The Frankenstein Candidate (51 page)

“One day,” Frank said, “one day I might go back to the movie project I wanted to fund.”

“What’s it about?” Olivia asked.

“A teenager can’t decide between economics and writing as a career. At first, he chooses economics but he just can’t handle arcane math. So he switches to writing and decides to do a biography of a legend who is his hero. Then, as he does his research, he finds out that the great legend was really a charlatan.”

They entered the terminal, and a lady, fortyish, was waiting there with a young boy.

“Uncle Frank!” the boy said, jumping with delight.

“Hey, what a surprise,” Frank said, though you could tell from the woman’s face that he had planned it all along. Frank hugged the boy and lifted him off his feet.

“Kayla and Olivia, this is my sister Daniela and her son, Jimmy.”

They all just stood there, waiting for someone to say something. Although they knew of his family, this was a side of him that neither Olivia nor Kayla had seen.

“What have you been up to, Jimmy?” Frank asked.

“We had this project at school. Our teacher, he like, you know, made two groups. Each group had to do some work and the other group had to pay money…like five dollars to each boy or girl if they liked their work.”

“Great. What work did you do, Jimmy?”

“Well, our class captain, he made some of us dig holes…like with spades and stuff—”

“Good. I see you got blisters.”

“They don’t hurt, Uncle. And then some boys had to fill the holes again.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah, but we didn’t get our five dollars ‘cause the other kids, you know the other group…they couldn’t see what work we had done.”

“Do you blame them?”

“No. They did stuff we could see. I guess it was a bad idea to fill the holes.”

“Yes, Jimmy, only a complete fool would believe that digging holes in the ground and filling them up again is useful work,” Frank said.

“Uncle Frank, next time we will do something that people can see.”

“Good, do that. By the way, I was just telling Olivia about a story…a story for a film I want to make.”

“Wow, you are going to make a film?”

“I hope so. Anyway, as I was saying, Olivia, the teenager finds out that the chicanery of his former hero had spread into prestigious institutions that started to teach the fraudulent story-telling as though as it was real science. But no one believes the young man. Publishers refuse to publish his book. His professors call him insane. But he never gives up, and in the end his courage proves contagious.”

“What’s it called…this film?” Olivia asked.

“Citizen Keynes,” he said.

Olivia gave up. Frank was more human than before, but it was still hard to get him to talk about his personal life.

Quentin Kirby’s recorded transcript recalling the conversation with his aide had been crucial. Mike Rodrigo had meticulously laid out the entire chain, linking Raul Fernandez to a meeting with two men from a security firm. The security firm was a front for a mercenary organization that John Logan occasionally hired. The initial requirement was for a big enough accident to occur that resulted in the deaths of several civilians, including Frank Stein. Raul was to have been paid three million for his involvement. Mike Rodrigo had located the mechanic who had agreed to put a delay on the brakes. He had received one million dollars and wasn’t talking. He finally cracked when he was cornered. He was a Cuban who was let go provided he returned to Cuba with his green card cancelled and the one million returned.

As much as he hated to let the man go free, Phil Enright knew that the director of prosecutions needed to nail the kingmaker. Enright had seen the mechanic’s video testimony and read the signed affidavit. There had been a change of mind at the very last moment. It had been too late to save Raul and four other civilians who died at the scene of the accident.

“All roads lead to John Logan,” Phil Enright said to the carefully assembled team of four select individuals in his office. Logan had personally ordered the reversal when he found out that a kill was intended. The mercenary firm had merely been advised to “take care of” Frank Stein, but Logan’s handlers had panicked.

Logan had nevertheless orchestrated the SEC investigation into Stein, as well as the strategy to buy Roscoe Maynard’s cooperation. This made the SEC prosecutor another target of the investigation—he had severely compromised his integrity by letting a presidential candidate drive the SEC’s prosecution strategy. There was a rumor that he had been promised an attorney general’s position if he could nail one of America’s richest celebrities.

Logan had played no part in the threats made to Gary Allen, which squarely stood with Victor Howell and others of his own party, nor with the murder of Casey Rogers, which was entirely the work of a white supremacist organization.

The Democrats also suspected the Republicans of implanting Ashley Bennett. A trap had been laid, and Colin Spain had fallen straight into it. Ashley Bennett had been given a new identity. She had disappeared and could not be traced. They had to let it go. The Kirby camp was widely suspected to be behind the entrapment, but nothing could be proven. It wasn’t known whether Quentin Kirby merely knew of it or even authorized it; the benign explanation was that he chose to never question certain members of his camp—they did what they did behind the scenes. Such a strategy was very common. It offered full deniability, as well as granting latitude to the players on the lower rung to choose the scheme. It was that strategy that got Logan undone; he had not intended for his players to plan murder when the good old stratagem of defamation was available to stop Frank Stein—but his political handlers got nervous in September with Frank Stein’s rising popularity.

All the news broke at once. One fine morning, the United States awoke to a news story that was arguably bigger than 9/11, or at least as big. A presidential candidate had allowed his aides to plan murder. Four innocent civilians had been killed. Logan had then relentlessly pursued his quarry by corrupting a senior federal regulator. The federal regulator had allowed himself to be corrupted. Logan had then been elected as the forty-sixth president of the United States of America.

Serious distrust of Washington had grown rapidly. Now it was well beyond redemption. Not since 1973 had a U.S. president or vice president been forced to vacate office while facing criminal charges, but the charges against John Logan were far more serious than those against Spiro Agnew in 1973.

The case against John Logan was certain to bring about an impeachment. In a strict sense, Logan’s activities were undertaken when in Congress rather than in the Oval Office. It nevertheless entitled Congress to impeach him.

He saved them the trouble. The day after the news broke, he resigned and was arrested immediately afterward.

A mere five weeks after being sworn in as the vice president of the United States, Claire Derouge was sworn in as its forty-seventh president. With that, the entire Cabinet underwent another transformation; orders for name-embossed rubber stamps were flying out of the White House.

In her third week in the Oval Office, Claire Derouge was in the Situation Room late one night with the chiefs of the armed forces when an unexpected bulletin hit the president’s private channel.

U.S. intelligence satellites had picked up Israeli jet fighters en route to what appeared to be Iran.

Derouge asked for her presidential hotline. The Israeli prime minister, Azzan Herzi, was not available. It took them ten whole minutes to track him down.

The jets were low, noiseless, and white, and the day’s excellent cloud cover almost completely hid them from sight. They slid into Iranian airspace virtually unnoticed.

The four jets then calmly proceeded toward their target. Suddenly, they had the Iranians on their tail. They scrambled and appeared to cover for one pilot who shot through to his final destination. He managed to release what seemed like at least a dozen or so bombs in quick succession.

Within minutes, the airspace was filled with at least fifty Iranian fighter jets. All four Israeli jets were brought down.

Claire Derouge watched with a mixture of horror and joy as Iran’s nuclear facilities were blown to smithereens.

“Madam President, Prime Minister Herzi,” the voice on the conference line said.

“Put him on,” she said.

“I am sorry we could not communicate this earlier, Madam President,” Herzi said.

“It is unthinkable that you would carry this out without the knowledge of—”

“We tried, Madam President. But President Logan was very preoccupied these past two weeks. He kept thinking we could defer—”

“I will need to call you back, Prime Minister.”

Claire Derouge was furious; the chiefs of the armed forces must have known this was coming, and they had kept this from her. They all denied it, though, and if they really didn’t know, John Logan had not brought them into the loop.

“What is done is done. What matters now is to let Israel and the whole world know that we approve of it. If I may say so, it’s a great opportunity,” Olivia said afterward to Claire when they were alone.

Olivia missed not being with her girls. Still a Senator, and disowned by everyone in her party except the President, she had continued to work long hours.

It was Monday, March 29. It was almost midnight by the time she got back home. She planned to tiptoe her way into the master bedroom when she noticed Gary was still around, half-awake on the couch in the living room. Two wine glasses, one half-full, one empty, caught her eye, and a flash of remorse hurried across her mind.

“Will you share a Syrah?” he said, his eyes glassy, from tears or the drink she could not tell.

As he poured her a glass, the heaviness of
the unspoken
and
the unresolved
hung in the air. Rain battered the roof monotonously, as if its drums were calling for a truce.

Suddenly, she felt her stomach rumble. She could not remember when she had last eaten. Making her way to the refrigerator, she noticed an untouched plate on the dining table. Moisture had touched the sides—for how long had the dish awaited its patron, she did not know.

Another tentative step told her eyes what her heart already knew—it was her favorite:
brandade canapes with cornichon pickles
. She noticed a note sticking out of the bottom of the plate. Her heart missed a beat. Strong memories came flooding back. With trembling fingers, she raised the plate and pulled out the piece of paper. Scribbled on it were the words, “
Olivia, my joie de vivre
.”