Political Pressure td-135

by Warren Murphy

  Frederick Home, mayoral hopeful in one of the South's biggest cities, was the one who came up with the name.

  "Various 'Behavior Establishments' have been around these parts for years. It's a name people know," Home drawled. "That's exactly what the book says to look for."

  "Sounds like a country club," Flicker complained.

  "'Morals and Ethics' belongs in the name, too," insisted Herbert Moule, who had an iron grip on the third- place position in a race for one of the most powerful governorships in the northwest. "Morals and ethics is what we're all about."

  "I agree with all of you," Flicker said. "It's a good name, yes, but the acronym is awful."

  "Who cares about the acronym?" somebody asked.

  "The book doesn't say anything about the acronym," Jessica Wicker pointed out.

  Murmurs of agreement. Orville Flicker didn't dare disagree now.

  Flicker's campaign had been built around a core of wisdom, and that core was the White Hand Book. It was their strategy, it was their guide, it was their step-by-step plan for changing the world.

  Flicker was the one responsible for making it the bible of his campaign, and he knew that faith in the White Hand Book could not be compromised if the campaign was to succeed.

  What he knew, and no one else knew, was that the White Hand Book was the product of an earlier age. Back in the days of the first moon landings and the breakup of the Beatles. Back then, the world had been less acronym-obsessed.

  The White Hand Book was nothing more and nothing less than a lifetime of collected wisdom from one of the great public-relations geniuses of the twentieth century. Orville Flicker studied under the man in college, respecting him tremendously for his skills as a marketer but disgusted by his liberal politics. The old man, semiretired at that time, taught a few college classes and spent years working on his book. He claimed, and everyone in the business believed, that it would be the most comprehensive how-to manual ever on the manipulation of public opinion.

  Flicker helped proofread the book in the final days of the professor's life, when the old man's hands were shaking and his eyes were clouded over.

  The old professor died quietly. The pillow over his face was what kept it quiet. The old man's weak respiration was snuffed out as quick as a candle. Flicker hid the magnificent book in his car, knowing it was a masterpiece. He knew it was immensely valuable and powerful, and someday, he was not sure how, it would be vastly important to him.

  He piled the notes and early drafts of the book in the old man's bedroom and started a fire, let it burn awhile, then called the police and fire department. He was quite distraught when they arrived.

  "He said the book was no good and he was no good. He locked the door. He wouldn't let me in. By the time I broke the door lock the bedroom was full of flames— I think he's in there. Help him!"

  Sure enough, the old man was in there, along with clouds of fluttering paper ash, but he was beyond help.

  A great loss—both the man and his book—to the noble profession of marketing, advertising and public relations, the obits said.

  Years and years later, Flicker retyped the professor's never-published masterpiece and called it the White Hand Book. He didn't claim it for himself, but he never told his followers exactly where it came from.

  "Seems to me this name is just right, just what the book says it ought to be," said Home.

  Murmurs of agreement. It was as good as a unanimous vote. Flicker risked his own credibility if he fought them on it.

  "Okay, all, after two years we finally have a name," Flicker announced, feigning enthusiasm. "We are now the Morals and Ethics Behavior Establishment!"

  Cheers and applause from all over the nation.

  "MAEBE! MAEBE!"

  They started chanting ecstatically. Flicker joined in but felt silly.

  "MAEBE! MAEBE! MAEBE!"

  Well, Flicker thought, if it brings the Everyman to the polling place then it was a good enough, no matter how wishy-washy it sounded.

  Will This Be The Next Powerful Political Party? Maybe!

  Mark Howard smirked. Maybe not, he thought.

  Bunch of losers with some good PR. What in the world had possessed him to bring his morning paper to work? He had skimmed the sports pages and the comics. He rarely bothered reading the news. After all, he spent most of his workday catching up on current events from far more accurate sources.

  He put the paper in the wastebasket and in that morning alone he sifted through more electronic intelligence than the entire CIA processed in the entire decade of the 1950s.

  Harold W. Smith smelled something bad. Outside his office he found Mark Howard and his secretary, Eileen Mikulka, looking into a paper sack.

  "Mark brought us lunch, isn't that nice?" Mrs. Mikulka said brightly.

  "Really?" Smith asked dubiously.

  "Burritos," Mrs. Mikulka added, trying to sound pleased.

  "From the convenience store," Mark Howard added, dubious himself.

  "Oh," Howard Smith said. He didn't know what else to say.

  "Very frugal, I'd say," Mrs. Mikulka said.

  "They smell awful," Mark announced. "Not sure what I was thinking. You don't want to eat these."

  "You were just being thoughtful," Mrs. Mikulka said.

  "I guess," Mark Howard said, and rolled the paper sack tightly closed on his way back to his office. When the door closed Mrs. Mikulka gave her longtime employer a worried look.

  "I hope Mr. Howard is feeling okay," she said, loading the statement with a question that Harold Smith couldn't answer.

  "I hope so, as well," Smith answered, and returned to his office without further comment.

  Mark Howard felt preoccupied, distracted by his own distraction. What in the world had compelled him to go out to the local convenience store for a sack of microwaved burritos?

  He tapped the keyboard, got the wrong results and searched again. What was he looking for, again?

  He needed a cup of coffee and he needed to get that stinking sack of burritos out of his closet-sized office. The fumes were probably a health hazard.

  Mrs. Mikulka gave him a murky smile. Mark Howard strolled downstairs and out the service entrance to the trash bins. He opened the sack and took out a burrito, tossing it into the big green container.

  He took out a second burrito, tossed it in.

  He took out the third burrito and looked at it, his mind wandering somewhere far away.

  Then he asked himself a question that changed his entire day: why didn't he just throw in the entire burrito sack and be done with it?

  He was acting strangely, and sometimes he was so damn dense it took him a long time to realize he was acting strangely.

  "I'm an idiot!"

  He dropped the sack and opened the burrito, poking around with one finger in the mushy contents of the soggy flour tortilla. Then he looked at the wrapper, read the ingredients label.

  He didn't know what he was looking for, but he was looking for something.

  He didn't find it in the refried-bean-and-cheese filling and he hoped like hell he wouldn't have to go retrieving the first two burritos. There was nothing else in the sack except for the receipt.

  Mark Howard grabbed the receipt and held it to the sky, trying to make out the faint printing from the convenience store cash register.

  The first three items were all the same: "BURTO, FZN, BF&BN, $3.49."

  He was an idiot. Only an idiot would throw away ten bucks on those inedible things.

  The last item was NEWSPPR, and the price was a very reasonable $0.75.

  Mark Howard wadded up the mess of the burrito and the paper bag and sent them flying into the trash bin, then yanked at the door, carrying the receipt.

  "Oh, hello again, Mark."

  "Hiya, Mrs. Mikulka!" Mark Howard was running fast, and then he was gone with a slam of his door.

  On his desk was a copy of the morning paper, in exactly the same place as the one he brought from home, and which still
poked out of his garbage can. Only now did Mark remember actually buying the paper with the burritos and putting it on the desk when he reached he office, but he didn't know at the time why he was doing it.

  The front-page headlines read Will This Be The Next Powerful Party? Maybe!

  Mark slithered behind his desk and flipped up the screen, bringing it to life with his last collection of windows still there. That's right. He'd been searching for something, and the search results were all wrong. What was he was searching for again?

  He backed up a few screens until he found the answer. It wasn't a word he knew. He certainly didn't remember typing it, but he had. The word was "MAEBE."

  "Maybe?" Harold Smith asked dubiously.

  "It's an acronym," Mark said. "Morals and Ethics Behavior Establishment. MAEBE."

  Smith had one more item to look dubious about. "Not a name to inspire confidence, either way," Smith said as he pulled up the bookmarked files sent to him from Howard's computer over the extremely small Folcroft digital network. He began reading an article about MAEBE from the online Washington Post, frowned again, and skimmed The New York Times article in seconds.

  "Mark, this group is new. MAEBE did not even exist until yesterday evening," Smith pointed out. "The murders we're looking at go back as long as eight months."

  "I know." Mark Howard nodded, wearing a doubtful look himself. "I haven't figured it out yet—what I'm supposed to be seeing here. I just know I'm supposed to see something."

  "Yes?" Smith said, noncommittally.

  "You did ask me to come to you as soon as I experienced any events, Dr. Smith. Remember?"

  "Of course, Mark," Smith said, and he made an effort to sound encouraging, despite his doubts.

  Smith was a pragmatic man, with a view of the world that had a hard time fitting in the extraordinary. Smith knew that anything that looked unusual, bizarre, supernatural, usually had a mundane explanation if you probed below the surface. But he also knew, from experience, that nature and science had some exceptional tricks up their sleeves.

  Mark Howard just might be one of those tricks. The young man possessed what some would have called extrasensory perception, but which Smith liked to think of in clinical terms such as precognizance.

  Howard, like Smith, came to CURE by way of the CIA, where his ability helped solve a number of sticky intelligence issues, although no one had known about it then. His mental sensitivity had almost killed him, too, when he began working with Dr. Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, within the mental reach of a comatose man who had his own unique mind powers, and who was one of CURE's most dangerous enemies.

  Those events had taken a lot out of Mark Howard, and when he came back to work Smith had become even more interested in understanding the mechanics of what was going on in Mark's head. The trouble was, even Mark didn't understand it very well. His insights seemed to come out of the blue, without effort on his part. He couldn't make it happen, apparently, and often didn't recognize it when it did happen. Sometimes he realized he had been giving himself messages repeatedly for hours until they registered. Sometimes the message, or clue, or whatever it might be termed, slammed into him in a single stroke.

  Mark Howard had usually been on his own when it came to deciphering the messages he was sending himself, and the young man was blessed was a genius of sorts in the investigative realm. He always figured out the message, eventually. Smith had asked him, with a twinge of embarrassment, to involve him when he received these messages. He hoped Mark didn't take it as an intrusion of his personal privacy.

  Now the boy had brought the latest such message to Smith's attention, and he didn't want to make Mark regret it.

  "Tell me what you know about this group," Smith said officiously.

  "Until twenty-four hours ago they were just a bunch of independent political campaigns from across the country. Mostly far right, mostly with an anticorruption platform. From what I've seen these are all 'give the government back to the people' types and they're mostly long shots in their respective political races. It looks like Dr. Lamble started getting calls from across the nation yesterday supporting his controversial statements about Governor Bryant after the assassination. All these supporters realized they had a nationwide brotherhood in the making, and somebody floated out the idea of turning their local movements into a national political party."

  Harold W. Smith frowned as he shifted the screen from one online media report to another. "I'm listening. Please continue."

  "There was a flurry of activity, first local meetings, then state meetings, that resulted in the appointment of state-wide representatives with voting authority. There was an election held by all fifty representatives during an online voting system put together by one member's college-age son. They had themselves a new political party put together in time for dinner."

  Smith nodded. "Organized by whom? Lamble?"

  Mark Howard considered that. "Nobody, from what I read. Lamble's a top dog, but he's not being touted as the head man."

  "That's the impression I get, too."

  "But that can't be," Mark added. "Somebody had to handle the logistics. Somebody spearheaded the thing."

  "Yes, that seems likely," Smith said, but didn't sound satisfied.

  Mark fidgeted. "Maybe this is a dead end."

  "No."

  Mark looked at Smith. "Why not?"

  "This defies logic," Dr. Smith looked at him briefly, tapping the desktop that hid his display. "I don't believe MAEBE is what it appears to be. A hundred, two hundred independent campaigns from coast to coast spontaneously allying themselves nationally? Groups that exist independently to promote a specific political agenda would not be quick to become just a small cog in a big new machine."

  Mark was scanning his newspaper and nodding. "But MAEBE is not replacing any local agendas. Listen to this. 'A spokesman says the new political party will not serve as a coalition of independent forces driven by one overriding philosophy—bringing ethics and moral principals back into government.'"

  "Sounds like they're doomed to failure from the outset," Smith remarked. "Some of their members have got to have extremist views—who'll decide what constitutes ethical and moral principles?"

  "One of the new members is A1 Scuttle," Howard remarked. "He's the independent who's already started campaigning hard for Bryant's job. Then there's the fact that Lamble's campaign manager served as spokesperson yesterday. I think we need to look into Lamble's political race."

  "I just had the same thought. The other races as well. I wonder what we're going to find if we start cross-referencing our list of recent murders, with MAEBE races. Why don't you start on the West Coast and I'll start on the East. Let's see what we come up with."

  Mark Howard jumped to his feet. "Dr. Smith, I've got a new routine that I think can get it done faster than our old searches."

  Smith raised his eyebrows. "We need a database on MAEBE membership before we do anything else."

  "The system can make it in real time," Howard said in a rush. "There will be press releases appearing on the wires and online media outlets across the country. I can set up a routine to index them and cross match them as they hit the Web and the wires. It'll take two minutes to get it started."

  The sour-lemon, bloodless gray face of Dr. Harold W. Smith seemed to blossom in surprise. He had been hacking the global networks since Mark Howard was in diapers. Hell, he had almost single-handedly created a sort of global Internet years before the university researchers at Stamford University ever conceived of the unique idea to share data over telephone lines using their room-size, number-crunching computing machines. But he had never allowed himself to fall behind the state of the art in terms of data compilation or networking technology. Still, at this moment he didn't clearly understand how Mark Howard intended to create a cross-referencing applications when there was nothing yet to cross-reference to.

  Mark Howard was more than a little surprised when

  Harold W. Smith got up and gestured at
the chair. "Please. I'd like to see how you go about it."

  Mark Howard walked behind the desk and sat in Dr. Smith's chair. He put his fingers on the keyboard, tested their tactile response and suddenly he was quite comfortable.

  He typed furiously fast, as if he were beating the commands out of the keys. Smith was disappointed when he saw where the young man was headed. The online edition of the Runoff Gazette from Runoff, New Mexico. It had to be a small town since Smith had never heard of it, and the newspaper didn't look like his first choice for vital intelligence.

  Before Smith had time to ask about it, Howard had a second window open and brought up a script from the store of custom applications stored in the CURE mainframes. Howard sped through the code, typed in a few extra commands, then hit the return key.

  He sat back, folded his arms, and smiled.

  "Mark?"

  "" Runoff Gazette" the young assistant director said.

  "I see that."

  "The Folcroft Four are hacking it. The Gazette's got one of those systems to alert readers when there is an update. Lots of Web sites have them."

  Smith was sure he was missing something. "So you're signing us up to get updates from the Runoff Gazette!'

  "Yeah. Yes. But the system isn't too secure and it's piggybacked on the Gazette's internal LAN, so I've got the Folcroft Four reprogramming the system to feed all electronic documentation generated in the newspaper offices into a hidden Web page." Mark looked up at his boss and saw the heavy lines of concern. "You see what I've done, Dr. Smith? I've got the newspaper server dumping all its content into Web pages only we know about, indexing it and sending us the results if and when they match our search terms. MAEBE. If somebody in the vicinity of Runoff, New Mexico, becomes a part of MAEBE, we'll get the news, official and unofficial."

  "In Runoff, New Mexico?"

  Mark Howard smiled, sat up, and his fingers snapped so viciously against the glass that Smith was sure the young man had to be bruising his fingertips. The screen filled with chaos.

  "It multiplying," Mark explained. "The script can hack the systems used by ninety-five percent of the media outlets in the United States. They're all a lot alike. Thousands of them, and they'll all be doing CURE'S work for it. We don't have to go to them. They send the intelligence we want to us as soon as it is generated."