The Frankenstein Candidate (35 page)

“My reputation…for me, it’s more important than my life.”

“Your reputation will not survive without my cooperation. Mr. Conway and I saw you try to take your life. Dr. Rohl knows why you are here; he has your file. And…I have been wearing a wire all along.”

“Isn’t that illegal? I wasn’t told.”

“Try me in court. A little late for you to resort to lawfulness.”

Mardi broke down repeatedly during the conversations. Finally, she agreed a plan with him. Dr. Rohl was prepared to keep him longer, but she persuaded him to release Mardi over to her. Mardi had to submit a detailed affidavit to her first, containing everything he had told her, a copy of which she would lodge confidentially with the attorney general. Mardi was to detail all that he actually believed: the unpredictability of climate science, the ease with which climate could be cooled by artificially created volcanic gas spewers, the benefits of surface temperature warmth for plants and disease control, the near impossibility of lowering temperature by controlling carbon, and the near impossibility of lowering carbon emissions themselves.

Mardi would also name and shame the bureaucrats and the politicians who knew and were complicit, everywhere from the U.S. to the UN to Asia to Europe. Mardi would also cite the scientists whose work he respected and had been subjected to Stalinist-style assault by the climate scientologists.

She would help digitalize photos of him at Ocean City. He would go back to work like nothing had happened.

After her fourth meeting, she left with an affidavit ninety pages long, signed by Dr. Mardi Tedman in the presence of a state attorney she brought along to witness the signature.

Requesting a lunch meeting at one of the Pepperoni’s private rooms, Olivia had Brendan stand guard outside while she met with the attorney-general.

Phil Enright had been her teacher on civil law when she studied at Columbia, and he had a spotless reputation for integrity and candor. On any other day, she might have disagreed with his conservative politics, but today he was the man she most wanted to see.

Lean, silver-haired, bespectacled, and calm, sixty-year-old Phil had overseen countless allegations, investigations, and scandals, yet if you saw his laugh lines, you would think he was a professional clown, not an attorney.

“You had two matters, Miss Allen?” he said.

“I am still Olivia, the student.”

“Really? Or should I get used to Madam President?”

“The first concerns Dr. Mardi Tedman. I have a signed copy of his affidavit that I am keeping in your custody. He asks that it be released into the public domain upon his death…howsoever caused.”

“Do we need to call the FBI?”

“Yes, but for protection, not investigation. I have no knowledge of any hit ordered on him. But no one has seen or read that affidavit yet.”

“Understood. And the second one?”

“It concerns my husband. He hired a private detective, a man by the name of Micah Zelman. Here is Mr. Zelman’s report. You won’t need to subpoena him, he is happy to be interviewed.”

She handed him a black iPad and a signed memo. “It’s all in there.”

“What are we talking about here?”

“Intent to cause terror.”

“Have you informed CTU and Homeland Security?”

“Not that kind of terror. Directed at one person. Masterminded with political intent.”

“This better be true, Olivia.”

“It’s not directed at your party, Phil.”

“What? Who are we talking about?”

“Victor Howell to start with and some others…powerbrokers mainly.”

Phil Enright gulped, stupefied by what he had just heard. Had the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee just reported one of the party’s elders for felony misconduct that could fire up the news stations for months…the very months that led to the presidential election? She had.

“Before I open this, you know what this means?” he said, catching his breath.

“Yes, it’s our very last chance to save this country.”

She left him still gasping, and the waiter asked whether Phil needed a glass of water or a doctor. He declined both, ordered a double espresso instead, and sat down to read the two documents in the isolation of his secluded seat.

The meeting had been postponed twice, but she was here now. Olivia had a quietness about her when Dr. Joshy finally saw her again. She declined to sit on the reclining couch, preferring an upright seat looking straight into his eyes. He sensed that change was already underway.

It was the evening before the party’s national convention. Olivia had the presidential nomination all sewn up.

“Big day tomorrow,” he said.

“Today is a bigger day…I will say good-bye tonight to Mother.”

“What else will you tell her?”

“It’s my life…my decision…it should always have been,” she said. He smiled.

“It’s who I am to me that matters most,” Olivia continued. “I like the sound of that—who I am, to me, that matters most. Everyone…almost everyone…in my life to this point has been using me for their ends…I am the vehicle. My mother, my teachers, children…you expect that of children. Not Gary…for all the wrongs he has committed, he never used me. And not my father. But yes, Colin, Larry, Katrina, Victor, all of them…the whole party structure is about manipulation.”

“You are their leader now…what will you tell them?”

But she kept going. “Manipulation. That’s what politics is. Manipulation of issues, of people, of discussions, of debates…the whole of life is but a game to be won or lost. It’s jungle law. I just can’t be part of it anymore. Strangely, I have never felt better than I have this past week. I discovered the worst in men. Now I know why I don’t belong. Now I know why I have always felt like I didn’t belong. I thought it was because I was not good enough to be up there…I was never good enough for my mother…it is a void that I can never truly overcome; I will never be good enough for my mother inside my heart. But the people, the creatures that I work with and for, they are not worth the fight.”

Her eyes were glassy, not from sorrow but from an intensely felt betrayal.

“I will always wonder how many of them knew. How many of them know now…how many of them would have rather not known, how many have been derelict by preference to avoid knowing the horror.”

There is a kind of intense self-confidence that comes from wrath. The paroxysm of umbrage is about a fundamental goodness in you, for it’s only the good that can be betrayed.

“You, me, and the public at large have been double-crossed on just about every issue there is. Revenge is the only answer. I have a new mission now. Retribution. Mom can take a back seat.”

“What about your father? What about Compassion?” he asked.

“Retribution is compassion. It’s compassion for the victims of this immense tragedy. We can do no better for the victims than show them how they have been manipulated and victimized and how they can get out of it. They are capable. They don’t need our charity but they need our discovery. Frankly, we have run out of the means to give. There is no excess wealth in America anymore. You can’t give away what is not even created—that’s what Stein says, and I am immensely surprised that I am quoting him. Politics, Dr. Joshy, was about compassion—to me anyway. I got tricked. My colleagues are very compassionate with other people’s hard-earned money.

“Maybe I will always fall short in my mother’s eyes. I will always have some fear of being unmasked. But the more I feel the fury, the more they have to fear me. They are the ones who are going to be unmasked. All of them.” She was icy, stern.

“Nothing so tranquilizes a mind as a steady purpose,” he said.

“Now where have I heard that before?”

“The line was in the old classic tale of Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley. If you need to set right the wrongs that have occurred, then the new purpose in your life will keep you from wondering about—”

“Whether I am made of the right material…because I am,” she finished his sentence.

Olivia Allen had never felt clearer in her life. Rohan Joshy had rarely felt happier. When she left, Dr. Joshy felt that she might never come back as a client, which, of course, delighted him.

Olivia went straight to the airport, where Gary was waiting for her. They boarded a flight to Miami. It was Friday, May 15. Eight thousand people were to gather at the Miami Beach Convention Center for the three-day Democratic Party Convention.

On day one, the keynote address was delivered by rising star Claire Derouge. Claire was a congresswoman from Florida with a background not dissimilar to Olivia’s. Born into an upper middle class, well-educated, political family, with a penchant for oratory and a touch for reaching out to people, Claire seemed to be destined for public life.

Claire was only thirty-nine and had been in politics for ten years. It was rare for the party to ask someone so young to deliver a keynote address at the national convention. But the seniors knew they would get extensive media coverage. The old and the tired hadn’t worked. Here was an opportunity to send out a message of hope renewed. Olivia, they knew, would be a hit. They also knew that the public had become distrusting of the entrenched. The Victor Howells of their world knew their future careers now lay only as kingmakers.

“More than at any other time in American history,” Claire said, borrowing phrases liberally from the hackneyed addresses of the past that described the American dream, “we are at crossroads with destiny. This nation, unlike any other before it, was a land of opportunity where skill not birthplace, tenacity not connections, and talent not money mattered the most. Not any more. The America I grew up in…it wasn’t like this. Back then, people worked hard, but for those who worked hard, the American dream remained viable. Now that dream has all but vanished from the landscape. We all know who is to blame for that…”

The pause was designed for applause, and loud, rancorous applause is what Claire got. Eight thousand people, thought Olivia, desperate to cling on to the safety of belonging to a crowd, delirious with the feeling of togetherness, singing and shouting in unison, on cue from the speechmaker of the day. Only the baton was missing, but it was hardly ever needed. For hours on end, it was the party to end all parties, the mother of all rock concerts, as Olivia disappeared several times to mull over her speech, her direction, her decision.