu’s Art of War or case studies from the Army War College, you realize you can’t win an important military campaign without mastering all the elements you need to overpower your enemy. All the intelligence, all the logistics and supply chains, all the soldiers and tanks and missiles and planes. Not just on one battlefield, but on multiple fronts across the entire theater of war. Political campaigns are no different.

  “A few months after Citizens United came down, I realized people who failed to understand the need for a comprehensive approach to political strategy were destined to waste the financial resources Citizens United would deliver.”

  They walked for a while in silence. Billings stopped and turned to face Franks. “That’s a good story, Mr. Franks. I do appreciate the value of a comprehensive approach. But I need to understand more about your capabilities. You can mask the details if you like, but if you can’t convince me the breadth and effect of what you are doing are materially better than what other political operatives do, then I doubt we’ll be doing any business together. But if you can convince me, I’m likely to be very interested and very useful. Let’s head back to the house and find out which one it’s going to be.”

  They turned around, passing the guard on their way back the logging trail. Neither man spoke. A few minutes later, Billings motioned for Franks to stop and pointed to a clearing up ahead. A huge bull Elk stood proudly in the grass, sniffing the wind, which was blowing gently toward them. In a few minutes, the animal moved off into the woods and disappeared. Billings walked on down the trail, motioning for Franks to follow. As they walked, Billings asked, “Were you ever a hunter, Mr. Franks?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “Never had much chance growing up. Same with fishing, although I’ve certainly done that plenty of times. Do you hunt?”

  “A lot less than I used to. My eyesight is still pretty good, although I’m not the Expert Marksman I was back in Viet Nam. I’m less interested in getting up before dawn to hike to a tree stand in the freezing cold. Plus, my attitudes about hunting have evolved. A few years ago, I would have taken that shot back there. Hell, I would have borrowed the guard’s rifle to do it. But today, it would bother me to take that creature out of this beautiful forest. God knows, I still support the right to bear arms and respect the role hunting has in good wildlife management. But there’s something different to me today about taking that animal we saw back there. They brought those Elk back to the National Park in 2001 and the animals have been slowly expanding their range ever since. They’ve finally started allowing some limited permit hunting in areas outside the Park. But I don’t think that’s for me.

  “I used to think I was getting soft in my old age. I’ve since concluded I’ve been an environmentalist all my life, despite my career in chemicals. The longer I live, the more I realize it’s the people who are the problem. Not just with the environment but with most of our problems. Unfortunately, you can’t cull people like you cull animals. I guess that’s why I got more active in politics. Makes the culling easier.”

  They talked about the weather the rest of the way back.

  The house was located at 4,000 feet of elevation on a 220-acre tract in the Blue Ridge mountains about 40 minutes west of Asheville, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Billings and his wife had built the house almost 40 years ago to give their kids some vacation time in the mountains. They had spent a lot of summers and holidays here, including Christmas many years. It was a classic North Carolina mountain house, with bleached wood siding, wood casement windows, stone fireplaces and floors made of hickory and flagstone. It was surrounded by rhododendron, mountain laurel, dogwood and hundreds of native perennials they had planted. As the years went on and Billings’ businesses flourished, they’d built a two-bedroom guest house with an additional two-car garage and an underground safe room complex.

  Today, with his wife dead and his only son living in California with two kids, and a wife Billings despised, Billings was the only regular occupant. His daughter and her family in Atlanta drove up when they could.

  Shortly after completing the guest house, Billings had added the caretaker’s house down by the main road where Franks came in today. The concrete block three bedroom, two-bath house was home to Billings’ full-time security guard, the guard’s wife, their two school-aged children and a highly trained German Shepherd. A white Jeep Wrangler and a black Ford F-150 Super Crew, both 4x4’s, were parked in a barn-like garage.

  What wasn’t visible from the highway was a second, far more secure gate hidden in the forest a few hundred feet up the mountain. Behind the gate was another concrete block building with a garage for four vehicles, a bunk room for six people and a weapons safe. It wasn’t Fort Knox, but it wasn’t bad.

  Like all visitors to the house other than family and close friends, Franks left his vehicle at the second building and was driven up the mountain in the guard’s F-150 after being photographed, scanned and cleared. With rare exceptions, visitors were not allowed to take weapons, ammunition, mobile phones or other electronic devices to the main house. Franks was not an exception.

  Stepping into the Great Room with Franks, Billings triggered the gas log fire in the huge stone fireplace. He said, “Gets a bit chilly up here this early in the Spring. Never thought I’d trade logs for gas. My wife talked me into it at one of our other houses and after a couple of seasons we converted every fireplace in this place to gas, except for the one on the big porch. Let’s sit here.” He gestured for Franks to take the leather wingback chair to the right of the hearth. Billings sat in the matching chair to the left and put his feet up on the hassock.

  “So, Mr. Franks,” Billings said, “I have to admit I’m somewhat intrigued. What are you prepared to tell me about how you take your concept from ideas to reality?”

  Franks said, “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘going viral’ on social
media?”

  “Yes,” Billings said, “I may be old, but I have grandkids and I’m still a voracious reader and curious about too many things for my own good. But I should add, proudly, you won’t find me on Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn. I hope what you do is more than help people go viral on social media.”

  “Much more, but let’s start there,” Franks said. “Something ‘goes viral’ when it spreads rapidly through a population by being shared frequently with a number of individuals. You’re in the chemicals business. One of the few things I remember from high school chemistry is what happens when you heat up gas in a jar. As the gas warms up, the atoms get agitated and bounce off the jar and each other more frequently. If you turn up the heat, more collisions happen faster. Increase the number of vectors and increase the frequency of the collisions and you have the essence of going viral on the internet.”

  Billings smiled politely at Franks’ explanation and said, “Go on.”

  “As you know,” Franks said, “brands and politicians today are spending millions trying to get things to go viral on the internet. Technology companies like Facebook and Twitter are reaping billions by helping their customers slice, dice and micro-target the unsuspecting users who have given them their personal information to make this targeting possible. As Obama proved in 2012 and Trump drove home in 2016, this kind of targeting can achieve huge leverage, both positively and negatively. It can work with facts. It may be even more effective with fake news, misleading statements and outright lies, state sponsored or otherwise. Whatever else happened, and we may never know, the Russians took advantage of these tools in the 2016 election and probably in 2018 as well. While the Dems have had a field day hammering the Republicans for what the Russians and Trump did or didn’t do, going forward the real danger—which some people would call the real opportunity—is the use of these advanced internet marketing tools by domestic political parties and politicians.