The Frankenstein Candidate Page 27

  Ralph switched his cell off and went for a walk down Broadway, taking the cap off his sweaty scalp. The droning bee was gone. He felt a lot better now.

  Olivia spent the weekend in Baltimore with Gary. They watched the interviews now raging on the Net Station. Scientist after scientist had broken free.

  Some of them cried openly on national television—some thanking Mardi for his confession, some denigrating him for selling himself out.

  “You have to get back in there,” Gary said. “Your country needs you.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” she said.

  “And?”

  “I will join him if he’s still interested.”

  “You know, I was hoping that would be the case,” Gary said, “not just because you belong there, but because Frank’s vision is the right one. And you need to pay Victor back his dues. We need to get him.”

  “Don’t worry, that train is in motion,” she said.

  49

  The Vice Presidency Drives the Polls

  Despite the little victory that Stein had with Ralph Prescott, Sidney Ganon was running red-hot in the polls with well over 50 percent of the vote.

  After Olivia had more meetings with Frank Stein, the press caught on to what was likely to get announced. Frank and Olivia didn’t deny it either. On the night of September 22, Frank Stein announced that Olivia Allen would join his campaign as the vice presidential nominee, a mere three days before the vice-presidential debate.

  It was hard to make sense of Olivia’s decision by any conventional yardstick. She had already won the Democratic nomination for the presidency and would have been short odds to win the presidency given the way Ganon was leading the pack at the moment.

  Victor Howell and several others were indicted on charges relating to assault and reckless endangerment brought by the attorney general on Wednesday, September 23. America was no longer shocked to know that senior politicians and their officials had plotted to keep Olivia’s husband away from his mistress by a threat of violence just to keep Olivia’s image clean. But it helped to bring Ganon down to almost level with Logan and Stein.

  On Friday, September 25, Jackie Harding, Claire Derouge, and Olivia Allen got off their respective private flights to make their way to the CNN world headquarters in Atlanta, the site of the first vice presidential debate.

  Going first was drawing the short straw because there was only one debate for the vice presidential nominees. But in fact, after Olivia spoke first, people hardly remembered what Jackie Harding and Claire Derouge had to say about anything.

  She opened with the most obvious of questions to answer.

  “Why did I have to do what I did?” Olivia said in her opening three minutes. “It will never be easy to explain. The party, or rather both the major parties, are terribly infested with a self-preservation, self-enhancement, and self-aggrandizement disease, and it has spread much too far to cure from within. For those who choose to serve in public office for the right reasons, it is no longer a malaise one can ignore or tolerate. It is impossible to work with people whose motives you often suspect are sinister.

  “I believe Frank Stein’s motives are pure. He is the exemplar of what a public servant should be: conscientious, intelligent, and completely forthright.

  “It is terribly rare for someone to seek power in order to diminish the very institution that he derives the power from, but that is exactly what Frank Stein is setting out to do.

  “But it wasn’t Frank Stein who first made me see the light. It was Dr. Mardi Tedman—if the environment was a device for rampant subterfuge, what else was out there? I saw that a candidate’s spouse could be threatened or maimed just to maintain an image. But I refused to be somebody’s lovable doll trained to continue the chicanery. No, the show must not go on. This is not Broadway, it’s America, and the people deserve better.

  “It is now the greatest moral challenge of our times to expose the moral depravity of the post-modern hippies, to officially stamp the carbon lobby as a cult. A cult that has relentlessly attacked the archetype of our civilization—men and women of science—and converted them into lackeys for its real motive, which is to bring industry to its knees, to exert extraordinary levels of state control over all productive enterprises for a manufactured fantasy.

  “In the early nineties, Russia gave up communism to create an even bigger horror—a crony system in which the politicians in bed with the local mafia endlessly enriched themselves at the expense of the ordinary citizenry. I’m afraid Frank Stein has convinced me that we are on our way to becoming another Russia.

  “All my life, I believed that the state was needed to help the helpless, feed the starving, and house the homeless. I actually still believe that this job needs to be done.

  “Regulation has a positive motive: to prevent fraud. But when we assume that human beings and private entities have an intrinsic nature to deceive, we end up with an inexorable amount of red tape that suffocates the benign and the hopeful. This is where we are today. Perhaps the red tape got its own momentum because those in power created more obstacles to service, many of them arbitrary so their own importance was amplified.

  “We have an aging population that can no longer be taken care of by the young. True, they paid their Social Security, but the government of the day spent it all on the old of those times. The Ponzi scheme has now burst. But Frank has an answer for taking care of the old—the tenth commandment, the commandment of humanity. If we bring in multitudes of young immigrants, we can recapture the demographic pyramid. These new young immigrants will have no access to welfare. It is ugly, but there is no other way. The commandment of humanity will open our doors to whoever can find paid work here, because otherwise our factories are going overseas. They will find work, pay taxes, and those taxes can take care of the old who were deceived into believing the state was going to look after them in their old days.

  “How did we let this happen? How did we get hoodwinked?

  “There is but only one road ahead now. Find the truth about everything at all costs.

  “For if you too feel the rage one feels when one is swindled, then I ask but only this: maintain your rage, now is not the time for apathy. Maintain your rage so you can enhance it, enlarge it, and then unleash it. Thank you.”

  Ralph Prescott sat in the back of the CNN hall. He smiled. He was back, this time as a television reporter with the growing Net Station. So impressed was Net Station’s young chief executive Kayla Mizzi by his “Ghost of Weimar” piece that she signed him up straightaway. Just as Mardi Tedman had done with his fellow scientists, Ralph had unleashed a torrent of unspent courage amongst his fellow travelers. Media men and women of all sorts: magazine freelancers, radio talk show hosts, television presenters, and newspaper journalists were breaking away from the safety of the government cocoon, risking entire careers in pieces that dared to confront the unvarnished truth.

  Ralph Prescott was a pioneer, and he absolutely loved it. Courage was contagious.

  But it was far from over. Old habits die hard. Although some of the coverage Olivia received was complimentary, there was much that was savage: some said she had betrayed a noble cause; others said she had encouraged civil disorder and violence with her inflammatory rhetoric; and there was even a continuing suggestion that she was having an affair with Frank Stein.

  The suits went to work—hadn’t she received a campaign grant from some of the biggest oil companies in the country? Had she misused and misallocated her campaign funds? Could a turncoat ever be trusted?

  The trouble was, Olivia wasn’t a performer in the traditional sense the way Sidney Ganon was, and the people knew it. Her honesty shone through, and her ratings continued to soar…and with them ascended Frank Stein’s chances of the presidency.

  It made no difference to the people that the suits threw in Kayla Mizzi’s blossoming relationship with Frank in the media with a deprecating pooh-pooh about the age difference. It just wasn’t an age where the people cared a
bout whether their president got oral sex from an intern. The people would have certainly shot to death anyone who spent five million dollars in taxpayer funds trying to establish whether a certain irrelevant semen stain on a dress belonged to a president. No, it was an age where America was reeling under the prospect of a great depression. It was an age where general unemployment was already over twenty percent and youth unemployment was over forty percent. It was an age where the price of everything from food to gas to healthcare was spiraling out of control. It was an age where the manufacturing sector appeared to be gone forever and even the service sector was under threat from the Asian tigers. Yet some of the corporate well-to-do and some of the bureaucratic fat cats seemed to be doing just fine, thank you very much. It was the Russia of 1993 magnified by a factor of four. How did this happen? Why did this happen? How do we get back? These were the questions people wanted answers to—and to hell with everything else.

  The suits got another opportunity to enlarge the smear. Olivia had spoken of unleashing a rage—metaphorically, of course, but that did not stop a rampaging mob of more than one hundred civilians from marching into the Arlington headquarters of the Neo-Green Movement at night. Olivia got the blame.

  In the second and third debates, Frank Stein went through his ten commandments again, taking care to explain how he would privatize Social Security, essentially as a form of unemployment insurance that anyone could buy. Campaigning in the Midwest and the South, Logan railed against Stein’s atheism. But it no longer mattered what the candidates said in the second and third presidential debates.

  It wasn’t because of the ten commandments of honesty, forbearance, temperance, respect, integrity, kinship, courage, justice, dignity and humanity–something dramatic had happened when Olivia Allen flipped. Masses of people, people who had never voted once in their lives, were out and about chanting “Down with Washington,” “Bring the army home,” and “I will work for food.”

  Suddenly, the Stein-Allen ticket was leading the race. With the flood of new voters tuning in, the impossible ticket had over 60 percent of the popular vote. The unthinkable was now possible. The suits had to play the ace in the hole.

  50

  The Felony Conversations

  It was Monday, October 19, just fifteen days before the election. The suits arrived in droves to visit Frank Stein at his campaign office. Olivia Allen was in discussions with several other campaign staff.

  The suits came unannounced, the way one would expect the FBI to do a drug bust. It was an age where there was no difference between allegations of white-collar misdemeanors and substantive evidence of terrorist activity. It was perfectly legal for the suits to act the way they did.

  Frank had been tipped off at the last minute by Alpha Corporation’s counsel, Blake Heynman. Blake had arrived just moments before. A tall, wiry, and dark-haired thirty-six-year-old, Blake was a no-nonsense legal scholar of some repute, highly practical, well connected, and intensely critical of regulatory excess.

  Only one of the visitors was doing the talking. His name was Conrad Drummer, a heavy set, broad-shouldered, rough-looking man with a counterfeit genteel manner. The unwelcome visitors were from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Conrad looked, talked, dressed, and conducted himself like a bulldog.

  Drummer and his team insisted on a private meeting with Frank and Blake. Olivia excused herself for an hour, casting an inquiring eye at Frank as she left him alone with Blake and the SEC people.

  “We have been investigating these trades for quite some time,” Drummer summarized in his gruff voice. “It does seem that Mr. Stein had conversations relating to the share price of Citibank, East Coast Atlantic, JP Morgan, and a number of other bank stocks.”

  “Conversations?” Blake Heynman, Frank’s lawyer, queried.

  “Well, we have sufficient evidence to launch a full-scale public investigation. On November 18, 2017, Mr. Stein suggested to Mr. Roscoe Maynard of Featherstone that some banking stocks were overvalued. The two then specifically, directly or indirectly interacted with certain traders and senior bankers to put these sell orders into effect. Mr. Maynard interacted with Mr. Stein again, specifically on July 9 this year, with respect to East Coast Atlantic.

  “The cumulative effect of the short positions, by that we mean of course the selling of shares that are borrowed but not owned, positions taken by Featherstone, Alpha Corporation, and certain other funds based in Channel Islands, was to disrupt the normal working of the stock market for the stock of East Coast Atlantic and International Financial Group, which had the effect of rendering impossible the fundraising necessary to save those organizations from bankruptcy.”

  “A very long-winded speculative theory,” Blake said. Frank remained silent.

  “Mr. Stein, I am hereby advised to give you notice that you are being investigated for an alleged breach of Rule 10b-5 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. We will require from you detailed statements as regards your best recall of your dealings and conversations with—”

  “Save your breath Mr. Drummer,” Blake said. “Leave the notice with us.”

  “Given the immediacy of the circumstances, the state of the economy being what it is, and the position of the banks…with East Coast already in Chapter 11—”

  “Don’t we know it?” Blake interrupted him again.

  Ignoring Blake, Drummer continued, “It would seem prudent to make headway rather quickly. Unfortunately, the SEC is obliged to make a public statement, as you no doubt appreciate—”

  “Of course, the fact that my client is the leading contender for president in a federal election fifteen days away is merely an unfortunate coincidence.”

  “Very unfortunate, Mr. Heynman, but you see our investigation was proceeding at just the right—”

  “As I said, save your breath, Mr. Drummer. We shall be seeing you,” Blake said.

  After the unwelcome visitors left, Blake slammed a fist into the wall of the campaign office corridor. He left soon after, knuckles bruised on his left hand, his right hand shaking, reaching for his car keys as he wandered around the parking lot, forgetting in his rage where his car was parked. Frank remained steely, bristling on the inside, but with a look of resignation that said he was expecting things to get dirtier.

  Olivia had taken the hour to rouse nearby shoppers in an impromptu performance. A camera came out of nowhere and followed her as she lifted various items in the grocery store, from cucumbers to eggs to milk, calling out their prices, and comparing them with what they were a year ago. The campaigning had started to feel like fun.

  Frank was waiting for her when she got back. Olivia went into Frank’s private office and shut the door behind her.

  “It was always going to be difficult for someone like me, with my background…to trust someone like you,” she said.

  “True. Yours has been an incredible transformation, just the one that the whole country needs to make.”

  “So did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “The thing that they are trying to pin on you…whatever it is…the wrong thing, the criminal thing.”

  “You speak as if the two are one and the same.”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Not the time for games, Frank.”

  “I did the right thing, and it is entirely lawful as well. These days, though, some right things have been criminalized. We sold shares in some banks. Alpha Corporation sold those shares by borrowing them from someone who owned them. Then Alpha bought the shares back from the market at a profit when they had fallen in value. All this is perfectly legal. The regulators may take a view that it caused or could have caused the demise of the banks in question, but in fact most of the large banks have been bankrupt for quite some time and have been propped up by their dear friends in DC. Money managers like to hasten the demise of a very sick corporation. It’s like mercy killing.”

  “How will you explain this to the publ
ic?”

  “Same as I just did. The banks deserved to die before they could be revived. The law says we can’t collaborate to bring a corporation down. We never did, even though the law is wrong in this case anyway.”

  “What are they basing their charge on then?”

  “We assume it is a single conversation I had with Roscoe Maynard at a conference. We shared our views about banking. We never discussed our investment strategy.”

  “So Roscoe will say that as well?”

  “Shouldn’t he?”

  “What if he has other problems, and they will all go away if he says you did talk specifics?” Olivia was getting nervous now.

  Frank was taken aback by her conjecture. “You can think like them, which is a good thing. Know thy enemy. What you say is true. That is a risk. Then it is his word against mine.”

  “If there are six or seven of them—”

  “Then it will be one word against seven. All depends on the jury then.”

  “I will speak to Phil Enright. Perhaps he can intervene,” she said.

  “I doubt it, but no harm in asking.”

  She was amazed that Frank Stein didn’t look anywhere near like a man unjustly accused or one facing a possible felony. He sensed her astonishment.

  “You are in the same boat as I am, Olivia. We are taking on a colossal monstrosity, a Frankenstein that has long since escaped its creators’ design. You literally have to be prepared to die for the cause. You could get unjustly defamed, go to prison, or lose a loved one. But we have momentum on our side. In another ten years, it could be too late. More laws will be changed. The entire Supreme Court bench could be reappointed by the new mob that gets in. It’s now or never.”

  She remembered what Mardi Tedman had done, what Ralph Prescott and others who followed him had done. The nervous energy dissipated. She was once again proud of her accomplishment. She was the one who carried the people’s vote. She could defend Frank’s reputation.