To Kill a Man - Maggie Costello Series 05 (2020)

by Bourne, Sam

  Chapter 29

  Washington, DC

  Dan Benson’s finger was hovering over the arrow keys, clicking through the slides. The Digital Director had sent them to him for his approval – though, tellingly, he’d sent them to Dan’s personal email rather than to his campaign address. He hadn’t needed to spell out why.

  Benson looked at them – ads that would pop up in people’s social media feeds – and had to admire their ingenuity, each one perfectly designed to reach its target audience and, just as admirable, betraying not so much as a hint of its source, or of the fact that it had anything to do with politics. Benson’s favourite was the one showing a now retired athlete, a star quarterback from the 1980s, with his finger pointed at the camera, above the words: Don’t Miss Out. Guess the NFL and win $50 million. Below, white letters on red, was a button that read simply, Enter Here. Who could resist that? Certainly not men over fifty who were a key demographic for the Harrison campaign. One click, and they would see the offer: guess every coming NFL game correctly and scoop the jackpot. Never mind that, as the Digital Director had explained to Dan, the odds of anyone winning that prize were one in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Or that the Harrison for President campaign – or rather a shell organization that would be near impossible to trace to the campaign – had taken out an insurance policy to cover that eventuality-cum-calamity.

  All that was beside the point. The purpose of that ad, and the others, was to pull in people who would never otherwise click on a political message – indeed, people who had never voted before – and prompt them to reveal not only their contact details, but also just enough about themselves to allow the machines to sketch a rough, outline picture. It was a vast data harvesting programme, one that aimed to gather information on millions of Americans.

  You’d be surprised how little those machines needed to go on. Feed them a few morsels of info – someone’s retail habits, say, or TV viewing preferences – and the programme could slot them into a narrow demographic niche and, from there, work out with astonishing accuracy their political outlook. In turn, that would reveal what buttons – psychological and emotional – a campaign would need to press.

  The button-pressing took the form of a steady drip-feed of yet more ads slipped into those voters’ timelines or feeds, each one tightly tailored to that specific slice of the electorate: in the case of the faux $50 million competition, middle-aged, male NFL fans. If the ads did their job, they’d get those voters riled up and positively itching to vote. Thanks to demographic and polling analysis that assessed the political leanings of particular groups, it was barely in doubt how such people would vote. Getting them motivated to vote, that was the thing. And now, through these ‘dark’ ads, so customized and micro-targeted that the national media might never even see them, those people would be not merely motivated, but whipped into a state of fury that would have them up and dressed at dawn, itching to cast their ballots.

  Benson was happy with this first round of ads, those that would serve as bait to lure in the unsuspecting social media surfer, tricking voters and – even better – previous non-voters to offer up their data, thereby rendering themselves nicely targetable. There were some pleasantly surprising ones, like the image of a polar bear nestled against her two cubs. Protect her! Click here. Once you’d clicked and signed up to ‘Americans for Nature’ or whatever bogus front organization the digital team had confected, you were on the list and would soon receive messages aimed at tickling your sweet spots – and your neuralgic ones too.

  It was those second-wave ads Benson was interested in, the ones that would come at you via Facebook after you had, unwittingly, invited them in. These were more subtle, most not looking like ads at all. On his screen now was a message that appeared to the naked eye like a regular news story, one that had simply been ‘shared’. The format matched that of a respectable news website. If you looked closely, it seemed to have been published by a newspaper called the Seattle Telegraph.

  Natasha Winthrop says men should apologize before they speak

  Presidential hopeful and lawyer Natasha Winthrop has suggested men should begin every sentence with the words “I’m sorry”, to make amends for centuries of “male oppression” of women, it emerged last night.

  Winthrop, who far-left activists are pushing as a rival to long-time frontrunner Tom Harrison, made the remarks at a recent, closed-door meeting of supporters. “Women have suffered for thousands of years. And who’s made them suffer? It’s men. Now, I’m not asking for the earth. All I’m asking is that men at least acknowledge what they’ve done. And I mean every man, every time they open their mouth.”

  The lawyer-turned-politician went on to suggest that if a man is talking to a woman or group of women, he should first utter the words, “I’m sorry.”

  “It should become a habit. Like a reflex. So that even when no women are in the room, when it’s just a bunch of guys, they start with an apology.”

  Asked at what age this practice should begin, Winthrop said that she was open to further discussion on the matter. “Obviously it should be compulsory for all males over the age of fourteen. But maybe we should do this for every male baby and toddler, from the moment they learn to talk. So that it becomes truly ingrained. We’ll know we’ve made progress when a male child’s first words are, ‘I’m sorry.’”

  Benson had to admit it had been artfully done. The little evasions were relatively subtle. No specific time or place was given for the event where Winthrop had supposedly made these remarks and not many would know that the Seattle Telegraph did not exist. It would hit the outrage nerve directly, prompting many – maybe even most – of the carefully targeted audience who would see it to hit the ‘Share’ button in their fury.

  But, he wasn’t sure. Was it too much? Did it lack the requisite kernel of truth, or at least the plausible lie, that helped such stories grip the imagination and start spreading? Also, he didn’t love the reference to Harrison in the second paragraph. Any journalist saw that, they’d immediately know who’d paid for it. They might as well put Harrison’s signature on it.

  He scrolled to the next one, which was a variation on that same theme: same format, same bogus source.

  Natasha Winthrop says women should receive reparations

  Presidential hopeful and lawyer, Natasha Winthrop, has called for men to pay women “reparations” to compensate for centuries of “male oppression” of women, it emerged last night.

  Winthrop, who far-left activists are pushing as a rival to long-time frontrunner Tom Harrison, made the remarks at a recent, closed-door meeting of supporters. “Women have suffered for thousands of years. And who’s made them suffer? It’s men. Now, I’m not asking for the earth. All I’m asking for is a stipend, perhaps two or three thousand dollars a month paid to every woman over the age of sixteen and funded by every man of the same age.”

  The lawyer-turned-politician went on to suggest that the law could stipulate that no woman should be allowed to share their reparation money with a male, whether that male be a husband or son. “This money is women’s. No man should be allowed to get near it . . .”

  It was ludicrous, of course. As obviously, laughably, false as could be. And yet he knew that would present no obstacle. The fake news stories that had shaped the last couple of campaigns were equally outlandish, and that had slowed their progress not at all: they had taken flight, soaring into the social media stratosphere. The key, Dan had learned, was that what such stories lacked in literal truth they had to make up in emotional truth. They needed to hit voters where they hurt.

  Old-school political operatives thought that meant targeting a rival candidate’s weak spot. Your opponent had once, as governor, failed to support the death penalty in a specific case, commuting the sentence of a man with learning difficulties: ergo, they were soft on crime. Your opponent spoke French: ergo, they were effete and unpatriotic. Easy. That, Benson suspected, was th
e political style of his new boss. For Harrison was nothing if not old school.

  But that approach rested on a misapprehension. It wasn’t the weakness of your rival you needed to target. It was the weakness of your voters. It was their insecurity, paranoia or lack of self-esteem you had to home in on, ruthlessly.

  The ‘I’m sorry’ and reparations posts were not bad in that regard, playing on male fears of emasculation. But they were a little direct, a tad on the nose. Which was why Dan preferred the messages he looked at next.

  The first was a short video. It showed the hands of a white man in a plaid shirt – you couldn’t see his face – holding a letter. The voiceover made clear that it was a job rejection. As the hands scrunched up the letter, the voiceover intoned: ‘You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a woman because of a “gender quota”.’ The phrase was all but spat out. ‘Is that really fair? Natasha Winthrop supports gender quotas. Tom Harrison believes jobs should go to the best person, whoever they are.’

  Benson smiled at that. The homage to campaigns past was clear, and the messaging effective. He could see that one working.

  He looked at the next suggestion, also a video, which once again focused on a pair of hands. Except this time they were a woman’s: the nails were painted a strong red. The hands were holding a phone, thumbing out a text message. As she tapped away, the voiceover said: ‘Natasha Winthrop killed a man. She says she’d never met him before. But now we know she sent him secret messages before he came to her house. What did those messages say?’

  Interesting, but Benson’s gut told him it was wrong. It was somehow too literal. Besides, he felt sure there were plenty of Harrison’s target voters who would admire anyone who had killed a man, especially a bad one: no point reminding them that Winthrop was tough.

  Next came the simplest offering so far. It showed a Photoshopped image of Natasha Winthrop, altered so that she was in the pose of a schoolmistress, wagging her finger. There were only four words.

  Meet the new boss

  Dan absorbed his own instinctive reaction, a fleeting, barely conscious moment of recoil. He told himself it was not peculiar to him, certainly not a weakness of his, but rather an instant, unmediated response that would be common to most men confronted with the image of a bossy woman.

  He skipped to the next image, which the Digital Director had called ‘The first wife’. Again, there was a Photoshopped Natasha, this time standing in a kitchen, hands on hips, her face folded into a scold. Her expression conveyed: What time do you call this?

  Benson had to smile at that. He remembered the focus groups he’d witnessed the last time his party had chosen a female nominee. When male voters, especially older ones in blue-collar jobs, were on their own with a male moderator, they admitted that the candidate reminded them of a hectoring teacher, an imperious new manager tasked with shaking up their factory or office, or, most damningly and revealingly, their ‘first wife’.

  In that case, the female candidate had been older and an established figure of authority. But the digital team apparently reckoned that those factors were secondary to the more basic one: that there were only so many ways men could see a woman with power, even one who was in fact young and new to politics. Hence the gambit that had resulted in these images: to cast the young and beautiful Natasha Winthrop as a nagging, joy-killing harridan.

  Benson’s colleagues had clearly given this some thought, because they had presented him with options within options. There were, for example, two versions of the ‘Meet the new boss’ image. In one, Natasha was wearing dowdy, schoolmarmish clothes while her face had been subtly altered. Her lips had been redrawn to expose more of her gums, the teeth enlarged. Her nose was bigger and her eyes smaller and uneven.

  The other version showed Natasha wearing her own clothes – a tight-fitting, thin-strapped black dress, showing plenty of skin – with her face intact, her eyes sparkling, even if her mouth was no longer fixed in that People magazine smile but resting instead in an expression of rebuke. Her body was still moulded into the same, imperious shape as the first version, her finger was still wagging, but her looks were intact.

  The effect was unnerving and confusing; Dan felt it himself. And if he did, so would most of the men who would see this image scrolling across their screen. He was simultaneously attracted and repelled and – was this his therapist talking or him? – attracted because repelled. Or should that be repelled because attracted?

  He was staring at the alternative the team had generated for the ‘first wife’ image, still feeling the same, contradictory, destabilizing sensation. There she was, the gorgeous Natasha Winthrop, absurdly recast as a moaning housewife. It left the male mind torn and conflicted, not sure whether to move towards what it saw or away from it. The loins were stirred, but the brain disapproved. One part of you knew that this person was your enemy, the other desired her. Which only made you resent her more.

  Benson sat back in his chair, impressed with his colleague. He’d known the Digital Director was savvy with the technology, a whizz when it came to algorithmic patterns and social media data tracking. In fact, one of the inducements to joining Team Harrison was the assurance that the campaign had bought for itself a tech advantage that would guarantee it an edge over its rivals. He remembered the smile on the face of his soon-to-be boss at the hiring meeting, as Doug Teller said proudly, ‘Dan, I’ll spare you the details, but when it comes to technology this campaign has a secret weapon that will revolutionize digital warfare.’ Teller hadn’t spelled it out – ‘No chef ever gives the recipe for his secret sauce’ – but Dan took it as read that the secret weapon was the Digital Director himself.

  While he had never doubted that man’s online prowess, he hadn’t credited him with such a grasp of human psychology. He seemed to understand what underpinned male hostility to women, and to have tapped into it quite ruthlessly. It made Benson think more highly of Tom Harrison. He’d appointed this digital guy and of course he’d had the vision to appoint Benson himself. Maybe he really did have what it took to be president.

  Chapter 30

  Washington, DC

  For the duration of the journey back to her apartment, two thoughts had jostled with each other for primacy in Maggie’s mind. Though ‘thoughts’ might be flattering at least one of them. The first was the conundrum that had been dropped in her lap by her sister’s (reluctant) sleuthing skills, the unexpected two-word resolution of the mystery of the Maine number that had cropped up often and regularly in Natasha’s phone bills: V Winthrop. The other was the prospect of a warming glass of malt whisky.

  The two were linked in that only when she was seated at her own table and sitting in her own chair, with a swig of Ardbeg stinging in her throat, did Maggie believe she’d be able to solve this puzzle. She was in that exact position now, and yet she kept coming back to the same basic contradiction.

  On the one hand, Natasha had been insistent that her family were all dead. Not only had her parents and sisters been killed in that car crash back when Natasha was a teenager, but the woman who had raised her was gone too. Maggie remembered the conversation they’d had on Cape Cod, when Maggie had blundered into mentioning Natasha’s Aunt Peggy. Died a few years ago, I’m afraid.

  Had Maggie misheard that somehow? Had she got the wrong end of the stick?

  No, Maggie’s memory of that exchange was still sharp. She could hear Natasha’s voice: I do miss her terribly though, as you can imagine.

  Perhaps there was another ‘V Winthrop’ close enough to Natasha that they spoke every Sunday evening, and yet who was not her great-aunt Peggy. Maggie supposed it was theoretically possible, though it seemed vanishingly unlikely, not least because Natasha had been clear: she had no living relatives. So who, exactly, could this Victor or Veronica Winthrop be?

  Maggie heard a rattle from the bathroom, metal on metal, like someone fiddling with a lock.
A second later there was a creak of wood.

  She sat bolt upright, her senses prickling. She was conscious of her eyeballs moving from side to side, like antennae twitching at the unexpected presence of another creature. All her energy, the blood in her veins, seemed directed towards her ears, straining to pick up any further sound, to decode it for more information.

  A beat, then another beat, then another. As quietly as she could, she rose to her feet and moved away from the table and towards the kitchen, willing her feet to make no sound.

  As she assessed what was available – there was a large knife in the cutlery drawer, but opening it would be too noisy – she heard a loud thud from the bathroom. Her brain processed that sound along with the others and decided that a man had come in through the bathroom window. It would have been difficult but, thanks to the exterior iron staircase that served as this building’s fire escape, not impossible. A parallel stream of thought, running along the borderline that separated the conscious from the subconscious, was regretting that she did not own a gun. Uri had wanted her to do it, to keep it by the bedside – I would recommend it for anyone, but you, given the work you do: it’s crazy that you don’t have one – but she clung to her view that a firearm in the house would only make her more vulnerable. Take this moment, the one that was playing out right now in both split-seconds and a weirdly drawn-out, treacle-like slow motion: would she really want to introduce a gun into this situation, running the risk that if she aimed it at the intruder, he might grab it, turn it on her and, in the panic, it would be her not him who would end up shot?

  All of that passed through Maggie’s mind in less than a hundredth of a second, or so it felt. At the same time, instinct had made a decision for her, prodding her to reach for the knife block that sat on the counter and remove the heaviest blade, one with a serrated edge. That too entailed a risk, she understood that: she could be providing this man, whoever he was, with a tool he might not have. If he disarmed her, she could be supplying him with the murder weapon for her own death.