The Frankenstein Candidate (4 page)

“I asked,” Heller said.

Kirby nodded. “When is the meeting set for?”

“There isn’t one. He refused to meet.”

“A man refused a meeting with the vice president of the United States?”

“I’m afraid so,” Kevin said.

“Then fuck him,” Quentin said as he pushed a wine glass off the table. A dash of wine spilled on the fancy carpet. The glass rolled to the edge of the fireplace. Not a soul moved to pick it up. Quentin laughed, and as was customary, they all laughed with him.

San Francisco, Thursday, November 21, 2019

Two weeks after President Young’s announcement of his condition, Frank Stein was bubbling with frustration in the way water bubbles when it is just below the boiling point. Frank was a handsome, energetic, fifty-year-old of medium build, with graying, dark brown hair. He was rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams, but wore his wealth effortlessly, without grandeur or apology. Frank was chairman and president of Alpha Corporation, an investment company he had set up in 2008 soon after the global financial crisis.

Frank, they said, was aptly named—he was honest to a fault. He had compassionate, brown eyes and, on most days, a gentle, assuaging manner. He did not have a temper, some said. Yet people close to him knew just how his exasperation, if intense enough, could boil over into a storm on those very rare occasions when he let it. Frank had never been married, and that fact alone made people wonder whether he was gay, notwithstanding the occasional heterosexual relationship he did have. Some said he had a girlfriend in his late teens that he never quite got over—his personal life was the one thing he never liked to talk about, although just about everything else was game. He worked incredibly hard and was very street savvy, but he was also smart in a bookish way. The money business suited his personality perfectly, and he had been superlatively successful at it.

Alpha Corporation had been one of the most successful money management firms of the new decade, a decade characterized by extreme turmoil. Economic growth in Asia had lagged all the predictions made a decade earlier, and the economic woes of Europe and America had exceeded all but the worst economic forecasts. “But the worst is yet to come,” the pundits kept saying, and with the inevitability of a long-foreshadowed typhoon, it had almost arrived.

Frank Stein, though, kept his forecasts to himself. Watching NBC News on his computer monitor, he was vexed at being caught unawares of a bill that sliced 9 to 10 percent off the value of most international corporations listed on U.S. stock exchanges.

“It’s what we need for our economy,” the government spokesperson said, and the NBC News correspondent could not agree more. Two more pundits on the monitor nodded their heads in orchestrated agreement.

“Corporations have no empathy,” one of the pundits said, reciting the symptoms of psychopathy. “They do not care about relationships, or the safety of others. They can easily lie for the sake of profit.”

One of those experts then proceeded to defend the bill, called the Americans First Employment Bill or the Jones-Brackmann bill, after the senators who proposed it. Jones was a Democrat; Brackmann was a Republican. Any corporation listed in the U.S. was to be barred from increasing overseas employment by more than it increased its American workforce in any given calendar year. If passed, it was to take effect in March 2020. The media spinners had quickly commenced the advertisements to sell this measure to a public hungry for remedies.

It was time to end the conspiracy and the waffle, thought Stein.

It was not the sort of half-baked political measure that Stein would normally have missed observing in the making. Nor would he have missed its impact. The impact on his personal wealth hardly mattered. By all accounts, he was still worth between one billion and two, depending on where various world markets were on the day you measured his wealth. He had converted three hundred million of that into cash, which he held in accounts in various currencies around the world, and held another three hundred million in gold.

No, it was not about personal wealth. Nor was it about his ego—he certainly had missed other opportunities and threats in his stellar twenty-year career. True, Alpha’s shareholders would be impacted, but given the global breadth of their investments, the impact was minimal.

No, Frank Stein was incensed that politicians kept making the problem worse—all the while lying, deceiving, and evading the issues that the public was being kept in the dark about. The show must end, he thought. It was time to take the camera backstage and expose the naked emperors of political power.

The anger was understandable, but it was the intensity of his rage that he could scarcely explain. It made his decision easier.

Many a billionaire had become a philanthropist in his later years: Hughes, Moore, Carnegie, Gates, Rockefeller, Buffett—the list was long. Stein had certainly long considered that option. This, however, was different. This was an exposé that the nation needed. The poor could be helped more by ending deception than by philanthropy. Besides, he thought, charity suited those who carried a measure of guilt over their wealth, but he felt none. Devoting the rest of his life to a crusade against deception was his way of giving back to society.

“But you could be killed,” one of his closest friends said.

“Doesn’t matter what you say, the media will spin it the other way,” one of his trusted advisers said.

“Alpha’s shareholders need you,” one of his corporation’s board members said.

They were the only three people Stein called to seek counsel.

By afternoon, he was calling them again, just to let them know his mind was made up. They kept pleading with him, asking him to reconsider, to reflect on it a bit more. However, by evening, he had begun assembling a campaign team that would not use any media specialist. At Alpha, he said he would resign immediately as the company president but remain as the chairman of the board.

The legacy of his life was not going to be wealth. He was going to be the boy who called the emperor naked. Decision made. He felt a lot better now.

Pouring himself a glass of champagne, he switched on the television. The coverage showed the growing queues for food. Queues for food…in California? Yes, it was happening. In the State Medical Centre, which offered free access to medical care, the emergency centers had two hundred people crammed into a waiting room fit for forty. The crisis coverage continued, showing ghost towns that had been created by rows of beautiful, unoccupied, foreclosed houses from Fresno to Orange County.

Frank Stein switched the television off. He was going to fix things, once and for all.

Wasn’t this the country where you could say anything you wanted?

It was the summer of 1969. Frank was born to a middle-class Jewish couple, Joshua and Dora Stein, in Anaheim, California, on July 20, 1969—the day mankind set foot on the moon.

Dora Stein watched a little television monitor mounted in the corner of the delivery room as Frank virtually choreographed his entry into the human world at precisely the moment Neil Armstrong first uttered the words—“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Dora and Joshua were deeply religious. They were Ashkenazi Jews who arrived from Poland in 1968, a newly married couple who had been granted permanent resident visas on account of their refugee status, courtesy the Soviet-sponsored anti-Zionist campaign. In the U.S., the Sixties was a counterculture decade marked by irreverence for all things good and bad: sexism and homophobia, but also industry and thrift as well as academic and technological achievement. Although the moon landing was obviously a scientific and technological achievement, Dora saw in it a foreshadowing of the arrival of a messiah of sorts. Joshua too saw something divine in the timing of Frank’s arrival. Joshua believed that the joyous sense of confidence that he spontaneously felt was because God had looked after the men floating in a vulnerable capsule in the vast darkness of space and guided them to safety—it must be an auspicious day—so God would look after Frank.

He also thought it meant that Frank would become a scientist. Not that Joshua disliked scientists—he loved the idea of Frank becoming a NASA engineer or a medical doctor, but he did not want Frank to abandon his Jewish traditions. So Joshua made sure that both Frank and his sister Daniela, who was born three years later, attended a local Jewish elementary school.

Joshua and Dora ran a small pharmacy and regularly attended the synagogue. Home was a little three-bedroom cottage in a middle-class suburb where copies of the Old Testament and Hebrew scriptures abounded.

It was obvious that little Frank was a precocious child. As above average that the Jewish elementary was compared to other schools in the neighborhood, Joshua and Dora could barely wait until Frank could be packed off to a more challenging school. Oxford Academy at Cypress, an academically selective senior high school, enticed them. Frank passed their entrance exam with flying colors. Aged eleven, he soon found himself at one of the most academically advanced public educational high schools in the country.

At first, Joshua and Dora were extremely happy. Dora would do the early morning drive to drop Frank off at school and come into the pharmacy late, which actually was before nine in the morning, but for the Steins…well, that was a late start. Joshua would drive him back from school, and Frank spent a lot of his spare hours with Daniela in the back of the shop waiting for his parents to wrap up the day’s work, which often wasn’t until after nine at night.

The Oxford Academy encouraged Frank to look at everything objectively. Most of the syllabus was science and mathematics oriented, but even in the humanities and languages, Frank had teachers who would set objective criteria for evaluation, challenging tradition, and always encouraging the quest for improvement.

It was at Oxford that Frank met and befriended kids of a non-Jewish heritage. It was at Oxford that Frank first met girls. It was at Oxford that he met teachers who were not overly religious; in fact, some even professed a kind of atheism that at first shocked him. It was at Oxford that he met his first set of close friends: Quentin Kirby and Bob Zimmerman. They were both tall, athletic, and clever, and from Caucasian, Protestant, well-off families, the kind of families that would normally have avoided public schools at any cost if it were not for the fact that this was the Oxford Academy, the most magnetic of the magnet schools in the West.

So often did Joshua and Dora talk about the moon landing that Frank thought he was ordained to become a physicist. He excelled in the sciences and mathematics, subjects that Oxford held very dear. He studied hard and was quite easily the highest-ranking student in seventh grade. Frank envied Quentin and Bob. They were not quite as clever as Frank, but they were still very smart in their own right. They played football, they were on the school rowing team, and even at twelve, they already had girls two or three years their senior giving them second looks.

Joshua was getting greatly concerned that Frank’s extensive homework was preventing him from attending the synagogue. Frank hardly ever read the Tanakh anymore. Gone were the days when father and son would sit together at night with Frank asking pressing questions about the Torah and the commandments and Joshua patiently answering them all, proud that he had a son so bright. Dora assured Joshua that Frank’s foundations were well laid in Judaism and now it was time to let go, to let him become the man he was destined to be.