The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2)

by Updegrove, Andrew

  He opened his email and clicked on the link that Josette had sent. The app had a peculiar name: Angry Indians/Angry Cavalry. That wasn’t very politically correct. He scrolled down, and saw that there were two sets of almost identical screen shots. Above one set, it said Angry Indians, and above the other, Angry Cavalry. Apparently, you could play the game in either of two modes.

  He clicked on an arrow on a video clip of the Indian version, and watched as the animated Native Americans sent a terrified cow hurtling over the palisade wall of a fort. He hadn’t been much of a history student, but he was pretty sure Native Americans never used catapults. Oh well, it was just a game.

  He tried the Cavalry version, and this time it was a hapless bison that landed inside a circle of tepees.

  Okay, so it was a best-selling game. Why would Josette be so sure that this was what they were looking for?

  He did a search of the game name and was surprised to see that the top hits were all stories in the mainstream press instead of at gaming sites. It seemed that people who were politically engaged had piled on in masses. There was even an online gaming site where you could log on in one mode – say as an Indian – and play against people that had logged on as Cavalry.

  He clicked through to that site, and saw that there could be as many as 83,124 cattle and bison in virtual flight at that very moment. There was a big scoreboard, too, showing which player was winning nationally, by state, even by city. Clearly, the electorate had found a healthy way to relieve their pre-election animosities while waiting for the big day. He checked another page and saw that, unlike some games, the only version available was for mobile devices. And it was free.

  He had to hand it to Josette. The game checked off every block on the list of criteria he’d developed. But before he tried to inveigle his way into another establishment under an alias he wanted to be as sure as he could be that he was on the right trail. He called her back.

  “So Frank! What do you think?”

  “I agree, that looks pretty promising. But the only way we’re going to know that this, or any other app, is the one we’re looking for is by running it on a phone that we’re using to vote on a real voting machine. Maybe several different voting machines, if it doesn’t work on all of them. I don’t want to have to do that more than once. Which other apps look promising?”

  There was only silence at the other end of the phone. He waited, but still she said nothing.

  “Josette?”

  “Oh!” she exploded. “I cannot take it anymore! I have such a chicken to pluck with you!”

  “Uh…”

  “You can never believe that anyone else can come up with anything! And you insist on always making things so complicated!”

  “Josette…”

  “No ‘Josette!’ Unless you think of something yourself, it can never be right! You need to acknowledge that other people have brains, too!”

  She paused for breath, giving him a chance to pose the question he desperately wanted to ask. “Uh, Josette…”

  “What!”

  “A chicken to pluck?”

  “Is that not the phrase?”

  “Do you maybe mean ‘a bone to pick?’”

  Silence. “Is that what I meant?”

  “I think so.”

  “Oh.” It sounded like she had calmed down. “Whatever. Still. I saw this and was so sure that this must be the one. Can’t you just download a copy and test it?”

  “Sure, sure. And I promise I will. But I might not find anything. And if I did, I’d still need to have the equipment on the other side of the transaction to be sure. And we haven’t considered yet what we would do if we did find the right app, have we? I want to understand as much as possible before we double down on this one.”

  “Excuse me − ’double down?’”

  “Sorry. Before we put all our eggs… Damn! Until we’re sure we’ve got the right one.”

  Josette frowned. What he said made sense, but she had hoped that for once Frank would agree with her immediately. It took some further nudging from him before she agreed to look for at least nine more credible possibilities while he started the long drive to the distribution center.

  * * *

  46

  Let Me Give You My Card

  Frank had not enjoyed admitting to Josette that he was not up to date on the election. Politics didn’t interest him, but he recognized that if he paid too little attention he might miss an important clue. Worse, Josette might pick up on it instead. So it was that when he arrived late in the afternoon at the town where the warehouse was located, he spent the evening catching up on what was happening in the electoral trenches.

  The first impression he formed was that Henry Yazzie was riding an almost surreal wave of success. Everything seemed to be going his way. Why was that? He started skimming one news site after another.

  The Centrist Coalition of America had officially endorsed Yazzie, and was bankrolling his campaign. It looked like they’d done quite a job organizing local activity, too, in every blue and swing state before the deadline. Most of the red states as well. And what do you know? They’d gotten Yazzie on the ballot in every single state! That took real organization and effort.

  It wasn’t going so well for the conservative candidates, though; they were still dragging each other’s dirty laundry out for all to see. The President must be enjoying that….

  Ah – too bad. Vance Cabot had dropped out. And he was the most experienced candidate by a mile. Not such a big surprise, though, after coming in last in Iowa and New Hampshire.

  Thank goodness – Roxanne Rollins and Landa Goshen were gone, too. It had been fun for the late night comedians while it lasted, though.

  Johnson was still hanging on, but probably not for long. It looked like his fundraising had fallen off a cliff.

  Oh, and look here – crazy old Roland Overby was still waving the Libertarian flag. It looked like he hadn’t broken into the double digits in a single primary yet, but here he was pledging that he’d keep yapping at the heels of the front runners all the way to the convention.

  That left just who… right, Randall Wellhead and Hollis Davenport. So one of them would have to be the final nominee.

  So much for the raw data. What were the pundits saying?

  Frank hunted up a recording of one of the Sunday morning political news shows and settled in to listen as the host of the program quizzed his quests about the latest developments.

  So let’s start with Henry Yazzie. What do you have to say about him, Tom?

  What do I say? I say it looks like the whole world wants him to win!

  How so?

  Well, you got your unrest in the Middle East – of course. Then there’s China getting more aggressive in Southeast Asia and Africa – that’s where all the natural resources they want come from. Europe looks like it’s going to drag our economy down with theirs – again – and ours had been stumbling to begin with. Finally, the President’s numbers haven’t stopped sliding since the beginning of the year.

  But why should that only help Yazzie? What about the Republican candidates?

  What about them? The conservative Super PACS are spending all their money running attack ads against each other’s candidates. If you believed the commercials, you’d never want to vote for any of them.

  How about you, Margaret? Do you agree that when things go wrong it only helps Yazzie?

  Absolutely. The Republicans haven’t passed a single piece of legislation yet that could boost the economy – and goosing the economy is what they ran on. And when the President proposed a big job creation bill, they shot it down. Then they accuse him of doing nothing. The voters are sick of it all.

  Ray?

  Of course the voters are. And why not? When the President issues an Executive Order to t
ry and get anything done, the leaders of the House and Senate accuse him of exceeding his Constitutional powers. It makes everybody – except Yazzie – look like they’re characters in a sitcom!

  Shouldn’t that help the President, though, Tom?

  Not really. People just want to see something get done. Fair or not, they’re always going to blame the man at the top if they can’t make ends meet. And besides, there’s this new rash of terrorist acts against U.S. interests abroad. The conservatives are having a field day attacking the President for not doing enough to safeguard Americans.

  How about that, Margaret? Do you think that’s fair? After all, Congress refused the President’s request to improve overseas security just a few months ago this year.

  Do you mean fair as in “fair,” or “fair,” as in Washington? [laughter]

  Frank sighed and closed the video. Politics was certainly proceeding as usual in an election year.

  Still, it seemed clear that more and more Americans were disgusted with the entire sorry, Beltway mess. He shouldn’t be surprised that voters were attracted by what the good-looking young Native American candidate had to say. After all, everything he said sounded rational and mainstream. They weren’t hearing that from anyone else. One commentator had even begun calling him the “Native American John Kennedy.”

  He tried another news show and fast forwarded a video until Yazzie’s name was mentioned. This time the host was interviewing a former presidential campaign manager:

  Well sure, he’s had a pretty good ride. Of course, so far the President and the conservative candidates have avoided criticizing him directly.

  Why’s that?

  Well, in the beginning I don’t think they wanted to lend any credibility to his campaign by acknowledging that it even existed. The last thing any politician wants is a three-way race. There’s too much uncertainty. And then I think they were also nervous about attacking a Native American.

  Why? Native Americans are a pretty small demographic.

  Right. But they might swing a few western states. And larger minority constituencies – like blacks and Hispanics – might read an attack against a Native American as indicating other biases on the part of a candidate. And anyway, Yazzie doesn’t have a voting record, so they don’t have much to work with.

  Of course. But both the right and the left can criticize him for not supporting some of their main initiatives.

  All well and good. But what does that leave them with? Calling him a “moderate?” That just further defines him as the only centrist candidate. And this just may be the year of the centrist.

  Frank closed his laptop at the end of the interview and mulled over everything he’d heard. He was surprised how radically Yazzie’s fortunes had changed. Even the press was being gentle, at least so far. Maybe that wasn’t surprising; Yazzie’s positive message must be more fun to write about than the incessant sniping and mudslinging of the main party candidates.

  * * *

  And then, of course, there were the polls. They continued to show Yazzie’s popularity rising. If current trends continued, more of the Americans deemed most likely to vote would be casting their ballots for Yazzie on Election Day than would favor any other candidate. Publicly, party pundits pooh-poohed these polls. They said that when the time came to actually vote, the same people would cast their ballots for either a Republican or a Democrat candidate, just as they had for more than a hundred years.

  In private, though, party leaders were panicking. It wasn’t because they really believed that Yazzie could win. What did concern them was the fact that Yazzie couldn’t be clearly categorized as either conservative or liberal. That made this election unique, leaving them with no way to tell for sure which party would lose the most votes to the increasingly popular interloper.

  Although both would deny it, representatives of both the President and Hollis Davenport had contacted Yazzie’s campaign manager to confidentially ask whether Yazzie would be interested in a discrete meeting between their respective handlers. The purpose was obvious − to determine whether he might consider discontinuing his campaign in return for a place in a post-election administration. Davenport’s man implied that it was possible that his candidate might even consider Yazzie as a running mate.

  Carson Bekin was sorely tempted by Davenport’s suggestion. It seemed that Yazzie’s rise in the polls couldn’t continue forever. What leverage would they have after the election was lost? Now seemed to be the ideal time to capitalize on his unexpected surge of popularity. And if he became Vice President, he’d have to be taken seriously when the next election cycle came around.

  But Yazzie would hear none of it. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t because his success had gone to his head, or that he had decided that he really could win. He assured Carson Bekin (as well as himself) that it was a matter of principle. Throwing his lot in with either Davenport or the President would mean betraying all of the policy positions he’d worked so hard to promote. Who would ever trust him in the future, even if he became Vice President?

  So there was nothing for Bekin to do but convey Yazzie’s polite, but negative, response to both sides. He wondered, though, why he hadn’t heard from Randall Wellhead’s people. Were they that convinced that Wellhead would win?

  It was mid-August now, and the first national convention of the Centrist Coalition of America was set to get under way in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There was genuine curiosity over who Yazzie would pick as his running mate.

  Would it be another Native American, a Caucasian, or someone of another minority ethnicity (and if so, which one)? Would it be a nobody, like Yazzie himself, or might someone with traditional political credibility roll the dice on Yazzie’s surging fortunes? The media was paying close attention to Yazzie’s travel plans, as well as to those of his closest aides for any clues that might suggest who he was considering.

  * * *

  Frank was fidgeting on the edge of a vinyl-covered chair in a small waiting room at the distribution center. The only other objects within view were a second chair, identical to his, a glass coffee table littered with old magazines, and a reception desk with no one behind it. The glass door leading to the interior of the building was locked, and all he could see on the other side were ceiling-high racks of boxes. He’d already pressed the button next to the sign that said, “For assistance, please ring.”

  He tapped his feet rapidly on the linoleum floor and waited. There had to be somebody inside – there were at least 65 loading docks on this side of the building alone, as well as a couple dozen cars in the parking lot. Maybe he should have figured out somebody to call first?

  Then the glass door opened. A young man in coveralls came out.

  “Can I help you?”

  Frank stood up and smiled. “Yes, I’m here to check out the voting machines you’re holding for shipment. There’s a new software update we want to install before that gear gets shipped all over the place.” He pulled one of his cards out of his wallet as he was speaking and handed it over.

  The young man glanced at the card. “Okay. I’ll need you to wait here a minute while I log your data into our system.” He turned around and disappeared through the glass door.

  Now what? What did “log-in the data” mean? What if his data got rejected? Would this guy call the police?

  But the young man soon returned and led Frank into what looked like the world’s largest “Big Box” discount store. Row after row of twenty-foot tall storage racks crammed with huge boxes ran off into the darkness of what seemed like infinity.

  “Let’s see…,” his guide was swiping his index finger over and over across a tablet computer. “Okay – here we go: ‘municipal polling equipment.’ Figures, right? They couldn’t just call them ‘voting machines,’ could they? Let’s hop in this.”

  Frank sat next to him on a golf c
art parked against the wall, and they drove for several hundred yards along the endless rows of racks, motion-controlled lights winking on ahead and off behind them as they hummed along. Finally, they turned down one of the aisles between the racks, and rolled to a stop. His guide pointed to the third shelf up on the left side and said “There you go. How many of them do you need to work on?”

  After his experience in Promise, Frank had anticipated a question like this. “I’ll have to check the numbers against my records. Maybe you could come back in fifteen minutes? After I figure out which ones I need to work on I’ll need to take them down and power them up. Is there a place I could use for that?”

  “Sure. We’ve got a room we use for breaking big boxes down and repackaging the contents for smaller deliveries. You can use that.”

  As the golf cart disappeared, Frank dragged a wheeled access ladder down the aisle and stared at the boxes, trying to figure out what each one might hold, and from which manufacturer.

  By the time his guide reappeared, this time driving a forklift, Frank was ready to point out the boxes he wanted to work with. He’d arrived prepared this time, with complete lists of product numbers he’d pulled down from the vendors’ web sites.

  Ten minutes later, his selections were spread on tables in the packing room.

  “When you’re done, dial 100 on that phone on the wall, and someone will pick you up.”

  Frank nodded his thanks, and began cutting open the boxes and trying to figure out what exactly he was finding inside.

  Far away, Len Butcher was deciding what to do about the information displaying on his computer screen. It seemed that one Alan Turing of Lincoln IT Electoral Services was engaged in an unauthorized visit to a very large warehouse in a state he had not been instructed to visit.

  * * *

  Six hours later, Frank was famished. He was almost finished testing systems from three manufacturers, using eleven identical new phones, each of which had three different voting apps loaded. Ten phones also had one of the apps on board that he and Josette had agreed upon. The eleventh would serve as his control unit. He’d used that one to provide baseline data that he could use to compare with the information he gathered from the phones loaded with the suspect apps.