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

by Updegrove, Andrew

  “My phone? Why?”

  “I am not going to ask twice.”

  Butcher handed it over. White Crow tapped the keys and began swiping through screens.

  “How did you know my password?”

  “‘Jim&Kate?’ I’m sure I never could have guessed. But you log on often enough at the tables that anyone could see.” He held the phone up.

  “Can you tell me what this icon is for?”

  “It’s my email account.”

  “Exactly. No, no need to give me your password; I have that, too.” He closed the phone and put it in his pocket.

  “Now hear me. Don’t even think about changing your password, switching to a different email account, or opening a new one. Before you’re back in your car, I will have extracted the data on your last 10,000 emails – who to, who from, and how often. If I see any changes in these patterns, I will immediately let your superiors know that you have granted access to someone outside the agency.”

  “Please, Ohanzee….”

  “That’s all.”

  “But Ohanzee!”

  “I said that’s all!”

  Butcher waited a moment more, and then made his way to the office door. With his hand on the knob, he paused and turned.

  “What’s a ‘naalté?”

  White Crow looked up. His face relaxed into his thin, trademark smile. “Ah, naalté! So funny you should ask. It’s what our Navajo brothers call a slave. Tell me − was there anyone in particular you had in mind?”

  As Butcher closed the door behind him, he heard a sound he had long doubted existed. White Crow was laughing.

  * * *

  Frank was deeply immersed in the code of Angry Indians. He’d never consciously decided to help Marchand out, and if his old boss had called to put the question to him right then he would have said that he didn’t know. But the puzzle of how the malware operated had been tugging at him, and there seemed to be no harm in figuring that out.

  The voting apps he had downloaded all worked pretty much as he would have expected: each displayed the candidates, provided blocks to be checked after each one, displayed the results of your voting and asked you to confirm your choices, and then sent the results to the voting machine when you touched your phone to the wireless voting logo.

  He could see why they were so popular with town governments as well as voters. Not only did they display all kinds of information about each candidate, but they also allowed you to vote before you went to the polling station. That meant shorter lines, since those using apps could vote in a matter of seconds instead of puzzling over minor office candidate choices and reading ballot measures they weren’t aware of until they were standing in the booth.

  He expected that confirming how the vote got changed inside the phone wouldn’t take him too much time, now that he knew which app to focus on. And he’d already seen it in action once at the distribution center, so he had an idea at what point in the voting process something suspicious happened. The more interesting question was to figure how whoever had hacked the app decided which votes should be redirected to which candidates. The simplest way would be to just change every vote to whichever candidate it was the unknown culprit wanted to win.

  But that would be too obvious. Somehow they had to figure out how many votes needed to be switched, and in which states, in order to win but not arouse suspicion. If they were really good, they’d also factor in which way a given district usually voted, so that they could begin changing votes as soon as a voting station opened. And since the election would be won by electoral votes rather than by a national, popular majority, they’d have to calculate the number of votes they needed on a state-by-state basis.

  Judging by the results of the primary voting and the spreadsheet Josette had prepared, he was quite sure that the voting adjustments were happening in real time, or close to it. Someone, somewhere, must not only have a very detailed and robust algorithm, but some pretty impressive processing power as well, and was using both to switch just enough votes from one candidate to another in real time to get the result they wanted.

  But how would they know, from state to state, how many votes to alter? Most of the accumulating vote totals stayed out in the field until the polls closed. That meant that the hacker would have no access to the real voting totals as they were piling up, voting station by voting station.

  Frank stewed on that for a while. How would he tackle that? And what did he have to work with? Well, for starters, so long as no one closed the back door to the polling systems, the hacker would gain a pretty good idea going into Election Day how people were likely to vote. That should allow them to start with a pretty good idea – say plus or minus five percent – how many votes needed to be switched.

  But that wouldn’t be good enough if the race was closer than the polls predicted, or if the polls themselves were off the mark. And that could happen, since you couldn’t predict with certainty which people would actually get off their butts and vote.

  Anyway, what the polls were saying now wouldn’t tell him much about how the hacker had developed their algorithm to begin with, since they would have had to devise their plan at least a year ago. Back then, they would have had to take all possibilities into account, and they also couldn’t know how many mobile phones they could infect. He decided there had to be more to the planning than relying on the final poll numbers to set the final switching orders that would be sent to the hacked phones.

  Clearly, it was time to engage in some fevered pacing. He rose to his feet and began walking the few available spaces back and forth in his small living room.

  So what else did the hacker have to work with? Well, the votes of the people with the apps, of course! As the day progressed, the hacker would have a more and more accurate idea of how people were actually voting. If they had tens or hundreds of thousands of apps in every state, that would be far more reliable than any poll. And they would also know what districts those app owners cast their votes in through the geolocation function of the game app.

  He was pacing faster now, swerving out of his living room, into his tiny kitchen and down his hallway as well. The rest of the pieces fell into place fairly naturally. He had always assumed that when the owner of a phone activated her voting app, the hacked app would check in with headquarters, report its location, and be told whether or not to switch the vote, and if so, to which candidate. Now, he realized, in order to capture the predictive value of each copy of the app, the real intentions of the voter would be equally important, so the first thing that would happen when the hacked app logged into the host system would be to report how the owner of the phone was actually voting. The hacker’s system would incorporate this most-current data from the field into its algorithm at the same time it was sending the vote switching message back again, thereby constantly refining its effectiveness throughout Election Day.

  Well, now, wasn’t that pretty slick? Frank upped his earlier estimate of the amount of computing power the hacker would need by several notches.

  He sat down at his diminutive kitchen table and poured himself a cup of cold coffee. He now had an idea how the hacker would avoid shifting too many votes. But how could the hacker tell whether he had enough votes under his control? That was an interesting question, and depended on all sorts of variables, each of which would be hard to nail down.

  For starters, the hacker wouldn’t know whether more liberals or conservatives would get out and vote. On the other hand, the hacked app could report back whether the phone also carried a voting app. But again, the hacker couldn’t know how many of the owners of those phones would actually vote, and how many of that final, smaller number of individuals would decide or remember to use their phones to vote.

  He got up and started walking again. How many copies of the app would have to be out there? And were they in the right states? If not, t
he hacker might not have enough votes to play with to rack up enough electoral votes. If it really was a close race, then they’d have plenty of room to spare. But if one of the candidates was really far ahead, maybe the plan was already doomed to failure? Or how about this scenario − if too many of the people with hacked smartphones intended to vote for the hacker’s candidate anyway, then the whole scheme would collapse, because there wouldn’t be enough votes to switch. Even with 40 million downloads, it would probably have to be a pretty close race for the hacker to know for sure his candidate could win.

  He stopped pacing. Okay, and so what? With the polls worthless, only the hacker knew the answers to any of the questions Frank was asking.

  He looked at his watch; he’d just spent an hour analyzing something he couldn’t get to the bottom of, and couldn’t use anyway. He had to assume that the race was close enough to be successfully hacked, because he couldn’t afford not to. It was time to get back to working on something productive.

  For starters, that meant figuring out how the switch was accomplished, and there seemed to be two logical ways to do that. One was easy, the other hard.

  He doubted that the hacker would have chosen the hard way, which would be for the Cavalry and Indian code to take over control of the voting app. There were multiple voting apps, and the hacker would therefore have to find a vulnerability in each one, and then exploit it. The easier way would be to find some element that was external to every version of the voting app and work with that.

  The obvious one was the radio signal that all of the apps would use to send their information to the voting machine. If the hacker could intercept that signal along the way, they wouldn’t have to do anything to the voting app or the voting machine. That was such an elegant and logical approach to take that Frank was sure it must be the answer.

  Luckily, he was in a good position to test his theory, because at the start of the project he had been given access by Voldemort to the source code for one of the brands of voting machine. Having that was crucial, because if he only had the kind of code that was normally shipped with a computer, called “object code,” all he would have would be the endless lines of gibberish that only a computer could understand. But source code was “human readable,” or geek readable, anyway, so he would be able to see exactly what the software did, and how. It was time to see what would really happen on Election Day.

  * * *

  Butcher stared straight ahead as he waited for his flight to start boarding, oblivious to the other passengers milling about. His mind was more than occupied by a single, inescapable conclusion: no matter that his tormentor had said they’d be even if he delivered the secret to hacking the voting. After what the pit boss had called him, he was convinced that White Crow would never let him go. The most he could hope was that there might come a time when he no longer had anything that White Crow wanted.

  What could he do? There seemed to be no way out short of killing the casino manager, and he knew he was incapable of doing such a thing, or even of hiring someone else to do it for him.

  “Last call for flight 780 to Dallas-Ft. Worth.”

  Damn! He’d been so preoccupied he’d almost missed his plane! He was reaching for his roll-aboard when a barely audible voice at his elbow said, “I can help you.”

  Butcher snapped his head to his right, and found himself gazing into a newspaper.

  “What did you say?” he whispered.

  The soft voice from behind the newspaper repeated itself. “I can help you. I was at the casino today.”

  Butcher waited for more, but instead the speaker lowered his paper, folded it neatly to its original form, and then in half once more. Standing up, he placed the newspaper on his seat, with the print aligned in Butcher’s direction. Then he looked at his watch, picked up his carry-on bag, and walked away.

  Butcher was about to hurry after him, when he noticed that there was a telephone number written in the margin of the paper, followed by his own initials. He stared at it for a moment, and then, trying to look as if a headline had caught his eye, reached out to pick up the paper as casually as possible. Clutching it to his chest, he hurried onto the plane.

  * * *

  40

  You Really Look Like You Could Use a Vacation

  The Republican and Democratic conventions were anticlimactic at best. For both candidates there was the usual problem of foregone conclusions. No serious challenger to the President had arisen from within his own party, and Wellhead had piled up enough delegates to lock up the nomination before the primary season was half complete.

  The big push to the finish line, however, was going to be something else again. Over a billion dollars had been raised by each of the two traditional parties. Even Yazzie had begun to pull in real money, though far less than his opponents. Now that the polls indicated the possibility of a dead heat between all three candidates on Election Day, the gloves were off as well. The President and Wellhead, as well as their PACs and Super PACS, were now buying as many attack ads targeting the CCA candidate as at each other.

  As usual, Yazzie was successful in turning disadvantage into a display of virtue. The voters were sick and tired of politicians, so his lack of experience struck many as a plus. With no Super PAC money behind him and just enough grassroots economic support to keep his own name out there, he engaged in no negative campaigning at all. And with no past voting history or party affiliation to work with, the negative ads his opponents cobbled together sounded hollow and desperate. The more negative advertising the Republicans and Democrats engaged in, the better he looked.

  Nor did Yazzie have to spend any time, or tarnish his own luster, by campaigning for other candidates, or defending his party’s past mistakes. Every ad he ran, every statement he made, and every photo op his handlers scheduled, could be dedicated solely towards winning votes, rather than trying to avoid losing them.

  Naturally, it was driving Richard Fetters crazy.

  * * *

  Len Butcher stared at his watch until it was exactly 10:15 AM. Then, clutching a thumb drive in his pocket, he strode out of the department store, up to the curb, and raised his hand in the air. A cab with tinted windows swerved to the curb, and he stepped in.

  “Welcome aboard.” The person seated behind the driver slid the window shut between the front and back seat.

  Butcher’s companion was unmemorable to the point of fading into the upholstery of the cab. An anonymous face, with an anonymous voice, protruded from an anonymous suit. Butcher assumed that if asked, he’d say his name was something like John Smith. Butcher felt envious.

  “I assume you’ve been able to pull together the materials that we discussed?”

  “Yes, I’ve got everything on a thumb drive. I can display them for you, but I can’t allow you to make copies of anything. I shouldn’t even have agency files on a thumb drive, let alone take them offsite.”

  “That’s fine. We just need a bit of confirmation before we can commit to do as we’ve discussed.”

  Butcher belatedly thought to look out the window to see where they were headed.

  “Where are we going? And who am I going to be meeting with?”

  “We’ll be there in just a few minutes. I’ll tell you where to go when we get there.” His escort glanced out the window. “Trees are just starting to change, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Butcher said, frowning. He wondered what he was getting himself into now.

  * * *

  When the taxi came to a halt, Butcher stepped out, alone, under the portico of a downtown hotel. The lobby was awash in press and people of all stripes – literally. Many wore red, white and blue ties, jackets or other apparel. One contingent, wearing “Hook’em, Wellhead!” T-shirts had added red, white and blue paper top hats – with paper cattle horns, no less − to their ensembles. Perhaps the candidate himself was
about to make an appearance.

  But there was no time to find out. As instructed, he took an elevator to the third floor, where he found himself in an empty hallway of doors, each with a nametag outside bearing a name like, “Algonquin,” “Iroquois,” and “Wampanoag.” Something about that seemed vaguely incongruous under the circumstances, but he was too nervous to figure out what it was. When he reached “Powhatan,” he stopped abruptly and stared at the closed door. Once he passed through it, he would surely be committed. Should he turn around and leave?

  Taking a deep breath, he tapped on the door. He barely heard the sound himself, so after waiting for thirty seconds, he tried again, this time more aggressively.

  The door opened while his knuckles were still poised in mid-air, leaving him facing a very recognizable Vice Presidential candidate and former Cabinet member. He caught Butcher in an intense stare for a moment before turning and taking a seat at the head of a table that stretched a full thirty feet down the length of an empty and only half-lit conference room.

  “Sit down,” his host said, and Butcher took a chair along the side of the table, feeling like a student called to the principal’s office. His chair was uncomfortably low and straight backed. He fumbled briefly but unsuccessfully to change its altitude and angle.

  Giving up, he turned back to face his host, who was obviously quite comfortable in his own, better adjusted seat. Butcher guessed it was set six inches higher than his own, so that he found himself looking up, rather than down, into the unblinking eyes that were trained on his own.

  He cleared his throat, but his host still said nothing. Butcher began to tremble.

  “I’ve brought the information I was told to. If you have a laptop, I can show it to you.”

  Butcher glanced around the table, noticing for the first time that there was no computer to be seen.