Paul
“Where’s your phone?” Paul asked as soon as c1sman and Bee came through the door, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “In my bag?” c1sman replied, slipping the backpack off his shoulder. He dug around inside and pulled it out. “I had it on vibrate and I guess I couldn’t feel it.”
“I need you to have that where you can feel it,” said Paul. C1sman just nodded. “But that’s OK. You’re here now. I need you to look at something for me. We’re having what seems like a weird delay between when the e-mails are time stamped as being received and when we actually see them. And then another big delay when we send mail out. I’m worried stuff might be slipping through without us seeing it.”
“No, I know what the problem is. Don’t worry, I can fix it, but nothing’s slipping through.” C1sman sat down on the couch where Paul had been perched and started working at once.
Paul didn’t need to give c1sman any other instructions. The hacker was prone to worry and distraction and second guessing when he didn’t have something else to occupy his mind, but give him a well-defined goal and he was off to the races. Plus the Adderall seemed to be helping a lot too. Paul went over to Bee and talked to her in a low whisper. “And what about your phone?”
“It’s not getting any signal in this hotel. I’m going to switch to one of the other ones. A stupid one. I’ll forward everything to that.” Bee sat down at the desk next to Sandee and started messing with her phone and another one she took from the box on the table.
Chloe knocked and then let herself in a few minutes later. Paul assumed that, as usual, she’d moved through the halls and waited until no one else was around before she stepped inside their suite. She pulled off the wig as she shut the door behind her, sighing in relief. He stepped up next to her and ran his hand through her short, pink hair and then down to the back of her neck. He rubbed there for a while and the two of them watched the others at work. Sandee was monitoring e-mails now, while Sacco looked over his shoulder. Bee and c1sman were hard at work on their projects. They had, he hoped, a moment to catch their breaths and relax.
“Care to follow me into the bedroom?” Chloe asked.
“Absolutely,” he replied.
“Don’t go too crazy in their kiddies,” Sandee called from across the room as they started to close the door behind them. “One quickie and then back to work, OK?”
“Yes, mom,” Chloe said, and closed the door.
The two of them collapsed onto the bed together and stretched out on their backs.
“How’s Isaiah?” Paul asked.
“He seems good. Who can tell. Sounds like he ran into some kind of minor hiccup, but he’s handling it. Any word from Mr. Data?”
“We’re all good to go there too. He’s sorted through everything on the accounts front and pulled it all together with the database Sacco sent him.”
“So we’re about ready to go?”
“As soon as c1sman sorts out that weird delay issue and assures me there’s no problem, then yeah, I’d say so. Isaiah should be able to start printing tonight and then do envelope stuffing and distribution over the next twenty-four hours.”
“And Monday morning the shit hits the fan,” Chloe said. She sounded tired but also very pleased with herself, with all of them. “This is really big.”
“They won’t know what hit ‘em,” Paul said. They left unspoken all the worries about hitting a target this big, with this many connections. No, the bastard would have no idea what hit him, but after he’d been hit, he’d do everything he could to find out. And it was the kind of thing that, if they didn’t play it just right, would attract a lot of law enforcement attention, something they’d been good about avoiding up until now. They’d thought all about that of course, planned and fall back planned, and emergency contingency planned for months. But there was always… always something that if you thought about it too much, you’d drive yourself nuts. He moved on to other topics. “How’s Sacco holding up?”
“He’s good. Way into it all, like you’d expect. Wants to be doing everything, everywhere, all at once, also like you’d expect. But he’s good. Has his shit together. It’ll be interesting to see his anarchists in action.”
“Did you end up meeting any of them?”
“I changed my mind at the last minute. I listened in on Sacco’s phone call with them last night and I can just tell that some of those guys are gonna get arrested, no doubt about it. They’re itching for it. I decided it was best that they never had any idea at all that Sacco had a woman friend who knew something about what they were doing.”
“Good,” said Paul. They’d fought about that one, and Chloe had decided to meet them in heavy disguise. She had good reasons—review the troops, make sure they knew the rules of engagement, sniff out any weak links or possible undercovers in their midst. But Paul always liked to err on the side of caution with people from outside the Crew, and these black bloc cats were way, way outside.
“Yeah, yeah, you were right, I was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong about c1sman was I? Did he forget his phone somewhere or just ignore it?”
“Claims he couldn’t feel the vibration in his bag.”
“Which is no doubt why he put it in his bag in the first place. He’s freaking out a little.”
“Just a little. Bee keeps him focused. The work keeps him even more focused.”
“Bee needs to keep her focus on him then, because there are some cutie little hacker snots down there with their eyes on her.”
“Oh yeah? Good for her.” Bee had come out of her shell quite a bit since they’d dived into this uber-complex caper of theirs. Part of that was time and distance from past events, part of it was her newfound role as third in command and mentor/leader to c1sman, Sacco, and Mr. Data. Some cute boys lusting after her would only boost her confidence even more.
“It’s good for her, maybe, but it’s bad for c1sman. He’s probably the jealous type.”
“You’ll…”
“I’ll have a talk with her. Although a little competition is probably just what c1sman needs. I don’t want him taking Bee for granted.”
“As far as I know, they haven’t even kissed, I doubt he’s taking anything for granted.”
“Well then, I don’t want him thinking he’s got ‘dibs’ or some bullshit like that. Like I said, it’ll keep him on his toes, and give him something to focus on, as long as he doesn’t get discouraged or give up on her.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” said Paul, closing his eyes. He wondered if they could squeeze in a quickie. Then he wondered if he could squeeze in a fifteen minute nap. Then c1sman knocked on the door and he and Bee and Sandee all came piling in. The delay was fixed, Bee’s phone was working, Mr. Data was ready with the package. Time to get back to work.
While downstairs the Friday night dinner outings and hacker competitions had begun, in their suite it was all work. Counter to the standard caricatures of government wastefulness and sloth, Danny, the congressman, and the target all worked late into Friday night. Most of it had to do with pretty arcane matters of legislation and/or fund raising. The target didn’t attempt any more contact with the congressman or his staff that night, so Paul was left in the role of passive voyeur, letting all the mail and text messages go through as written. The congressman stopped sending mail and making calls around 9:00 PM and the lobbyist knocked off work around 8:00. Judging from the data from the GPS in his blackberry, Danny the aide didn’t leave the Capital Hill office until 11:18. It was only when he was sure he was halfway through his walk home that Paul sent a wholly fabricated e-mail to Danny.
From: Ken.Clover@cloverandassociates.com
To: Daniel@wolvertonforamerica.org
Subject: Heads Up
Danny,
Just wanted to let you know, I got a tip from a media friend who says there’s something brewing out there about our man. Someone’s digging into a story about the Congressman’s record on national security issues. Border security stuff. I don’t know what exactly, but thought you might want a heads up. I’m with the wife this weekend and won’t be answering phones, but text or e-mail me if you have any questions or need a hand and I’ll get back to you as soon as spousal harassment permits.
K
Paul watched on his remote mirror of Danny’s phone as he opened the e-mail, and presumably read it. Ten minutes later, by which time Paul could see on the GPS that Danny was back at his apartment, he started sending out e-mails and even making phone calls of his own. Paul let them all go through as written, since they served his purposes just fine. Danny was putting out feelers to his own media contacts, looking to see if anyone out there had heard any rumors about this supposed investigation into Congressman Wolverton’s record on border security, which he assured them was spotless and above reproach. Just by asking the question, Danny was laying the groundwork for what they planned to unleash the following day. When reporters heard rumors of a story, the assumption was that there must be something there. Even if the story turned out to be bogus, the rumor still meant that someone out there at least thought they had a story worth investigating. And when Paul and Chloe and the rest of the Crew provided that story to them, they’d already be primed to jump all over it.
Danny stopped sending and answering e-mails at 1:30 AM, and there’d been nothing from the congressman or the target in hours. Paul checked in with Chloe and confirmed that the package had gone out to Isaiah as planned and that he’d started printing down in Florida, also as planned. Bee and c1sman were out in the hotel somewhere, hopefully having fun, and hopefully with their phones on. Sandee had passed out on his bed on the other side of the suite, and Sacco was snoring away in his chair. He and Chloe set up a watch schedule. She agreed to take the first shift, watching the e-mails to make sure nothing happened during the night with any of the phones or e-mail accounts they were tapped into. Paul would take over at 5 AM and let her get some sleep. He kissed her goodnight, leaving her with a Red Bull and the laptops and Sacco’s snoring.
Paul took the early morning shift, fished out a Red Bull from the water-filled cooler that used to have ice in it, and started pulling up the e-mails he’d pre-written to go out to internet media figures and bloggers that he hoped would put some pressure on the congressman starting today, building up to a crescendo come Monday morning. The gist of all the e-mails pointed to a series of posts and articles spread around the Web that Paul and Mr. Data had dug up or fabricated/enhanced in the last month. They were based on a solid core of truth, namely that Congressman Wolverton had been a strong opponent of changes to labor policies in the U.S. controlled Mariana Islands. He hadn’t been on the forefront of the issue, nor had he taken any paid-for-by-lobbyist junkets to play golf or otherwise enjoy the islands’ offerings. But he’d voted straight down the line over the years against any kind of tightening of restrictions or even investigation into labor conditions on the islands, and had gone on record a couple times to reporters opposing any such changes.
The fabrications came in the form of a couple of pieces of gossip that the Crew had seeded out on blogs and various sites, including a rather risky hack into one of the newspaper websites from Wolverton’s home town in Missouri. C1sman hadn’t had much difficulty making the switch in the paper’s online archives, but if anyone searched either the physical archives or the Way Back Machine for the original web pages, they’d find the change. The charade only had to last through a couple of days anyway, and there would be enough else going on that Paul doubted anyone would have interest in checking right away. Even the Congressman wouldn’t necessarily have cause to doubt he’d said the fabricated quote, since, as Paul had suspected based on the man’s record, it was totally in line with his actual beliefs as expressed in the private e-mails Paul had been reading through in the past sixteen hours.
Paul started by posting links to some of the articles in comment threads on Daily Kos and the Huffington Post and some other sites, using screen names that he’d established and cultivated for months, some of them even dating back to his first big scam in San Jose. Then he set up a series of time delayed posts to launch on the handful of blogs he’d been running as well, with alerts in his e-mail to remind him to post links to those blog entries back in those comment threads. Then he started refining the e-mails he’d send out to the more mainstream press and big time bloggers and news sites. He made quite a few changes, mostly incorporating a few choice facts he’d gleaned from the Congressman’s e-mails about his general opposition to immigration reform that focused on local enforcement instead of showy, make-work projects like the border fence. There wasn’t a lot there, but it was enough for Paul to build a really smoky, if not very hot rhetorical fire.
His kindling in place, Paul moved back to the big issue: the legislative changes. He and Sacco had worked hard researching and coming up with the perfect and legal wording for the budget earmark, and then Paul had spent a good chunk of the early morning hours going over the other e-mails that Mr. Data’s search program had pulled from the target’s servers about exactly how he worded such requests. When he’d composed his first draft of the bogus earmark request he’d used circumspect language full of euphemisms, and so he was surprised to see that the target tended to be very straightforward with his requests, especially when dealing with someone like Rep. Wolverton with whom he had a long history. The quid pro quo that would get everyone in trouble was never quite spelled out, but the camouflage was the bare minimum.
The target’s bread and butter was a very specific kind of lobbying. It was Isaiah who’d first turned them on to Ken Clover, lobbyist. He’d worked in the Department of the Interior during the first president Bush’s term in office and before that had been on staff for a couple of Republican Congressmen. During the Clinton years he’d cashed paychecks from several different conservative think tanks before setting up on K Street. He had no particular issues and no huge industry clients that he specialized in. Indeed, unlike many lobbyists, he did not stay on retainer for specific clients. Instead he was a kind of lobbying consultant, brought in when others couldn’t get the job done or needed a little extra something. He was, in short, a deal maker, and for the past seven years he’d become known (within a very small circle of trusted clients) as a procurement trader.
Budget procurements, or earmarks as they were more commonly referred to in the media, were the best way going for a representative or senator to bring some money home to their district or state. The more money that came in, the more likely they were to get re-elected, or at least so went the conventional wisdom. But inserting earmarks often left fingerprints and could be used by political opponents or media critics to paint a very unflattering picture, so the fewer of these earmarks that could be specifically tied to electioneering greed and/or lobbyist paybacks, the better. If a congressman like Wolverton put in an earmark for something from which he would not benefit personally and that brought no particular benefit to his home district, then the assumption had to be that he was doing it because he honestly believed it was good policy.
Ken Clover and his firm offered what Paul considered a money laundering service to the members of Congress who paid his rather stiff fees. Chloe had approached Rep. Wolverton’s aide with a classic deal. She, as a supposed lobbyist for the entertainment industry, wanted an earmark to provide funds for enforcement of new anti-piracy measures. Wolverton took in a fair amount of money from entertainment lobbyists because of his committee assignments, but he didn’t want to be seen as being so obviously in their pocket. At the same time, there were other members of Congress who took no money from those lobbyists, but owed favors to other industries, like say Florida agricultural interests. Both sides worked through Clover, who arranged for the two representatives to swap earmark responsibilities. Clover would have the Florida Congressman insert the procurement for the anti-piracy measure and in return Rep. Wolverton would insert the earmark for whatever farm-bill related procurement Clover told him to. Meanwhile, Clover would collect his money by charging a fee from the lobbyists on each side of the deal without ever having any direct monetary, and only minimum actual contact, with the two representatives.
That was how it was supposed to work, and how it did work week in and week out for Clover and Associates. Except that Chloe wasn’t really a lobbyist and there wasn’t any Congressman working to actually make a trade with Wolverton. From Wolverton’s point of view, managed by Danny, he was making a trade on behalf of his MPAA and RIAA friends. In return he’d insert some earmark for Rep. Olivera in Florida, who would do his dirty work for him within a couple of weeks. Except Rep. Olivera didn’t know a thing about it, nor in fact did anyone at Clover and Associates. Because plausible deniability was vital for the trading scheme to work, Wolverton would never talk directly to Olivera about the trade, certainly not before it was actually done. And since the two Congressmen didn’t serve on any committees together or have many other points of contact, the odds of Wolverton saying something to Olivera that might tip the con were very slim.
So they’d hooked in Wolverton and his staff with Chloe and the forged e-mails from Clover’s account. The agriculture bill was in conference this weekend, scheduled for a vote on Monday. Now was the time to insert earmarks, during the last minute wheeling and dealing as the Senate and House worked out their differences on the bill. Paul looked over his language once again, still nervous that he’d made some very obvious mistake that would set off alarm bells in the Congressman’s mind when he saw it. Paranoid, Paul had re-written the entire thing from scratch, choosing to use a similar e-mail from Clover’s archives as a template and then inserting his own legalese where needed. It seemed appropriately obscure and legislative to him, but who knew. Only one way to find out: send it.
But he couldn’t send it. Not yet. He had to wait for the right moment—once the staffers from the House and Senate had gotten together and started horse-trading, so Danny would only have a window of a few hours to pass the new earmark along for inclusion in the bill. That wouldn’t be until this afternoon at the earliest. In the meantime, all he could do was wait, watch, and intercept any e-mails or text messages or phone calls that could screw them up.
The phone calls were the biggest worry, since there was no way to fake those. They had one safeguard in place though: any call from Danny or the congressman or the congressman’s office to any of Clover’s phones would be automatically blocked and forwarded to voice mail, which they could then erase. The same was true in reverse. If the target tried to call Danny or Wolverton, his call would also go straight to voice mail. If they used other lines though, or somehow ran into each other on the streets, things could go very wrong. The key, then, was to keep them busy worrying about other things.
Saturday morning crept by, the others waking and setting about their tasks. Chloe offered to spell him at the watch, but he was still going over his e-mails and tweaking, so she went and got everyone breakfast instead. Bee and c1sman hadn’t come in last night, and Paul assumed they’d stayed in c1sman’s room. She showed up mid-morning looking more tired and grumpy than morning after bliss, so he doubted anything too exciting had happened between the pair. C1sman was on duty in the NOC downstairs and then planning on attending some talks and generally presenting himself as a solid, upstanding member of the Shmoocon staff. Shortly after noon, Sacco left to go meet up with his anarchists and coordinate the coming assault. Sandee had gone for a jog. Danny was busy doing the congressman’s bidding and failing to get any confirmation about the alleged brewing investigation. The target remained largely quiet, apparently enjoying a nice weekend with his family. Time seemed to crawl by.
Then, all of a sudden, the moment was upon him. It happened in the space of a few minutes. Paul sent out the e-mail to Danny, who received it and jumped into action, forwarding it on to his fellow staffer who was in the conference committee meeting and telling him it was very important. The staffer texted back and said not to worry, it was a done deal. It was that easy. Months of planning, and thousands of man hours and dollars came down to that moment and Paul had managed to insert a $50 million earmark into the federal budget. Boom! Just like that.
He should have felt something more, he thought. He should feel different somehow, more excited, more charged. He just blinked, and rubbed his eyes. There was still so much more to do. The bill hadn’t been signed yet, and the big score against the real target still hadn’t come off. But hey, he’d just spent fifty million taxpayer dollars. “We’re officially earmarked,” he called out to the room.
“Really?” Chloe said. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“That’s fucking awesome!” she sounded as excited as he was supposed to feel.
“It really is.”
“So, time for Sacco to start some serious shit.” She pulled her crypto-phone from her pocket and dialed. “Hey screwball, let’s get this party started, yeah?” She hung up without waiting long enough for him to answer.
“I’m going to go get Sandee,” Paul said. “Make sure the camera batteries are charged. I don’t want to miss any moment of chaos.”