The Frankenstein Candidate (48 page)

“Finally, the fourth estate has shown that some of its players, albeit still a minority, have realized their true calling. That helps. But at the end of the day, it is between the people and the elected officials. It is about the fundamental question—are the elected officials put into office to protect every individual’s liberty, or are over five hundred of them in Congress merely to fight on behalf of their own constituencies or groups, cheating other constituencies or groups like in a tribal war? The tribal war that is fought in Congress by warriors dressed in business suits, warriors who are too scared of forthright discourse.

“This is not a hard struggle if the dialogue is honest and open. Your enemies can win only by deception. You must continue to deny them that privilege.

“So help yourself to rise above this mess. Thank you.”

Frank Stein finished to a round of applause.

Quentin Kirby had not moved an inch during Frank’s speech. A part of him grasped why Frank had termed it a victory speech. Now filled with revulsion, he made his way to the bathroom to disgorge the contents of his multiple gin and tonics.

But his loathing was not directed at Frank or, for that matter, at the process and art of emotional manipulation. It was directed at himself. He knew the answer; he had known it all along since September when he first heard Paul Constantinos’ remark.

He called Phil Enright, the attorney general, and asked to see him.

“When?” Phil asked. “I’m assuming today or tomorrow is not convenient given we have an election on.”

“As soon as possible. Tonight is fine,” Quentin said.

Unbeknownst to Quentin Kirby, Mike Rodrigo had been researching the leads he had from San Francisco since September 11, and he too was headed for the attorney general’s office.

If Phil Enright had been a guessing man, he would have conjectured that the two were connected somehow. He would have been right.

Wednesday, November 4, was an incredible day for America. Results had been pouring in all day, and there was hardly a state in which there was one clear winner. It wasn’t even a two-way contest. In virtually every state, the contest was a three-way struggle, and the fear of mail-in ballots deciding the president played on electoral officials.

There was not a single channel—not even CNN, CBS, NBN, or ABC—that would call the election; there wasn’t even one single media outlet that was prepared to call a single state until late Thursday afternoon, when Fox News announced that Frank Stein had won Colorado. It was a historic moment. No independent had ever won a state in the last one hundred years, they said.

On Friday morning, the state of California announced its bankruptcy and reversed its stance by afternoon. If you blinked, you missed it, especially on a day like this. Mary Mendoza, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, had quickly put together a rescue package for California, and as a pre-emptive measure, also put together bail-out packages in the hundreds of billions for six other states whose financial status was dire: Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Utah, and Arizona. The aggregate had come to $3 trillion. No one even bothered to ask the Fed where the money came from—even schoolchildren knew that ingenious book entries had made the printing press redundant.

By late evening on Friday, the election results had a shape to it—Ganon had won all the delegates of Maine, and Logan had won Nebraska. The rest of the states were all on a winner-take-all basis, and as the results rolled in, fears of a tie remained real.

Counting and recounting went on all night. It was Saturday morning when a picture finally emerged. Astonishingly, Frank Stein had won eight states and all their delegates: Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and California. “Christ Almighty, Stein has 148 delegates,” the headlines bellowed. Unless someone won 270 of the remaining 390 votes, it was going to be the first deadlock in almost two hundred years; one had to go back to 1824 to find another deadlocked presidential election in the United States.

Neither won even 200. Ganon carried all the usual Democratic states except California and Wisconsin and none of the purple, giving him 192 electoral votes. Logan had all the usual Republican states except Wisconsin; of the purple states, he had won Arkansas and West Virginia, giving him 198 votes.

In such a situation, the House of Representatives was required to decide the winner. But that was hardly the end of it. The House had a Republican majority, but the lame duck Congress was going to be replaced by new representatives in January 2021, and the incoming majority was Democrat. Both sides had their legal scholars argue their case, but it was clear to the Democrats that the sitting house was in no mood to concede. They had six more electoral votes, and it was all that mattered to them. But the popular vote was awfully close and marginally the other way: Ganon had 34.8 percent, Logan 34.5 percent, while Stein had a healthy 30.7 percent.

Of course, each side argued that their man had won the popular vote.

The fighting continued and boiled over into the Christmas break. Meanwhile, another $3 trillion of debt got repaid, and the money quickly circulated within the United States.

Late on Friday, Olivia found out that Victor Howell’s lawyers had tried to get the truck driver discredited at the trial and succeeded in securing a continuance. Victor’s trial was rescheduled for March 2021.

The indictment of Victor had already suffocated Sidney Ganon’s chances of a clear victory. Ganon’s camp had been circulating rumors that the Republicans were behind Casey’s death, alternately blaming the Stein camp, in the usual hope that the two would blend in the public’s mind as extremists.

Blake Heynman was still seething that the white collar Gestapo had killed the prospect of a Stein victory. He wanted the earliest possible date for a pretrial hearing with regard to the Stein case. He got one, but not before the United States decided who the forty-sixth president was going to be.

The year 2021 had dawned, and finally, the suits had done it. William Young was sick, and Quentin Kirby unelectable because he was part of the status quo. Colin Spain had become popular, but at the height of his popularity, he had fallen for the oldest trick in the book, and Katrina Marshella, a.k.a. Ashley Bennett, had enjoyed a well-earned vacation in the Bahamas en route to a cozy lifestyle in British Columbia with millions in her bank account. The most serious danger was Olivia Allen. She came out of nowhere. Yet she spectacularly jumped out of the race of her own volition. The monster was easy to smear; he gave them the words himself. Sidney Ganon was undone by Olivia when she led a very public charge to expose the dirty tactics of their bishops and their knights.

Yet they had not counted on the sheer size of the economic debacle that propelled the monster into more than just a wedge—he had ripped through the myth that independents always peter away; they had misjudged Stein. He had the one thing the other independents had been so lacking since Ross Perot in 1992: hundreds of millions to pour into a presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, they were here now, and all that was needed was one decision—they needed to get it done before January 20.

Strange, the monster was still shouting at the top of his lungs—some people never know when it is over—he was shouting that Imran Sharif represented the best opportunity to put a serious dent in militant Islamism and terrorism. Israel was itching to accept Sharif’s invitation to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities—never before had they been given so lofty an invitation. But at the State Department, no one was listening because they were all too busy bickering with the other party.

Amidst all the fury and the acrimonious agitation, the House of Representatives met on Friday January 15. They were required to select one of the top three candidates for president if none of the top three had an absolute majority. The Constitution otherwise gave them no guidance. Plurality was the next best thing to a majority, and the Republican majority House passed a resolution to appoint John Logan as the forty-sixth president of the Unites States of America despite objections and dissents from all the Democratic members of the House.

The fuming Democrats were so bent out of shape that they wasted no time in convening a Senate meeting the following Monday, two days before the president’s inauguration and the swearing in of the new House members. The Senate was required to select a vice president from the top two candidates in cases where no candidate had an absolute majority. In a move that stunned the whole world, they calmly proceeded to appoint Democrat Claire Derouge as the forty-ninth vice president of the Unites States of America.

If John “get tough on China and immigration” Logan missed a heartbeat, the party that thrust the “nationalize everything” man into the spotlight had their woman ready to take over the presidency.

Before they knew who would be president, Logan and Ganon had worked on a deal, ideally to be announced before a president was sworn in, but they had missed the deadline. Nevertheless, Logan honored his end of the bargain. It was sure to go flying through Congress. Their deal was to combine their pet projects. Logan had been working on the idea of a national high-speed broadband network. Ganon wanted to build a national high-speed rail network. Then one of their staffers got a very bright idea—why not lay high-speed fiber optic cable in the rail corridor and then run segments of the cable right into every home in America?

“Imagine,” Sidney Ganon said, reciting Barack Obama’s words, “boarding a train to the center of the city. Imagine no racing to an airport and across the terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whizzing through towns at speeds of two hundred miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation and ending a block away from your destination. Imagine what a project that would be, to rebuild America.”