But only if the Cavalry didn’t wipe out the Indians. Some things never seemed to change.
* * *
Josette and her fellow filles were hunkered down in their respective apartments, in constant communication online. The last two weeks had been exhausting as each hacker team played hide and seek − and seek and destroy − with its opponents. Each was forced to continually update its strategy as it discovered, and was discovered in turn. And what about Frank? He must be plotting to foil them all.
Lately it had taken on the dynamic of an eBay auction, with each team plotting its last and final bid in secret. What would the other teams do on Election Day? There would be no way to tell until tomorrow arrived.
* * *
48
Frank Hits the Beach
Frank opened the scoring page of the Cavalry and Indians game site and stared at the tiny numbers in the bottom corner of his laptop screen. In just a few minutes, it would be 7:00 AM, Eastern Standard Time, and the big game would be on. Had he thought of everything? Had he left anything to chance? What if he had?
Marla had made his bed for him; the smooth surface of the blanket floated calmly amid the chaotic mess inside the camper like an ice floe riding serenely on a stormy sea. Frank had set his computer to display four separate news feeds on his muted, flat panel TV. Its surface resembled the side of an ant farm, bustling with the activity of tiny, silent figures going about their daily tasks.
With only seconds before the top of the hour, Frank was relieved to see that the current high score was still low. The game vendor broke the day into multiple contest periods: midnight to noon, Eastern Standard Time, noon to 6:00 PM, and then two game periods for the busy after school and evening hours: 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM and 8:00 PM to midnight. Each time a period ended, the top three scorers were awarded points that counted towards their over-all game ranking. Then the scoreboard was reset to zero, and the process began again.
The first few hours of the morning would be the first important test of the day as people voted on their way to work. Frank had considered letting these hours go by without interference, worried that early reports of phones failing to register votes would start hitting the news. That might tip his hand to one or more of his opponents, giving them an opportunity to figure out how to respond. But it would also mean that enough invalid votes would be registered to taint – and maybe even lose − the election. In the end, he decided he couldn’t take the chance.
A few days before, he had contacted Marty to say that he could finally reveal, in great confidence, additional information regarding what the project was all about. He told him that months before, the CIA had picked up terrorist chatter indicating that rival terrorist groups were competing to launch a major assault against ATMs on Election Day. These were the groups Marty had been observing as they fought for the glory of causing confusion and disrupting the election – and also for the millions of dollars that would be diverted to the winner’s coffers when it succeeded in controlling the game app. He also informed the hacker that he’d arranged with the warden to make Marty available all day and into the evening via a live video link to keep Frank informed about what the opposition might be up to.
It was still one minute to 7:00 AM. To stay in control, he needed to be totally engrossed for several minutes at the top of each hour until the polls closed. But in between, he would have nothing to do but fidget, run the same tests on the robot he’d run a hundred times before, and pray: pray that the scores of innocent gamers would never exceed the robot’s capabilities before the last voting stations closed; pray that none of the other teams would discover what he was up to; pray that none of them simply got lucky and made a change in their own interest that inadvertently screwed up his own hack; and pray that his brain didn’t explode.
At last the alarm on his computer went off, as it would every hour for the rest of the day. Time to go into action. He ordered the robot to begin playing, and in less than a minute its score was high enough to win. He instructed it to fire the next hapless cow into the ground, thereby avoiding driving the score up for no reason. Then he immediately commanded it to report its score, as well as fire the phone control message in the split second after its score was paired to its player ID on the game site. He looked at the clock on the screen: 7:01. Success, he hoped.
Now what would he do with himself for the next hour? He’d already drunk a pot of coffee, but he started to make another. While he did, Marla turned up the sound on the TV. The ten civically minded adults of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire had as always cast the first votes of the election – using paper ballots − just after midnight. And as usual, they announced the results: Yazzie had edged the competition by one vote each. That gave the talking heads something to talk about for the first few minutes of their broadcasts. Because exit polling was no longer permitted, this would be the last reliable data anyone would get until the first state closed its voting stations at 8:00 East Coast time that night.
Of course, that didn’t stop any of the pundits from nattering on endlessly. He clicked through the various stations, each of which was rehashing the run-up to Election Day from its own particular point of view. For the liberal channel, that meant recapping the amazing rise of Henry Yazzie. A panel of self-appointed experts who had never heard of the Native American candidate ten months before were opining authoritatively on what a Yazzie administration would be like, despite the fact that they had no more insight on that topic than a pack of Labrador retrievers.
Over on the network channel, the smiling cabal of morning news people was working the crowd on the street, shoving microphones across a barricade and asking anyone that wasn’t too busy yelling “Hi Mom!” who they thought would win. Some even knew the names of all three candidates.
Over on POX News, the anchors were running archival footage of the truly incredible number of ways the President had already doomed this once-great nation to the ash heap of history. It was clear that if he were to win a second term life as we know it would cease to exist at the precise moment when the last polling station closed.
Frank put on his virtual screen helmet, as much to escape the nonsense of the real world as to practice his game. It was going to be a long, long day.
* * *
He had just ordered the robot program to send in the 10:00 AM signal when he got a call from George.
“We’re getting the first reports of voters having trouble with their voting apps.”
“Hmmm – that didn’t take long. I was hoping we’d get a few more hours before the news people caught wind of it.”
“News people? Haven’t you ever heard of social media?”
“Oh. Right. Anyway, that’s fantastic news. It means our strategy is working.”
“What do you think the opposition is doing about it right now?”
“I’m hoping nothing, yet. I’m hoping they’ll be too busy to pay attention to the news. But if they have heard, I think first they’ll want to try and make sense of what should be pretty conflicting and vague reports. Remember that the voting app will work fine if a vote isn’t changed, so that ought to confuse them. If we’re lucky, the next thing they’ll think is that it’s a glitch in the voting apps themselves. After all, this is the first election where they’ve been used at a national level, and they didn’t have any way to put their servers under this much stress until people actually started voting.”
“Makes sense. Then what?”
“After that, I’m banking on them thinking they somehow screwed up the voting app themselves, with all the unanticipated messing around they’ve been doing trying to edge each other out. It would be great if they just started madly searching through the game app to check their own work to make sure they didn’t leave a pair of forceps in the patient.”
“Here’s hoping. I’ll let you know when I hear anything new.”
Frank checked
the time. It was only ten past the hour. Why not check in with Marty?
The hacker looked worried when his face popped up on the screen.
“What are you seeing?” Frank asked.
“Nothing – I think they’re stunned. I don’t see any changes being made at all, but I bet they’re going nuts trying to figure out what’s happening. Say – I’ve got a special, one day only offer for you! For five years off my sentence, I’ll fix it so you don’t have to grab control every hour!”
Frank would have dearly loved to take him up on the offer, but he knew he couldn’t deliver. “Sorry – no can do.”
“C’mon! You can’t blame a guy for trying to work with what he’s got. How about four? Four years off! That’s my final offer!”
“Sorry, Marty. And I gotta go now.”
Marty had just time enough to yell, “Think about it!” as Frank disconnected.
Marla laughed. “He must think you’re a lot better poker player than you really are.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he expected us to fold yesterday. Tough luck for us both I couldn’t.”
Finally, it was a minute to eleven. He looked at the current high game score; it was still in the low level seven range.
* * *
Richard Fetters was as close to raising his voice as he had ever been since he entered the political world. At the other end of the phone, his hacker supervisor was wishing that for once his boss would start screaming, because the intensity of the animosity in his voice was frightening. He couldn’t help imagining himself as some sort of hapless creature in an animated movie, cowering in horror while the evil villain morphed into a cobra that towered and grew to enormous size until at last it struck and annihilated him.
“Look, I just don’t know what’s happening. We did lose control to somebody – I’m guessing White Crow’s people − for a while, but then we figured out what they were up to and got the phones back again. But we’ve got no idea why some voting apps aren’t working. We’re trying to figure out what’s up, but we’ve never had any reason to try to get inside them before. It’s really hard to do that all of a sudden.”
“Do you think I care if ‘it’s hard?’ We may be losing tens of thousands of votes every minute and you’re telling me ‘it’s hard?’”
“I know, but it is! And there’s only so far I can push these guys. We’ve already paid them a ton of money, and if they want to just walk away from their terminals, what are we going to do? Report them to the voting commission? Or worse yet, how about if they report us?”
“If we win the election we can worry about that later. Now go make that happen or I guarantee you’ll have something much worse to worry about.”
* * *
White Crow gazed intently at the screen on the wall of his hotel war room. In the dim background several people were hunched over laptops, while the foreground was filled with the face of someone with Asian features and a week’s worth of sparse, black stubble on his chin. Anyone walking in would think they had just entered the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, where Captain James T. Kirk was staring down the captain of a Romulan warship.
“I need to know more than you are telling me.”
“So? I’m needing to know before I can tell you. What can I say?”
“You can tell me a number of things: how many phones are failing to work, and why? Have you or our opponents crippled them? Are any signals getting through, and if so, which ones?”
“And I tell you, I don’t know. So, you want me to make up answers?”
White Crow was barely able to control his temper. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose if he antagonized the man. “No – I want you to get answers and get back to me.”
“So! You let me get back to work then!” The screen went dark, and Captain Kirk bowed his head in frustration.
* * *
Josette was feeling isolated and helpless. The Daughters of Lafayette had done what they could to help the incumbent President survive the election, but their opponents overwhelmed each ploy that lay within their technical skills. Now it seemed that some voters’ phones were malfunctioning. Could they have bungled what they had done, again making matters worse?
This was not what she had hoped Election Day would be like. Someone – her team said probably two different “someones” – was trying to steal the election. And a few days before, she had learned of Frank’s death from a terse email from Marla. Josette was startled by how shocked she had been, nearly fainting when she read the news. She told herself it was because it made her fear for her own safety, since someone certainly must have had him killed. Everything was in ruins, and she was afraid to answer her own door.
She remembered how she and her friends had so recently congratulated each other for being courageous revolutionaries, challenging the complacency of Europe and the arrogance of the United States. But as she watched the streams of social media scrolling down her screen and thought of what might lie behind what they were reporting, she felt overwhelmed and very alone.
* * *
With the scoreboard once more swept clean, Frank’s robot made short work of its first log-on of the afternoon. One, two and three o’clock also passed without serious challenge. But a half-hour later, a glance at his computer nearly took his breath away. Somebody logged on as “Zomboy” had just entered a level seven score. And it was only 3:30! He’d never seen a level seven score before late in the evening.
He checked the second copy of the robot he’d left chugging away after he dedicated the first one to hourly use: it was just barely into the eighth level. Not much farther along than the version he’d been using all day.
He returned to the game site. Days ago he had skimmed through the last several weeks of top scores to see what he might be up against, and couldn’t recall seeing that name. He went back and checked another month of high scores – still nothing. Was this an old player returning to the site, or had one of the other teams caught on?
He looked around for Marla, and then remembered she’d gone out for a walk. He wanted someone to watch the scoreboard while he went back to practicing. Damn.
Pulling his helmet on, he plunged into the game, without logging his scores in. The last thing he wanted to do was make Zomboy feel like he was being challenged. Maybe the guy would get bored and log off.
Just before 4:00 he took his helmet off and looked at the scoreboard. Thank goodness – either Zomboy had moved on, or he’d just had a single lucky game. Or maybe it was another team waiting for Frank’s next move?
He logged the robot on and let it play until it topped Zomboy’s score by 100 points. Relieved, he triggered the score and phone signals, and then disconnected as Marla came in.
“How goes the battle?” she said.
“Not good. Someone named ‘Zomboy’ popped up a half hour ago with a really high score. I’m worried.”
“Don’t you think the robot can beat him?”
“Dunno. It’s getting close to the top of its range. I’ve been watching the scores all week, and I was thinking it would never come to this. I was hoping all we’d really have to worry about would be the geek community deciding to figure out what was going on with the voting apps. If one of them did, they’d be sure to brag about it.”
He glanced at the scoreboard.
“Shit!”
Marla jumped. “What! What is it?”
“Zomboy just came back and topped my score! He must be on to me!”
“How can you tell? How would he know you were different than any other player?”
“The robot uses our back door to send the phone signal. The other teams must be going nuts trying to figure out what’s going on. Maybe they noticed Marty nosing around and followed him to it. Damn it! I should have told him to stay away today instead of lurking!”
&nb
sp; Then he had an awful thought. “Maybe one of them even found the back door and closed it! Maybe my scores aren’t doing anything at all!”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy – don’t get so wound up. You’re jumping to conclusions with no reason to think they’re true! If someone really was on to you, wouldn’t he lie low? If he attracts your attention, wouldn’t he be worried you might be able to adapt somehow?”
“Okay, good. So that makes me feel a little better – thanks. But what is he up to then? Maybe he figured out I may be up to something, but doesn’t know what it is.”
“Well, that’s good then, right?”
“As long as it lasts, yes, but what happens when the robot taps out? And what if he notices that I always log on precisely on the hour? If he figures that out, all he has to do is run the score up out of my range right before the hour and the game’s over.”
“The scoreboard clears at 6:00, right? So you get a clean start then, and it clears again at 8:00.”
“Yes, but what do I do if he turns in an incredible score each time right after the board clears?”
She leaned down next to him and peered at his screen. “It looks like he only beat you by 100 points. Maybe he’s already at the edge of his ability.”
“But maybe not! Remember, if this is the original hacker, he’s been playing around with the game for a long time. Or it may even be the game developer that’s hacking the election. If that’s the case, he can probably just plug in any score he wants! I bet he’s trying to learn as much as he can by watching me. He might even think that whatever it is I’m doing, he’s reversing it by topping my score by the same margin.”
“So that would be great, right?”
But Frank wasn’t listening any longer. He looked at the screen for the time: it was 4:20.
“I’ve got to start playing again so he never guesses what the top of the hour means. I’ve got to start blowing some smoke.”
The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Page 35