Election Page 2

  No, that’s insane, he thought. This doesn’t make even a little sense.

  The screen switched to images of his grown children, Florence and Schueller.

  “They don’t exactly share my politics,” Hudson said.

  “Yes, I know,” Vonner said, amused that Hudson thought this might be news to him. “But they love their dad. They’ll be good, loyal kids . . . and they’ll play well with the youth vote.”

  Hudson nodded, half proud, half confused, and the rest just made him dizzy.

  The conversation ended fifteen minutes later when Vonner seemed to instinctively realize that Hudson had reached his limit. “Here’s how to contact me,” Vonner said, handing him a small, cell phone-looking device. “It will reach me directly. Securely.”

  Hudson, still dazed, stood and headed toward the door. In the hall, he suddenly turned back, and through the doorway asked, “Hey, one last question. Did I get the loan?”

  “Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get the loan.”

  “Even if I don’t run?” Hudson asked.

  Vonner raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, don’t worry. Either way, we’ll take care of you.”

  “Thank you,” Hudson said, making eye contact before turning and limping away.

  Once the door closed behind him, Vonner pushed a button on his phone, waited for the voice on the other end, then said, “He’s in.”

  Chapter Three

  The five individuals—two women and three men—seated at a large, round, mahogany table had arrived in secret. If their attendance were to be discovered, prison might be their best hope.

  “Thank you for coming,” their host, a man codenamed AKA Washington, began. “We all know the dangers of proceeding, but the time is now. After years of work, NorthBridge is ready.” Each of them had adopted an alias inspired by the original American revolutionaries.

  “We have eleven billion dollars, with more coming in every day,” AKA Jefferson, one of the women, announced. “As you know, Franklin, has created digiGOLD, a crypto-currency which will ensure our funding continues even if the US economy collapses.”

  “It’s time for the final vote, AKA Hancock said. “Our point of no return.”

  “Then let’s be clear,” Jefferson said, looking at Adams, the other woman. “We’re talking about more than protesting the government. This may well lead to civil war, revolution . . . overthrowing the United States government.”

  “Let us hope it doesn’t get to that,” Adams solemnly added.

  “We have access to advanced weapons, and a backdoor into the NSA’s surveillance apparatus, the CIA’s computer systems, and the key to destroy the US military’s networks,” Washington said, as a monitor displayed their plans. “So when it does ‘get to that,’ we’ll be prepared.”

  “But it can’t be that easy,” Jefferson said in a questioning tone, putting on her glasses for a closer look, as if not quite believing what she was seeing.

  Washington shook his head. “Phase One will take at least two years. Hopefully we’ll get our person into the White House.” He looked at Adams. “By whatever means necessary.”

  “Even if we don’t,” Hancock said, pointing to a multi-colored bar graph on the screen. “There are millions of Americans who will side with us, if we manage the media right,” he paused and made eye contact with Jefferson. “We’re counting on you.”

  She nodded. “Thomas Paine once wrote, ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’”

  Washington surveyed their faces one last time, then announced, “It’s time to vote.”

  “To quote my namesake, Benjamin Franklin, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’”

  The five leaders of NorthBridge then agreed, one-by-one, to commit treason, launch the most well-funded and technologically advanced revolution ever, and change the world.

  Hudson, back in his pickup truck, sat trying to figure out what had just happened. For a second, he thought it might all be part of one of those elaborate reality TV show hoaxes. Cameras would record him making a fool of himself, actually believing that one of the richest men in the world, or anyone for that matter, would want him to be the leader of the free world. But then he remembered Trump. A reality TV star had become president. Surely I can do a better job than Trump did. After all, I might have been born poor, but I’ve never bankrupted a business—not yet, anyway. He still needed that loan.

  After a few moments of attempting to dissect the unfathomable event, he dialed the number to the most grounded person he knew: his girlfriend, Melissa, an efficiency expert who worked from home when she wasn’t visiting a client in some other Midwestern city. He pulled out of the bank parking lot and steered his truck toward Melissa’s house, even while waiting for her to answer.

  Melissa Atwater, a forty-year-old CPA with a law degree from Georgetown, wasn’t just grounded and efficient. The attractive and athletic blonde was also the most driven woman he’d ever met. Unable to have kids, early in their relationship she’d managed to befriend both of Hudson’s adult children—Schueller, his twenty-two-year-old drifting musician son, and Florence, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, an RN, who also ran a popular health blog. Hudson and Melissa had been dating seriously for two years, and enjoyed the kind of easy relationship he’d thought he’d never find again after losing his wife to cancer twelve years earlier.

  “How’d it go at the bank?” Melissa asked, as she took his call.

  “You won’t believe it,” Hudson replied.

  “You did get it, didn’t you?” she asked almost defensively, since she’d done most of the work on the loan package.

  “Yes. No,” he stammered. “I mean, I don’t know. It turned out to not be about that.” Hudson swerved to miss striking a mailman, realizing he’d not come to a complete stop at the last intersection. “I really shouldn’t talk about this now, on the phone. I mean, while I’m driving.” He chuckled at the absurdity of it all. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Chapter Four

  Melissa greeted him as he pulled into the driveway of her ivy-covered brick house, a home easily worth three times what his would bring. Two guys dressed in green shirts and khakis worked in the yard. The dogwood trees would soon bloom, along with a sweeping array of perennials. He told her the incredible story of meeting Vonner while they sipped coffee in the sunroom.

  “President of the United States,” she repeated several times. “No offence, but what kind of sense does that make?”

  “None taken. And I have no idea.”

  “Vonner isn’t crazy . . . or maybe he’s crazy like a fox.” She paused. “I actually met him once. He gave the commencement address when I graduated from law school. He’s a Georgetown alumni, and, well, I can’t really say I met him met him. It was a meet and greet at the post-grad ceremony reception, and I had maybe three minutes with him, but I’ve followed his career ever since. He’s influential. They say it’s nearly impossible to win the Republican nomination without his support.”

  “Good, then I’m a shoo-in,” Hudson said sarcastically, musing at the same moment that she’d make a perfect president’s wife. Then, instantly, he was shocked that his mind had so easily produced such a thought.

  “This is the wildest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “I mean how did you even get on his radar? Did you ask?” She looked at him, caught his smile, and raised her eyebrows.

  “He’s got people. Sometime after the last election he developed criteria, and his staff has been looking at computers, databases . . . I was a match.”

  She touched his hand. “The only match?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I needed to think about it.”

  “And are you?”

  “One of the world’s richest men, a known political kingmaker, has asked me to run for president, and pledged his support. How could I not think about it?”

  Melissa laughed. “Hudson Pound,
President of the United States.”

  “It’s nuts.”

  “It sure is strange . . . ” She hesitated, then got up and plucked dry leaves off a few plants. “But we’re missing something. Don’t get me wrong, I think you could be a good president, better than most of the jokers running, but this is so far out there. I think we might need to do some investigating.”

  “Then we’d better get busy. If I run, Vonner wants me to announce in three weeks, and he said I needed to do one thing first.”

  “What?”

  “Get married.”

  A family meeting was arranged, but it would be several days before the schedules could be matched. Florence, who now lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, found someone to take her Thursday shift at the UVA Medical Center, because it was the first day that Schueller, who at least for the moment resided in Cleveland, didn’t have a gig. Melissa postponed a client visit to Indianapolis. In the forty-eight hours while Hudson was waiting for his “top-advisers” to convene, he studied the other candidates who had already announced.

  The crowded field didn’t seem to leave much room for a Pound candidacy. Each party already had an impressive array of seasoned politicians; well-funded, experienced in campaigning, and knowledgeable on the issues. Both sides also had a couple of outsiders who’d announced, and although they appeared to be long shots, the novices seemed to have more going for them than Hudson did.

  For the Democrats, there was “Newsman” Dan Neuman, a former news anchor who’d already stunned the establishment by winning the Oregon governorship two years earlier. Neuman had decent name recognition nationally from his news days, but little else.

  A bigger threat, with pockets not as deep as Vonner, but deep enough, was Tim Zerkel, a tech billionaire who actually believed he could change the world by using money and technology to tackle all the biggest problems—hunger, poverty, war, etc.—as if they were startup businesses. Vonner had called him “a socialist in bad disguise.”

  The Republicans had their own pair of newcomers. Thorne, a “shock-jock” who claimed to be a “thorne” in the side of the status quo, had been getting tons of media attention in the post-Trump era. With twenty-seven million listeners to his popular show—that skewed young but otherwise crossed the demographic spectrum—some considered the dark horse a legitimate threat. Often claiming to dislike the GOP as much as he did Democrats, he had decided to run as a Republican because he thought elephants were “cooler” than donkeys. Announcing his intentions on his radio show, he elicited the first controversy when addressing LGBTQ rights: “Gay people don’t bother me except when they tell me who they like to screw. Do I go ‘round telling you I prefer doing Asian women? Shut up already!” His next stir came when he argued that soldiers who’d seen combat should be charged with crimes against humanity because war was the ultimate sin. No one thought he’d make it through the first primaries, but the media loved his constant controversies.

  There was also Pete Wiseman, a Yale professor who had written a bestselling book about a new form of government, but few believed he’d scrape together enough funding to even make it to the Iowa caucus.

  Hudson reviewed the complete list to date.

  Republicans

  Bill Cash, Texas Governor

  Brian Uncer, Arizona Senator

  Chuck Brickman, Former Pennsylvania Governor

  Dan Stein, Florida Congressman

  Paul Jones, Oklahoma Governor

  Thorne, shock jock

  Professor Pete Wiseman

  Celia Brown, Illinois Senator

  General Hightower

  Democrats

  Hap Morningstar, California Governor

  Andrew Kelleher, New York Governor

  Cindy Packard, New Hampshire Senator

  Henry Beck, New York Congressman

  Hart Sweeney, California Senator

  Newsman Dan Neuman, Oregon Governor

  Tim Zerkel, tech billionaire

  By the morning of the family meeting, he’d learned all he could about the sixteen candidates, who, if he accepted Vonner’s offer, would become not only his colleagues, but also his most fierce competitors. They all seemed formidable, he considered several of them absolutely unbeatable—such as Senator Uncer and Governor Cash—but Vonner had reminded him that politics, and presidential campaigns in general, were totally unpredictable, a fact that was hammered home as he and Melissa were waiting for his children to arrive. A news flash lit up the TV screen.

  “Presidential candidate and Arizona Senator, Brian Uncer, is believed to be dead.”

  Chapter Five

  Hudson and Melissa stared at the screen in horror—the fiery shell of an automobile still being extinguished, replays of Brian Uncer, the US Senator from Arizona, getting into that same car after a campaign event in Tucson.

  “Uncer had been considered by many pundits to be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination,” the newscaster said somberly. “The Senator, his driver, and an aide have just died, and there seems little doubt that this was not an accident. This was an assassination.”

  The graphic images were difficult to watch as the Senator was seen waving and smiling moments before his car exploded, engulfing him and two other occupants in an immense fireball. The third-world-style hit immediately drew comparisons to many similar attacks in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East carried out by Islamic extremists. During the initial aftermath, with the media already rushing to judgment and assuming it to be the act of Middle Eastern terrorists, shocking news surfaced that a mysterious domestic group was claiming responsibility.

  “Uncer was one of the people you had to beat,” Melissa said. “The Republican nomination was his to lose.”

  “I know, I know,” Hudson said, unable to take his eyes from the screen.

  “The previously unknown group signed their statement simply as NorthBridge,” the newscaster reported. “In their release, the ‘NorthBridgers’ said they represented a large number of Americans who were tired of waiting for ‘change.’ Instead, they have decided to begin what they are calling ‘a second American Revolution’,” he said in a monotone.

  “Oh my God,” Melissa whispered.

  The newscaster read from the group’s website: “We honor the actions taken on the North Bridge of Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775 by Minutemen against the English King’s troops, to open the American War of Independence. Ralph Waldo Emerson rightfully referred to that exchange as ‘the shot heard around the world.’ We declare that the politicians and elites who have corrupted the freedoms our forebears fought and died for are far worse than a distant monarch inflicting his whims and wrath on a good people.”

  In the days since the bank meeting with Vonner, Melissa and Hudson had talked of nothing else. Hudson was leaning heavily toward running, but still wanted to talk with his children first. Now, however, this attack made him reconsider everything.

  That could have been him, and it certainly demonstrated the mood of the country, or at least a part of it. Hudson wasn’t sure if it was because of his time in the service, his own frustration with the state of the world, or even events from his past, but seeing a US Senator murdered like that made him even more interested in being president. Things had to change, there was no question, but such change had to come about peacefully.

  Hudson pulled his laptop across the coffee table and went to the NorthBridge website. He found the home page text familiar.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . when a long train of abuses and usurpations reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it
is their duty, to throw off such Government . . .

  Hudson then heard the newscaster repeating the line.

  “‘Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,’ Thomas Jefferson.”

  For the next two hours, a parade of prominent politicians appeared on every news channel to condemn the horrible act as terrorism. Celia Brown, an African-American Senator from Illinois, and also a Republican candidate for the White House, said, “For these cowards to hide behind the bravery of the Founding Fathers is an insult to their memory. The Founders established the Constitution and our great democracy in such a way that grievances can be addressed in a public and civilized manner. The NorthBridgers are nothing more than murderous thugs, and we must use every resource to hunt them down.”

  Only Thorne broke from the unanimous condemnation when he said, “People are sick and tired of the rigged system, and the NorthBridgers have a point. Now, I’m not condoning murder, but perhaps some of these corrupt politicians should be arrested and charged.” When asked if he had specifics on crimes committed by Members of Congress, he declined to answer, but offered, “More than ninety percent of US Senators, and eighty percent of House members, should be put on trial.”