by James Rosone
Each day she drove to work, she felt like she was putting in another day in debtors’ prison, and at the end of each day, she was one day closer to being free. Then, four months ago while she was wallowing in her sorrows at a Beef ‘O’ Brady’s over a Reuben sandwich and some sweet potato fries, a man had struck up a conversation with her. They’d talked about anything and everyone for the next couple of hours before the man had to leave, but he’d promised to return in a couple of days to meet her there again.
Julie didn’t know what to think of her new friend. He was charming, funny, had a good job in the city, and for some unknown reason, he seemed interested in her. She felt excited for the first time in years, like she might actually have found someone who shared some of the same interests she did. The next two days went by quickly—she couldn’t wait for Thursday to come so she could return to Beef ‘O’ Brady’s and see if her mystery man did in fact come again to meet with her.
When Thursday arrived, she had butterflies swirling around in her stomach all day at work. The excitement was building until finally the end of the day arrived. She hurried home to change and put on her best outfit. Stopping before she walked out the door, she thought better of it and put on some perfume and touched up her makeup before she rushed out.
When she opened the door to her favorite sports bar, Julie spotted her mystery man right away. True to his word, he was there…waiting for her. He smiled at her with his perfectly straight pearly white teeth. He had cute little dimples on each cheek, and his deep brown puppy dog eyes were so inviting.
She learned that her new friend, Mike Wang, was a bank executive at Wells Fargo. From her perspective, he appeared to be pretty successful judging by the clothes he wore and his well-groomed appearance. She imagined that his haircuts probably cost more than three of hers.
They conversed throughout the evening and he just seemed to lap up everything she said. She was shocked to find him nodding and asking questions, affirming everything she told him. To her amazement, he asked her out on a date for Saturday. He said he wanted to take her out to a concert in town and then dinner. Julie was elated. She hadn’t been out on a date in more than a year. She truly felt like she might have found her Prince Charming.
For the next four months, they talked and went out several times a week as they built up a bond of friendship and romantic interest. Then one day, they had a conversation that nearly ended their relationship.
Mike gently touched her cheek, and she held his hand there as they looked in each other’s eyes for a moment. “Babe, I just feel so bad about how things in your life have turned out,” he began. “I mean, you have such a heart for people and wanting to help them, and that university took advantage of you. They had to know that after six years at their school, you would owe so much money that you’d never be able to live the dream that you went there for.”
“I think about that sometimes,” she admitted. “It does seem really wrong how they sucker people in. That school really does try to promote the whole ‘reaping and sowing’ principle. They essentially convince you that if you sow good into the world, that God will see that and you will reap a benefit. Like somehow, a miracle will happen, and your loans will just not be an issue.”
“It just doesn’t happen like that, though,” he said. “They honestly lied to you to get your money. It just feels so wrong, like deeply morally wrong.”
“I know,” she admitted. “That’s why I don’t go to any of those ‘name it and claim it’ churches anymore. I almost left the faith entirely because I felt like God had abandoned me when I didn’t get the miracle I’d believed in, but I’ve just come to see things differently now.”
“I wish I could just wipe out your loans for you,” he said. “Business is going well, but unfortunately, not quite that well yet.”
“I wouldn’t expect that from you,” Julie responded. “I mean, you’re already paying for almost all of our dates, which is really nice. I can’t tell you how good it feels to just have a nice dinner and not worry about the tab every once in a while.”
“I wish I could do more, though,” Mike told her, sadness in his voice. “I mean, I hate to see you stuck in that house with that grumpy, lazy dolt of a stepdad. I honestly don’t know how your mom stays with him.”
“I ask myself the same question all the time,” she replied, “but I know that she just believes divorce is utterly wrong for any reason other than infidelity, which is the one sin he has somehow failed to commit, or at least he’s never been caught.”
He sighed. “Look, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I know someone who might be able to help you with your situation. I have this friend, and he has a side business—he’s willing to pay mail carriers fifty dollars per absentee or mail-in ballot they hand over.”
Julie bristled. “Mike—tampering with the mail is a serious offense. It can land you serious jail time.” She crossed her arms defensively.
He calmly replied, “Yeah, I get that. But it is kind of crazy to think about. I mean, how many absentee or mail-in ballots do you deliver in a cycle?” Mike smoothly added, “That’s just a lot of money…”
He changed the subject, and she eventually brushed it off as some sort of wishful thinking. But then, on a different date, he brought it up again.
This time, she actually thought about the question and found herself answering him. “I guess I probably deliver around five or six thousand of these ballots, maybe more,” she explained. “I mean, my route includes two large retirement communities, and older people tend to vote by mail so they can avoid standing in the long lines on election day.”
“Wow, babe…” Mike said. He grabbed her hand and stroked it gently, looking into her eyes. “Just think about it for a second, OK? If you withheld five thousand ballots, that would be $250,000—six thousand ballots would be $300,000. You could not only be free from your student loans, you could actually buy your own house and get away from under the thumb of your stepfather.”
As she sat there thinking about the awful man that made her beautiful, loving mother miserable every day, and by extension made her miserable every day, she felt herself falling under Mike’s spell. In just one day, she could erase years of wretchedness and spite and finally be free.
“I don’t know, Mike. It does sound like a nice fantasy, honestly. But how do I keep from getting caught?” she asked.
Mike smiled that million-dollar smile of his. “Well, if you were going to do this, you’d deliver the ballots on your route like normal. You wouldn’t attract attention that way, since no one would be calling asking where their missing ballot is. But when it came time to do a mail pick up, you’d put aside any ballots you found and send a text to this contact I have. He’d set up a meet along your route so you wouldn’t be late heading back to the processing center and tick off that ridiculous ogre of a boss you have. When you make the exchange, he’d pay you cash based on how many you collected that day. No paper trail, and nothing to tie it back to you.”
“I don’t know…I’ll have to think about it,” she found herself saying.
Julie didn’t actually spend much time considering the reality of the scenario until the first day of early voting, when she picked up twenty-two absentee ballots from one of the retirement centers. She suddenly felt incredibly nervous. Her heart raced, her palms became sweaty. She was so terrified, in fact, that she didn’t text the man Mike had told her to.
When she got home, Julie felt so conflicted about it that she puked her guts out. She thought about how wrong it was, the fact that she had nearly broken the law and could have gone to jail. Then she realized Mike’s friend would have paid her $1,100 cash. No taxes, just plain old-fashioned hard cash. In all reality, no one would have been the wiser. No one would have known what she’d done. It wasn’t as if each letter was electronically received by her and then matched at the receiving center to make sure she didn’t lose anything.
She shook her head. She stared at the pile of bills on her desk. Her m
ost recent student loan statement showed she still had a balance of $77,212, after paying on the debt for over eight years. That was after the loan forgiveness that the post office offered. Julie looked up at the wall. As she stared at the poster that had been put on her wall with Sticky Tack, she realized that she was still living like a teenager in her parents’ home, even though she was now thirty-two years old.
What if I just hand over enough ballots to cover what I still owe? she thought. Then I could quit this miserable job and find something better…
*******
It was 2:30 p.m. when Julie Parsons finished her daily mail pickup at the Whispering Pines Retirement Community. After collecting the bins of outgoing mail and dropping off the bin of inbound mail, she sat in her truck and briefly sorted through what needed to go where before she headed back to the central mail processing center.
As she separated the general letters and packages, she spotted some of the absentee ballots in the pile of outbound mail she’d picked up. Curiosity got a hold of her, and she decided to count them. It turned out she had a lot of them in today’s batch—a total of fifty-three. Pulling out her smartphone, she did a quick calculation.
Holy cow, that’s $2,650, she thought.
She stared at the number on the calculator. A few seconds later, she flipped over to her text messages and found the number Mike had given her. Without thinking, she texted the number with the code word Mike had given her and the number of ballots she had.
She immediately shook her head. She couldn’t believe what she’d just done. Just as she was about to lose her nerve and return to the processing center to finish her day’s work, she received a response.
The text message was an address, which was conveniently located on her route back. The impulsive side of her won over, and she entered the location into her Google Maps app and started to head there.
When she arrived, she received another text that told her to come around to the back of the shopping center and wait. Nervously, Julie drove around to the back, doing her best to make it look normal, like she did this all the time.
A minute later, a man came out of the back of the Jersey Mike’s sub shop and headed toward her. He gently rapped on the window to get her attention.
She nearly jumped out of her skin. “You Julie?” he asked.
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I was told to give you this envelope and to pick something up from you. Do you have the package for me?” he asked. The guy seemed nervous. Julie figured he had to be no more than twenty years old, probably a student at the local college nearby.
Julie’s heart skipped a beat. For a brief second, she didn’t know what he was talking about—she didn’t have a package. Then it dawned on her, he must have meant the group of ballots. She had bundled them all together with a rubber band. She reached down and handed them to him, and the young kid handed her an envelope. Julie looked inside, and sure enough, there was a wad of cash, mostly twenties and a few hundred-dollar bills.
The young man quickly turned around and headed back into the Jersey Mike’s sub shop, and Julie sped off back to the mail processing center.
That evening as Julie looked at the money spread out on her bed, she made the conscious decision that right or wrong, she was going keep doing what she’d done that day. If she had to deny some old farts their votes to get her student loans paid off, then so be it.
It’s not like they count absentee ballots anyways, so who cares? she told herself.
*******
Mike Wang was busier than a gopher on a golf course. The election was in full swing with early voting happening in earnest. Surprisingly, a lot of voters were moving to the iVote blockchain voting app the government had announced last year. Mike figured most people would wait another cycle or two before moving headlong into it, but he was wrong, at least about the younger voters, those under the age of thirty-five. The voters above forty definitely tended to trust the electronic system less, and the elderly voters relied heavily on the absentee ballot system.
Standing in front of the map of Wake County, which encompassed Raleigh, Mike felt reasonably confident that this plan would work. He was a bit apprehensive when his mark, Julie, got cold feet the first few days of early voting and didn’t text his contacts that she had ballots for him, but she came around. Fortunately, his other marks didn’t have the same moral dilemma she seemed to have initially suffered and were much quicker to seize on the free money he was offering. His only challenge now was ensuring his other team was able to discreetly open the mail-ins, identify who they’d voted for, and either reseal the ones who’d voted the way they needed them to or eliminate the ballot so it wouldn’t count against them. If they had to destroy a ballot, it was imperative that not a single tiny little scrap of paper was left to draw any sort of suspicion.
If Mike did his job right, come election night, Wake County would see a massive increase in the number of people who voted for their candidate, and a precipitous drop-off in the number of people who voted against them. They only needed this operation to be successful in a couple of counties in the state, and it should tip the balance in the right direction.
Shaking his head, Mike did have to marvel at how they had come up with this plan. By running up the score in districts that already leaned heavily their way, it wouldn’t draw suspicion when they helped ensure the other party’s vote count in that same district evaporated. If they could make the divide large enough in a couple of large districts, they could swing the outcome of the entire state, and thus the election.
Chapter 10
Dynamic Raid
October 26, 2020
Kosovo
Brigadier General William Lancaster and Lieutenant Colonel Seth Mitchell watched the video feed coming in from the MQ-9A Reaper drone as it loitered 10,000 feet above the small village of Srbica, which was situated fifty-two kilometers away from their current position.
The camera zoomed in, providing them a good overwatch of the mosque and the two houses they were observing nearby. On a different monitor was another video feed being transmitted to them by a pair of intelligence assets hidden nearby. Another team was set up in a house several hundred meters away with a set of parabolic microphones aimed at the two houses they were monitoring and the mosque. It was only a matter of time until the person they were after showed up, and then the capture team would be sent in.
A few hundred meters away from the room where they were watching all the feeds was a pair of Blackhawk helicopters with a Delta Force team ready to roll, the helicopter blades rotating slowly as the engine idled in anticipation of a quick launch order. Further down the flight line were two Ospreys on standby with two ODA teams on alert should the initial capture team run into heavy resistance and call for help. The ODA teams weren’t happy about being sidelined in place of Delta, but they had been overridden by the JSOC commander.
“There!” shouted one of the soldiers excitedly as he pointed at a Mercedes-Benz that was approaching their observation zone.
Turning to look at the soldier, General Lancaster asked, “Are you sure? Do we have confirmation that he’s in the car?”
Nodding his head, the soldier removed one of his earphones. He had been listening in on the information being provided to him from the NSA. “Yes. NSA has given a 97 percent voice match to the target. He’s actively using his phone in the car. That’s how they confirmed it’s him.”
Standing now, the general walked over to the young man. “I want to know who he’s talking to, and I want the location of the caller on the other end,” he demanded.
The soldier nodded and passed the order over the headset to the NSA operators on the other end. The analyst back at Fort Meade would set to work tracking down the person on the other end.
“Should we launch the capture team?” asked the Delta Force squadron leader, a lieutenant colonel who had accompanied his troops to Kosovo.
Shaking his head, Lancaster replied, “No. Not yet. I want t
o know who Rexhepi is talking to first. Pipe the conversation through to us as soon as we have it.” The general took up station next to the soldier who was coordinating things with the NSA.
A second later, the soldier hit a few keys on his keyboard, and they heard the conversation being played out over the computer speakers:
Voice A: You need to go to ground. The Americans will be all over you.
Voice B: No, there is still too much to do. I can’t just disappear. Not yet.
Voice A: You don’t understand, they captured one of your team members. If he hasn’t given you up yet, he will soon.
Voice B: No, they didn’t. I read in the news reports, they were all killed in a police shoot-out during their missions.
Voice A: That’s what they wanted us to think. My source says one of them is still alive and being interrogated. He’s not dead. They lied.
Voice B: Crap…are you sure?
Voice A: Yes. Go to plan B and disappear. The monies have been moved and are ready for your other team.
Voice B: Fine, I’ll head to the alternate site and disappear. How will I get in touch with you again?
Voice A: You won’t. We’ll reach out to you when we need your services again. Just make sure your other team executes their next attack. When they do, then I’ll transmit the final wire transfer.
Click.