The Voting Machine

Single Point of Failure

I've had a gun pointed in my face many times in the past and it always has the same effect, making me so acutely aware of life's fragility. I am compelled to honor each of the trillions of cells that compose my blood, bones, brains and flesh. I am the sum of those parts that could be torn apart in an instant with the flash of a barrel. The world would then go on without me. Or maybe it wouldn't. I guess I'd never know.

Chet was clutching a stainless steel Sig Sauer, the deluxe edition with a heavy barrel and a double magazine. It was a rich man's gun, the kind that left little to chance. A slight twitch on the trigger and my brain would be splattered all over his Persian carpet and the legs of his stained oak table. His face was death personified. His boyish features and lean, toned body seemed to be immune to the aging process, as if some special magic protected him from the effects of time and mortality. Alistair lifted me in his thick arms and planted me into a chair. I was sitting at the table, facing the window. Chet was behind me now, with the barrel pressed firm against the base of my skull.

Behind me, Alistair whispered something into his radio phone. From his earpiece, I heard Dean's voice on the other end mentioning Larry and Suzy. They seemed to have them both in the guest house now, judging from what I could hear from their conversation. I laid my palms flat on the table top, staring ahead at the ocean. My eyes scanned the coast line and the clouds, searching for an escape hatching in the blue sky above.

"What are you looking for? You think the Coast Guard choppers pay attention to what happens in these mansions?" Chet asked, answering his own question with an arrogant laugh.

His tall engineer with the grim face was typing feverishly at his computer. The sun was setting behind a patch of clouds on the edge of the water line. The man removed his sunglasses, revealing a lazy eye that seemed to float as he tapped the keyboard. A few minutes later a stocky Latino man entered the room carrying another laptop. He sat next to tall engineer and they started working together, pointing to the code on their screens and whispering plans to each other. I remembered Brenda's description of Shiro's soldiers in Iraq.

"You're Brown and Sanchez from Project Siren," I said.

"Smart guy," Sanchez said, chuckling. "That's what everybody says about Temo McCarthy right? Such a smart guy."

"Don't worry about what a smart guy he is," Chet snapped at him. "What's taking so long? I thought it would only take 60 seconds to download the files once we found them in the Second World."

"She set up a few extra passwords, nothing we can't break," Brown said. "Just sit tight."

One of Chet's body guards entered the room and handed Alistair a small, medical supply bag. Alistair unpacked its contents, placing a needle, syringe and vial of liquid on the table top.

"Now?" Alistair asked Chet.

"Wait until they finish getting the files."

"A lethal injection?" I said. "Why not just shoot me in the head and get it over with? Or maybe you don't want to bloody the furniture."

"This isn't lethal," Alistair said, loading the syringe and flicking the needle to remove the air bubbles. "This is just something to help you relax."

"I see. You get me drugged, put me behind the wheel of a car and roll it down a cliff into the ocean."

"Actually we were thinking the Ortega Highway," Chet said. "There's that set of sharp turns heading east down the mountains into Lake Elsinore. It's a plausible location. It gets very little traffic and it bypasses Camp Pendleton and those checkpoints on the 5. The perfect route for a terror suspect to make a run for the Mexico border."

"That's the story you want on the evening news," I said. "Temo McCarthy escaped Las Vegas, made it all the way to LA to try and reunite with his wife and daughter before finally giving into the drugs and demons."

"Like I said before, it's a plausible narrative. You have always been a loser, but there were those fleeting moments when you might have been transformed into some sort of hero. And yet you could never transform yourself, you could never bridge that gap between the future you wanted and the past you were born into. The media was getting ready to run with that story during the Employee of the Year trial and they had to shelve it when circumstances in the courtroom changed. But the story is still there. They've written it a thousand times already for all those other lone wolfs.  A promising young man whose life goes into a tailspin, he becomes increasingly troubled and unstable. His marriage fails. His finances fail. He succumbs to a warped, destructive ideology. The story is so common that everyone's heard it a hundred times by now. Why wouldn't they believe it applies to you? "

"It won't be that neat and tidy. There are too many people asking questions. You never had to bring me into this in the first place. I had no idea why Gina died."

"How could I be sure? Gina knew she was the single point of failure unless she spread the information to someone else."

"So you'll kill Larry and Suzy too?"

"We have time to think about how that happens. It's only logical that you'd finish them off before crashing on your route to Mexico. We can probably hide their bodies somewhere up in the mountains."

"What about my daughter?" I asked again.

"I don't know anything about your daughter."

"Of course you do."

"Juan Ricardo has her. You read the text on that phone he left with Davis. He wants to meet you at the Laguna steps at midnight. Too bad you won't be there. I think he's getting used to disappointment. El Norte is full of heartbreak for his people."

"The stuff at the apartment was all a trick. Juan Ricardo is really working for you."

"He's not working for me. He's working for my enemies. He is the one who caused all this trouble in the first place with his NAFTA trucks hauling voting machines over the border and his ricin lab underground in the desert. He did a pretty decent job with the execution, even if he was obviously just a hired hand in all of this. Los Empresarios would never have had the sophistication to plan all this without direction."

"You're saying you didn't kill Zeke and David?"

"Why would I kill them? It was their deaths that made all of these measures necessary." I could hear the anger rising up in Chet's voice. "After you survived the crash here in LA, I was even thinking it might've been easier to let you live in exile up in Las Vegas. You could help Marcus's hare-brained daughter with her bleeding heart campaigns. Let that fragile, little addict squander the great man's fortune. No I would've been happy to let sleeping dogs lie if it hadn't been for that business in the voting machines."

"The dogs weren't sleeping. David and Zeke were onto you. They would've exposed you if they hadn't died. David had been researching the games for years. Zeke was going to use his connections to find out what happened to his son in Iraq."

"No one was ever going to listen to those old cranks. David had been rattling on about the Shiro conspiracy for decades. He destroyed his academic career. His theories didn't have a shred of credibility with anyone who mattered. I made sure of that a long time ago. No one would've ever taken those two seriously if they hadn't been killed. Marcus and his cronies were finally clever enough to realize that. To plot the murder and make it look like terrorism right before the election. Well, if that didn't shine a spotlight on Shiro then nothing would."

"I don't believe Marcus is behind this."

"I really don't care what you believe."