The Frankenstein Candidate (26 page)

Despite all the forewarnings, Americans were unprepared for the economic catastrophe that surged like a tsunami. The falling U.S. dollar, combined with the prospect of war in the Middle East, shot gasoline prices up further. In two weeks, prices went from around $5.7 per gallon to $7.5 per gallon, while wholesale prices of West Texas Intermediate crude went from about $145 per barrel to near $190 per barrel. Food and commodity prices were already at record highs. Unemployment soared, reaching 18 percent, a level not seen since the Great Depression. Many of even those who were employed were in fact underemployed.

There was plenty of mud available to throw. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats spared the other side. Marginal levels of civil unrest across the nation had already been reported in the press. But no one was quite prepared for what ensued on April 5.

Liberals were angry at Republicans, at what they thought was a continued encouragement of a dog-eat-dog society. Conservatives were furious at liberals, whom they thought had underfunded a large number of promises. A number of unaffiliated folk, anarchists, and residual Tea Party activists were chafing at the bit against everything that represented government. If the middle class had it tough, the poor were at boiling point. Food and energy prices had more than doubled in two years, and Social Security payments that were tied to a consumer price index that exempted food and energy prices were no longer enough to subsist on. This was the class most vulnerable to provocation. And then there was crony big business and the connected. They were scared of straight talk, period. They needed to preserve the status quo at any cost. There was just no knowing who could incite whom.

It started in Los Angeles on Sunday, April 5. A march of anti-globalization activists was intercepted by police and stopped at a major intersection. Someone threw a broken bottle. It hit a rookie policeman, leaving a deep gash on his right ear. He charged the suspected assailant with a baton. The marching crowd engulfed the policeman, throwing him to the ground, kicking and stomping on him. Injured, he opened fire, meaning to fire into the air to scare his attackers off. But a shot went awry, and one of the attackers was killed.

The policeman was a Latino. That’s all the talk radio hosts needed to know. Never mind that the man was born in the United States. Never mind that he was defending himself. Never mind that he did not initiate the violence. Never mind that the death was an accident.

On Monday, April 6, riots broke out all over the country. Fuel depots were lit, buses burned, car windows smashed, and shops were randomly looted. Shopkeepers opened fire on looters, and offices were trashed. The New York subway suffered a terrible accident when someone managed to throw metal pipes onto the rails, causing a train to derail.

Dan Curtis, the bearded giant, had recently started work in the Vets Department in DC, near the Department of State building on 15th Street NW. His beard was back. This time though, it was neatly trimmed, albeit it still added a welcome contrast to the three-piece suit he wore to work. On Monday, the news of the riots was all over the radio and the internet, but it was the text that invited him to one that animated him. Dan excused himself on the pretext of sickness and took to the streets. Before long, he had walked past Farragut Square—he knew that a rampaging mob had begun to gather near Farragut North Metro, just up the road from where he worked.

A block down the street, the cops were positioned near the entrance to Farragut West Metro. They must have intercepted the global text.

Dan grabbed a seven feet long iron rail and stood in the middle of the mob’s path, the iron across his chest making him a virtual seven feet by seven feet cross, his right hand held high, palm outward in a stop sign.

As the crowd neared, he recognized his old friends—the snake and the shrub. The hundreds that were marching stridently slowed down at the sight of the giant and his iron.

“Not this time, Dan,” hissed the snake.

“He is one of them now,” the shrub said, making himself heard above the din.

Someone from behind threw a gasoline bomb, and it exploded right beside the giant.

The cops charged from behind him, rubber bullets firing into the crowd. Dan roared ahead with his sideways iron rail pushing into the crowd, trying to hold them back. But the hundreds that swelled the crowd hesitated only a second, and even the giant’s strength was quickly overcome in a clash of batons and baseball bats. Over and above the clang of the anti-riot shields hitting his iron rail, the giant shouted a no, but guns were drawn when the steel of knives glinted in the afternoon sun.

Somewhere in the mayhem, a stray bullet hit his head, and the giant fell, only to be trampled upon by cops and rioters alike till the Armadillo riot shields finally held sway and ambulances could safely swing in to the streets. It needed four medics to pick up his bleeding, unconscious form. Automated defibrillation kept the behemoth of peace ticking till he got to a hospital.

Altogether, three thousand people died, and scores of others were injured in the most horrific, senseless, and purposeless day of rioting in American history.

President Young called for an urgent session of Congress to consider imposition of martial law. The session was scheduled for Tuesday morning but erupted into an almost violent confrontation between Democrats and Republicans, each accusing the other of starting the riots. The bill could not be passed.

Over the week, though, things became quieter. Frank Stein went back to his campaign office on Wednesday. He noticed that the door handle had been tampered with and the door was ajar. Clearly, someone had entered the office. He did not realize the full extent of the vandalism till he was inside. Papers were strewn everywhere. The tables and chairs were thrown all over the place. Frank noticed that the windows had been shattered, and some of the glass from the windows had spilled inside. Someone had written on the wall with red paint “Fuck off Frankenstein and take your rich buddies with you.” He noticed the neat handwriting and the correct spelling; it did not belong to a street thug. He did not keep cash in the office. No documents were missing. But the hard drives of the three computers were gone.

The drawers had been emptied out—his USBs were gone too. Whoever did this knew him or at least of him; this was no robbery, it was a calculated and violent assault on his campaign. He always had one USB that he kept with him or at his home, but he had never preserved the hate e-mail he received on his main computer. Over the months, there had been at least six hundred hate letters and e-mails, maybe eight hundred—too many for the police to follow up on.
Oh, the police
. Yes, that’s right, he needed to make at least two calls—he called 911 and then he called Mike Rodrigo, the toughest guy he knew.

The news of Casey Rogers’ poisoning had changed the rules. Rumors were circulating that Casey was terminally ill. Frank would have loved to visit him in hospital, to wish him well even though he vehemently disagreed with most of what Casey said except the part that seemed to have made him an assassination target. But Casey’s whereabouts were a tightly guarded secret, and rightly so, Frank thought.

Mike Rodrigo was a former marine. He headed up a small private security firm that specialized in protecting celebrities and political targets. As a legitimate presidential candidate, Frank had requested federal protection, but it had neither been denied nor agreed to—the papers were stuck somewhere in the state machinery, and after Black Monday and the attack on his own office, Frank could wait no longer. In any event, federal rules only allowed Secret Service protection for presidential candidates in the last 120 days leading up to the election.

To say Mike Rodrigo was a tough guy was an understatement. A veteran of the Iraq offensive and the Northern Pakistan incursion, he had also served in the 2015 Syrian peace-keeping force before being wounded by a bomb explosion that left him with one leg. He spent three years in rehabilitation and came out with an artificial leg with which he practiced walking for fourteen hours a day until his body got used to it. At forty-three, he could still run five miles inside a half hour using one real and one artificial leg and lift twice his bodyweight on the bench press. They said he could shoot a clay pigeon in the eye from a distance of one hundred meters with a sniper’s rifle. He was tuned into the local police, the FBI, the armed forces, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Counter Terrorism Unit, besides also having friends at the local councils. His staff included veterans who were bomb experts and V8 super-car drivers. If you wanted to be safe from crowds and threats, Mike was the guy you hired.

The late evening news on the day after Black Monday was consumed by the nationwide riots.

The late-breaking news was equally ominous. Casey Rogers had slipped into a coma.

With Mike Rodrigo and his crew in tow, Frank went to the Net Station three days after Black Monday. Besides Kayla, there wasn’t a journalist in town who was prepared to be seen supporting him.

Frank knew he could always post his commandments onto the Web if he so wished. But while there was a public broadcast network of any kind still prepared to air his views, he was perfectly happy to utilize it.

“Civil unrest, a political assassination attempt, double-digit inflation, and near twenty percent unemployment, how bad are things going to get before they get better? Washington appears to have no answers. So listeners are ready to hear the heretic. Good evening, Mr. Stein,” Kayla said.

“Thank you, Kayla, and good evening to you too. Firstly, I would like to point out that our government does not include food and energy prices in the inflation calculation. Real inflation is actually close to thirty percent already. It is headed toward fifty percent or more on an annual basis. Double-digit does not even begin to describe what we are about to see.”

“Fifty percent? Some say you are just scaremongering, Mr. Stein. Is that why our economy is imploding?”

“Only partly. There are other reasons. But we have a cost structure that is absurdly high relative to the Asian economies. But in 2014, we introduced a whole new cost that we kept adding to.”

“What new cost?”

“The carbon apology, a gross misrepresentation of true science.”

“But don’t all nations abide by the Rio agreement?”

“It is impossible to monitor. We have strong evidence that the BRICs do not.”

“You mean Brazil, Russia, India, and China?”