The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2)

by Updegrove, Andrew

  He set off back towards the other end of the hallway, deciding that whatever lay behind the door marked Town Clerk might be his best bet. Sure enough, that door was unlocked. Inside, he found a small waiting room with a counter along one side, behind which was an open door. The soft, encouraging, sound of typing emanated from within.

  He walked up to the counter, but whoever was typing was invisible, off to the side of the room on the other side of the door. On the counter was an old-fashioned bell, the type you sounded by striking downward with the palm of your hand.

  He cleared his throat and waited hopefully for a minute. No luck. Taking another deep breath, he tapped the bell. The unexpectedly loud ding! made him jump, but a few moments later, he heard a chair scrape, and a gray-haired, 60-ish woman appeared in the doorway.

  “Help you?” she said.

  Frank had been prepared to confront the wife from the American Gothic painting, and was relieved to see that the woman looked pretty much like someone he might have met anywhere, assuming the time period was his childhood. She wore a gray wool skirt and an open, button-front sweater over a neat white collared blouse. Around her neck hung a pair of glasses on a beaded cord.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said, sliding his card across the counter. “We service your voting machines. I was doing a job up the road and my records show it’s almost time for a warranty check of your units. I thought I’d drop by and see if I could knock that off while I’m in the area. Problem is, I see the Electoral Commission office is closed. I guess I should have called first, but is there anyone around that could show me to where you keep the machines?”

  The woman picked up his card and settled her glasses on the end of nose. She peered at the card carefully, and then turned it over to see if there was anything else on the back.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “You mean my name?”

  She peered at him over the top of her glasses. “I think I can figure ‘Lincoln’ out on my own.”

  Frank began to sweat. “Sorry. It’s a Scottish name.”

  She looked at the card again and then handed it back.

  “Well, Mr. Turing, it wouldn’t have helped to call anyway. The Electoral Commission only meets once a month when they need to, and that’s not often. The voting machines are in the basement. If you’ll have a seat, I’ll see if I can rustle up the janitor. He can unlock the storage room for you.”

  Frank did as he was told while the woman dialed a number, failed to get the janitor, and left a message. She returned to her office, leaving Frank to study one of the agricultural magazine back issues that lay on the table between the two mismatched but equally uncomfortable wooden chairs in the waiting room. Lulled by the sound of typing from the office, he struggled to stay awake by updating himself on the latest developments in GPS-enabled farm machinery.

  Fifteen minutes later the door to the hallway opened to admit an elderly man wearing faded bib overalls. Stoop shouldered and balding, his sad eyes struggled to hold up the large bags beneath them. Frank reflected that if he was an actor in a Western, he’d be cast as the guy who takes care of the horses and usually has a nickname like “Stumpy.” It was always Stumpy who caught the first arrow when the Indians attacked.

  He shuffled up to the counter. “Sally, you looking for me?”

  The gray-haired woman who now had a name called back. “Gentleman here needs to check out the voting machines. Can you take him down there?”

  Stumpy looked around, noticing Frank for the first time.

  He studied on the situation for a moment. “Yup, I can do that.”

  He turned towards the door to the hallway and Frank trundled obediently behind him, trailing his mostly empty tool case.

  After a few steps, his guide stopped and waited for Frank to pull alongside.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, son. Where you from?”

  Frank tried to remember the address on the card. When he couldn’t, he said “Philadelphia.” His ears burned as he vowed to come up with a background profile before he tried this again. Shouldn’t someone from Voldemort have provided him with something like that?

  “Well, that’s a bit of a drive, ain’t it?” With that nugget of information secured, he shuffled along to a door marked “Stairs,” down into a basement, past two restrooms, and at last to an unmarked wooden door. It took him some time to flip through the dozens of keys hanging from a ring hooked to his belt to find the right one.

  “Everything you’re looking for should be in here. You need anything else, you ask Sally to hunt me up.”

  Frank thanked him, and the sound of the old man’s shuffling feet tapered away, leaving Frank alone in the silence of a half-dark room filled with large boxes. A bare light bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling, casting more shadows than light on the gray-painted stone foundation wall running along one side of the room.

  Where to begin? He was used to sitting at a laptop looking at neat file names on pull-down menus serving familiar systems.

  He wandered around the room looking for information on the outsides of the boxes, and finally noticed a clipboard hanging from a hook by the door. He was relieved to see that it held an inventory of everything in the room, with a number and the contents given for each box.

  Twenty minutes later, he’d made good progress. He’d found a copy of the set up manual for the system, as well as a Wi-Fi router and a laptop preloaded with the system that the table top wireless voting units would communicate with. Figuring his odds were better than they should be, he turned the laptop on, and when it asked for a password, typed in “admin.”

  Sure enough, that worked. Whoever had delivered the system had never bothered to change the factory password before turning the system over to whoever it was who would be managing it, and that individual hadn’t bothered to change it, either. So much for local security.

  His next challenge was finding an Internet connection, as the air card on his own laptop couldn’t find a signal to share. He found a courthouse Wi-Fi signal, but this time “admin” didn’t work.

  Making sure the door wouldn’t lock behind him, he found his way back to the empty waiting room of the Town Clerk’s office. Happily, he could still hear typing coming from the back room.

  He walked up to the counter. “Uh, excuse me. Could I ask you for the Wi-Fi password?”

  Sally came around the door and leaned across the counter.

  “It’s ‘courthouse’ – all lower case.” She said quietly. “I didn’t want to just call it out.”

  Frank thanked her and acknowledged her prudence.

  Now that he had his super-secure password, he was able to set the system up in full operational mode. Then, sitting on an unopened box under the bare bulb, he got down to business.

  * * *

  “Sorry, son. Got to ask you to leave now. Closing up for the day.” It was the elderly janitor, standing at the door.

  Startled, Frank looked up. “What time is it?”

  “Almost 5:00. Need to lock up. But you can come back tomorrow at 8:30, if you want.”

  Frank stood up. “Gee, can you give me another ten minutes? I just finished, but I need to put all this stuff back the way I found it.”

  The old man nodded and disappeared. Frank hurriedly packed up, trying to leave everything exactly as it had been before. He was just hanging up the clipboard when the sound of shuffling feet materialized down the hall.

  As the old man locked the door, he said, “You heading back to Philly now?”

  “No, down the road to the next stop. It’s one of those jobs where you sleep in a different motel every night.”

  “I know what that’s like. Used to be a salesman for a while after the Korean War. Then I wised up and came home to Promise. What more could you want out of life than what you can find right here?�
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  Frank was still musing on that koanic query as he drove past the last few neatly-kept homes of Promise and out onto the sea of growing soybeans that surrounded the town. For his part, he was simply happy for his first undercover mission to be over.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours later, he was driving slowly around a loop of dirt road, checking out each of the half dozen empty campsites he passed along the way before he made a decision. When he did, he selected one where the usual picnic table and fire pit lay beside the chortling stream that gamboled in one end of the state park and out the other. He got out of the camper, and surveyed the scene, hands on his hips. The soft rustle of fluttering aspen leaves murmured above his head, and the late-afternoon sunlight energized the colors of the green grass and wildflowers surrounding the site, contrasting elegantly with the porcelain-white trunks of the aspens and the sparkling waters of the stream.

  All of which was lost on Frank. He had just stumbled through his first radio interview, and was still smarting from the experience. His agent had suggested he try one out in the boonies before his formal book tour, which made sense to Frank. Somehow, though, he had expected an interviewer would be good at the job, or at least have prepared a few questions in advance. Instead, he had been ushered into a live radio booth while the show host read his book’s promotional package for the first time. It hadn’t been pretty.

  He was looking forward to getting back to something that he was good at, which would be analyzing the data he’d collected the day before at the courthouse. It was an unseasonably warm spring day, and soon he was perched in his trusty folding chair, facing the stream. Once again, he was faced with the question of where to start.

  He’d been able to capture a complete record of the recent voting process at the Promise courthouse, which he hoped would provide crucial information. Not only was the data still on the laptop that he had found there, but he’d been able to log on to the state electoral office to see what had been sent in from Promise, using the credentials he had received from Voldemort.

  Combining what he had copied from those two sources, he had a complete end-to-end record of every vote from the moment it was cast to the point when it was included in the final state-wide tabulation of voting results. And he could confirm the path that each vote took as it was sent from the voting station to the laptop, and from the laptop via the Internet to the state data center, where it was entered into the appropriate cell of the database that yielded the final tally that was announced publicly.

  The obvious first step for him now would be to compare the laptop totals with the state numbers. That took only a moment, and the two totals matched. So if there had been any tampering with the vote at this location, it couldn’t have happened anywhere between the laptop and the state electoral center. This narrowed his investigation dramatically, and represented an important finding in itself.

  It also meant that any mischief involving the Promise totals, short of paying people to vote as instructed, had to have occurred in one of only a few ways. The first was that malware might have been installed in the software of the tabletop voting station itself, where it could have converted a vote for candidate A into one for candidate B.

  The second possibility was that someone sitting in the courthouse could have taken over the voting system’s wireless network – or more likely planted a device there earlier to intercept the votes as they were sent from a voting station, and then alter them before forwarding them on to the laptop. But that didn’t make sense – someone would have to plant a device at every single polling station in the country to rely on that technique − or at least in enough places in enough states to swing the election.

  The third and final alternative was that malware programmed to convert votes had been installed on the laptop, either before it left the factory, or when it connected to the Internet. Or perhaps the malware had been set to simply ignore the real votes and assign a pre-determined percentage of the total votes to the candidate the hacker wanted to win. But which of the two realistic approaches might the hacker have taken?

  Unfortunately, the voting stations didn’t have any local memory storage. That was a shame, since it gave him nothing to compare to the totals stored on the laptop. So to explore that possibility, he’d have to look for malware on the software he’d copied from one of the voting stations. If he couldn’t find any, that would leave only the voting stations under suspicion.

  He was pretty confident he could find any malware loaded on either the voting station or the laptop. If he did, that would be a big win. It could then be removed from voting systems elsewhere, and he’d be a hero.

  With his laptop now up and running, he got to work. When he wasn’t tapping at the keyboard or staring at the screen and drumming the arms of his chair, he was pacing back and forth on the bank of the stream. Either way, it burbled and splashed away over honey-brown stones, blissfully indifferent to, but mirroring, the turmoil of his thoughts.

  * * *

  35

  As a Matter of Fact, There IS an App for That

  A day later, he was behind the wheel again. As he pulled out of his campsite, he reported in to Voldemort on his mobile phone.

  “That’s right, Vickie. Everything was clean as a whistle. If there was malware anywhere on this system, I sure couldn’t find it.

  “Yeah, I’ll dump all the data to the server so your folks can check it as well.

  “No, that doesn’t mean I’m sure nothing happened in Promise. One thing I’m thinking is that they might remotely de-install the malware after the voting is done, so a forensic investigator couldn’t find it. So I’m on my way now to the next primary state.

  “Right. This time, I’ll do the same drill the day before the voting starts and see if I can find anything.

  “Yeah, I’ll send a report. Just wanted to give you a high level status sooner rather than later.

  “Right. You too.”

  Frank had used his usual mobile phone to make that call. For the next one, he used one of his disposable models and switched on Howie’s nifty white noise generator. The number he called belonged to a similar phone he’d given to Josette.

  She didn’t answer, and he didn’t leave a message. But she called him back almost immediately.

  “So sorry,” she said. “I could hear the phone ringing, but could not remember where I had put it.”

  “No worries. Just wanted to let you know what I’ve found – or not – so far.” He gave her a more detailed rundown than he’d provided to Vickie.

  “So what do you do if you find nothing at the next polling place?”

  “Well, maybe leave it at that. After all, we don’t have any proof that anyone is doing anything at all. Every state has a different mix of people, and every time there’s a debate it changes the minds of some people that had been undecided. And then, of course, you can rely on some of these buffoons to stick their foot in their mouths up to their knee pretty frequently as well. So how do you tell the difference between the effects of manipulation and random events?”

  “That’s exactly the point, Frank! If that’s the case, why does Henry Yazzie do better every time, as well as Randall Wellhead? It can’t just be random!”

  “Is that still true?”

  “Of course it’s true! Haven’t you been following the news?”

  “Well, no, not really. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m doing the investigative bit of this project. Following the numbers is your job.” After a bit of idle conversation, he promised to give her another update after his next investigation, and hung up.

  Josette was annoyed and frustrated. She felt that Frank still didn’t really believe that someone was hacking the voting as well as the polls. For that matter, she wasn’t sure he was even convinced that anyone was still tampering with the polls.

  * * *

  Fr
ank headed south and west to intercept his next primary, and the rising sun of the first morning after the voting found him sitting outside his camper, this time on public land many miles from the nearest town. It was a relief to be back in a state where he could simply pull off of a jeep track when he found a place he liked and set up camp. At campgrounds, anyone feeling bored could, and usually did, stroll by and ask what he was so busy doing on that laptop – didn’t he know how to leave his work behind, huh?

  He’d succeeded in getting all the information he wanted, from a large district this time instead of the tiny one he’d timidly targeted before. The experience had been more nerve-wracking – if the voting station supervisor had told him to talk to the IT director, they might have checked his business card against their records. No matter how good Voldemort was, he doubted it had planted a maintenance contract in the district’s files with Lincoln’s name at the top. What would happen if he ran into someone who was more thorough? Would the folks at Voldemort rescue him, or would they leave him languishing in some county lock-up till the Feds took him away for attempting to tamper with voting machines?

  But that was a problem for another day. Right now, he was debating whether there was something he’d missed despite spending all day picking and poking at the data and analyzing it every way he could think of. But everything kept coming up clean.

  Finally he shut down his laptop and sat, fists balled up on top of the computer, staring straight ahead, lost in thought, turning the same things over in his mind that he’d analyzed twice already.

  The shadows of the trees were lengthening when some bored or rebellious patch of neurons in his brain registered the fact that something not far away was out of place. No, that wasn’t it − not out of place − unusual. Grudgingly, his subconscious assigned a few additional ganglia to channel this new data, and then made the decision to alert his higher levels of awareness of its conclusion: deer.