The Frankenstein Candidate Read online

  He needed to see his friend, right now. He called her—there was no answer. Damn it, where was she when he needed her the most? He left a message. He then went straight to his apartment, opened a bottle of bourbon, and started to cry.

  29

  Black Monday

  Despite all the forewarnings, Americans were unprepared for the economic catastrophe that surged like a tsunami. The falling U.S. dollar, combined with the prospect of war in the Middle East, shot gasoline prices up further. In two weeks, prices went from around $5.7 per gallon to $7.5 per gallon, while wholesale prices of West Texas Intermediate crude went from about $145 per barrel to near $190 per barrel. Food and commodity prices were already at record highs. Unemployment soared, reaching 18 percent, a level not seen since the Great Depression. Many of even those who were employed were in fact underemployed.

  There was plenty of mud available to throw. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats spared the other side. Marginal levels of civil unrest across the nation had already been reported in the press. But no one was quite prepared for what ensued on April 5.

  Liberals were angry at Republicans, at what they thought was a continued encouragement of a dog-eat-dog society. Conservatives were furious at liberals, whom they thought had underfunded a large number of promises. A number of unaffiliated folk, anarchists, and residual Tea Party activists were chafing at the bit against everything that represented government. If the middle class had it tough, the poor were at boiling point. Food and energy prices had more than doubled in two years, and Social Security payments that were tied to a consumer price index that exempted food and energy prices were no longer enough to subsist on. This was the class most vulnerable to provocation. And then there was crony big business and the connected. They were scared of straight talk, period. They needed to preserve the status quo at any cost. There was just no knowing who could incite whom.

  It started in Los Angeles on Sunday, April 5. A march of anti-globalization activists was intercepted by police and stopped at a major intersection. Someone threw a broken bottle. It hit a rookie policeman, leaving a deep gash on his right ear. He charged the suspected assailant with a baton. The marching crowd engulfed the policeman, throwing him to the ground, kicking and stomping on him. Injured, he opened fire, meaning to fire into the air to scare his attackers off. But a shot went awry, and one of the attackers was killed.

  The policeman was a Latino. That’s all the talk radio hosts needed to know. Never mind that the man was born in the United States. Never mind that he was defending himself. Never mind that he did not initiate the violence. Never mind that the death was an accident.

  On Monday, April 6, riots broke out all over the country. Fuel depots were lit, buses burned, car windows smashed, and shops were randomly looted. Shopkeepers opened fire on looters, and offices were trashed. The New York subway suffered a terrible accident when someone managed to throw metal pipes onto the rails, causing a train to derail.

  Dan Curtis, the bearded giant, had recently started work in the Vets Department in DC, near the Department of State building on 15th Street NW. His beard was back. This time though, it was neatly trimmed, albeit it still added a welcome contrast to the three-piece suit he wore to work. On Monday, the news of the riots was all over the radio and the internet, but it was the text that invited him to one that animated him. Dan excused himself on the pretext of sickness and took to the streets. Before long, he had walked past Farragut Square—he knew that a rampaging mob had begun to gather near Farragut North Metro, just up the road from where he worked.

  A block down the street, the cops were positioned near the entrance to Farragut West Metro. They must have intercepted the global text.

  Dan grabbed a seven feet long iron rail and stood in the middle of the mob’s path, the iron across his chest making him a virtual seven feet by seven feet cross, his right hand held high, palm outward in a stop sign.

  As the crowd neared, he recognized his old friends—the snake and the shrub. The hundreds that were marching stridently slowed down at the sight of the giant and his iron.

  “Not this time, Dan,” hissed the snake.

  “He is one of them now,” the shrub said, making himself heard above the din.

  Someone from behind threw a gasoline bomb, and it exploded right beside the giant.

  The cops charged from behind him, rubber bullets firing into the crowd. Dan roared ahead with his sideways iron rail pushing into the crowd, trying to hold them back. But the hundreds that swelled the crowd hesitated only a second, and even the giant’s strength was quickly overcome in a clash of batons and baseball bats. Over and above the clang of the anti-riot shields hitting his iron rail, the giant shouted a no, but guns were drawn when the steel of knives glinted in the afternoon sun.

  Somewhere in the mayhem, a stray bullet hit his head, and the giant fell, only to be trampled upon by cops and rioters alike till the Armadillo riot shields finally held sway and ambulances could safely swing in to the streets. It needed four medics to pick up his bleeding, unconscious form. Automated defibrillation kept the behemoth of peace ticking till he got to a hospital.

  Altogether, three thousand people died, and scores of others were injured in the most horrific, senseless, and purposeless day of rioting in American history.

  President Young called for an urgent session of Congress to consider imposition of martial law. The session was scheduled for Tuesday morning but erupted into an almost violent confrontation between Democrats and Republicans, each accusing the other of starting the riots. The bill could not be passed.

  Over the week, though, things became quieter. Frank Stein went back to his campaign office on Wednesday. He noticed that the door handle had been tampered with and the door was ajar. Clearly, someone had entered the office. He did not realize the full extent of the vandalism till he was inside. Papers were strewn everywhere. The tables and chairs were thrown all over the place. Frank noticed that the windows had been shattered, and some of the glass from the windows had spilled inside. Someone had written on the wall with red paint “Fuck off Frankenstein and take your rich buddies with you.” He noticed the neat handwriting and the correct spelling; it did not belong to a street thug. He did not keep cash in the office. No documents were missing. But the hard drives of the three computers were gone.

  The drawers had been emptied out—his USBs were gone too. Whoever did this knew him or at least of him; this was no robbery, it was a calculated and violent assault on his campaign. He always had one USB that he kept with him or at his home, but he had never preserved the hate e-mail he received on his main computer. Over the months, there had been at least six hundred hate letters and e-mails, maybe eight hundred—too many for the police to follow up on. Oh, the police. Yes, that’s right, he needed to make at least two calls—he called 911 and then he called Mike Rodrigo, the toughest guy he knew.

  The news of Casey Rogers’ poisoning had changed the rules. Rumors were circulating that Casey was terminally ill. Frank would have loved to visit him in hospital, to wish him well even though he vehemently disagreed with most of what Casey said except the part that seemed to have made him an assassination target. But Casey’s whereabouts were a tightly guarded secret, and rightly so, Frank thought.

  Mike Rodrigo was a former marine. He headed up a small private security firm that specialized in protecting celebrities and political targets. As a legitimate presidential candidate, Frank had requested federal protection, but it had neither been denied nor agreed to—the papers were stuck somewhere in the state machinery, and after Black Monday and the attack on his own office, Frank could wait no longer. In any event, federal rules only allowed Secret Service protection for presidential candidates in the last 120 days leading up to the election.

  To say Mike Rodrigo was a tough guy was an understatement. A veteran of the Iraq offensive and the Northern Pakistan incursion, he had also served in the 2015 Syrian peace-keeping force before being wounded by a bomb explosion that left him wit
h one leg. He spent three years in rehabilitation and came out with an artificial leg with which he practiced walking for fourteen hours a day until his body got used to it. At forty-three, he could still run five miles inside a half hour using one real and one artificial leg and lift twice his bodyweight on the bench press. They said he could shoot a clay pigeon in the eye from a distance of one hundred meters with a sniper’s rifle. He was tuned into the local police, the FBI, the armed forces, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Counter Terrorism Unit, besides also having friends at the local councils. His staff included veterans who were bomb experts and V8 super-car drivers. If you wanted to be safe from crowds and threats, Mike was the guy you hired.

  The late evening news on the day after Black Monday was consumed by the nationwide riots.

  The late-breaking news was equally ominous. Casey Rogers had slipped into a coma.

  30

  The Commandment of Integrity

  With Mike Rodrigo and his crew in tow, Frank went to the Net Station three days after Black Monday. Besides Kayla, there wasn’t a journalist in town who was prepared to be seen supporting him.

  Frank knew he could always post his commandments onto the Web if he so wished. But while there was a public broadcast network of any kind still prepared to air his views, he was perfectly happy to utilize it.

  “Civil unrest, a political assassination attempt, double-digit inflation, and near twenty percent unemployment, how bad are things going to get before they get better? Washington appears to have no answers. So listeners are ready to hear the heretic. Good evening, Mr. Stein,” Kayla said.

  “Thank you, Kayla, and good evening to you too. Firstly, I would like to point out that our government does not include food and energy prices in the inflation calculation. Real inflation is actually close to thirty percent already. It is headed toward fifty percent or more on an annual basis. Double-digit does not even begin to describe what we are about to see.”

  “Fifty percent? Some say you are just scaremongering, Mr. Stein. Is that why our economy is imploding?”

  “Only partly. There are other reasons. But we have a cost structure that is absurdly high relative to the Asian economies. But in 2014, we introduced a whole new cost that we kept adding to.”

  “What new cost?”

  “The carbon apology, a gross misrepresentation of true science.”

  “But don’t all nations abide by the Rio agreement?”

  “It is impossible to monitor. We have strong evidence that the BRICs do not.”

  “You mean Brazil, Russia, India, and China?”

  “Yes. The sheer monitoring expense is extravagant. But that’s not even the real issue. The real issue is that the whole carbon movement got disguised as science, and many nations, including the BRICs, know this.”

  “What specifically got disguised as science?”

  “The nonsense that parts of the world are about to get submerged in water unless we reduce carbon emissions. This never had any basis in science. There is little possibility that atmospheric carbon would decrease if mankind curtailed industrial production of carbon dioxide, at least for several decades.

  “This is before we get into the monitoring for carbon emissions, not to mention the difficulty of enforceability of this cult in developing countries that don’t really buy into this absurdity.

  “It is time we called this a cult, for like a religious cult it is. It is an anti-industrial movement. It is the romanticizing of returning to Mother Earth and a longing for a past where humans supposedly existed in harmony with nature. But this past never existed on our planet.”

  “Are you really suggesting that humans should not live in harmony with nature?”

  “There is no such thing. Floods, earthquakes, and droughts are of great harm to mankind. When harnessed, nature provides us with beneficial coal, wood, water, and recreational delights. We have to deal with nature as we find it.”

  “But, Mr. Stein, people have a longing for natural beauty, they feel one with it.”

  “But that kind of recreation is largely a product of civilization. The harshness intrinsically present in nature has been tamed by science, which then allows you to enjoy the rest of it.”

  “Dr. Tedman, the chief scientific officer of the United States, said that it is a great moral challenge of our times…”

  Kayla was interrupted by a loud bang of a door being broken, the clang of metal hitting metal, and raised voices that sounded like they were a floor below. Frank’s second phone, the one supplied by Mike Rodrigo, buzzed loudly.

  Frank looked at the text. “Get out of there. Now. Go to the roof. Chopper waiting. Come alone.”

  Frank grabbed Kayla’s arm and pulled her with him. The cameras stopped rolling. She was yanked off screen so fast that she was at the exit door before anyone could say “commercial break.” The camera crew knew instinctively what to do—they ran a commercial.

  His pull was hard…she trusted him as she went along, shouting to her assistants, “Announce a commercial break, we will be back,” but they started running too.

  “No, this interview is over,” he said as he ran for the back exit to the recording room.

  “What the hell was that?” she shouted as they came into the corridor.

  A gunshot sounded from just outside the recording room’s main entrance, and Kayla needed to ask no more questions. She ran with him to the fire stairs and started to head down. He yanked her again as he pulled her upward.

  “Chopper upstairs,” he said as they heard strange voices gate-crashing the studio.

  They got to the top floor without being chased. The door to the large roof was locked. Frank banged on it twice. Then as he heard footsteps on the lower floors, he kicked it hard. Another bang was heard, this time from the roof. The door opened; Mike Rodrigo stood at the doorway.

  “I said to come alone,” Mike said as he pointed his gun toward the staircase. He wore a helmet and a bulletproof vest.

  Frank, still holding Kayla’s wrist, stood his ground. A shadow appeared at the corner, a boot foreshadowing the glint of metal.

  “No, she comes with us!”

  “Okay, go, go!” Mike fired at the arm of one the intruders. His gun fell.

  The chopper’s door was open; its blades were gathering speed. Frank and Kayla swooped to the safety inside. The door closed with the press of a button. The blades screamed into motion, like strong heat lifting into the sky, threatening to take the chopper with it.

  “Wait for Mike,” Frank said.

  “Don’t worry, Mike and Jake have automatics.” The pilot was calm as the helicopter shot ten feet into the air and swerved ninety degrees, majestically, elegantly, and with ease, clearly in the hands of an expert.

  “No, wait for Mike!” Frank shouted.

  “I am sorry, I take orders from Mike. You are the person we protect, you alone,” the pilot said.

  “That’s about to change,” Frank said, a good thirty feet overhead at a wide angle, relieved as he saw Mike and Jake on the roof, guns pointed at two young men who had rifles lying at their feet.

  He looked at Kayla. She was shaken up but trying to stay composed. They hugged as the chopper flew over the magnificent skyline of East Manhattan. She let herself sob in his arms, shivering, vaguely aware of the glittering night sky.

  “Jamie. Rob. Crystal. I—”

  The pilot read her thoughts. “Ma’am, Mike’s men have taken control. He said there were no casualties.”

  Over the din and the crackle, they heard Mike Rodrigo on the chopper’s radio.

  “We are holding three, Mr. Stein. Five injured workers, none too serious. We have medics on the way.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Kayla said, still trembling. “Who were they?”

  “The carbon racketeers, probably wanting to scare us.”

  The chopper began to lower near an isolated airfield and hovered, waiting for permission to land. Kayla was calling her friends and colleagues on her phone, desperate t
o talk to whoever was well enough to answer.

  When they landed, a man arrived to fetch Frank. Rodrigo had organized a car to drop him off at a new location, a hotel, not on the original manifest. Frank asked for two rooms; he didn’t want to risk Kayla going back alone to her apartment. They checked in ten minutes apart. Then they shared a drink in her room as he was told not to risk being seen in the lobby. Two of Mike’s security men were five feet away, seated on another lounge. Frank also carried a gun, alert, his eyes fixed on the door. Kayla had not stopped trembling.

  “Why would they try to kill you?” she asked.

  “Perhaps only scare rather than kill. The vested interests are getting desperate. Their scare campaign hasn’t quite worked. The last thing they need is an exposé.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Research. Convictions. Networking. Decades of thinking.”

  “Do you always talk like that?” she asked, her hands still trembling.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you know everything?”

  “But I don’t.”

  “What will you admit that you don’t know so well?” she queried.

  “Love…romantic love.”

  She smiled. It had been one heck of a day, but perhaps there was a human touch to him after all.

  He hugged her to stop her trembling; his touch felt warm—it soothed her. Her sobs came again, this time more from relief than anguish. The security men were unmoved, emotionless.

  Frank allowed himself a long hug, finally admitting, but only to himself, that he too needed it. She lifted her profile off his chest. Her watery eyes locked into his; he held her gaze.