Fair enough, he thought, and softened. “Alright, I grant you that. I’m not exactly Mr. Friendly. I hate socializing even with people I know. It’s kind of my worst nightmare. Makes me think of the first Indiana Jones movie…”
“It had to be snakes!” She completed the thought for him, and this time they both laughed.
It wasn’t until after they had finished eating that Josette finally got around to the primaries. She set her fork down, and leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand.
“So Frank, do tell me what you think about this Mr. Yazzie doing so well. He seems to have come out of nowhere, and now perhaps he is becoming a serious challenger?”
Frank started to analyze Yazzie’s platform, but she interrupted him.
“I’m sorry, no. I do not mean his policies. I am asking, do you think that he is really doing so well?”
“You mean, do I think that someone’s tampering with the actual votes?”
“Yes! Do you?”
Frank leaned back in his chair. “Why, I hadn’t really thought about it; I’ve been pretty preoccupied with the book. But no, it doesn’t seem all that odd to me that there could be a strong ‘none of the above’ kind of protest vote, especially this early in the campaign. After all, the President’s popularity is in the toilet, and all of the Republican front runners seem to be unelectable. Why not?”
“Why not is not the same as ‘why,’ that’s why!”
“Well, okay, but still, what is it that makes you suspicious? That guy Perot who we read about did really well for a while, too.”
“It’s like this, you see,” she began, and then told him how little she had been able to find out about the CCA.
“Alright, so there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available about them. But still, why not just assume it’s a protest vote?”
“Because it matches the polls so closely.”
“But I fixed that!”
As the words were leaving his mouth, he saw a triumphant look spreading across her face. “Uh, didn’t I?”
“That’s what I thought, too. But today I checked with my friend at Voldemort, and she tells me that they are no longer trying to figure out who it was that had hacked the pollsters.”
“That’s good, isn’t it? I mean, weren’t you worried that eventually they’d figure out it was you and your friends?”
“Yes, of course. But still, why should they stop? Is it not a serious matter that someone had hacked those systems?”
“Sure, but so what? Why look a gift horse in the mouth?”
She looked puzzled at the metaphor. He tried again “I mean, why not just be grateful and let it go at that?”
“Because it matters! Don’t you remember how much time and effort my colleagues and I invested in trying to help your voters realize the mistakes they were making? Why would we stop now, if it looks like someone is tampering with the election?”
“You mean, ‘someone else.’”
“Shh! You are speaking too loud!”
Frank leaned in. “Sorry. But this still sounds unlikely – someone hacking both the polls and the ballot machines, too. Why do you think that?”
“Because I hacked one of the pollster systems again this afternoon, and the software has not been repaired!”
“Are you crazy? What if someone is still monitoring those systems?”
“Except that my friend says that they are not. Anyway, I was very careful. But don’t you think it is quite a coincidence that the agency that discontinued the investigation did not remove the back doors? And that no one else – except us – knows that the pollster systems had been hacked?”
“So you think that Voldemort is trying to hack the election?”
“No. I think that Len Butcher is!”
“Butcher?”
“No, not Butcher only. I expect that he is part of some bigger picture.”
Frank was still trying to process this when the band swung into its first number; he had been so engrossed in what Josette had been saying that he hadn’t noticed as the musicians took the stage one by one and begin fiddling with their instruments. It was difficult now to discuss anything seriously, so they settled back into their seats to listen.
Or perhaps Josette did. As usual, Frank’s mind was more engaged in abstract thought than in appreciating something as frivolous as music. Now what? Was Josette on to something, or was she simply reading patterns into events that weren’t there at all?
And either way, did he want to have anything to do with it? Other than running into her once by accident in the bar, he hadn’t heard or seen Josette since Iowa. And now, it seemed obvious, she had gotten in touch just to see how much information she could get out of him. He folded his arms and scowled at the stage.
When the band took a break, Josette tried to pick up the conversation where they had left off. But he was distant and uncommunicative, and she could not get him to concede that there might be something to investigate after only three primaries. Before the band came back from its break they left the club and went their separate ways.
* * *
Over the next weeks, two more primaries were held, and Fetters called a spreadsheet up on his computer to stare at the numbers he had been accumulating there. It was a very complicated piece of work, set up to incorporate both poll data as well as voting results across the nation. Now that he had the ability to influence the actual voting in almost every primary, the question was how to use that power aggressively enough to assure the desired outcome, but not so much so as to invoke suspicion.
The hard part had to do with the poll numbers. If he pushed the voting numbers too far too often, people would begin to wonder why his candidate always outperformed expectations, while the other candidates, at least as a group, underperformed. He only had a fixed number of votes to work with, since the votes cast could hardly exceed the number of voters that had checked in at the voting stations.
That meant that every time his candidate received an illegitimate vote, it had to come from someone else. Plus, the final results needed to be close enough to the pollsters’ predictions to not raise suspicion.
That hadn’t been too difficult to pull off in the first few primaries, because there were still so many candidates. The malware he’d paid to have developed only had to pull a small percentage of votes from each one.
But now he could see trouble ahead, because one candidate – Yazzie – was shooting up in the polls, and that meant that his voting totals needed to match the polls as well. Doing this had been part of the plan all along – he had wanted a credible candidate to siphon support away from the President – but he hadn’t counted on Yazzie being this credible. To keep things believable, he had been forced to not only let Yazzie keep all his votes, but even shift some legitimate votes to him, instead of Wellhead. Luckily, the declining poll numbers for the other candidates were making that possible, but he worried that this trend might not continue. And as weaker candidates began to drop out, the situation would become even less flexible.
He switched the spreadsheet over to graphic mode and instructed the program to project the current poll trends out through the end of the primary season. Unless Wellhead’s momentum picked up or Yazzie’s slowed down, the independent candidate would be ahead of Wellhead by Election Day. Fetters adjusted the voting totals up and down for each candidate to see how many votes he would need to shift to avoid that result, and kept at it as the clock counted down to midnight. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find a way to keep his candidate ahead of Henry Yazzie that wouldn’t be significantly out of sync with the predictions.
* * *
White Crow called up the spreadsheet that one of Baxter Maxwell’s boys had set up for him. The casino manager had been to business school, and he was impressed. It was a clever piece of work
, set up to incorporate both poll data as well as voting results from all 50 states. Now that he had the ability to influence the poll numbers it was easy to use that power to indirectly affect voters.
Every other candidate was now suffering at his command. At the same time, the media was reporting that Yazzie was gaining greater credibility and momentum by the day. Voters that had never heard of him six weeks ago were now voting for him.
Better yet, since he had never revealed anything about Len Butcher and the poll hacking to Fetters, he didn’t need to tamper with the actual voting at all. Simply by elevating Yazzie’s poll numbers higher and higher, week by week, he could leave it to Fetters to do the high-risk tampering in order to avoid arousing suspicion.
Playing with the sliders on the software, White Crow felt like a kid in a game arcade again, only better. This time the game was Punch and Judy, and he was Fetters’s puppet master, all without his rival knowing that someone was pulling his strings at all.
Within a minute he had all the poll numbers he needed to plant leading into this week’s primaries. He looked at his watch: 8:45 PM. Time to take a stroll around the casino floor and make sure that all was as well there as it was with Henry Yazzie’s inexorable march to the presidency.
Life was rarely this good, and he savored it as he greeted the regulars. He even tossed a few chips in the tip cups of his favorite pit bosses.
“Wonder what’s with the boss tonight?” one whispered to a waitress. “He looks like he just pulled off another Little Big Horn.”
* * *
Josette stared hard at the poll and voting spreadsheet she had so laboriously created. Now that she had five primary’s worth of data, she thought that the trends were undeniable. True, the numbers for Wellhead and Yazzie didn’t rise in precise lockstep, either with each other or with the polls. But if you were to draw a trend curve between their respective dots, there was no missing the fact that they rose in tandem, and much more smoothly than those of the other candidates, which jumped around considerably. Since this was true for both the polling and the primary results, someone had to be manipulating both.
The question was who? And how could she find out, all on her own?
* * *
“Dan, this is it! You’ve got to tone the text down or I’m going to back out of this deal!”
Grover looked up to find Frank shaking a thick sheaf of paper over his head. He looked rather like an old fashioned gospel preacher threatening his congregation with hell fire and damnation.
Grover adopted his most soothing, author-placating voice. “Right, right, Frank. Believe me, I understand how strongly you feel about the book not sounding like it’s all about you.”
“It’s not just that! It’s how you’re portraying me – like, like I’m some kind of Marvel Comics character! Here – here’s a good example! Listen to this:”
Looking neither right nor left, I careened at high speed – sometimes on two wheels − through the fleeing crowds that were desperately seeking to escape the Capital. I was just as desperate to reach my destination in the heart of the perhaps-doomed city, aware that I was the only man on earth that might still avert the impending nuclear apocalypse.
“And anyway, my father was driving!”
“Yeah, yeah, I kind of see what you mean. Maybe I can dial that back just a bit.” Then he continued, as he always did, in what had become their personal version of Kabuki theater.
“But you know, we’ve talked about this over and over. We’ve gotta sell a lotta books if you want to reach a lotta people with your message. And to do that, we gotta grab them by their, well, you know, with the story line and the action.”
“That’s what you always say. But there are lots of accurate books that become best sellers, and they don’t have any of this crap! And here – how about this – the part where you talk about the President being taken to a tunnel so he can be whisked off to the underground War Room:”
Chaseman and Sanford followed silently down the hall of the West Wing, and then down the stairs that led to the White House kitchen. The Acting President tried a joke to mask his anxiety. “I suppose you’ll be taking us through a secret door in the back of the meat freezer?”
The General didn’t laugh. “Hardly necessary, sir. Placing the entrance in the kitchen was a matter of necessity. The White House doesn’t always lend itself well to modern modifications. Would you please press your right thumb on this pad, sir?”
Grover nodded briskly. “Yeah! Pretty cool, don’t you think? But I also considered having him drop through a hatch door under the four poster bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. You like that better? I can change it.”
“That’s not the point! How do you know what they did at all?”
“Well, you know, it’s not like they’re going to tell me, is it? But he had to get to the War Room somehow, right?”
Sticking with their script, Grover moved on to Act 2.
“Anyway, that’s the type of book the publisher specified in the contract. So it’s a little late to try and change the deal when we’re two days away from the submission deadline and you’ve probably already spent your advance. And remember − you’re not gonna get the big bucks unless people buy the book.”
Grover had figured out early on that Frank had probably blown through his advance. Ever since, whenever Frank threw a tantrum, he would let him blow off steam for a while and then close off the discussion by bringing up the advance. As usual, it worked.
“Yeah, I know,” Frank said with less energy, staring ahead. Grover waited for more, but nothing followed. Puzzled, he followed Frank’s line of vision, and saw that Molly was holding Frank in a malevolent fixed stare. Grover wondered whether he should snap his fingers to bring him out of it.
Instead, he said gently, “So are we good to go, Frank?” His co-author broke free of the cat’s gaze and turned to Grover with a surprised, “where was I?” look on his face.
Finally he said, “Well, can you at least tone down that first part?”
“Sure! No problem. So how shall we tie things up, Frank? Do you want one last pass at the draft before I submit it? Or can I turn it in and you can just read the first page proofs when they come back? I need to tell you, though, once it’s in proof form, we need to be talking about typos and corrections, not rewriting, or the publisher will go ballistic.”’
Frank stewed on that for a minute. On the one hand, he knew now that when Grover promised to tone something down “a little,” he was using that word in the most diminutive sense possible. But on the other, the writer had worn him down. Frank had utterly failed at making line by line edits that resulted in text he would have allowed his own mother to read, much less the general public. And he couldn’t bear the thought of reading the breathless tale of his own supposed derring-do one more time.
“I guess just go ahead and submit it.” He knew when he was beaten.
* * *
31
The Salon of Mme. Falconet
Simone Falconet stared absently through the narrow window of her tiny, well organized kitchen. There was nothing particular to look at; only the windows of other apartments across the courtyard, some with their metal shutters already closed for the evening. Familiar sounds wafted up from below; a courtyard door closing as someone came home from shopping or a visit to the museum; the muffled sound of an annoyed child inside an apartment on another floor; the faint grumble of traffic rising from the Parisian street that lay beyond the opposite side of the building.
The sudden shrill note of the tea kettle behind her returned her thoughts to the moment. She turned off the gas and filled the china teapot on the tray she had prepared, and then carried it the few steps between the kitchen and her small, formally furnished sitting room. It was a seasonally damp, gray Sunday, but she left the lights off, content to let the shadows gather around her fo
r a while.
She regretted the waning of the day, not because her weekend had been pleasant (although it had), but because its end would mean the commencement of a new work week. The arguments among the faculty had been particularly petty and annoying of late, and the data her dutiful research assistants had collected recently had been perversely contradictory. More unsettling was how quickly the new head of her department had consolidated the support of her colleagues since Henri Gaumont, his predecessor, had retired from that position. Gaumont had been her mentor ever since her student days at the university where she was now a professor, the Institut d’études politiques de Paris – quite a mouthful, and hence simply “Sciences Po” to anyone familiar with the prestigious institution.
The elevation of Richard Pissante to head the Political Economy department would have been regrettable enough, given his superior and abrasive manner. But his contempt for the theories she had spent her entire career developing was personal and professionally threatening. Whether he actually disagreed with her premises or only used them as a pretext for undermining a rival candidate to succeed Gaumont hardly mattered. The result was the same.
While her protector was in charge, there had been little that Pissante could do beyond sniping at her work in print and making disparaging comments behind her back in the faculty lounge. Now she could feel her position eroding, as one professor after another found it expedient to fall into line behind the new department head rather than risk becoming the target of his condescension.
She picked up a magazine, but it was growing too dark to read easily. Anyway, there was no use trying to avoid the question. Her departmental problem demanded a solution, because her theories were by their nature controversial. Some critics even called them fascistic, a contention she found simplistic as well as insulting.
The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Page 20
