* * *
25
Call it: Your Book or Mine?
The morning after the Iowa caucuses, Frank was throwing a few articles of clothing and toiletries into the same beat-up suitcase he’d used since college when his mobile phone rang. He saw a Washington number he didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Frank?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Dan. Dan Grover.”
Frank frowned. “Uh, should I know you?”
“Didn’t Mr. Vose tell you I’d be calling?”
Oh − right he was referring to Perry Vose, his agent. “Sorry, yes, he did. But I don’t think Perry mentioned your name. My mistake.”
“Hey – no problem. Sometimes I can’t remember my own name! You ever have days like that? Hey? Am I right? So where are you, anyway?”
Frank frowned again, holding the phone several inches from his ear to protect his hearing.
“Iowa.”
“Iowa! No shit? Really? Who the hell goes to Iowa? Oh man – my bad! I mean, you’re not from Iowa are you?”
“No – Brooklyn.” He set his phone on the bed in speaker mode and took a seat a safe distance away.
“Whew! Hey, that was a close one, wasn’t it? So hey – when’re you coming back to D.C.? I hear we need to fire up the grill and get this burger out to the customer!”
The co-author his agent had recommended was comparing his book to a hamburger? Granted, he hadn’t managed to write even a page of it on his own, but still, he’d been thinking of his book with a capital B. Something significant and respectable, to be toiled over and served up on a silver platter to a public that would consume it with respect – not like some fast food meal to be scarfed down with fries and followed with an indifferent belch.
“I don’t know; I haven’t really decided.”
“Well hey – what’s today – Wednesday, right? I bet you could be here Thursday night, if you push it. How’s about we get together at 9:00 on Friday morning, and we can start storyboarding things out? What’a’ya say?”
“Storyboarding?”
“You know – nail the narrative down and anchor it with some really good action scenes – make sure we get a page turner people can’t put down.”
Frank stared at the phone in shock. “Dan, I think we need to go back a couple steps. I want to write a well-documented, serious argument that demonstrates why our society needs to wake up and address cybersecurity risks before it’s too late.”
“No! You’re shitting, me, aren’t you? With a million dollar story like you’ve got, you want to give them a cliff hanger! You’ll never get a story like this again in your life! Man, I know a hundred writers that would give their left nut to run with a story line like this! Come on – you’re yanking my chain, aren’t you?”
That was it. “No I’m not. It sounds like this is all a big mistake. I don’t know what Perry told you, but obviously what you and he talked about is different than what I have in mind. I’m sorry he wasted your time.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line before a very sober Grover spoke again.
“Okay, okay, hold on. I mean no problem. It’s your book, right? So give it to me slow. What exactly is it you have in mind?”
Frank did as requested, elaborating on his plan to write a wake-up call that couldn’t be ignored, using the well-publicized events he’d been involved in as an example. When he was done, there was silence again.
“Alright, I got it. Sorry. I guess your agent did kind of say that, but he also gave me some other details, too. Do you remember who your publisher is?”
Frank had to think a minute before he replied.
“Right! That’s not exactly a literary house imprint, is it? We’re not talking Farrar, Straus and Giroux here. These are mass market paperback guys. You know – they pump out thrillers and bodice-rippers for sale at Walmart. They gave you a big advance, too, right?”
“Well, yeah, they did.”
“So what do you think they’re expecting? Something from a professor, or a fast read that’s going to open at number one on the Best Seller lists and stick there like glue?”
“Well, I don’t care! It’s my book, isn’t it? Don’t I get to tell the story the way I want to?”
“Sure, until you sign a contract. It’s your story, but it’s their advance! If you want to keep it, you better play ball or they’ll reject the manuscript.”
Now Frank was silent for a while. The guy had a point. He knew the publisher couldn’t care less about wising the public up to cyber threats. What it probably wanted was a true-life thriller telling how a lonely nerd outsmarted the bad guys and saved the country – and the reader − from nuclear annihilation.
“Look,” Dan added, “let’s do this: we use the story as a vehicle to get your message across. Not all the time, but we keep putting it in there whenever there’s an opportunity, and we make the read exciting enough that everyone will be sure to finish it. By the time they’re done, they’ll be terrified that something like this will happen again if we don’t get serious.
“How about that? And don’t forget, if you want to make a difference, you need to get a LOT of people to read your book. They’re not going to do that unless you get them crapp’n in their pants.”
Grover had been making some headway, but now Frank recoiled – not only did this guy want to write a literary burger, but it was supposed to get readers crapping in their pants?
Grover sensed he’d gone too far. “Okay, okay. So sometimes I get a little carried away. But you get the idea – if we hit the right balance point, the publisher gets what he wants, and you get what you want. What’a’ya say?”
If Frank could have looked through his phone, he would have seen that Grover was literally holding his breath. The journalist desperately wanted his name on this book, even if it was in smaller print than Frank’s. And he wanted the book to be a hell of a page turner, so the five self-published and barely read thrillers he’d already written could ride the coattails of the new book’s success.
Frank drummed his fingers on the fake wood of the table in his motel room. What the guy was saying made some sense. But it also made him uneasy. The last thing in the world he wanted was to thrust himself into the limelight. That was why he’d always refused to be interviewed.
“Well, okay. But you’re going to have to let me drive the bus on this. If I’m getting uncomfortable with anything, you’ve got to promise me you’ll yank it out.”
Dan gave a silent thanks to the patron saint of bad literature. “You got it, buddy. So how about it? Your place or mine Friday morning?”
* * *
26
Vote Free or Die
“So Ohanzee says this guy Maxwell checks out?” Carson Bekin asked Yazzie.
“That’s what he says.”
“So what happens next?”
“I guess we call him back and say we’re ready to get together.”
Two hours later, Yazzie and Bekin were sitting at the Des Moines airport, feeling a bit stunned as they waited for the flight to Boston lined up by Maxwell. A car would meet them at Logan airport and drive them straight to Manchester, New Hampshire, where they would meet Maxwell for dinner.
“So how do we play this, Henry? It’s great if we get this organization’s support and all, but we don’t want to lose control of our own campaign.”
“I hear you, and I agree. I think we’ve got to just lay down the law and let him know that if he wants to endorse us, that’s fine. But he’s not going to run our messaging, or push us into doing or authorizing anything we’re not comfortable with.”
“Right. I sure hope we can have it both ways, though. All of a sudden this whole campaign is starting to feel real.”
“What d
o you mean ‘real?’ If it hasn’t been real all along, why have we been working night and day on this for the past year?”
“Well, you know. Up till now I’ve been thinking we’re just trying to get some points up on the board – put Native American concerns on the national agenda – get some name recognition. Maybe most people forget all about us by Inauguration Day, but still, it puts a foundation in place we can build on for the next election.
“And let’s be real − so far we haven’t been able to sign up that many of even our own people to work on the campaign. Now all of a sudden we have all this publicity from Iowa, and we didn’t get that on our own. Maxwell was showing us he can produce.”
“Well, let’s not get our hopes up. I can’t believe we’ve seen all of this guy’s cards yet. For all we know, this balloon pops at dinner tonight.”
“Yeah, well, at least we got a free flight to New Hampshire. With our budget, that’s a win right there.”
* * *
It was a tired and apprehensive Frank Adversego that rode the escalator up from a Metro station in Dan Grover’s neighborhood in Washington, D.C. He got out his phone to double check the address, and set off to learn what his hyperactive co-writer was like in the flesh.
Frank never looked forward to working with new people, and expected this project to be more uncomfortable than most. He knew he’d be dependent on this guy in every way, no matter what arrangement they came to.
Moreover, he’d spent some time checking Grover out online, and didn’t like everything he’d found. To the good, the guy seemed to know technology, and that was a relief. But it looked like none of Grover’s five thrillers had gotten any traction at all, despite the unremitting social media bombardment the author had unleashed on the reading public. Perry Vose might think Grover’s familiarity with social media was a plus, but Frank’s regard for social media was only marginally higher than his opinion of tooth decay.
Still, there was nothing to be done but try to keep calm as he carried on up the escalator until it disgorged him onto the sidewalk. A few minutes later he was standing in front of a three-story row house that he guessed had enjoyed at best a casual relationship with maintenance after it was carved up into apartments. He pressed Grover’s doorbell and was promptly buzzed in. When he rounded the turn at the top of the third flight of stairs he saw a pony-tailed, fireplug-shaped individual wearing shorts, an untucked Hawaiian shirt, wool socks and sandals.
“Hey, Frank! Pleased to meet you. What time did’ja get in last night?”
“Real late. But here I am.”
“Well, glad you could make it. Coffee?”
“Please.”
“Great. Back in a jiff. Why don’t you settle into my office here.”
Frank walked into a room that could have been his own, with one pronounced exception: in addition to the collection of haphazard, worn furniture the room contained a large cat. Like Frank’s living room, it had obviously not been subjected to a serious straightening up since the previous millennium. Teetering stacks of magazines occupied one window sill and a skeletal plant with two green leaves stood in the other.
One of the two chairs in the room stood in front of a cluttered desk with a laptop placed front and center, so Frank approached the over-stuffed chair occupied in an overtly proprietary fashion by the over-stuffed cat. It stared past him with a look that successfully conveyed the conviction that it had not the slightest interest in acknowledging his existence. Frank began to sit down nonetheless.
“Sorry, cat. It’s the Law of the Bigger Butt.”
Jumping down at the last possible moment, the cat retreated to the space beneath a bookshelf and glared at him with obvious ill intent, tail switching angrily from side to side as it considered its options for a counterattack.
“I see you’ve met my little Molly,” Grover said, entering the room and handing Frank a cup of coffee. “She keeps me company most of the day.”
Frank was even less of a cat fancier than a dog person, and figured Molly was not a topic to linger on.
“So how do we get started? I’ve never worked with a co-writer before.”
“Well, that’s pretty much up to you, but here are a few suggestions. At one end of the spectrum, you can do a first draft, and I’ll edit it. At the other end, you can just talk at me and I’ll do everything – figure out the narrative and pacing and write the book for you to read and comment on. Between those two endpoints there are lots of gradations of writing and control. Why don’t we start by you telling me how much you want to do, and how much control you want to have?”
That made sense, but left Frank feeling a little taken aback. He hadn’t really thought about how he wanted to work with Grover – only about how he didn’t. He frowned and started drumming the fingers of one hand, then the other on the arms of the chair.
Grover tried again. “Well, how about this. We already talked a bit about what you want the book to say, so why don’t we go over the narrative, and then we can work our way into the mechanics later? How does that sound?”
That, or anything else at the moment, sounded just fine.
“Okay, where do you want me to begin?”
“Well, how about where you first became aware someone was hacking the Library of Congress? When was that? And what did you think was going on at the time?”
Frank started haltingly, but after a little while Grover no longer needed to prompt him with questions. Indeed, Frank soon picked up enough speed that Grover couldn’t keep up by taking notes. With Frank barely noticing, he pulled a recorder out of his desk, and set up a microphone facing Frank.
It was fortunate Grover was a good listener, because Frank had never had an opportunity to tell his story before, start to finish. The only people he would have wanted to share it with had been personally involved, and his co-workers knew him well enough not to pepper him with unwanted questions.
As he reeled out the tale he found himself pausing sometimes to think about details that had passed him by in the heat of the moment, things that the FBI, CIA or the hackers themselves must have done, or been thinking of doing at the time.
At last, Grover looked at his watch. “Whoa – let’s take a break here. It’s ten to one, and if you don’t need a bio break, I sure do. Give me a minute and I’ll be right back.”
Frank looked at his own watch with astonishment. Grover was right. He realized that his mouth was dry and his legs were stiff; he must have been holding them at the same angle for a long time. He stood up and stretched.
Grover reappeared and turned off the recorder. “So that was great, Frank. There’s all kinds of dynamite stuff to work with there. We’ll want to emphasize some of the more graphic stuff – like the predator missile taking out your camper. If that one doesn’t get you a movie deal, Hollywood might as well close up shop. What do you say I try writing a couple of chapters for you to look at? That way you can get a handle on how I write, and see if you’re comfortable with it? You’re a busy guy, and if it turns out you like my style, we can just keep going that way, with you reviewing the text and telling me where I’m off base, or where there’s something that needs to be added.”
Frank felt like he should say no, but he was also feeling an enormous wave of relief. If Grover was really willing to write the book for him, why say no?
“Well, I have to admit, my schedule really is jammed up right now,” he lied, “so while that’s not what I had in mind, I guess there’s no harm in giving it a try.”
“Great – that sounds like a plan. Listen, I’ve got to get a couple of other projects tied up before I can work full time on your book, so why don’t we call it a day? I’ll get a draft done in, say, three or four days? Would that work for you?”
“Well, I guess that sounds fine. You can email it to me, and I can email back with my changes.”
That was the last thing Grover wanted to do; he expected Frank’s first reaction would be to explode when he saw the style Grover planned on using.
“Uh, we could, but let me make another suggestion. Obviously you’ve got to be really comfortable with the book, so why don’t we agree to meet here on Wednesday at 9:00 in the morning, and I’ll have the chapters waiting for you – maybe even get them to you in advance? Then we can talk about how they strike you, and we can figure out where to go from there?” He tried to not look concerned, but found himself leaning forward as he waited for Frank’s reply.
Frank drummed his fingers for a moment. He was pretty sure he knew what was going on, and was determined not to be bulldozed. At the same time, he was becoming anxious to get the whole damn book project behind him as soon as possible.
“Okay. Alright, I guess that sounds like a good idea. So I’ll see you on Wednesday.”
They both stood up, and Grover clapped him on the back.
“Glad to be off and running, Frank. You’ve got a great book in the making here! I know you’re going to be really happy with it.”
Frank was much less sure, but there was no turning back now. At least ultimately all the decisions were his. He’d be tough with Grover if he had to.
The apartment door had barely closed behind Frank before Grover threw his fist in the air and mouthed a silent YES! Then he dove for his laptop to start tweeting:
Off to the races with the greatest cyberstory ever told! Stay tuned!!! #Bestseller #cybersecurity #thriller
* * *
27
The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Page 16