by Malcom James
Copyright © 2018 Malcom James
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9781543948479
To my father, RJF.
Table of Contents
Inauguration of Fear
A Good Offer
Day One
Natalie
A Sensitive Matter
Kompromat
All About The Money
Sherry
Domestic Identity Terrorists
Tate
Russiagate
A Formal Affair
Founding Fathers
Meltdown
Erasure
Triangulation
Witch Hunt
Anonymous Sources
Loyalty Test
Under The Bridge
Lost
Truth
Dancing on Graves
First Strike
The Twenty-Fifth
Afterword
1
Inauguration of Fear
The 45th and possibly last elected President of the United States was sworn into office on Friday, January 20, 2017. Standing on the western front of the U.S. Capitol in a long overcoat and beneath darkening skies, his left hand on Lincoln’s bible, he swore before several hundred thousand fellow citizens, and millions more watching around the world, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But for too many, there was a nagging feeling in the pit of their stomachs that he had zero intention of keeping that pledge.
For the citizens who felt this was a dark cloud descending on their once-proud democracy, election night morphed from a planned historic celebration of the nation’s first female president into a waking nightmare, and every day after felt like a horrific traffic accident unfolding in slow motion. The ugliest campaign in memory, which should have ended on election day, refused to die, and instead became an undead zombie of lies, racial hatred, misogyny, and greed that would be stalking the earth, masquerading as the leader of the free world.
This was not supposed to happen. But all the major polls, the networks and newspapers, the professional prognosticators, the talking heads on television, the chattering classes and their collected conventional wisdom — they had all simply gotten it wrong.
With his defeat of Eleanor Wilson, the brash billionaire Harold P. Franks had pulled off the greatest political upset in American history. And at 12:01 p.m. that day, he officially became not only the oldest and richest man to win the presidency, but also the first president without any elective office or military experience in his background.
How they all got it wrong, and he was one of the few who got it right, was racing through Eli Green’s head, as he stood in a glass-walled conference room in the temporary offices of Paragon Analytics, on the fifth floor of a nondescript office building, surrounded by half-packed moving boxes, watching the procession below. The new president’s half-mile long ceremonial motorcade of armored black limousines, Secret Service vehicles, motorcycle cops and agents on foot, was crawling along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House in a light rain.
Eli imagined the shock still echoing through the collective consciousness of so many Americans, including his own family, and certainly most of the liberal technology majors he went to college with back at Stanford. But Eli had seen it coming. All you had to do was look at the data to understand the result.
Harold P. Franks was a successful businessman who’d been in the public eye since the late 1970’s. He parlayed his inherited toe-hold in the cutthroat world of New York real estate into a global luxury brand. Condos, hotels, casinos, golf courses, airlines, a reality television show. He had done and survived it all, somehow coming out on top despite all the high-profile bankruptcies along the way. He had as much name recognition as anyone in the country, a basically unlimited campaign budget, a weak field of competition inside his recently-adopted party, a tough and historic but fatally-flawed candidate to face in the general election, and none of the political baggage of ever having held any elective office, or taken a single difficult vote.
His fundamental positions were fluid, because he had no real policy goal other than winning. Everything, and everyone, was subservient to that end. The character and consistency that used to be demanded of presidential candidates was now easily steamrolled by the lethal combination of saying what people wanted to hear in the moment, feeding the always-on, 24-hour cable and internet news cycle, and barking through the filter-free amplification of social media.
Franks waited for the perfect moment to strike, and the traditional politicians in both parties were caught flat-footed. It didn’t matter how divisive or outrageous, inflammatory or ignorant the latest Franks sound bite was; he was driving the news cycle, and they were constantly forced to react, while their message was simply downed out.
And most importantly, he found a core audience in white working-class Americans, primarily in the southern and rust-belt states, people genuinely hurting. Left behind by the increasing pace of globalization and the long hollowing-out of the manufacturing base, they believed they had finally found a champion. Here was a man who was not beholden to any special interests. A man who was the very definition of what poor people thought rich people were like: gold-plated, with a picture-perfect family; an American success story who could never be bought; a man who would tell it straight, kick out the criminals and their scourge of drugs, the illegal aliens preying on their American kindness, straighten-out the lazy brown and black-skinned people on welfare, make the best deals to bring back the jobs, and once and for all, kick the Muslim terrorists in the fucking ass, without any politically-correct apologies.
But to Eli Green, working for Franks wasn’t about the issues, it was about disruption. Harold P. Franks was the walking definition of disruption, exploding a system that was broken and badly in need of a re-set. If Eli had to explain it to a stranger in an airport bar, it basically went like this: forget about the individual issues; Franks was really no different than Uber entering a new market, and destroying the corrupt and inefficient local taxi business. It would be painful at first, but it was long overdue, and something better would be there when the dust settled.
It was his faith in the power of creative destruction that enabled Eli to filter out the disapproval coming from friends and family, and stay laser-focused on his contract work at Paragon Analytics, which had been hired by the Franks Campaign to provide the very-specific expertise he had in social media micro-targeted advertising.
What almost no one realized, including the politicians and strategists for the other side, was that the technology now existed to marry individual social media profile data, such as age, address, race, ethnicity, marital status, and “likes” with many other personal and specific bits of data, and use it to target an on-line ad only the people who fit the exact profile would ever see; down to a single person, if needed. The social media giants had the big data, the algorithms, and the processing power to make it all happen in billionths of a second, and were happy to sell access to it to the highest bidder. Paragon Analytics, with Eli’s help, had created voter models with personal data legally scraped from over one hundred million social media accounts through a developer’s back door into Facebook.
This new, entirely unregulated technology was the wild west of political messaging, and could never be matched by traditional TV ads, where the candidate still had to awkwardly attest “I’m Harold Franks, and I approved this message.”
It was the weaponization of social media, and Eli Green was their weapons dealer. This was disruption at the highest level; not of a commercial market, but of a nation’s destiny. So when the offer came to join Paragon Analytics and the Franks Campaign, it was too good to turn down for a thi
rty-one-year-old tech geek who lived and breathed data and disruption.
After the election, he stuck around during the transition, collecting a few more paychecks and helping with data analysis for all the hiring the Franks team needed to fill hundreds of jobs.
But as the last of the motorcade’s tail lights began to fade in the rain, there was now a feeling of major let-down. The election and transition were over, and he would soon be unemployed. He didn’t have a ticket back to California yet, and hadn’t given notice on his studio apartment. He didn’t know if his roommate had someone living in his bedroom in Palo Alto. They hadn’t talked in over two months. He was planning to let him know he would be headed back soon, when his cell phone rang. It was David Berringer, his boss at Paragon.
“David,” he answered.
“Quite a show, huh?”
“Seriously. He was fired up.”
“Yes he was. You still at the office?”
Eli walked along the window as he talked, looking down. People were in the street, following the tail of the motorcade.
“Yeah, making progress but still a way to go.”
“So what’s your plan? Did you get a ticket yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Because you have a new job. If you want it, that is.”
Eli stared out the window into the rain, picking nothing in particular to focus on as his hearing sharpened.
“Seriously? Doing what?”
“Working in the White House. Walter personally requested you. Why don’t we meet for a drink?”
2
A Good Offer
The drizzle that threatened on and off during the inauguration subsided, and a narrow slit of sun poked through the gray sky. The streets of downtown D.C. were filled with people from all over the country who came to either witness or protest the unique spectacle of the peaceful transfer of power that was the hallmark of American democracy.
With the streets so full, Eli and David were lucky to get a table at the nearby Steer and Horn Pub, even if it was outside. David ate out constantly, and knew everyone in the neighborhood, so they opened the patio. The heat lamps were turned on; the waitress wiped the table down and brought them each a pint of Guinness.
They knocked their glasses together and drank. David Berringer was one of three founders of Paragon Analytics, and Eli’s boss. David came from an Eastern blue-blood family in Massachusetts, politically connected to Republican heavyweights. In his mid-forties, he had a young-but-polished GQ look that spoke to his Harvard MBA and his time on Wall Street, and he favored the same blue blazer, khakis and horn-rimmed Oliver Peoples glasses one might see while lunching at a yacht club; only today, he added a scarf.
He was quite a contrast to Eli, with his Stanford hoodie, skinny jeans and running shoes. Even though he was in his early-thirties, Eli still looked like a twenty-two-year-old college kid, with a bit of unruly wavy brown hair and big, intelligent eyes, which alternated between darting around while his mind whirred, and turning to a laser focus when he listened or made a critical point.
He was handsome in a boyish way, and easy to get along with; the ideal upper-middle-class Silicon Valley millennial engineer. The difference was, unlike so many other millennials that David worked with, Eli never appeared focused on himself. He was focused on the concept or task at hand. He was driven, but not in an off-putting way. David liked that, and apparently Walter Donnelly did too.
“Congratulations,” David said after his sip.
“For?” Eli asked.
“You’re the only one from Paragon being offered a job inside the White House. That’s huge.”
“Honestly, I’m shocked, but thank you.”
“It was one hell of a campaign, that’s for sure. I still can’t believe she got three million more votes,” David said.
“She got ‘em in the wrong states. Gotta love the Electoral College,” Eli said, and took another sip.
“And all those fucking people freaking out right now, they can shut up if they didn’t show up,” David added. “Tell me you’re in, so we can get the paperwork moving. All kinds of security shit to fill out.”
Eli smiled. “Okay, but maybe I should know what the job is?”
David stared at Eli and lowered his voice to a whisper, even though they were alone. “The president directed the re-election campaign to begin today. The firm will continue to assist. But Walter wants one of us to run analytics for the White House policy office. He saw what you can do. You can’t be on the Paragon payroll while you work there. I would do it, but I’m not selling my stake in Paragon, so I’ll stay outside. First initiative is voter fraud. He wants major action taken before the next election. No loss of the popular vote next time, whatever it takes.”
Eli sipped his beer, and David continued.
“The pay will be worse and the hours a hell of a lot longer. It’s government work. On the other hand, you’ll be changing the world, and you’ll have the White House on your resume forever.”
“Sounds compelling.”
David pushed ahead. “Any skeletons in the closet you never mentioned? Now would be the time.”
Eli turned and watched two attractive older women in long coats as they entered the pub from the street.
“Nothing they would find.”
Eli turned to see David looking at him and not laughing.
“Sorry. I’m kidding. There should be nothing. I mean, there is nothing,” Eli clarified.
“I vouched for you when Walter asked. Don’t screw me here.”
“I would never.”
“So that’s a ‘yes’ then?” David asked.
“Give me a couple of hours to think it over?” He learned from his father years ago that whenever an unexpected demand was made in a negotiation, it was best to buy time before you answer. Snap judgments were frequently bad judgements.
“Sure, think it over for a few hours, but let me know tonight, we owe Walter an answer, and he’s got a shit-ton of hires to make, and they’re already way behind. This one should be a slam dunk.”
Eli nodded and took another sip of his Guinness as the two women took the table next to them, smiling as they removed their coats.
***
It was twilight. Eli ran in his windbreaker, lean and fast and sure-footed, down the right side of the National Mall along Constitution Avenue, toward the Washington Monument. Barriers and fences were still up, but he was able to run alongside them. The garbage strewn along the Mall for miles was being swept up by city workers. Limousines and cop cars and spectators still clogged the streets. Police helicopters patrolled the airspace, one just passing the sharp point of the Washington Monument as it poked the sky, its blinking red lights complimenting the narrow slice of dark red sun pushing through the clouds in the West.
Running was what Eli did to clear his mind, and as his pace increased, his mind was nearly blank. All his energy was focused on his feet, navigating the immediate steps in front of him. As he reached 15th St. NW and turned right toward the White House complex, he saw and heard the protesters chanting outside the White House, still fired up from the historic Women’s March.
As he ran north toward the White House and all the commotion, he could already see the lights on inside the Residence. He imagined the president and first family were probably getting to know the new digs inside, preparing for all the big inauguration balls and parties. Were they hanging clothes in the closet? What was it really like, being inside the epicenter of power in the Western world? How did it feel, standing in the Oval Office? Could you feel the history in the walls? Or was it just another office?
He stepped on the gas, and his mind was as clear as it would get; he had all the data, now he had to ask the question and “blink” the answer: would he ever get the chance again if he didn’t take it now?
The chanting of the protesters got louder as he reached Pennsylvania Avenue, so loud he assumed the president must be able to hear them
inside. The cops had it under control, and the new second fence was much farther back than when Eli and his mother visited D.C. when he was a kid. He saw the shadow of a black-clad man with a long gun on the roof as he ran closer to the crowd.
The chanting of the protesters had to be unnerving on your first day. But Franks had Teflon skin. The protesters would wear down, and soon be gone. As he continued along 15th St. NW then turned on New York Avenue back toward Logan Circle, he blinked, and it all became clear, and he knew he had his answer.
At the next corner, he stopped and caught his breath, pulled his cell phone out and texted David. “I’m in.”
David texted back immediately. “Great. Download the SF-86 and get it going. I’ll let Walter know. Congrats!”
Eli smiled to himself, fist-bumped the air with a quiet “boom” and started running again.
***
He slowed to a walk three blocks from his building to search for dinner. Ever since the anarchists smashed the windows in Starbucks and neighboring stores the day before, a lot of smaller businesses decided to take a holiday until the town returned to normal.
He turned a corner, assuming everything would be closed, and then he saw it across the street: the new taco place. It was empty, but the light was on. He jogged across the street, and as he approached he spotted an older black man sitting on the sidewalk next to the front door, shivering in the wet cold, dressed in rags, a cardboard sign in his lap that said “I’m just hungry.”
“Spare any change?” the man mumbled.
“Sorry, no cash on me,” Eli answered, and he pulled open the door, wiping the rain off his face. There were a few empty tables in the front, then a single counter with a back-lit menu above the cash register, but no one behind it.
He walked up to the counter and scanned the menu. “Hello?” he called toward the back.
And then a girl appeared. She was in her early twenties, Mexican, maybe 5’2”, with big dark eyes, full lips, her dark hair pulled back, in a tank top and low cut jeans, tats down one arm, and a nose ring. She had a small scar under her left eye, just above her cheekbone. The look in her eyes was somehow fragile and tough at the same time. She looked him dead in the eyes.
