The Big Lie Read online

  “Florida, Florida, Florida,” television analysts proclaimed as the polls closed.

  It was the refrain made famous by NBC’s Tim Russert and his low-tech whiteboard in the 2000 election, when “hanging chads” and Florida’s twenty-nine Electoral College votes put Bush 43 in the White House. The squeaker of 2000 was only the first of three presidential elections of the new century in which the margin of victory in Florida was 1.2 percent or less. With a fourth in the making—the second to involve MacLeod—Florida again was the nation’s focus, with analysts on every network borrowing the late Washington bureau chief’s three-word mantra.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” said Harry.

  The doorbell rang, and Jack made himself useful by answering it. A team of caterers wheeled in enough hors d’oeuvres and refreshments for a weeklong watching party. Last in the line of excess was a cake in the shape of Senator Stahl from the shoulders up, so lifelike that it was downright creepy. Fondant struck Jack as the perfect political confection: it looked amazing, but in the end, not nearly as good as promised.

  The senator’s father walked over to check out the cake. “My granddaughter would absolutely love this,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “Such a shame she can’t be here tonight with her father.”

  The senator’s divorce was filed but not final. Last Jack had heard, Mrs. Stahl and her daughter were waiting out the campaign from an apartment in Singapore, where homosexuality was a criminal offense punishable by caning, and where freedom of the press lagged behind countries like Egypt and Afghanistan—which made it the perfect place to insulate a nine-year-old girl from constant media speculation about her father and his alleged boyfriend, her father and a male prostitute, her father and a gay porn star, her father and a bacchanalian orgy of young boys and centaurs.

  Harry walked over to greet his old friend. Behind them, in the living room, were four flat-screen televisions brought in for simultaneous viewing of different network coverage. Senator Stahl and his closest advisors had choice seats on the overstuffed couch. Senior was about to reintroduce Jack, but the group was suddenly gripped in awkward silence, as the attack ad of the campaign aired one more time before the polls closed on the East Coast. It began with Senator Stahl standing before a bouquet of microphones at the historic press conference he’d called just three days after the convention, his wife nowhere to be seen as he delivered his prepared words.

  “The truth is that I did break my wedding vow to a woman I love very much. I had an extramarital relationship that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”

  The image froze, locking onto a strategically selected frame in which the senator seemed to be winking at the camera. Voice-over followed:

  “Why won’t Senator Stahl tell us who it is?”

  The senator slowly faded into the background, as if hiding from the voters. A man and a very concerned-looking woman replaced the senator on the screen. They were seated on a bench at a playground, a group of preschoolers behind them climbing on monkey bars.

  “If you ask me, there’s more to it than cheatin’ on his wife,” the man said into the camera. “That’s why Stahl won’t tell.”

  “Honestly, I don’t even want to know who it is,” the woman added. “I’ve heard enough.”

  The voice-over returned: “Haven’t we all heard enough?”

  The ad ended with the American flag flying over the White House and the voice of the president: “I’m Malcolm MacLeod, and I one hundred percent approve this message.”

  To say that Stahl survived the ad was to say that Michael Dukakis neutralized convicted killer Willie Horton and the revolving prison door, the 1988 mother of all fear-mongering attack ads. The campaign’s initial response—“We see no reason why gender matters”—only confirmed that Democrats had no clue what mattered outside a Democratic primary. Finally, after an eleven-point swing in the polls, the Democratic narrative shifted to “the senator’s affair was with a woman, but we still believe gender shouldn’t matter.” By then it was not only too late, it was laughable. Late-night comedians turned it into a twenty-first-century version of the old Seinfeld joke, “Not that there’s anything wrong with the senator having an affair with a man.” The ad didn’t explicitly accuse the senator of having a same-sex extramarital affair, but the gay dog whistle called home millions of lukewarm MacLeod supporters who had voted for him once and vowed never to do it again.

  “I need a drink,” said the candidate, and he started to the kitchen.

  Stahl and everyone else had seen the ad countless times, but it never seemed to lose its effect.

  “Evan should have paraded out a former Playboy model and shut down this gay talk from the get-go,” said Senior.

  Jack understood the cynicism. “For what it’s worth, my wife liked his explanation in the final debate—that he got involved with a woman who regrets it and wants to save her marriage.”

  “What’s to like about it?” asked Senior.

  “Naming her would make it impossible for her to reconcile with her husband. It’s not an honorable situation, but in a way the senator did an honorable thing by respecting another family’s privacy.”

  Senior seemed to appreciate Jack’s attempt at a silver lining. Then he looked at Harry. “You think we’ll ever find out who Evan slept with?”

  Harry shrugged—not that he didn’t know, but because it was inevitable. “Certain people would pay a lot of money for that information. Everyone has his price.”

  It was grammatically correct, but in this context Harry’s use of the male pronoun left an awkward silence hanging over them.

  “Her price,” said Senior. “Everyone has her price.”

  Chapter 3

  President MacLeod and his wife were home, in their Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment, in time to hear the first media projection of the night. Paulette Barrow, Florida’s attorney general, phoned the president with the news. Barrow was a rising star in the party and one of the president’s favorite people—“and not just because she’s a gorgeous blonde,” the president had said more than once on the campaign trail. Barrow had delivered the “why women love MacLeod” speech at the Republican National Convention.

  “Great news, Mr. President. MSNBC projects that Michael Moore will move to Canada if you’re reelected.”

  “Good riddance. Communist.”

  “Best of luck, sir.”

  “We don’t need luck. We need Florida.”

  Of his final twenty-four hours of campaigning, MacLeod had spent eighteen in the Sunshine State. Florida’s I-4 corridor—the nineteen-county, 132.3-mile swath from Gulf-side St. Petersburg to ocean-side Daytona—was arguably the most valuable political cache of swing voters in America. Political consultants called it “America’s corridor of power,” paved with presidents made and contenders broken. It was the six million registered voters in the middle third of the peninsula that put Florida up for grabs: Republicans racked up votes in the conservative north and southwest, Democrats cleaned up in the southeast population centers, and the two sides battled it out in the high-growth “purple” areas along Interstate 4. Prior to the conventions, MacLeod’s campaign strategists had all but conceded Florida to Stahl. Then everything changed.

  “How we looking in Florida?” the president shouted across the room.

  His campaign manager checked the latest numbers on his tablet. “It’s literally fifty-fifty, Mr. President. But that’s with less than one percent of precincts reporting.”

  “One percent? What the hell good is that? They could have just polled Senator Stahl’s parents. No way Evan Senior voted for anyone but the straight candidate. There’s your fifty-fifty.”

  The eighty-inch flat-screen television suddenly turned bright red. A real projection was about to be made, and it was the right color.

  “Where’s the remote?” MacLeod shouted.

  There was only one remote, and only one television, because MacLeod watched only one network. He found it wedged between the
couch cushions and raised the volume to hear the important announcement.

  “. . . is projecting that President MacLeod will win the key state of Ohio, adding another eighteen Electoral College votes in his march to the magic total of two hundred seventy he needs to win reelection.”

  The living room erupted with joy, MacLeod shot two fists into the air, and high-fives were slapped all around. Ohio was just one of three “toss-up states”—Pennsylvania and Florida the other two—that strategists said the president needed to win. But MacLeod was feeling momentum.

  “Where’s the First Lady?” he asked, popping a handful of Tic Tacs into his mouth. “I deserve a kiss!”

  “She’s getting her hair blown out, sir.”

  “Good. We all need to look our best. Oscar, bring me my victory speech!”

  Oscar Teague was the president’s chief strategist and senior counselor who, in life before the White House, founded an online news platform that brought the alt-right out of the shadows. Even Teague conceded that no one ever knew what the president might say at any given moment, but Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that if anyone could hold him to a script, if only for a little while, it was Teague. He took a seat on the couch and handed the president the latest draft, which was freshly bleeding with red ink.

  MacLeod skimmed the first page and then laid it aside, scowling. “Where’s that line I liked so much? You left it out.”

  “What line, sir?”

  “The one you texted me right after midnight. ‘It’s morning again in America.’”

  “Sir, I wasn’t suggesting we use it. That was President Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan. ‘Prouder, stronger, better. It’s morning again in America.’”

  “Oh. I knew that.”

  Political slogans were not MacLeod’s strong suit. MacLeod was a businessman, not a politician. He’d made his first millions in multilevel-marketing companies, but his real fortune had come later in life, when at the age of forty-nine he was literally the old man in the digital world, pioneering the multibillion-dollar industry of peer-to-peer (P2P) file trading on the so-called dark side of the Internet. It was “the dark net” that had come back to haunt him, unleashing a chain of events that led to the appointment of a special counsel and threats of impeachment by the House of Representatives.

  “Can I have a minute in private with you, Mr. President?”

  Andrew Blake was right behind him, the president’s personal attorney—personal criminal defense attorney. The president excused himself from his guests, and the two men retreated to the library. MacLeod closed the double doors of dark mahogany, shutting out the buzz of excitement from the watching party.

  “I’ve always been straight with you, Mr. President. And I’m being very straight with you now.”

  “Straight” was Blake’s favorite word. Straight talk. Keep to the straight and narrow. At times, MacLeod felt like telling him to go straight to hell. But Blake was irreplaceable. Against strong Democratic opposition, he’d convinced the Justice Department to stick to its long-standing position that the U.S. Constitution prohibited the indictment of a sitting president.

  “Tell me,” said MacLeod.

  “There are millions of Democrats who still think you dodged a bullet when the House decided not to bring impeachment proceedings. They had the votes.”

  “But they didn’t have the votes to convict in the Senate. That’s politics.”

  “Correct. But that’s not the end of the story. I spoke with the U.S. attorney in New York. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you lose this election, you will be indicted on the day after Stahl is inaugurated as president.”

  “All this P2P file-sharing nonsense was over twenty years ago. At some point, the statute of limitations has to run on those crimes.”

  “Those crimes” were identity theft. MacLeod had been an early investor in file-sharing software and platforms that allowed complete strangers to connect online to search for shared files on the computers of their “peers” on the same network. Most people shared music or video, prompting the lawsuits over illegal trading of copyright-protected material that shut down Napster and others in the early 2000s. Of greater interest to law enforcement was the fact that, on most of the P2P networks, roughly two-thirds of downloadable movies and other files contained malware—viruses, worms, Trojan horses—that turned personal information on a home computer into the cyberspace equivalent of an unlocked and unattended vehicle with the keys in the ignition and the motor running. P2P became a virtual smorgasbord for identity thieves. MacLeod cashed out of the P2P industry at the right time, before Silicon Valley discovered that stealing personal information was completely unnecessary, that people would happily shovel everything about themselves into the social-media maw, as long as their friends would “LIKE” it.

  “The indictment won’t be based on the violation of any cyber-security laws,” said Blake. “The offense is lying to an FBI agent in violation of Title Eighteen of the United States Code.”

  “What’s the lie?”

  “There are actually thirty-one of them, sir.”

  MacLeod grumbled. “I should never have agreed to sit down and talk to those bastards.”

  His lawyer’s expression said it all: I told you so.

  “What’s done is done,” said MacLeod. “What’s our strategy?”

  “Win the election.”

  “I mean if I lose. What’s Plan B?”

  Blake paused, which was what he always did before delivering news the president didn’t want to hear. “You should resign, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Vice President Kincaid will become president for the final two and a half months of your current term. There’s no guarantee, but it would be within his prerogative to issue a full pardon before President-Elect Stahl takes office. In the best interest of the country, of course.”

  MacLeod rose from his chair and began to pace, considering his lawyer’s advice. Then he stopped and looked at Blake. “I much prefer Plan A.”

  MacLeod hurried from the library, walking with purpose down the hallway to the living room. Election coverage continued on the television screen, but MacLeod went straight to the whiteboard in the corner, where his advisors had been doing the election math all night long in two columns, blue for Democrat and red for Republican. So many numbers had been crossed out and recalculated that it looked more like a physics equation than an election tally.

  “Am I going to win?” he asked his chief strategist.

  Teague struggled, there being no doubt what the president wanted to hear. “Right now, the only thing we know for certain is that we’re getting clobbered in the popular vote. We’ll lose by at least four million. Probably closer to five.”

  “We didn’t run our campaign to win the popular vote. Not in the last election, and not in this one, either. Where are we in the Electoral College?”

  “None of the networks have called Pennsylvania yet, but we’re hearing good things on the ground. We’re going to win there.”

  “And if we do?” asked MacLeod.

  Teague grabbed two erasable markers and put two numbers on the board. “Two sixty-five,” he said, writing in blue for Stahl. “Two forty-four,” he said, switching to red.

  MacLeod walked to the window, buried his hands in his pockets, and gazed out over the city lights. It was simple math: 509 of the 538 Electoral College votes were sewn up. The winner needed a majority of 270.

  “So, it comes down to Florida,” he said—not a question, but a mere restatement of what he’d heard at least a thousand times in the final stages of the campaign.

  “Yes, sir. Twenty-nine from Florida puts you over the top with two seventy-three. Or it puts Stahl over the top—way over the top—with two ninety-four.”

  “How close is it?”

  “As of this minute, you’re up by about eight thousand votes. With total voter turnout pushing ten million, that’s a dead heat. Shit, Roseanne Barr got over eight thousand votes when Romney lost Fl
orida to Obama by less than a point.”

  “I voted for Roseanne,” said MacLeod. “What’s wrong with Roseanne?”

  “That wasn’t my point,” said Teague. He grabbed a black marker and circled a different number on the board. “Five million. That’s still the number that concerns me. If you win Florida by just a few thousand votes, and you lose the nationwide popular vote by five million, it’ll be Gore versus Bush all over again. We need a strategy.”

  “Get me Paulette Barrow on the line. I need her to shut down the cries for a recount before they get started.”

  “In Florida I don’t believe the attorney general has any say over recounts,” said Teague. “It’s up to the secretary of state.”

  MacLeod was losing patience. “Oscar, the Florida secretary of state is a Democrat, am I right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you name a more loyal Republican in the state of Florida than Paulette Barrow?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And not to put too fine a point on it, but how many blow jobs do you think I’ve gotten from the Florida’s Democrat secretary of state?”

  He’d never gotten one from the Republican attorney general, either, but the president rather enjoyed the way his backhanded innuendo made his staff squirm.

  Teague nervously reached for his phone and dialed. “I’ll get General Barrow on the line, sir.”

  Chapter 4

  “I know this is not what you want to hear,” said Harry. “But I believe you should concede.”