Gilded Hate Machine

by Robert H Wilde

  There was another mission on the go. Dobbs was walking round checking his watch while wearing nothing but a dressing gown. It was custom made, although he had stopped short of having his initials embroidered onto it, because would he have chosen RH or St. George? Obviously, no one familiar with the latter saw the dressing gown but you never knew. Anyone could visit the house, he supposed, interrupt him and try for an autograph or advice because that’s what happened to celebrities as he now was. Security did their bit, of course, but people could slip through.

  A check of the watch. She should be here in a minute. They were on time if nothing else.

  He went through and poured himself a nice sized glass of wine, meaning huge, and then the buzzer rang.

  “She’s here boss,” security said.

  “Then send her up.” A brief while later there was a knock on the door. Hume almost bounced as he went and opened it. A huge man stood there, filling the path and a tightly stretched tracksuit, while with him was a small and unhappy looking Asian girl.

  Hume pulled a wodge of notes from his dressing gown pocket. “Collect her in three hours,” he said and handed the pimp the money. The girl was shoved indoors.

  Hume smiled as he looked her up and down. He’d tried having sex with British women, but they just didn’t make the noises Asian imports did, and what’s more this pimp had a never-ending stream of new ones for him to try. What’s more you could do anything you wanted to them and it didn’t matter if they didn’t like it. You couldn’t say that for local talent.

  He thought about offering her a glass of wine. Not the nice stuff he had, but a cheap bottle he kept for low rent visitors. However, that might dull her a bit, and he wanted to hear the full range of her little cries.

  Three hours, time to get to work.

  The journalists were sat round their meeting table. Susan concluded the atmosphere was better since Stremp had pretended not to be involved, she’d have to say people were happier and working under less pressure. Without him shouting at everyone and generally being miserable everyone walked lighter, and although the work was if anything more intense, they handled it better. So, everyone had come into the meeting with the temporary editor and were ready to update.

  Susan was only sort of there, in the sense she was sat in the room with everyone else, but it was only a physical presence. Her mind had drifted off into the place known as self-harming guilt, and every moment she hated herself now she had realised what she had become. A shill, that all the other papers knew about, part of the problem not the urgently needed solution.

  “Welcome everyone,” said someone no one ever called editor without putting something ahead of it like ‘stand in’. “What have we got for me today?” He didn’t need to mention the election, because every other person in the room was trying to fit the election into their material. Even the guy who’d been punished with this week’s missing dog story had found a way, and as for the sci-fi convention you bet the Dalek was shooting photos of Dobbs and Hume.

  A journalist who’d joined after Susan raised a biro. “I’ve got a London statistician willing to rubbish Dobb’s proposed spending plans, on record.” The room took a sharp intake of breath at someone doing some real work.

  “That is superb!” He smelt a cover story, with the Dalek photo alongside to attract people’s attention. “Anyone else?”

  Hands were raised. Stories were outlined. Projects were explained, writing was approved, until the faux editor looked at someone. “Susan, do you have anything for us today?”

  “I… am… in the middle of a blistering headache. I need some pills and a twenty-minute power nap, then I’ll be able to focus.”

  The rest of the journalists looked at each other with barely disguised mirth. You didn’t come into a morning editorial meeting and ask for a sleep!

  “I think Susan, we should have a word after…” but the puppet editor didn’t get to finish.

  Susan lurched to her feet, “just going to go and be sick,” she said, and she disappeared out of a door.

  “Do you think she’s pregnant?” a colleague asked aloud.

  “I think you’ll find that’s sexism,” came a reply.

  “But am I wrong? Am I?”

  “She’s teacher’s pet,” someone added.

  “Probably crazy like her sister.”

  “I think that’s enough discussion on Susan,” said their editor. But they knew something was up, and no one had the first idea it was down to a pang of morality. It was questionable whether many of them had any of their own.

  Five

  “Did we miss a zombie apocalypse?” Lindleman asked as he and his three colleagues came into the Bunker to find it completely empty, just like the rooms they had just passed.

  “What disturbs me about that Lindleman,” Sharma replied, “is you sound absolutely gutted to have missed it.”

  “Oh, I am ready, I am so ready. Come on zombies, my husband and I have got our plans.”

  “You don’t have any guns,” Grayling noted, “or any idea how to use them.”

  “When the zombies come, I’ll be the reason you need guns,” Lindleman burst out laughing.

  “Well that got fucking dark, let’s get back to something more wholesome like catching criminals, yunno, like we’re good people or something,” Sharma pointed at the chairs. The four began to sit down.

  “Do we need a secret code name?” Rob asked.

  “Are you taking this seriously?”

  “Yes Inspector.”

  “Right, well, maybe take it less seriously, we do not need code names. So, does anyone have any idea how we are going to prosecute Rupert Hume and Morthern.Info seeing as they have degrees in being just the right side of the line?” She paused, and she, Grayling and Lindleman all looked at Maruma. “I mean you Soloman. What’s going on in that mind of yours?”

  “There is a possibility,” Maruma confirmed.

  “I knew it! Tell all.”

  “So, I remember reading that electoral law has rules on how much money people can spend on an election, where it can come from, all that, and this mayoral election is defined by that same electoral law.”

  “So, the current mayor, Hume, Stremp, they can only spend so much?”

  “Yes. Yes, and if they were breaking those rules, they break the law. Now, the anti-fascists we spoke to the other day, who’d been attacked by Hume, were throwing around all sorts of accusations, but they did say at one point they believed Hume to have secretly been funding Morthern.Info to promote him, which, I suppose means we have information that both of them might be mishandling election funds. It would be terrible if someone did officially complain and we had to look through their spending information to see…”

  “We’ll go Al Capone on their asses!” Sharma blurted out.

  “I assume you mean nail them on the financials and not wait till they die of sexual diseases?” Grayling concluded.

  “I mean exactly that!” Sharma said. “Right, Rob and I will visit these campaigners and get statements on what they think they’ve found, then Grayling and Maruma, you get on the button and be ready to request their numbers as soon as we are finished. We will do a massive swerve and go after anything we can find.”

  “Also tell Wick” Grayling reminded.

  “Oh yeah, someone send a text to Wick, and yes Rob, you can make this one as vague and secretive as you want.”

  “Bingo calling hot dog,” Rob said, “bingo calling hot dog.”

  “To be honest we all expected you to be hot dog.”

  Monty T was in full work mode. He was sat in front of his laptop, but this time it was on a table, he was dressed, and he was fully focused. Yes, he could shit-out a great rewritten article in minutes, but what he was engaged in now was potentially much more lucrative and mind bending. But as his uncle always said, you have to speculate to accumulate, so he was just organising the transfer of a large sum of money to people he, in all honesty, wouldn’t be able to identify in a police line-up with
their real names tattooed above their eyes, and then it was simply a matter of waiting to see if it came through.

  This wouldn’t be the first time he’d been stiffed while swimming in the black market, but that was the whole ethos of investing. You did your research, you paid your money and you took your chance, and if you won a certain amount more than you lost it was all good…and he was definitely used to winning, with the money to not care when he didn’t.

  A beep, a link arrived, a file was downloaded. Then a click to open it and…

  A spreadsheet appeared; a lovely series of columns surrounded by green bars. A listing of emails, phone numbers and people from across Morthern, thousands of them, harvested by means both legal and illegal, passed by sale from company to contact to company, a database which exceeded the one Monty had created himself. The sort of data he could use to email Morthern.Info to many new eyes, presented in a manner which meant he could do this in just a few clicks.

  Load his mail provider, create a new mailing list, import the contacts, load up the template he’d created, a matter of minutes and now he could appear in the inbox of many, many unsuspecting readers. Of course, he liked to think there was skill in getting the perfect subject line, in pulling people in, giving just enough to make them click through to his profit providing sections. Oh yes, in just a few minutes and with a few careful words he had created a fucking verbal missile.

  So, there was nothing to do but press send, see the picture change colour and wait.

  He tapped his hands on the table. Time to do something else, maybe come back in, what, half an hour? What could he do in half an hour? A bacon sandwich? A shower? Bacon and a shower! Could you put the bacon on, shower, then get back by the time it was ready to turn? Is this what it felt like to be rich cos he was worried about bacon temperature and not mortgage payments?

  He grinned. Hell, yes, he was rich. Hell, yes it was easy. Hell, yes, he was making a difference. Just one his own way. What a time to be alive.

  “Do you want a coffee?” Maruma asked Grayling.

  “I’ve had so much today I feel I’m gonna die,” came the reply, “but as I’m not actually dead I better have another one to speed things up.”

  “Awesome. Second choice, made in our own fair Bunker, or do you want me to run to the new place for some variation.”

  Grayling pondered, “nah, this stuff will be along soon, we are waiting for that beep.”

  “Oh yes, the amount of time I spend waiting for someone to send me what they’ve promised I could have played Twilight Imperium a few times.”

  “And what is that in traditional English?”

  “Eight-hour game.”

  “Oh yeah, good point.”

  A beep sounded.

  Maruma was back at his computer in an instant, and Grayling brought up the reply. “So, what have we here, a nice summary from our guy, and he’s sent details of two UK bank accounts and then…oh he didn’t, oh he didn’t!”

  “What?” Maruma said leaning over.

  “Monty’s been using bitcoin, but he cashed it, we can trace his details! Our guy has them!”

  “Well that’s a pretty heavy screw up for a man who spends his whole time calling people idiots. Do you want to take the bank and I the bits?”

  “Yes, let’s split like that and go.”

  Maruma nodded and they both settled in.

  Grayling looked up when Morthern.Info had been registered and went back in the accounts that far. “Okay, so I’m at the start,” Grayling informed Sol, “Low and behold, there was a large sum of money which was transferred into the accounts when it began, a sum that corresponds quite well to the costs of setting all this stuff up. But it didn’t come from any bank business loan. Might be legit of course, but we’re dealing with a guy who sends bitcoins. Do we have Hume’s accounts yet?”

  “Yes, we have Hume’s personal account and all the Patriot Party’s associated ones.”

  “Alright, let’s just sit and read.”

  A long period of time passed. Grayling finally turned and blinked. “Well sadly the easy link isn’t there. Hume’s accounts aren’t where the money came from. Instead Info received a sum of money from a different source. Then, recently, Info started receiving large cash sums in payments, for the entirety of the mayoral campaign and a bit before. Same source, but it’s all just an account number, doesn’t obviously link to Hume.”

  “Hey, if we’re concluding that Morthern.Info benefitted from an initial set-up injection a few years ago, Hume might have had the same too. I wonder how long it’ll take us to find out whose accounts these are?”

  They settled back in to work. They settled for so long, that when Wick opened the door to the Bunker and peered in both Maruma and Grayling were asleep in their chairs. He walked over and nudged them gently on their shoulders.

  “What, err, oh hi boss.”

  “You both need to go home and sleep. But first did you find anything?”

  “Yeah, yeah we did,” Grayling confirmed. “The Patriot Party was created with money from this British billionaire who’s connected to loads of right-wing groups. However, those cash injections ceased a long time ago, and there’s been nothing since. Meanwhile Morthern.Info was funded by money from someone, but the accounts and money transfer are very well masked and complicated, we’re going to need a finance officer on this for a while. The P.P. backing billionaire isn’t hiding, he’s widely known as a string puller. Info is just an idiot who thinks he’s safe. But whoever funded him knows their shit. Also, Info was entirely self-funded for a while and making a vast profit, and the payments from this benefactor account stopped for a while, but recently they restarted. So, I wonder if the relationship changed. It could be Hume through a back channel. That said, we could have a series of transactions which break the law and involve Monty in lots of dodgy stuff. We could go and arrest him.”

  “Could?”

  “Might be best to wait and get all of them at once. We can pursue this account from our end.”

  “Might be best to go home and sleep.”

  “Oh, yeah, sleep…”

  Susan looked up from her desk. Stremp walked past and into his office, followed by the stand-in editor, which made her look at the clock. It was late, almost nobody was here, and Stremp normally didn’t arrive at this point. Either he’d come in much earlier and still been there, or he was gone. He definitely shouldn’t be here now, which said to Susan skulduggery. So, she stood up, and wandered over in the direction of the office.

  Then she leaned on the wall in her specially chosen spot that was close enough to the water cooler to pretend she was drinking, but close enough to the office to listen in.

  “So, sir, I’ve done a chart for you,” the plastic editor began, “and I can show you what we’ve tracked. Here are the opinion polls that we’ve been holding online, broken down by specific time points which we chose. Basically, when we’ve run a major story online, we took a snapshot after, and when the television ran stories on their set times, we took a snapshot, and the same with the major websites like Morthern.Info. What we can conclusively prove is that the news stories tip the scales. We can prove it. Whenever someone runs a story, the polls change. There are people who know who’d they’d vote for, and it doesn’t change. But those who would change get moved by the media, and the polls show a three-way split in which the winner is genuinely changed by what comes out in the media in the time period before. It is entirely as we suspected, but now we have the data to prove it.”

  “Thank you very much,” Stremp replied.

  “Will you be selling this research?”

  “No,” Stremp said, “it is the proof I need. In the two days before the election, we will begin a complete multi-media assault on people’s minds. The money is put aside. We move. We spend. We fulfil this plan exactly as these statistics have drawn it. Old media is dying. We use the web now.”

  “What’s the time?” Maruma asked as he dashed into his home. In the doorway opposite, Gr
ayling looked at her watch.

  “Look, we’re going to be on time, Wick woke us up.”

  “Good, good.”

  “Just make sure you’ve got all you need right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, hey you don’t have to come you know. It’s not your scene.”

  “I am not judging the members of your gaming group, I know it’s nicely diverse, my scene is anywhere with happy people having fun. Also, I will pour a considerable amount of vodka into my water bottle and we will get going.”

  Maruma appeared in the doorway with a large bag.

  “How much stuff is there in this game?” she asked.

  “I have everything I might need.”

  “Okay then, give me a moment.”

  Soon they were driving through Morthern, before they turned into a brightly lit car park.

  “Jesus Soloman, this is better lit than a sunbed convention on the f’ing sun.”

  “Well games cost a lot of money and the club only picked somewhere really, really safe.”

  “Well it’s not actually safe, even if the highway code says park somewhere well lit, cos one drug addled loon and your stuff is wrecked.”

  “And this, dear Grayling, is why we don’t get on with the general public.”

  They climbed out, locked up and walked along to a scout hut. A knock on the door and they were let in.

  Everyone was there, staring back at them.

  “Sorry for being late!” Maruma said thinking that was polite.

  “We’re not late,” Grayling pointed out, “they’re all early.”

  “Yeah,” someone in the room said, “you said you’d be teaching us your game this week, so we all got here early!”