The Voting Machine

A Higher Power

Teresa, Pam, Luke and I left Paiza Club through a fire exit and walked down eleven floors before we emerged in a long hallway with plush gold-and-blue carpet and mirror-lined walls. The reflections made it look like the corridor continued forever. Pam led us to a set of double-doors near and rang the bell.

"Who is it?" A gruff voice inquired. J.P. always had trouble hiding his accent.

Pam announced herself.

"Why are you here?"

"Chen sent me. He says there's something you need to know."

"What does Chen think I need to know?"

"You want me to say it out here in the hall?"

The penthouse door opened and J.P. was standing in his bathrobe. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled like expensive liquor. He watched us all rush through the entrance and he backed away, reacting slowly and unevenly, pulling a gun from his pocket. By that time we were clogging the hallway inside his penthouse and he could have shot us all like fish in a barrel.

"Is that what you want, J.P.?" I said. "A pile of dead bodies and a smoking gun in your suite?"

He leered with a manic grin, sweat glistening on his forehead. I remembered the first time I'd met him in the Laguna Niguel Ritz Carlton. I wondered why a man this smart and this rich didn't get out of the game when he had the chance. Maybe he got trapped just like Abdul. Maybe once you got in there was no way out.

"Temo, Teresa. I thought you might show up. And you've brought the Dust family! Just look at you all. So resourceful."

"You can put that gun away. You know we're not here to hurt you," Teresa said.

"Of course not," J.P. said, casually tucking the gun into the pocket of his bathrobe. He led us through the hall of his suite in a drunken saunter. The double doors to the master bed room were open just enough to catch a glimpse of two beautiful women lying under satin sheets. He sat us in sofa in the study where he sat at his desk and put on a pair of reading glasses. J.P. was middle-age in a trim, vigorous sort of way. But the past few days had taken its toll. Glass doors behind him led to a balcony overlooking the Stratosphere and the northern stretch of the Strip.

"Let me explain," Teresa started.

"I don't think that will be necessary. I can imagine why you are here. You've decided that the Babylonian is the safest place in Clark County to wait out the manhunt. I made the same assessment. And second of all, Teresa, you believe that Shiro is trying to cut you loose."

"You too."

"Maybe. Now that you're here."

J.P. rested his hand on a small MacAir laptop on the desk.

"I am guessing that you want me to talk about Shiro," he continued, "as if contaminating me with whatever contaminated you will somehow absolve both of us."

"You know you are in trouble. That's why you are hiding."

"I am not on the Watch List yet."

"Yet."

"So you want me to name names and provide other details that you can use as leverage to save your lives."

"Our lives. Anyone who worked the games is at risk."

J.P. shrugged. "No one can prove the games mean anything. It's just a sport. The clients are busy so they pay people like you to play on their behalf. No one cares if they win or lose. Why would anyone care?"

"They'd care if they know the reason they play," I said. "The bets are just a way for the clients to pass messages. It's a code to let Shiro know their bids for the candidates."

"Who would believe a story like that?" J.P. said. "You don't have a shred of evidence."

"People wouldn't believe it before Zeke and David died in the voting machines. But they'd believe it now."

J.P. shook his head. "Zeke and David. Such a bad decision. Why bother with them? Who was going to believe anything they found?"

"Were you part of it?" I asked. "The Department of Strategy?"

"No, no," J.P. said. "I am not a formal member of the corporation. I'm a freelancer, like Teresa."

"Do you know the boss?"

"I don't know everyone."

"But you know the top dog don't you? You know the Chief Executive," I said.

"Who is he?" Teresa asked.

"I will never tell you."

"I don't think you have to," I said.

"What do you mean? You don't know who it is. You couldn't know."

"I think I do," I said. Teresa, Luke and Pam looked at me with surprised. "You were Marcus's right hand man at Passion as he built the whole company from scratch. Right up until he went to prison."

"I testified again him in the trial. I was a witness for the prosecution."

"I thought about that. I never understood why Marcus went to jail in the first place. He was the CEO of a bank. Those guys never see prison crime. But Marcus did. Why is that? Maybe he wanted to be there. Maybe it would put him beyond suspicion. Maybe the bank was a front for his real business."

J.P. laughed nervously. "That's what you think, huh? That's ridiculous. How could we get away with that for all those years?"

"Let us see your laptop, J.P. That's where you type all the messages that come through the games, the ones that Pam memorizes and records in her notebook. That's the information you give your boss so he knows what the clients want."

J.P. grabbed the laptop in a surprisingly quick and agile movement, the kind just about any man can make when his life depends on it. Then he bolted through the glass doors out onto the balcony. Once he was outside, his hands flashed in sudden movements and at first I expected him to draw his gun again. Instead, he held his light laptop over the edge of the railing. He dangled the computer in the air. If he let go the computer would fall hundreds of feet and smash on the sidewalk below. "I am holding the answers you want. Don't step any closer or they are lost forever."

"The thing I don't understand is why the high rollers need Shiro in the first place?" I said. "Why place these secret games? Can't they get what they want through proper channels?"

"Not always," J.P. said. "Elections are an art, not a science. People need to feel something. Intrigue. Excitement. Man is not a rational animal." He was fidgeting on the balcony, trying to look past me, stalling for time. "People need faith in something greater. We talked about faith before, Temo, didn't we?"

"The Leadership Retreat," I said. "Pascal's Wager. I bet on God's side. It was probably a mistake."

"Maybe you're just thinking about it the wrong way," he said. "What if God isn't up in the heavens like you imagined? What if he is a man right here on earth?"

"God can't be a man. God is a higher power."

"What if one man could be a higher power over his fellow men? What if he had absolute control over your life? What if he could give you the things that matter most or crush you like an insect? You should make him your god then, shouldn't you?"

I had no answer. I closed my eyes and felt the stillness once again, the calm acceptance of nature's unyielding flow of events. I stopped resisting and let fate carry me, helpless as a single grain of sand floating in the waves of the ocean. For an instant, my heartbeat was just one of an infinite number of sounds in the cosmos. A gust of desert wind whistled through the doors from the balcony.

Then there it was again, the mechanical humming, like an invisible mosquito just behind my earlobe. A blur of metal ripped through J.P.'s body and the laptop sailed over the edge of the balcony. His killer hovered in a cloudless stretch of sky, a blue bird made of gleaming metal, barely visible to the naked eye. I thought she might fire again but we darted behind the inner walls of the hotel suite, leaving her no clear shot. The drone lingered for another instant and darted out of sight.