The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prelude Tap, Tap, Tap

  1 Hi Ho Adversego!

  2 Fancy Meeting you Here

  3 Shelter from the Storm

  4 Frank’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

  5 Got a Match?

  6 Report of the Marvinites

  7 Me Client, You Server

  8 That’s Debatable

  9 Come into My Parlor, Please Do

  10 The Doctor will Diagnose you Now

  11 Time Out!

  12 Vive la Revolución!

  13 Knock Knock (Who’s There?)

  14 Just a Friendly Game of Cards

  15 Introducing the Next President of the United States!

  16 Midnight in the Garden of Fast Food and Evil

  17 You Want Lies with That?

  18 Breakfast at Epiphany’s

  19 Treaty Time

  20 Hello – Is This the Person to Whom I am Speaking?

  21 Every Picture Tells a Story (Don’t it?)

  22 In Which Frank Sees a Ghost(writer)

  23 Now You See Me, Now You…

  24 Why? Just be Caucus

  25 Call it: Your Book or Mine?

  26 Vote Free or Die

  27 The Return of the Native

  28 Pulp Friction

  29 One of Those Days When Morning Can’t Come Late Enough

  30 What a Difference a Date Makes

  31 The Salon of Mme. Falconet

  32 Ma Chère Professeur

  33 Another French Connection

  34 There’s No Fool like a Middle-Aged Fool

  35 As a Matter of Fact, There IS an App for That

  46 Let Me Give You My Card

  37 So Long, and Thanks for All the Cash

  38 Just a Friendly Game of Chess

  39 Can I Borrow your Phone to Make a Call?

  40 You Really Look Like You Could Use a Vacation

  41 Do I Know You?

  42 Now Go to Your Room!

  43 Surprise!

  44 Anchors Aweigh

  45 Maine: It’s the Way Life Should Be

  46 The Countdown

  47 Rock, Paper, Scissors

  48 Frank Hits the Beach

  49 Now is the Time for All Good Gamers to Come to the Aid of Their Country

  50 Many Happy Returns

  51 Au Revoir

  Acknowledgements

  THE ALEXANDRIA PROJECT

  1 Meet Frank

  The Lafayette Campaign

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Updegrove. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: 2016

  Starboard Rock Press

  Marblehead, MA

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  [email protected]

  http://andrew-updegrove.com/

  ISBN: 978-0-9964919-2-1

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  To my mother,

  who was always

  there for us

  Prelude

  Tap, Tap, Tap

  Endless lines of code scrolling through the text editor…

  Here?

  No. Farther down

  Here? Check the cheat sheet to be sure

  Yes

  Type the new section of code in now

  …Looks good

  Now send it to the code compiler

  Wait for the next signal to come back

  Is that the right address?

  Good again… and done

  Hard to believe such a small piece of code is about to change the world

  * * *

  1

  Hi Ho Adversego!

  A broad, Nevada valley stretched before Frank Adversego – stretched as far as he could see. Something about the vista pricked at his memory. Something about the way the mountains converged in the hazy perspective of the far distance.

  Ah – that was it. This was the stretch of road he’d traveled in ghostly moonlight a year ago, facing the uncertainties of the future and wrestling with the demons of his past. Against all odds, the events that followed had laid most of them to rest.

  This time his attitude towards the unknowns that lay before him was positive, expectant even. Ahead lay Silverlode, Nevada, with a population of 600 – as isolated an oasis of wandered-off souls as you could find in the lower forty-eight states. It would be a good place to try and write a book. Perhaps it would even be a best-seller. Given his recent brush with fame, that wasn’t impossible.

  The music on the radio gave way to the news. He turned up the volume.

  …brings the Republican field up to five candidates.

  That’s a lot this early in the game, isn’t it?

  Twelve years ago I would have said yes. But since then, campaign costs have skyrocketed – a candidate who waits too long to declare won’t be able to raise enough cash to make it through the first primaries.

  Sad but true. We’ve entered the age of the billion dollar campaign. And the costs keep rising.

  He turned the radio off. Heaven help us all, the election cycle was gearing up again, and just like last time, a bunch of improbable candidates had come yammering out of the woodwork. Anyone would think the doors of some political Bedlam had been thrown open, letting a mob of raving lunatics loose onto the primary trail. Incredibly, one after another had risen in the polls, too.

  He realized he was driving over 80 miles an hour again, and took his foot off the gas. It was hard not to daydream on endless, straight as arrow roads like this. Braking, he noticed someone standing beside the road up ahead with his thumb extended.

  Damn. City boy that he was, Frank was conditioned to regard all hitchhikers as presumptive murderers, hell bent on luring hapless good Samaritans to their doom. But the guy must have seen that he was slowing down, and it might be hours before another car ventured down this deserted stretch of road. Damn again. He really ought to do the right thing and stop. He kept his foot on the brake and the slim young man bent over to pick up his bag. The camper rolled to a stop just beyond him.

  Frank looked warily into his side view mirror. The hitchhiker had his back to Frank and was now picking up a bike with a front wheel that suggested a Mobius strip having a bad hair day: bent spokes bristled out at every angle.

  Well, he didn’t look too threatening, and it was clear why he was thumbing a ride. That was reassuring. But Frank was still annoyed at the prospect of straining to make small talk for the next few hours. He readily admitted to being a computer geek, and figured he must be at least fifteen years older than the hitchhiker. What the hell could they have in common?

  He got out of the camper to help the cyclist strap his bike next to his own on the rack on the back of the camper.

  “Here, let
me show you how that works.”

  The hitchhiker turned around. “Thank you for stopping. It is my lucky day. I have been standing here only one hour.”

  Frank stopped in his tracks: he was staring at a short-haired, slim – and very attractive – young woman. And with a French accent to boot.

  “Good. I mean, good I came along. Why don’t you go settle in? I’ll take care of your bike.”

  He took his time doing that while she climbed into the passenger seat, her bicycle pannier bags slung over one sun-tanned shoulder. Now what?

  Once more behind the wheel, he eased the camper into gear. Wondering what to say, he settled for the obvious.

  “Where you headed?”

  “To Gerlach?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It is north of Reno. And you?”

  “Silverlode.”

  “Ah! So perfect! I can fix much on my bike on my own, but I cannot straighten a wheel rim. And I have not enough extra spokes. But I can have a new wheel sent to me there, I think.”

  She gave him a bright smile, and then turned to look out the window.

  They drove on in silence, Frank’s hopes for a pleasant spell of daydreaming now dashed. Instead, he was painfully conscious of his young passenger as he drove on, eyes on the road but distracted by the image of her dark, long-lashed, glittering eyes. He also recalled short, black, wind-blown hair, warm, sun-tanned skin, and cheekbones that inspired him to wax metaphorical – cheekbones like… like the vaults of a gothic cathedral! He felt briefly pleased with that, and then foolish. He wondered how old she was.

  He kept his now-gloomy eyes on the road. Long divorced and solitary by nature, it had been ages since he had found himself in close proximity to such an exotic creature. He wondered what her story could be, traveling alone in this empty part of the country. Eventually, his curiosity got the better of his awkwardness.

  “What’s in Gerlach?”

  “The Burning Man festival. Perhaps you have heard of it?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  Which was true. But he hadn’t heard much. All he knew was that every year tens of thousands of latter-day hippies and countercultural types descended for some unimaginable reason on a sun-blasted salt flat in Nevada to build a temporary, psychedelic city dominated by an enormous, vaguely humanoid statue. A week later, they would torch the statue as the climax of the event, and the city would disappear as quickly as it had materialized out of the shimmering heat of the desert. Frank was even more uncomfortable around flamboyant people than he was around mainstream types. He was about as likely to attend a Burning Man festival as he was a debutante ball.

  Silence again. It bothered Frank that he had found this young woman on a deserted road. He had a daughter back east who was only a little younger, and he’d be furious to find her hitchhiking anywhere, let alone in the middle of an almost uninhabited desert. To the extent anyone lived here, Frank was disposed to assume the worst. How strange would you have to be to live in a place like this, anyhow?

  It was clearly none of his business, but finally he asked, “Don’t you think it’s dangerous for a young woman to be hitchhiking in such a deserted area?”

  “Oh no,” she said, still looking out the window.

  No? Clearly, this young French woman didn’t understand America and Americans. “Well, you’re wrong, let me assure you!”

  “I think not. But in any case, I do not worry,” she said, fumbling for something in the pannier bags at her feet.

  Surprised, Frank stumbled over how to explain something he thought was obvious to an attractive young woman he did not know who was not a native English speaker.

  “Well, what would you do if someone picked you up and tried to, tried to, well… force his attentions on you?”

  She laughed. “Shoot him!”

  Frank turned to her in surprise. Arms crossed, she had a playful smile on her face and a small gun in her hand. The gun was pointed at his head. She waggled its barrel back and forth and silently mouthed the word “Bang!”

  He jerked his head back to the road, eyes wide as saucers.

  For a minute there was silence again. Then she giggled. “Probably I would not really have to shoot him. But one must be prepared to, no?” She slipped the gun into a pocket and returned to looking out the window.

  Frank decided that he had exhausted his conversational skills as well as his need to know anything more. He wondered how much longer it would take to get to Silverlode.

  A half hour later, his passenger abruptly became talkative.

  “My name is Josette,” she said. “And what is yours?”

  “Frank,” he offered after a pause.

  “You are on vacation, yes?”

  “Not really. I’m writing a book.” Frank tried to sound nonchalant, the way he imagined a famous author might.

  “A book! But that is so interesting.” She looked around the inside of the camper. “This is a very impressive vehicle. If I may ask, what are all those controls?”

  This was a topic he could handle. “Electronics mostly, all satellite based and with service available anywhere: telephone, GPS, Internet, seven bands of radio, you name it.”

  “I see. With so many instruments, I suppose you must have a generator, too?”

  He shook his head, feeling a bit smug. “No. The top of the camper is covered with solar panels. I could run everything day and night, and never run the batteries all the way down. At least not in a place like this.”

  “Ah! Very good thinking.” She pulled an ultra-light laptop out of her pannier bags. “So I may perhaps use my computer to check my email, yes?”

  “Yes, with a password. Would you like it?”

  “Would you mind?”

  He paused; he wasn’t used to sharing a password with anyone. But his router was set to prevent anyone but him from archiving a password, and good luck to her if she could remember his.

  “Not at all. N!t2T3f$a5G ^m7T.”

  Once again they drove in silence, broken only by staccato bursts of typing and his passenger’s occasional, musical laughter. For his part, he brooded unhappily over the fact that he was an out of shape, socially inept, middle-aged man sitting next to an attractive young woman who was as unmindful of his presence as he was acutely aware of hers.

  With the sun going down, the road turned uphill, aiming for a pass in the ridge. After they passed through, a modest town appeared not half a mile ahead, snug in a fold of the mountain and illuminated by the brilliant rays of the setting sun.

  “That will be Silverlode,” he said.

  His passenger looked up. “Ah! That is very good. You will please let me off here?”

  Frank was surprised once again. But he obediently slowed the camper to a stop, scanning the roadside and wondering why his passenger wanted to disembark just there. They both got out.

  “Thank you for the ride,” she said as he unfastened her bike.

  “Don’t you want a lift into town? I think there’s a motel there.”

  “No. I have everything I need to camp.” She patted the heavy pannier bags slung over her slight shoulder. Then, half wheeling and half carrying the bike, she disappeared into the junipers that flanked the road.

  He felt hollow and at loose ends as he motored slowly up Silverlode’s main street, passing a gas station, a motel, a fire station, a few shops and cross streets, and finally a small supermarket. He pulled in and hunted for the shopping list he’d shoved into the glove box that morning.

  It was dark by the time he’d stowed away everything he would need for the next few weeks. It was time to find a place outside of town to park for the night. Ghostly, back-lit clouds scudded across the sky, intermittently obscuring and exposing the moon as gusts of wind rocked the camper. The temperature had dropped dramatic
ally with the setting of the sun; the readout on his dashboard told him it was 38 degrees.

  He wondered how Josette was faring, alone in the blustery darkness.

  * * *

  2

  Fancy Meeting you Here

  Frank was frustrated. He’d spent the last two days on his laptop and had nothing to show for it except make-work outlines and false starts. Lots of false starts. He ruefully admitted that he had not the slightest idea how to go about writing a book.

  He stared at his latest lame attempt at an opening:

  Never in the history of this great nation have we faced such a horde of vicious, invisible, insidious, and downright evil enemies. Each is more dangerous than the last, and the last cares as much for your welfare as Adolf Hitler. They must be stopped, and stopped now!

  He wished he had brought a printer along so he could crumple that up and toss it in the trash.

  After eight straight hours of failure near Silverlode, he’d driven off to the same mountain pass where he had spent weeks of difficult but exhilarating cybersleuthing work the year before. He parked just where he had then − even set up his folding chair in the same place, where he could once again ignore the fantastic scenery that spread before him as he focused on the challenge at hand.

  But no luck here, either. After another day’s clumsy effort he still hadn’t written anything worth saving. One sentence – couldn’t he write even the first sentence better than a seventh grader?

  He snapped his laptop shut and stomped from his chair to the camper. After exchanging his laptop for a beer, he stomped back.

  Now what? He’d quit his job in the information technology department of the Library of Congress and ordered a MountainTamer expedition vehicle − the same kind of rig he’d rented the year before, but this time customized to his own requirements. It had cost a small fortune. He’d had this idyllic notion that he could just head back west and pick up where he had left off, substituting writing a book for solving the mystery that had taken over his life the last time around. After that he’d live off the royalties for a while and figure out what to do next.