Once the lock clicked, his face fell into a dark scowl. He could still hear the local party hack’s braying laughter above the gobbling noises of the fundraiser in the adjoining room.
Judas Priest, what a jerk, he thought. Seabrook couldn’t swear, even in the privacy of his own head, without his mother’s sad look of disappointment flashing before his eyes. But guys like that made it tough to keep his temper. He’d long since learned to put up with such people. They paid good money for his time ($5,000 minimum donation to attend, drinks included). But what kind of ignorant turd still tells jokes like that in public? The hardest part is changing the diaper? Jerk.
The media liked to portray him as a stuffed shirt, a robo-candidate with no real emotions of his own. Just another thing they got wrong. He had to keep his temper in check, especially at times like these. He knew that there were knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers in the extreme wing of his party. He didn’t like them. But if they wanted to vote for him because of whatever image they’d already created in their bent little minds, then he wasn’t going to say or do anything to dissuade them. He was too close to the prize this time and every vote counted. Besides, it wasn’t like Curtis was doing anything to discourage the far-left whack jobs on his own team, like the Occupy Wall Street people. And that crowd was really dangerous.
Seabrook took off his jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. He wanted to get out of the bulletproof vest before rejoining the party. The Secret Service insisted he wear it for the speeches, but he figured he was safe enough in a room full of vetted and screened contributors. It wouldn’t look right for him to be wrapped in body armor while he was hammering Curtis for being afraid of his own constituents.
To tell the truth, he was uncomfortable with the entire line of attack. The vest was a reminder of the reality they both faced: they were targets for anyone with a grudge or a wish for sudden fame.
Seabrook had his own troubles with the hair-trigger rage of the voters. He’d been as careful as a bomb-squad technician during the primaries and he was still attacked every day by the Tea Party, the patriots, or whatever else they called themselves.
The same inarticulate rage that battered Curtis found a target in Seabrook, too. The rank and file of his own party distrusted him. A former Wall Street investment banker himself, Seabrook was too perfect, too polished, too rich. They doubted his commitment and zeal. He wouldn’t promise to shut down the federal government or return the country to the gold standard. His primary opponents gleefully threw red meat to the crowds because they knew they’d never win a general election. Seabrook, on the other hand, had a chance. So he spent every day on a tightrope desperately trying to find a balance between the extreme fringe and the swing voters in November.
As a result, he’d had to fight for every vote in the primaries—donations dried up after a disastrous third-place finish in New Hampshire, a state he was expected to win in a walk—and he spent a considerable amount of his personal fortune just to stay in the race. His closest rival dropped out, thankfully—she was still making appearances, but she’d more or less thrown her support behind Seabrook. The campaigning was really just to provide more footage for her reality-TV show, The Candidate. She’d told the media, with a straight face, that she could do more good with that than she could in Washington. And the other candidates fell away, just as he knew they would.
After the convention, his advisers flipped the script and used the same attacks on Curtis that Seabrook had suffered. They said the president was out of touch, an elite, unable to talk to the real Americans out there in the heartland (and Seabrook’s campaign deliberately left it vague as to how they defined “real Americans”). They mocked the tailored suits, the Ivy League education, the bombproof limo, even the “extravagance” of Air Force One. (“When was the last time you flew first class? President Curtis does it every day—and you foot the bill.”)
It made him uncomfortable. It was undeniably tawdry. But he hadn’t said no to any of it. Because the polls said it worked, especially in Ohio, which was going to be crucial in the final electoral count. So he let his campaign keep hammering away at it.
But he wondered how he would feel if something did happen to Curtis—if the responsibility would nag at him, or if the media would blame him.
He shook off the thought. The campaign had its own momentum now. He felt more like he was being dragged along than steering it.
Seabrook was undoing the Velcro straps on the vest when a man cleared his throat.
He spun around, heart suddenly racing.
The mild-looking man sat quietly in one of the hotel chairs, blending in with the decor like another shade of beige. He wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses.
“What the Sam Hill are you doing in here?” Seabrook demanded. He almost reached for the panic button the Service had given him, but it was still in his jacket, which he’d tossed on the bed. And anyway, this guy didn’t look like he could threaten anyone.
“My apologies, Governor,” the man in glasses said. “I thought your staff would have told you I was here.”
“Obviously not. Who are you?”
The man gave him a bland smile. “My name is Proctor. We met at the briefing last week.”
Seabrook blinked, suddenly off balance. He couldn’t quite remember this guy, but he remembered the briefing. As a courtesy, the CIA and other intelligence agencies gave classified updates to the opposition candidate, supposedly so that if he did win, he’d be up to speed on vital matters of national security. Seabrook suspected it was just an ego-stroking game of charades.
“That doesn’t explain why you’re here,” Seabrook snapped. “Unless we’re at war with someone you forgot to mention, this could have waited.” He didn’t like being surprised. And he especially didn’t like the way the little man had watched him undress.
Proctor frowned. “I’m very sorry to have upset you, sir,” he said. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly here on official business.”
Now, this just stank of wrong. Seabrook was ready to throw the pencil-neck out of the room himself when Proctor said, “What would you do to win this campaign?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, sir,” Proctor said, a hint of steel in his voice now. “What are you prepared to do to win?”
Seabrook shook his head. “I’m not sure what you mean by the question.”
Proctor smiled. Seabrook thought there was a hint of mockery behind his lenses now. “There’s no need for that kind of politician’s answer. I assure you, there are no bugs in this room. I’m not recording this conversation. This might be the one time in the next eight years you can speak freely. If you accept what I’m offering, I can almost guarantee you victory in November.”
“‘Almost’?” Seabrook repeated. “You talk about me being a politician. That’s a fairly big weasel-word.”
The man with the glasses nodded, acknowledging the point. “It’s a big country. We can’t push every lever everywhere. Besides, we’ve tried it in other places often enough to know that stuffing ballot boxes never works. It’s stupid and crude. Even with the new machines, people remember how they voted. What I can give you is advice and information. I could give you the inner workings that you’re not privy to—and never will be, unless you win. Believe me, you’d find a way to use them. Some of these disclosures would sink Curtis. Of course, the choice would be entirely up to you.”
For a moment, Seabrook was tempted. Like any decent politician, he’d studied Reagan’s 1980 campaign. The hostage crisis and the debates were what sealed it for him. And there were persistent rumors that the CIA helped Reagan into office by tampering with both. Until this moment, Seabrook would have called those rumors the typical whining of the losing side.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
“What would you want in return?”
“That’s something we’d have to discuss after your inauguration. All I can tell you: it will be well within your powers, it will not threaten you or your family’s safety, an
d it’s completely nonnegotiable.”
“How do you know I’d keep my end of the bargain?”
Proctor smiled again. This time there was no mistaking the mockery in it. “Because everyone always has.”
Seabrook had made many compromises to get where he was; he didn’t lie to himself about that. He smiled and choked back his indignation and disgust at certain people. He turned a blind eye to things that went against his personal morals.
But he knew this was different. This wasn’t a compromise. This was a buyout offer. And he had a nagging feeling all sales were final.
“Get out,” he said.
The man in the glasses shrugged and stood up. Seabrook stepped back to give him a wide berth as he walked to the door, as if watching a poisonous snake make its way across the floor.
HE’S NOT CHICKEN—HE’S A DUCK! QUIT DUCKING THE DEBATE, CURTIS!
—Sign carried by Seabrook campaign worker criticizing
President Curtis for refusing to debate
EMBASSY SUITES HOTEL, MALMEN, ILLINOIS
Megan Roark was stuck.
In her hotel room she finished uploading her last bulletin of the day to her website, The Roark Report: CURTIS CAMPAIGN CATCHES GUNMAN—A FALSE FLAG OPERATION? (Copyright, Breaking News, Must Credit.) The Net was an even more demanding beast than the cable news cycle. Every minute of every hour, there was someone awake in the world looking for a new story, a new hit of information and outrage. According to the software that monitored her site, some members of her audience hit refresh on their browsers every minute just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything she might have added in the last fifty-nine seconds or so.
Over a million people daily came to Megan’s site, read her quickly typed blog posts and watched her videos. They came for her vicious attacks on the Curtis administration. They came for her blunt-instrument sarcasm and humor. They came for scandal that the MSM—mainstream media—wouldn’t touch. And, she admitted freely, they came to look at her perfect rack and cute-as-a-goddamned-button smile.
At least when she was on cable, she had staff and producers to shoulder some of the load. Back then, she was one of a dozen forgettable blond anchors better known for their looks than their journalistic creds. Megan had carved a small niche as the one who was really snide in interviews with anyone perceived to be on the side of President Curtis. She was moved up to a spot during the morning news block on a trial basis.
But Megan lost her spot due to an unfortunate on-air freak-out after the terrorist attack on the White House. She’d been awake for twenty-four hours covering the story and had spent her off-air time gobbling Adderall to stay awake and reading Internet message boards that tracked the inconsistencies in the official timeline of events. Megan still wasn’t quite sure what had happened. She had only intended to bring up a few of these discrepancies while interviewing a White House spokesman in the aftermath. The next thing she knew, she was screaming at him, accusing him of orchestrating a cover-up. “The facts don’t add up!” she screamed into the camera. “You keep changing your story!”
She was yanked off the air and suspended. While she wallowed in misery in her apartment, waiting for the official word that she’d been fired, she spent even more time on the Net. And she found that a YouTube video of her tirade had become one of the most popular videos on the Web. Sure, some people just laughed (“LOL! Bitch be crazee! OMG!”), but others—many others—called her a hero. “she has the GUTS to aks the real ?s noone else will” was a typical comment.
Megan looked at the counter on the video and saw that more than two million people had watched it. That was about twice the number of viewers she normally pulled on cable. Within an hour, she set up her own website and began recording herself through her laptop’s built-in camera. The network shitcanned her as soon as her first home video hit the Net. They figured she was doomed to become another frayed thread on the lunatic fringe.
That was two years ago. Now she had a professional studio in one corner of her new $1.5 million condo and an advertising deal with a major media buyer. The lunatic fringe, as it turned out, was a very profitable place to be in America these days. But it was still only her doing it all: researching, reporting, writing and shooting and editing. And sometimes the content got a little thin.
The campaign trail was unbelievably boring to both her and her fans. She’d been reduced, in the last week or so, to rehashing some old conspiracy theories: Bin Laden had actually been dead for years and his corpse was kept on ice until the president’s poll numbers needed a boost; a hospital ship that sank in the Gulf of Aden last year was actually sunk by a U.S. Navy submarine; and her old standby about the suicide bombing run at the White House being an inside job.
None of it was dragging eyeballs to the site the way she’d like. She hadn’t seen a drop in overall unique users, but growth was no longer ramping up like before. She wondered if she should start showing even more cleavage.
But first, she checked her crank file.
She had a dedicated mail account that accepted public messages. She only opened it on a spare laptop that had no other purpose. It received thousands of e-mails. Maybe 50 percent were spam: get-rich-quick schemes, offers of Viagra and penis enhancement (she thought her balls were big enough, thank you very much), viruses, and porn, porn, porn, porn. Then there were offers of marriage from prisoners and would-be stalkers. Those went right into the trash. There were poorly spelled manifestos from true believers who wanted her to expose the alien tunnels under the Southwest, and a few obscene messages from unhinged liberal types.
Tonight, however, at the top of her in-box, she found something different. Sent from a random overseas server, it contained one massive attachment and a simple message:
The president doesn’t want you to know about this.
If it was a virus, it was the most ingenious one she’d seen yet. There was no way for her to resist that.
She clicked on the attachment and it began unpacking itself onto her computer.
It was huge. Reams of documents, plus video and photos. She recognized the first file almost immediately from her days as a cop reporter.
It was an autopsy report. Intrigued, she kept reading before shuddering at the description of the horrific wounds inflicted on the victim. Then she moved on quickly to the police report.
She checked her newsfeeds and archives just to be certain, but she was right. No one had covered this. No one had even mentioned it.
Someone had carved up a campaign worker for Curtis like a pig in a slaughterhouse. And while he was banging a local volunteer.
Then someone had tried to cover it all up.
Megan’s face split into a shit-eating grin. She did a little spin in her chair and squealed with delight.
She had her next big story. And it went all the way to the White House.
The question before us is: if these incidents are mere border skirmishes in this conflict, what would a full-scale invasion from the Other Side look like? For an answer, we should look back to the medieval period (5th century CE to 15th century CE), more commonly known as the Dark Ages. In that time, it was quite common for people to see demons, monsters, fairies, and the effects of black magic on a daily basis. It would be no real surprise for a 13th-century miller to see the Devil on the road in broad daylight. The supernatural was considered as normal as the weather, if less predictable.
Modern historians tend to discount these eyewitness accounts as fantasy, hyperbole, or simply the misunderstanding of a more primitive time. But this is a facile and simplistic explanation. One of the great mistakes of historical investigation is to assume people of earlier times are stupider than people in modern times. In fact, people in the medieval period, while largely illiterate, were no less intelligent than people today. The lack of formal education systems does not mean people in the past were any more likely to be prone to fantasy or delusion; if anything, they would be more likely to trust the evidence of their own eyes. And in the darkest parts of
the Dark Ages, they would be much more aware of their surroundings, since fatal threats were far more commonplace.
We have to consider the possibility if thousands of eyewitness accounts of supernatural beings exist from the Dark Ages, it’s because thousands of people were actually seeing these things. The sheer number of sightings, the existence of the old European “witch-cults,” the records of mass killings by unknown creatures—all of these point to a climate where the Other Side crossed into our world with impunity. The populace was consistently in terror from the things that walked in the dark, and had to take precautions every day to avoid them. Indeed, such a state of constant fear is less a hallmark of an invasion, and more like what is observed during an occupation by a hostile force.
—Dr. J.R. Berger, emeritus professor of history, “Them: An Examination of Human/Non-Human Contact Throughout Recorded History and Its Implications” (Specially Commissioned Report/Classified ABOVE TOP SECRET)
4:23 A.M., OCTOBER 11, 2012, PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN BUS, OUTSIDE LANFORD, ILLINOIS
The president was doing an admirable job of controlling his temper. But there was no mistaking the volcanic anger under the surface. He was pissed.
“How did this get out?” he demanded.
He pointed to the flat-panel computer on his desk, the screen turned outward to face his staff.
CURTIS CAMPAIGN WORKER KILLED DURING SEX ROMP WITH VOLUNTEER
Is there a “Campaign Carver” at work on the trail?
_____
THE REPORT HAD gone up at 3 a.m. on The Roark Report. She’d run it without waiting for confirmation or a response from the campaign, of course. But the police records and autopsy photos were enough. She had the whole sordid story of Kirkman and Ohio in excruciating detail.
The other media outlets were only asking tentative questions so far. They didn’t want to get their hands dirty on such a sleazy story if it turned out to be a complete hoax. So far, the campaign had been able to stall them with the tried-and-true “We won’t even dignify that with a reply.” But it wasn’t going to work for long. Pretty soon the Mansfield Police Department would have to issue a statement. And so would the campaign.
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