The Frankenstein Candidate Read online

  “I just don’t trust any of those powerful Wall Street types.” It was a housewife and a mother of three who had kept quiet so far.

  “The legal issue here,” the farmer said, “is to check for—”

  “The jury here is on a fact-finding mission,” she said.

  “Okay, but the facts are as follows. East Coast almost went under in 2017 and did actually get undone in 2020. Boston Bank and Kansas Bank were two small banks that went bankrupt in 2017. Roscoe Maynard met Frank Stein three weeks prior to all that at a conference. Neither denies that. Frank then told Roscoe his views on banks and vice versa. Neither denies that. Frank then asked Roscoe to participate in a scam, or shall we call it collusion, to bring the banks to their knees. Here they depart. Roscoe says so, and Frank denies this.”

  “So far so good,” Jenny said.

  “Then FFA, Roscoe’s company, executed their trades. Many other big traders were in on it. They sold the banks’ shares before they owned them. Five of them confirmed this. Stein’s company also sold the same company’s shares, also before they owned them. But Stein denies this.”

  “No, Stein only denies that it was a collusive action. He says their views merely happened to coincide,” Jenny said.

  “And thousands of jobs were lost,” the disgruntled doctor added.

  “He even said they should be allowed to do this sort of thing,” the receptionist said.

  “Yes, exactly…euthanasia he called it, the scoundrel,” the surfer pleaded. “People like him should not be allowed to put the banks to sleep just because they were about to die. It’s not for him to decide. Remember back in 2008 and then again in 2015, how many banks were rescued?”

  “Some were not, though,” the housewife intervened. “The government decided which were to die, which were to live.”

  “Stein’s views are not relevant,” a quiet man who only introduced himself as Barry jumped in. Barry was among the undecided. “His actions are relevant. Did he or did he not ask his trader to sell the banks’ shares, that is the question, isn’t it?”

  “No, did he or did he not do so as a result of the discussion he had with Roscoe Maynard, that is the question,” Jenny said. “What if he had already decided what he was going to do?”

  “It does not alter the fact that the banks were ruined and the livelihoods destroyed as a result of their actions,” the farmer said.

  “Maybe they would have been lost anyway,” Barry said. “Jenny is right. It’s not what happened, the issue is whether it happened because of the collusion.”

  “Whether there was in fact collusion,” Jenny corrected him.

  “How the hell do we decide?” the farmer said. “We are not legal people.”

  It kept going into the night and after breakfast the next day, with only a four-hour break for sleep. Finally, Jenny had two more of the undecided on her side: Samantha, a university student of English literature, and Carlos, a taxi driver.

  Exhausted, the farmer asked, “Do we just say the jury is unable to reach a verdict?”

  “Let’s have a show of hands again,” the doctor said.

  Eight hands continued to holler a guilty verdict. The remaining four were Jenny, Barry, Samantha, and Carlos. None of them were abstaining—each said innocent.

  The “not guilty” verdict was read out to the hundreds packed into the courtroom and the hundreds of millions who watched the spectacle on television, in the United States and abroad. Back in the courtroom for the verdict, Olivia Allen jumped for joy, and hugged Kayla. She felt Kayla’s body tremble from sobs of relief.

  The major papers, hurrying to their editorials online, denounced it—they called it the victory of the moneyed over the oppressed, of the connected over the common people, of the powerful over the powerless.

  Eli Mayer called it a triumph of American liberty and made an impassioned plea to strike down Murphy’s bill, a bill introduced by anti-industrial politicians egged on by overzealous regulators to have white-collar criminal cases decided solely by judges.

  “Jury trials as a matter of right for those accused of a felony have all but disappeared from legal systems everywhere except America,” Eli said. “It is our last vestige of freedom…once we leave our freedom entirely in judges appointed by the government of the day, America as we know it will disappear.”

  Blake Heynman appealed again for collusion to be removed from the list of securities felonies, calling for an end to criminalization of cooperative behavior among consenting individuals. His pleas fell on deaf ears.

  56

  The Catharsis

  Olivia Allen took a day off to visit her ailing father in Philadelphia on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Following her incredible campaign, her father had become Greenview Retirement’s most popular resident. Greenview was located on a beautiful, thirty-acre site in Andorra, Pennsylvania. Nestled on a site overlooking a valley and facing a hillside of luscious green grass were one hundred sky-blue two-bedroom residential villas. Greenview had it all: independent living, assisted living, memory care, health care, and acute care.

  The nurses at Greenview did not wear uniforms. The residents knew them all, and the village provided them with a street wardrobe that made them look like they were visitors. The villas faced the hills as if the residents had left the valley behind, but they knew that they had come down the hill, and after this picturesque stop, the valley was what lay ahead. Almost all of the residents were over eighty years old and infirm.

  As she walked toward the familiar villa number fifty-five, which she had visited countless times, Olivia was struck by a new sensation of the sheer serenity of the place: the sweeping panorama, the orchids, the imported willows, the little sky blue villas, the well-patterned brown cobblestones that led to the little office—until she suddenly realized that the serenity resided in her. It was a beautifully calm place, the inside of her mind. Not even the mental equivalent of a thunderstorm could upset the equanimity of that sacred abode now.

  Father and daughter then agreed to visit mother’s resting place. Olivia was with Compassion, visiting Ambition, who was resting, and neither was inside her head.

  They soon reached the Woodlands Cemetery. Making their way through the cemetery’s eighteenth century buildings, the tall stone cathedral, the green contours, and the majestic trees, Olivia held her father’s hand, her gait steady, knowing, and purposeful, determined to close a most difficult chapter of her life.

  Aging, wispy haired, and weakened by Parkinson’s, octogenarian Thomas Beal was nevertheless still possessed of an extremely alert mind. A former Congressman himself, he had watched Olivia’s every move, read every word written about her, and heard every radio show that focused on her campaign. He understood her reversal better than anyone else—it was her father she had called in the days before her momentous reversal.

  Laying her mother’s favorite orange day lilies in an open formation by the gravestone, Olivia felt her mother’s presence in the air.

  “I will never be what you wanted me to be, Mom,” Olivia said, “but I have become what I wanted to be. Perhaps you may have even liked the way it has turned out. But it’s my life, Mom. I have to lead it my way. Thank you for everything you did for me. I love you. Always will.”

  She felt the headstone say, “I love you too, honey, always will. And I pray for you.”

  Momentarily, Thomas Beal’s hands stopped shaking. “She prays for you,” he said to Olivia—above the gentle breeze and the rustling leaves, he must have heard it in his head too.

  He smiled at Olivia, and then father and daughter hugged tight for what seemed like an eternity; tears flowed freely, fingers clutched over each other’s winter coats, muscles tightened and then relaxed, the sobbing ebbed, and the smiles reappeared.

  For the first time in her life, Olivia felt completely free—free of anxiety, free of tension, and free of the burden of having to please her mother.

  That evening, when Olivia Allen descended the steps of her plane at a
new private airport in Washington DC, Frank Stein was there to greet her with Kayla by his side; they were holding hands. A surge of pure elation pulsed through her to see them together like this. They seemed so at peace with themselves and the world.

  “We did it,” he said. “We moved the needle…by quite a lot.”

  “You did it, Frank,” Olivia said, “and you, Kayla. I was the one moved.”

  “The compass doesn’t point north yet. But at least some people know where north is now,” Kayla said.

  The three began to walk back to the terminal, their winter jackets billowed by the wind, their gait purposeful and slow. Even the rain seemed to come in a slower drizzle. Olivia knew that their minds were calmer—the world always seemed to catch up to the pace of the thoughts in your mind. She saw Frank’s hands still interlocked in Kayla’s, and wondered what the future held for their relationship.

  “So what’s next?” Olivia found herself saying, hoping to hear of their plans.

  “One day,” Frank said, “one day I might go back to the movie project I wanted to fund.”

  “What’s it about?” Olivia asked.

  “A teenager can’t decide between economics and writing as a career. At first, he chooses economics but he just can’t handle arcane math. So he switches to writing and decides to do a biography of a legend who is his hero. Then, as he does his research, he finds out that the great legend was really a charlatan.”

  They entered the terminal, and a lady, fortyish, was waiting there with a young boy.

  “Uncle Frank!” the boy said, jumping with delight.

  “Hey, what a surprise,” Frank said, though you could tell from the woman’s face that he had planned it all along. Frank hugged the boy and lifted him off his feet.

  “Kayla and Olivia, this is my sister Daniela and her son, Jimmy.”

  They all just stood there, waiting for someone to say something. Although they knew of his family, this was a side of him that neither Olivia nor Kayla had seen.

  “What have you been up to, Jimmy?” Frank asked.

  “We had this project at school. Our teacher, he like, you know, made two groups. Each group had to do some work and the other group had to pay money…like five dollars to each boy or girl if they liked their work.”

  “Great. What work did you do, Jimmy?”

  “Well, our class captain, he made some of us dig holes…like with spades and stuff—”

  “Good. I see you got blisters.”

  “They don’t hurt, Uncle. And then some boys had to fill the holes again.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t get our five dollars ‘cause the other kids, you know the other group…they couldn’t see what work we had done.”

  “Do you blame them?”

  “No. They did stuff we could see. I guess it was a bad idea to fill the holes.”

  “Yes, Jimmy, only a complete fool would believe that digging holes in the ground and filling them up again is useful work,” Frank said.

  “Uncle Frank, next time we will do something that people can see.”

  “Good, do that. By the way, I was just telling Olivia about a story…a story for a film I want to make.”

  “Wow, you are going to make a film?”

  “I hope so. Anyway, as I was saying, Olivia, the teenager finds out that the chicanery of his former hero had spread into prestigious institutions that started to teach the fraudulent story-telling as though as it was real science. But no one believes the young man. Publishers refuse to publish his book. His professors call him insane. But he never gives up, and in the end his courage proves contagious.”

  “What’s it called…this film?” Olivia asked.

  “Citizen Keynes,” he said.

  Olivia gave up. Frank was more human than before, but it was still hard to get him to talk about his personal life.

  Epilogue

  Quentin Kirby’s recorded transcript recalling the conversation with his aide had been crucial. Mike Rodrigo had meticulously laid out the entire chain, linking Raul Fernandez to a meeting with two men from a security firm. The security firm was a front for a mercenary organization that John Logan occasionally hired. The initial requirement was for a big enough accident to occur that resulted in the deaths of several civilians, including Frank Stein. Raul was to have been paid three million for his involvement. Mike Rodrigo had located the mechanic who had agreed to put a delay on the brakes. He had received one million dollars and wasn’t talking. He finally cracked when he was cornered. He was a Cuban who was let go provided he returned to Cuba with his green card cancelled and the one million returned.

  As much as he hated to let the man go free, Phil Enright knew that the director of prosecutions needed to nail the kingmaker. Enright had seen the mechanic’s video testimony and read the signed affidavit. There had been a change of mind at the very last moment. It had been too late to save Raul and four other civilians who died at the scene of the accident.

  “All roads lead to John Logan,” Phil Enright said to the carefully assembled team of four select individuals in his office. Logan had personally ordered the reversal when he found out that a kill was intended. The mercenary firm had merely been advised to “take care of” Frank Stein, but Logan’s handlers had panicked.

  Logan had nevertheless orchestrated the SEC investigation into Stein, as well as the strategy to buy Roscoe Maynard’s cooperation. This made the SEC prosecutor another target of the investigation—he had severely compromised his integrity by letting a presidential candidate drive the SEC’s prosecution strategy. There was a rumor that he had been promised an attorney general’s position if he could nail one of America’s richest celebrities.

  Logan had played no part in the threats made to Gary Allen, which squarely stood with Victor Howell and others of his own party, nor with the murder of Casey Rogers, which was entirely the work of a white supremacist organization.

  The Democrats also suspected the Republicans of implanting Ashley Bennett. A trap had been laid, and Colin Spain had fallen straight into it. Ashley Bennett had been given a new identity. She had disappeared and could not be traced. They had to let it go. The Kirby camp was widely suspected to be behind the entrapment, but nothing could be proven. It wasn’t known whether Quentin Kirby merely knew of it or even authorized it; the benign explanation was that he chose to never question certain members of his camp—they did what they did behind the scenes. Such a strategy was very common. It offered full deniability, as well as granting latitude to the players on the lower rung to choose the scheme. It was that strategy that got Logan undone; he had not intended for his players to plan murder when the good old stratagem of defamation was available to stop Frank Stein—but his political handlers got nervous in September with Frank Stein’s rising popularity.

  All the news broke at once. One fine morning, the United States awoke to a news story that was arguably bigger than 9/11, or at least as big. A presidential candidate had allowed his aides to plan murder. Four innocent civilians had been killed. Logan had then relentlessly pursued his quarry by corrupting a senior federal regulator. The federal regulator had allowed himself to be corrupted. Logan had then been elected as the forty-sixth president of the United States of America.

  Serious distrust of Washington had grown rapidly. Now it was well beyond redemption. Not since 1973 had a U.S. president or vice president been forced to vacate office while facing criminal charges, but the charges against John Logan were far more serious than those against Spiro Agnew in 1973.

  The case against John Logan was certain to bring about an impeachment. In a strict sense, Logan’s activities were undertaken when in Congress rather than in the Oval Office. It nevertheless entitled Congress to impeach him.

  He saved them the trouble. The day after the news broke, he resigned and was arrested immediately afterward.

  A mere five weeks after being sworn in as the vice president of the United States, Claire Derouge was sworn in as its forty-
seventh president. With that, the entire Cabinet underwent another transformation; orders for name-embossed rubber stamps were flying out of the White House.

  In her third week in the Oval Office, Claire Derouge was in the Situation Room late one night with the chiefs of the armed forces when an unexpected bulletin hit the president’s private channel.

  U.S. intelligence satellites had picked up Israeli jet fighters en route to what appeared to be Iran.

  Derouge asked for her presidential hotline. The Israeli prime minister, Azzan Herzi, was not available. It took them ten whole minutes to track him down.

  The jets were low, noiseless, and white, and the day’s excellent cloud cover almost completely hid them from sight. They slid into Iranian airspace virtually unnoticed.

  The four jets then calmly proceeded toward their target. Suddenly, they had the Iranians on their tail. They scrambled and appeared to cover for one pilot who shot through to his final destination. He managed to release what seemed like at least a dozen or so bombs in quick succession.

  Within minutes, the airspace was filled with at least fifty Iranian fighter jets. All four Israeli jets were brought down.

  Claire Derouge watched with a mixture of horror and joy as Iran’s nuclear facilities were blown to smithereens.

  “Madam President, Prime Minister Herzi,” the voice on the conference line said.

  “Put him on,” she said.

  “I am sorry we could not communicate this earlier, Madam President,” Herzi said.

  “It is unthinkable that you would carry this out without the knowledge of—”

  “We tried, Madam President. But President Logan was very preoccupied these past two weeks. He kept thinking we could defer—”

  “I will need to call you back, Prime Minister.”

  Claire Derouge was furious; the chiefs of the armed forces must have known this was coming, and they had kept this from her. They all denied it, though, and if they really didn’t know, John Logan had not brought them into the loop.