“Just thinking out loud,” he said. “Annie, do you have any idea how many babies have been lost in Maryland because of late-term abortions? Specifically, to procedures that the Congressman has supported?”
“Not off hand, but we can find out.”
“The Rockville street fair’s coming up this weekend. McKenzie is sure to have a booth. What about calling on volunteers to picket him, holding up tiny coffins of the babies he helped to abort?”
“Rockville’s got a big Asian population,” the Crocodile said. “They’re mostly pro-life. But that’s pretty in-your-face.”
“Isn’t that what you said we needed to do?”
“It might be illegal.”
“We’ve got plenty of Republican lawyers on call. Find out exactly how to do it legally and let’s get on it.”
Aguilar was running a lean campaign, even with all the money he had brought in. He used consultants, not paid staff members, to handle high-end donors, direct mail, polling, data management, accounting, and media buys. For all the rest, he relied on volunteers—including for legal advice and his FEC filings.
“You’ve been pretty silent. What do you think, Camilla?”
Camilla Broadstreet was the best volunteer coordinator who had ever worked in Maryland. Or anywhere, for that matter. And because of that, she was one of the few paid staff. She brought the volunteers together once a week for a light dinner and drinks so they could schmooze with the candidate. It was part of her technique. She knew the value of star power as a motivator, and Aguilar knew how to turn it on. His volunteers would walk through hoops of fire to get him elected—and in campaign terms, that meant waving signs on highways in the rain, checking in donors at house parties, stuffing envelopes, working social media—and marching and singing in ninety-five-degree heat at parades and street festivals. When she wasn’t employed on a political campaign, Camilla toured the country as a motivational speaker, giving high-priced speeches about growing up bicultural and making it in a color-blind society. She, like Annie, had been hired by the Crocodile.
“I’m Roman Catholic. What do you think I think?” she said.
“How about the Latina girls?”
“Oh, this goes beyond the Latinas,” Camilla said. “We’ve got all kinds of people who get up at six in the morning to hold silent vigils in front of Dr. Carhart’s abortion mill. They’ve been doing it for over a year. Anglo housewives. Retirees. Even middle-aged gay men.”
“If the lawyers will sign off on it, it sounds like a plan,” the Crocodile said. “But we’re going to need to hire security from now on for our own events, to keep their oppo research guys from getting those close shots.”
16
There was a reason Annie Bryant had a “glow” about her. It wasn’t because she was pregnant: She was in love. As she watched Aguilar handle this mini-crisis, she couldn’t help but recall the afternoon when he had hit on her. It was so innocent, actually. He was charming, polite. Old worldly, even. Gallant was probably the word. At any rate, she wasn’t one of the Me-Too lynch mob and never had been tempted to join them. She liked men. She enjoyed their company. Indeed, she preferred them to most of the women she knew, especially those who thrived in the Washington, DC, swamp. And she had no problem enjoying Aguilar’s company and letting him know without umbrage where she stood. She was in love—with someone else.
She still wondered if the meeting hadn’t been a set-up by Gordon’s mom, Marcie, whom she had met during an earlier campaign event while working as staff counsel for Andy Harris, the only Republican member of Congress left in Maryland. Marcie was a good Republican, a staunch conservative, and you could count on her to show up at every campaign event. She volunteered to go door-to-door, lick envelopes, whatever. And never asked for anything in exchange. But she also was dead broke. That made no difference as far as Harris was concerned. But it meant that she was always going on about her son “the computer nerd” who worked down in Annapolis but still lived at home, helping her with the rent.
Gordon was a genius, Marcie said. Even at an early age, when husband number two (not Gordon’s father) had left her, he had displayed a rare talent that—if wrongly nurtured—could have sent him over to the dark side. In the eighth grade, he was furious when an English teacher gave him an F for a presentation on Huckleberry Finn that he had sweated over for hours. It was so unfair, he groused. He was upset for a week. And then, Mom got a call from the school principal asking her to come to his office. Gordon was waiting there when she arrived, his chin all the way down to his shoes. Clearly, the principal had been treating him as a juvenile delinquent and was about to exile him to Outer Slobovia. He was so huffy, trying to get her to share his indignation, but when she learned what her son had done, she laughed out loud.
“You mean he hacked the school’s server and changed his grade to an A?” she said. “And you want to suspend him for that? There were no broken windows, no smashed chairs, no broken jaws, not even a little scrape during recess. Nobody got hurt and nothing was damaged. You should be putting him in AP math and science, instead!”
When she told Annie the story the first time—and she told it several times before Annie finally got to meet the former child prodigy—she said that once they got home, she had asked Gordon to explain to her what he had done. He went on about how he had found a “back door” into the school’s main server, and then simply logged on as the system administrator, altered the grading database, and left. (The actual term he had used was “SQL injection,” but it went so far beyond her she never even attempted to register it). He never tampered with anybody else’s grades. He never told anyone else how he had done it. She was still angry with that school principal all these years later.
They corresponded regularly by email, mostly one-way from Marcie, who loved to forward conservative blog posts that poked fun of liberals. (Her favorite was a headline that read, “Singlehandedly,” above an attractive photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Down below, it read: “Putting an end to dumb blonde jokes.”) So when Marcie forwarded her the invitation to the local Republican Club meeting at the Red Horse Tavern in Frederick where Gordon would be making a presentation on the new voting systems the state would be using in the next election, Annie said, what the heck. It was only a fifteen-minute drive up to the Golden Mile from her small townhouse in Urbana, and she had nothing better to do. That was before the campaign, of course.
The minute she saw him, she felt as if she had known him for ages. He was just as Marcie had described him. Tallish and gangly, a bit awkward, even shy. But once he started speaking, he commanded the total attention of everyone in the room. He was low-key, precise, and intense. He didn’t just know everything there was about the new voting machines, but he had read all the vulnerabilities that were floating around on the Web and was prepared for all their natural skepticism, given that the Democrats had really pushed hard for these particular machines despite a horrible track record of errors and breakdowns in the paper-ballot scanners. He was handsome enough and would grow better-looking with age, she remembered thinking. But that wasn’t what initially caught her attention. It was his intelligence. Want to know a secret, guys? It’s not your looks that attract women. It’s not money or flashy cars. It’s your brains. She had a soft spot for intelligent men. Jocks and party-boys had never been her thing.
How to get his attention was something else entirely. She hung around after the Q&A, drinking a glass of mediocre Merlot, while a crowd of club members hovered around Gordon, the guys drinking beer from the bottle. He politely declined the beer but did finally accept a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the president of the club. She liked that.
Finally she saw an opening and went up to him to say hello. She said that she worked in Congressman Harris’s office, and she was sure the Congressman would be very interested to hear what he had been saying. Did he have a written version of his briefing he could email her?
“Sure,” he said. “Just give me your card.”
And that was that.
She was going to make him chase her.
Or so she thought.
The next time they met, she was sure Mom had arranged it. Marcie asked her to “show the flag” for Congressman Harris at the Maryland Wine Festival, which was being held on the sprawling grounds of the Carroll County Farm Museum in Westminster, just at the edge of his district. The Congressman wasn’t planning to attend—not good politics to be seen with a wine glass around your neck as you swayed from winery to winery amidst crowds of happy drunks on a beautiful sunny September afternoon—so Annie agreed to hang out at the Republican Party booth. And sure enough, not an hour had gone by when Gordon showed up to say hello to his mom.
“You two have met, haven’t you,” she said with innocence so fake it wouldn’t get a crab to bite.
Of course they had, Gordon said. A bit awkwardly, for sure, but that got them to small talk: the voting machine presentation, how did the Congressman like it…. And, low and behold, Mom was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
After a bit, it dawned on him. He saw the glass around her neck, and said, “I see you came prepared. We’ve got old friends who own Elk Run Vineyard on Liberty Road. They’ve got a booth just around the corner. Would you like to come taste their rosé?”
Carol Wilson was on duty, along with a male volunteer who helped out at the festivals, while her husband was back at the vineyard fixing the hydraulics on one of their tractors ahead of the harvest. She welcomed Gordon like a son and gave them each solid pours of the Cold Friday rosé.
“Why Cold Friday?” Annie asked.
“Because it was freezing cold the first year we harvested that plot!” Carol laughed.
They went on to sample the new Citrine rosé (a mix of Chardonnay and Pinot noir), the Cabernet Franc, and the Red Door Cabernet blend, and on the third glass decided they liked Red Door the best.
“What are you doing next Friday night?” Gordon asked.
“I thought I was having dinner with you,” she said.
And so it began, slowly.
Gordon invited her to the Surf House in Urbana, a recent addition to the bedroom community that attempted to reproduce the atmosphere of a beachside eatery, surfboards on the walls, tiki bar outside, fishing nets suspended from the ceiling, and large screen TVs with videos of surfing competitions on endless loop.
“Do you like Cava?” was his first question.
She said she did, and after two glasses he started to loosen up. She found herself enjoying his sense of humor, his self-deprecating way of telling stories about himself, and his taste for wine. They split an entrée of grilled squid that was surprisingly tender, and by the time their fish came, they had finished the Cava.
“We should have a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with the fish,” he said.
“Good thing I don’t have to drive far,” she said. “How about you?”
“I’m still at Mom’s house in New Market. But there’s a back road from here up to Old National Pike so I don’t have to go out on 70.”
“Sounds dangerous,” she said.
“I’ve been driving it since I was a kid. In fact, that’s where I learned how to drive—before I got my license.”
Gordon lived in a completely different world from hers, and it was refreshing to get away from politics. He’d been a gamer all the way through college and told her stories of his exploits on Azeroth in World of Warcraft while at College Park. She let the words flow over her, blending in with the pleasant buzz from the wine, and through it she undressed him in her mind. He still had a boy’s body, she thought. Little hair on his chest, the tight stomach, the thin waist. But those fine, long fingers. The blond hair that fell carelessly across his forehead like corn silk. And the innocence! He would be a few years younger than she was. So now I’m a cougar, she thought. But that’s okay. Without doing anything in particular, just being himself, he created an aura around them, a private world that encompassed them both. She felt warm and encompassed, as if he held the two of them in his arms.
Still, Annie was determined not to rush things. There was nothing worse in her book than being a vamp. They were all over the Hill, those young women with the fancy degrees and a lust for power who were determined to sleep their way to the top. The biggest prize was a Congressman. A chief of staff would do, or a majority chief counsel. But when needed, they would settle for junior staffers their own age to stay in practice or just for fun. Annie had graduated from a Christian college that tried—and failed miserably—to teach the virtues of chastity to its students. Then it was law school on the Left Coast where no one pretended virtue, let alone chastity. Because she was smart and endowed with athletic good looks, she had her pick of her fellow students. But since coming to the Hill eight years ago, she had become much more selective. The rumor mill churned non-stop, chewing up the innocent and the guilty and spitting them out in pieces. Mixing sex with office politics was deadly.
She let Gordon court her over a period of several weeks. Dinners here and there, weekend excursions to Baltimore or local vineyards. But still, he made no move. So in the end, she gave him a little push. She invited him to demonstrate the cooking skills he had boasted about—at her place. She made sure there was lots of wine.
And the rest was history.
After their third bout of love-making, he turned on his side and stroked her cheek, dialing her dark hair behind her ears.
“You are so gentle with me. Thank you,” he said. “You are so patient. So kind.”
“Shh,” she said. “I am happy. You don’t have to talk.”
“I do! For me, it was the first time,” he said.
“Really?” she said. That got her to sit up. “You could have fooled me.”
“I’m glad I did,” he said. “Now I’ve got to make up for lost time.”
The injection of carnality into their relationship removed the tension that had been building for several weeks. Now they found themselves hungry for each other, so much so that they would leave restaurants just barely finishing their main course and a bottle of wine, rushing back to Annie’s bed. She was happy. And she noticed that her face took on a new glow. And she didn’t mind that others, including Nelson Aguilar, could see it.
17
Nader Homayounfar looked again at the address he had scribbled down: 920 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE. It was a strange place for a tech firm to have its offices, a neighborhood of hundred-year-old brick townhouses on the wrong side of Capitol Hill. But that was unmistakably what Navid had told him. Yes, Southeast, he said, when Nader had questioned him. Behind Capitol Hill. There’s a bus but it’s a nice walk this time of year.
It was now less than three weeks before the election, and Nader’s boss, Representative Hugh McKenzie, was seriously underwater in the polls. An atmosphere of gloom hung over his congressional office. Staffers were quietly updating their résumés and avoiding each other in the corridor. At campaign meetings at DNC headquarters, Morton Nash was running the numbers precinct by precinct on a huge whiteboard, showing how they could still win and where they should deploy the candidate and their advertising dollars. But everyone knew Nash was grasping at straws. This meeting was supposed to get them back on their feet, McKenzie told Nader quietly. Just you and this guy, Navid. Granger’s guy.
It’s ironic that most of the IT managers on the Hill, at least the Democrats, are Asians, he thought. Mostly Indian or Pakistani Muslims, with a sprinkling of Iranian-Americans on top. The anonymity of sitting behind a computer screen shielded them from social awkwardness. But that still didn’t explain the numbers. Was there a math gene or computer gene that they shared? Maybe the Indian and Pakistani computer geeks were Parsees. That would explain it. One big distant family, reconnecting via 4chan and the nets.
Nader did a double-take when he saw the name on the bronze plaque
by the door. JT Government Services was familiar to anyone who followed politics, indeed, to anyone who watched cable news for more than an hour a day. Set up by Rick Jourdain, a former journalist, and Roger Turpin, a confidant of Governor Tomlinson and frequent TV commentator, the firm was known to be handling opposition research on Trump for the DNC. Turpin was always showing up on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, teasing out dark ties between Trump and Putin, Trump and neo-Nazis, Trump and the deplorable of the week. It was deep, it was complex, and it was dirty, so the narrative went. But IT wizardry didn’t figure in the skill set of Turpin and Jourdain. Nader half-wondered if he had come to the wrong address.
He slipped his business card to the receptionist, whose crescent-shaped glass desk neatly embraced the marble staircase spiraling to the upper floors. “I’m here for Navid,” he said. She took the card and nodded, continuing to talk to someone over her headset, and typed out a message. A few minutes later, an Indo-Pak head peered from around the corner and called his name.
“I work with Navid,” the young man said.
He escorted Nader to the end of a white corridor to an unmarked door secured with a digital lock and an optical scanner. “The War Room,” he said. “Please put your cell phone and any electronics you’re carrying in the box.” It was a black metal container with a hinged door. The inside had slots with foam protectors that held a dozen phones and a large flat area big enough for a laptop. It was a Faraday box, designed to block all electromagnetic emissions, including cellphone and Wi-Fi signals.
Downstairs, the corridor emptied out into a vast underground vault, where a dozen people sat in elevated rows of desks as in a movie theater, each with two monitors and a giant central display above the pit so they could all watch. For now, only the side screens were lit, showing five different TV channels, with a single word floating across the main display: SECURE. Navid’s office was off to the side, walled in milky glass. On his door was a nameplate that read:
The Election Heist Page 7