NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

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Up in Peacham, Vermont, Jock Gill opened his e-mail after Christmas weekend and found a very strange missive inside.

The text said simply, Please look at this.

The attachment looked pretty large, about 4 megs of zip files. It didn’t have an .exe extension, so it didn’t look particularly nasty. But what was really strange was who sent it.

Jock Gill.

Well, Gill knew he hadn’t sent himself any 4 megabyte attachments. Usually that was a clue to toss the mail without opening it. But this time, for no good reason he thought later, he decided to take a chance on it. He decided to look inside. So he opened Winzip, identified the file by name from his cache, and looked at the file list.

This was even stranger. There were dozens of files here, some text, some PDF. The file names told him nothing about what was going on. He decided to view the one marked as introduction.txt.

Dear Jock (he read):

These are files I captured while exploring computers at the Ohio Sec. of State, Republican NC and other state commitees referenced by above. They add up to something, but I can’t add them up. I won’t. You do it. When you do you will know what to do.

And then it was signed (rather melodramatically), Democracy Doom.

Well, it was addressed correctly all right. It had his first name right, and his e-mail address, an obscure box at Mac.Com. Someone had gone to real trouble in order to send him this Boxing Day present. A bit late (it was the 27th by now), but maybe it can’t hurt.

With some trepidation, he opened another file, this one a fairly modest-sized one marked Hamover.pdf. It was an Adobe Acrobat file. What he saw, after a few minutes, was a handwritten scrawl, like a letter, and Jock squinted hard to try and make it out. He could make the letters as big as he wanted, but that didn’t make them any more legible.

“Ken,” he read out loud. “Enclosed with this are my files from the afternoon operation. If anyone learns what we have done here, heaven help us. But needs must fit ends. God save this great country, and its dear leader. Signed, Mike.”

Gill went back to Winzip, looking other other, similar files. He found them, Excel files this time, marked Ham001.xcl and following, up to 12. He opened them and found columns of numbers, with cryptic headers that he (as a longtime political consultant) understood as BC and KE, twice each, and in the fifth column another number, varying in size from 0 (twice) to as high as 520 in one case, 473 in another.

He sent personal notes to trusted people on his own little list, called Greater Democracy, and called a few whose phone numbers he had, people he could trust. His hands were shaking now as he went through some other collections of files, some starting AL, some GE, some FL and others NO, SO, OK, KA, UT. These were abbreviations of states, and these looked like voting tallies. The styles differed, the file types differed, but…Gill’s heart started racing.

After sending out copies of the files, he decided to wait. “Take a look at these,” he had written his friends in Greater Democracy, “and see what you think they add up to.” Gill looked again at the header of the original message:

Status: U
Return-Path:
4-jockgill=jg@ma45c.com>
Received: from chello080108015082.6.11.vie.surfer.at (chello080108015082.6.11.vie.surfer.at [80.108.15.82]) )) with SMTP id 435CB4F4AA58B35F@l-daemon> for jg@ma45c.com> Mon, 27 Dec 2004 3:40:50 -0500 (GMT)
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Subject: Please Look at This
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It had gotten past his spam filters, yet the header looked suspicious, and he couldn’t figure out where it might have actually come from. That, he was believing, was intentional.

He was startled from his reverie by the jangle of the telephone. He looked up at his clock. It was 2 PM already. He hadn’t even touched his coffee! He shook himself, picked up the phone.

“Jock, here.”

“Jock, we’ve got to do something about this.” It was his friend Michael Cudahy, once a Reagan Administration official, now a lapsed Republican working with Greater Democracy as an independent.

“What do you suggest?”

“A lawyer. We need a lawyer. A good lawyer. Who’s the best you know of?”

Gill chuckled dryly to himself. “There’s one I know who might be very interested, and he seems to be unemployed at the moment. Down south. Raleigh. Is there a way we can get this in front of him?”

There was a long silence. “I’ll make sure of it. I know some people who know people. You’ll hear back. Get yourself some rest, you sound horrible.”

Gill took his friend’s advice. He made some lunch, a sandwich, a mug of warm tea. He talked to his family briefly, non-commitally, fearing they could hear his heart hammering in his chest. Heavily, he went upstairs and lay in his bed, trying to slow his breathing, fighting to control his emotions.

Gill imagined himself on a cold day in Washington, rushing with a paper toward a stage, where George Bush stood like a bridegroom before a heavily-bearded, swarthy man. He saw himself wearing…a wedding dress? And, rushing through the crowd, which parted before him (because of his costume?) screaming, waving the paper, “Stop the wedding! Stop! Stop!” Then, “hear the bell! The bell!”

The room was cold, but he was suddenly sweating. He shook himself. It was dark outside. He looked beside his bed. It was the phone, ringing. He picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Jock? John Edwards. We need to talk.”