by Wesley Cross
“I’m not worried in the slightest,” he said in response to the reporter. “The American people have already spoken, and this is nothing but a publicity stunt from Mr. Engel. A desperate move from a desperate man. There’s no reason to believe our voting systems have been compromised. This is just going to delay the inevitable. We fully expect the results to uphold.”
“I have to say, I didn’t see this one coming,” Schlager said, getting up to stand.
“We should have.” Hunt turned off the sound of the TV and turned to face his friend. “This is Engel we’re talking about. And like you said—it’s only thirty-two thousand votes.”
“You don’t think there’s actual voter fraud, do you?”
“No. I don’t think so. But Engel wouldn’t do it unless he had some kind of plan in motion.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but several possibilities come to mind,” Hunt said. “He could be intimidating officials. Maybe he’s hoping that during the recount he can gain access to the ballots. But he must think he’s got a real shot of flipping the result, or else he’d accepted it by now.”
“What can we do?”
“First, we need to understand the process. Without it, we’re reading tea leaves here. If we know what steps he’ll have to take, we will pinpoint vulnerabilities. There’s got to be a weak link. Once we find it, we can decide what to do.”
“Okay.” Schlager pulled out a cell phone. “I’ll get our legal on the horn right now. Let’s do a conference call.”
“Call them now, but give them an hour,” Hunt said, turning the TV off completely. “Let them digest the news. I don’t want anybody shooting off the hip. I want informed opinions.”
He moved the chair back to the table and started walking toward the elevator.
“Where are you off to?” Schlager called after him.
“My office. I want to look at a few things before the call. I have a feeling this might be bigger than a recount. And let Helen know. I want her here when we’re on the call. I’d like to know what she thinks.”
11
It seemed that Kowalsky had made an impression on Takara Sanuki, or Raven, as the sleazy clientele of the strip club where she danced at knew her. The morning after his visit to the Gargoyle, Kowalsky received a message from a blocked number that he could only assume came from the woman. There were three lines of text. The first one said:
Help them.
The second had the address that turned out to be a five-story residential building in the heart of the East Village.
The last one was a name.
Nikko.
After a quick search, Kowalsky learned that the entire building belonged to a slumlord who owned a few properties in the area and rented them to the fresh-off-the-boat crowd. Those people paid in cash, were easy to intimidate, and never complained about the conditions they lived in.
The walk-up apartment on the fifth floor was registered to a single tenant—Nick Smith—and he had been living there for the past two months. Kowalsky didn’t need to strain his deduction powers to conclude that Nick was a made-up name for the man who had crossed the ocean in a container with Takara Sanuki and didn’t wish to be found.
He called Latham Watkins, who had been assisting him for the past few years, and together they drove to the address. Kowalsky parked the car two blocks away from the place and they made the rest of the way on foot.
“You are a lousy date. You never take me to nice places,” Watkins complained as they stood in front of the building.
“That is true,” Kowalsky agreed.
The place had two separate entrances, distinguished by letters after the main address, A and B. A short flight of concrete steps led to the freshly painted red door on the A side, and a rusty, peeling, green door on the B side. In between the stairs, there was a row of overflowing garbage cans and a gate to the building’s basement.
“Which door?”
“The ugly one, of course,” Chuck said.
“They are both ugly.”
“The rusty one.” He pointed to the right entrance. “Didn’t you say I never take you to nice places? I have a reputation to uphold.”
He walked up the stairs and tried the door. It was locked, and to his surprise he found a magnetic fob reader installed on the doorframe.
“Try to ring someone,” Watkins suggested.
Kowalsky looked at the panel next to the fob reader and pressed on a few buttons. Each made a muted buzzing sound, but none generated any response.
“I’m not sure it’s even connected,” he muttered. He examined the lock, wondering if he could pick it, but it looked too complex for a fast job considering his rudimentary lock-picking skills. And the street was too busy at this hour for him to linger at the front door for too long. “In the back we go.”
“I need to partner with somebody else,” Watkins quipped.
They walked around the building to the back alley. It was a dead end, a narrow passage squeezed between two buildings, that terminated in a locked gate at the end. There was a dark-blue dumpster filled to the top with black garbage bags. The ground was littered with cans, newspapers, and other debris. A green and yellow graffiti MUZA 25 19 crawled up the wall at a forty-five-degree angle all the way to the second floor’s windows.
“Help me with this,” Kowalsky said, pointing at the dumpster.
Together, they pushed it under the fire escape and then used it to get to the ladder. The entire structure creaked and groaned as they slowly made their way up the stairs. As they climbed, Chuck clung to the cold, paint-shedding rusty railings, praying that the whole thing didn’t come down. When they reached the third floor, a man stared at them from his kitchen, a frown spreading on his big, round face as he froze, standing in front of a steaming pot on a stove. Kowalsky flashed a fake police badge, and the man backed away, deeper into his apartment.
As they got to the fourth floor, Chuck slowed down.
“What are you doing?” Latham asked.
“I don’t want to pop like a Jack-in-the-box in his window,” he whispered. “We’ll spook him. You’re a small guy—climb up there and take a peek. Just don’t stick your balding head out too much.”
He let Watkins pass and watched as the man climbed the steps and crouched when he approached the window.
“What do you see?”
“Shut up,” Watkins snapped, squatting next to the window and peeking this way and that way. Then he stood up and leaned against the glass, placing his hands against the window to shield from sun glare.
“Are you out of your mind?” Chuck said, coming up behind him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“It doesn’t look right, man,” Watkins said, pointing through the window.
Kowalsky leaned in, blocking the sun the same way Watkins did. His partner was right. The kitchen, a small place with ugly brown cabinetry and cheap linoleum tile floor, was in disarray. A mug lay sideways on the table in what looked like a puddle of black coffee. A wooden chair with a tall back was on its side next to the table, one of its legs broken. All the cupboards and drawers had been left opened and someone must have gone through them—some of their contents were scattered on the kitchen counter and some thrown about on the floor without care. When his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light of the room, Kowalsky saw something else that made the hair on the nape of his neck stand up. A foot was sticking out from the entrance to the kitchen—a doorframe without the actual door. The foot was shaking.
“Shit.” Kowalsky pulled out his Chiappa from the holster and grabbed the edge of the window with his fingertips. He tried to pull it up, but his fingers slipped. The window wouldn’t budge. “Fuck. It’s locked from the inside. Stay back.”
He turned his face away and, grabbing the revolver by the barrel, swung it hard at the window. The glass shattered with a loud crash, followed by a tinkle of smaller pieces raining down on the alley below.
“Whatcha doing, man?” somebody shouted from the street
.
Kowalsky leaned over the railing and saw an older man looking up at them as he held on to his hat.
“Police business,” Chuck shouted back. “Do not interfere.”
“We better hurry,” Watkins said, “before the real police—”
A gunshot roared from the back of the kitchen, and Kowalsky ducked as the bullet whizzed next to his left cheek. He pointed the Chiappa at where he thought the shot had come from and squeezed the trigger. Then, he crashed through the window, pulling the trigger for the second time, aiming at the thin wall next to the kitchen entrance.
He heard someone yelp, a sound of pain and rage all mixed into one, and Kowalsky shot again, pressing his luck but missed, the bullet hitting the doorframe with a thud. A moment later, he heard the falling drumbeat of steps echoing through the apartment, followed by a loud bang of a slamming door. Then the apartment was quiet again, save for the sounds of Watkins cursing as he climbed through the broken window.
Kowalsky rushed toward the door. A young skinny man was lying on the floor of the living room, his feet resting on the threshold between the two rooms, his arms folded on his chest. He was wearing a pair of thick flannel pajama pants with a smiley-face print and a simple black T-shirt. His face was battered beyond recognition, his left eye swollen shut, his nose flattened. The neck bore deep-purple bruises that to Kowalsky’s trained eye left no doubt of their origin—whoever fled the apartment was trying to choke the victim when he was interrupted.
But as Chuck kneeled next to him, he realized they were too late—the young man was dying.
“Nikko,” Kowalsky called out softly, stuffing his revolver back into a holster. “I’m sorry we couldn’t help sooner. Takara Sanuki sent me here.”
The faintest smile touched Nikko’s lips, and a thin trickle of blood ran down his cheek.
“Little Kara. Always the strongest,” he said, his voice barely audible. “I’d never made it to America if not for her.”
“I know you’ve escaped a factory,” Chuck pressed. “Can you tell me where it is?”
“It’s—” Nikko said, but his words caught, a gurgling sound coming from deep within his throat. His hand pointed somewhere in the bedroom’s direction.
“Where is it, Nikko?”
“Under the mattress,” the man said. “It’s all there. See…”
His hand dropped back and his only eye rolled up. The man’s chest stopped moving.
Kowalsky leaned over Nikko’s face and listened for a few seconds. Then he straightened, reached out and closed Nikko’s eye.
“You’re bleeding,” Watkins said. “Your hand.”
“Where?” Kowalsky climbed to his feet and looked at his hand that a moment ago closed the dead man’s eye, but there was no sign of injury.
“Your left. Must’ve cut it on the window.”
He lifted his left hand and there it was, the edge of his palm sliced deep, blood dripping on the cuff of his shirt and raining down on his shoes. Chuck brought up the hand to his face, stuck the wound in his mouth, and sucked on it. It tasted like an old penny.
“What are you, twelve?” Watkins nudged him with an elbow. “Take it out of your mouth. You’ll get an infection. We gotta go.”
Kowalsky shrugged, looking at the young man in front of his feet. A man who escaped a massacre, crossed the ocean in a cramped container stuffed with people like sardines, sleeping in a pool of piss and shit, only to be beaten to death in the slums of Manhattan. His stomach started to climb to his throat, and Chuck leaned forward slightly and took a long, deep breath to suppress it.
There wasn’t a universe in which he was going to throw up in front of Latham Watkins. Finally, he straightened up. “Don’t you worry, Nikko. We’ll find them.”
12
“What the hell does it mean?” Jason Hunt paced back and forth through the observation deck of Orion Tower. The screen above the bar showed a conference room with a few men in business suits—Orion’s legal team.
“Under the US Constitution,” an older man sitting at the head of the table said, “the states are delegated the principal authority within their jurisdictions.”
“I understand that,” Hunt snapped. “But I thought it was Engel’s responsibility to prove that he was cheated out of presidency.”
“Correct,” the man said. “The burden of proof always lies upon the challenger. Not only does he need to show that there was fraud, he has to demonstrate that the extend of fraud would change the result.”
“How does that work, exactly?” Schlager’s voice came from the depths of the chair by the window. He looked like an angry hawk surveilling the surroundings. Helen Chen sat next to him, her face an impenetrable mask.
“As you know, the election was decided by thirty-two-thousand votes,” the lawyer replied. “That means in order to challenge the results, Engel would have to show there’s been enough fraud to change the outcome. Say, if he had evidence of a couple of hundred fraudulent votes, that wouldn’t be sufficient.”
“Because that still wouldn’t have changed the outcome.”
“Correct. But they provided potential evidence of over three hundred thousand alleged fraudulent votes, which puts it well above the limit.”
“And all those fraudulent votes by some magic coincidence just happened to come from one county. The same county that every poll showed was going to be carried by Price by a seven-point margin.”
“I have to admit the circumstances look suspicious,” the man said. “But all procedures had been followed during the process. I don’t see how—”
“It’s Engel we’re talking about. He tampered with the system. He must have. We need to figure out how to fix this.”
“What happens to the votes now?” Schlager asked.
“As in the actual ballots?”
“Yes. Are they still even there?”
“They’ll be stored in a secure location,” the man said. “There’s a US code that mandates that all federal election ballots must be preserved for at least twenty-two months. After that they are destroyed.”
“How?”
“The law doesn’t actually stipulate how they are supposed to be destroyed. Typically, they would use a crisscross shredder or send it to a certified document-disposal business.”
“Seems anticlimactic. Those are presidential ballots we’re talking about.”
The lawyer shrugged. “I would assume they’ll be under some extra protection considering the circumstances. But that’s the standard procedure. It happens every time.”
“Thank you, gentlemen.” Hunt turned off the screen, walked to the window, and rested his bionic hand on the transparent surface. The glass vibrated under his fingertips as the wind swatted at the tower.
“What are you thinking?” Schlager asked from the depths of his chair.
Hunt stayed quiet for a few moments as he watched dark clouds racing the night skies under the relentless blows of the storm. Finally, he turned to face his friend. “I think I’m an idiot.”
“Why?”
“Because Connelly’s right. We’ve been playing by a completely different set of rules. We are always reactive. Defensive.”
“I can hardly blame you for not wanting to go down to their level. They are murderers, torturers, and thieves.”
“Yes, they are.” Hunt walked across the floor of the deck and sat in his chair, facing his friends. “But if we don’t go on the offensive, all we do is patch holes on the Titanic. And this ship is going down, there’s no doubt about that. And now with Engel possibly becoming president-elect, I might’ve squandered the only opportunity to do what Mike has been suggesting.”
“Yeah, it’ll be hard to hit him now,” Schlager said. “He’ll have all the protection of the Secret Service in addition to his own army. And now he’s not a private citizen anymore. He’s president-elect. The pressure to go after anyone who threatens him will be enormous. What do you want to do?”
Hunt looked down at his metallic hand. In the ghost
ly light of the night, the gunmetal-gray looked alive, as if made from liquid mercury. He bunched his fingers into a fist and then relaxed them again. “I think we should call Rovinsky. We need to brainstorm how to handle this. We can’t allow—”
“I think it’s always a good idea to talk to Jim,” Chen offered, interrupting him, “but I feel like both of you are not considering the most obvious.”
“Such as?”
“You’re trying to prevent Engel from becoming a president.”
“That’s the goal.”
“What you’re not discussing,” she said, “is what needs to be done if we don’t stop him.”
“We can make that decision later,” Schlager said. “I think for now we should concentrate on preventing it from happening.”
“There might not be a later,” she said. “I know we’ve been going back and forth about direct confrontation with Guardian. It’s practically going to be off the table if he overturns the results of the election. And let me tell you what I would have done, if I were in his shoes.”
“Okay.”
“First,” she said, “I’d cut off your oxygen. That is the easiest part—take away every single governmental contract you currently have.”
“It’s not that simple. We will fight that,” Hunt said.
“You can try, but we are not discussing normal practices here. This is Engel we are talking about. I wouldn’t give your contracts to somebody who gave a better bid. No, I’d accuse you of a serious crime. I would freeze your accounts, confiscate hardware, and arrest everyone at the top. Then, by the time your lawyers figure out how to even get you out on bail, your reputation will be ruined, your company will be bankrupt, and there’s a good chance you will never see the light of day again. Are you prepared to risk it all? To risk not just your life but everyone around you? To risk never being able to even try to revive Rachel?”