"Tell me about her."
"Remo—"
"You have a date, Smitty? You said we have more than an hour, so tell me about the election judge."
There was a pause, then Mark Howard began reading from his screen. "Eleanor George, age seventy- seven, lifelong resident of San Francisco and a prominent society figure. Family has had money for generations and she married more of it. Husband died in 1979, and she began putting her money into facilities to help unmarried mothers. Her centers provided housing, education and job training, that kind of thing. Very outspoken about getting out the vote, and she served as an election judge for twenty years."
Remo considered that. He felt Chiun looking at him. "She's a real troublemaker. Got what she deserved, that's for sure."
"She was accused of vote fraud," Howard added. "Says here one of the other judges turned her in."
"Her heinous crime was?" Remo asked, knowing he wasn't going to like the answer.
"She drove some of the women from her shelters to the polling place," Howard said. "If you're a judge, that's against the rules."
"I see." Remo did see.
"She never got the chance to enter a plea, but in several interviews she admitted doing it. She even said she'd done it in past elections."
"Which undermines the entire electoral process, and so on, and so on," Remo added. "Okay, so what about MAEBE? Who gets a big assist now that this election thrower is out of the picture?"
"Nobody," said Mark Howard.
"Yeah, somebody," Remo agreed.
"We've investigated that angle," Smith said. "Mrs. George was never one to espouse any candidate. She had an agenda, but it doesn't look like she made her views about the coming elections public."
"What about the MAEBE candidates in San Francisco?" Remo asked. "She wouldn't have voted for them, would she? So could this mean MAEBE will put in its own judges?"
"Remo, this is a dead end," Smith insisted. "Mrs. George was simply a convenient target for the local cell. She's just one more name they can add to their list when and if they decide to publicize their efforts to clean up the corruption. There's not much to be learned from her murder."
"She influenced elections," Remo said.
"Indirectly."
"But in a big way, in her section of the city, right?"
"Perhaps."
"Who's the alderman or whatever that's going to be less likely to win if Mrs. George isn't there to get her unmarried mothers to the polling place?"
After a moment Mark Howard said, "There's a Melanie Satz who has been a supporter of Ms. George's causes, and she's running for the state House of Representatives seat in that district," Howard said. "The incumbent state representative is Bruce Griffin, and he's ahead by a lot of points. The MAEBE candidate is Dr. Robin Eomer, a dental surgeon and Baptist minister."
"What kind of skeleton does Griffin have in the closet?" Remo asked.
"None, far as I can tell," Howard said.
"Look harder."
"Remo—"
"Humor me, Smitty."
"I'm seeing a DUI arrest from 1990, but it was thrown out—no conviction."
"Is he connected?"
"I don't know."
"Look!"
The silence was tense. The only sound coming over the phone was from Mark Howard's keyboard.
"What do you know," Howard said quietly. "There was a cover-up. Griffin killed somebody. The judge was later convicted of taking bribes for innocent pleas, but nobody ever connected him to Griffin before—until today. There's a San Francisco Journal article for tomorrow's paper about the conspiracy, and the local TV is going to break it on their evening news."
"Then Griffin's dead meat and it's a race between the boring old Melanie Satz and her out-of-fashion cause to help working mothers, versus the candidate from the wonderful new Party for the People," Remo said.
"Hmm," said Smith. "You may be on to something, Remo."
"Aw, Smitty," Remo said, "you know it's embarassin' when you start gushing all over."
24
Orville Flicker was afraid. Worse than that, he was nervous, and he was acting jittery, and that absolutely wouldn't do, especially tonight of all nights.
Flicker couldn't understand it. His White Hand had been doing its work for months, cleaning up the bureaucracy of the United States at every level, removing one despicable public servant after another from the government payrolls. There had never been a major hitch, not one, and subtle support was growing here and there across the nation. Everything was going exactly as planned.
Now, of all times, as the White Hand began its most important phase of operations and Flicker's political organization became a juggernaut, everything started going wrong. In just days there was catastrophe after catastrophe. The Midwest cell, wiped out at the Bryant assassination. The Continental Divide cell demolished, with only Boris Bernwick surviving and escaping— only to be found dismembered near the scene of the bombing of the drug-lord police chief.
Somebody knew a lot more than they should about the White Hand. The question was, how much did they know about the sponsors of the White Hand?
That was just one of a number of reasons why the big announcement should not happen tonight, but they didn't matter. The stage was set, the expectation level of the nation and the party had been primed to the perfect level. The announcement had to come now, tonight, without delay. Everybody was ready and waiting for the steamroller of events that had brought the MAEBE political party into existence to continue rolling, inexorably, flattening the competition.
Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the momentum that Flicker's carefully orchestrated series of "spontaneous" events had generated. MAEBE had to have unfaltering momentum. There could be no time for the individual parties in this eclectic mix of right- wingers to stop and discuss this course of events.
Discussion, contemplation, a true interchange of ideas—anything along those lines would bring this thundering herd to a dusty halt. If there was one lesson Flicker learned from years of politics, it was that discussion murdered progress.
MAEBE was born when a bunch of small, roly-poly snowballs got nudged into one another at just the right moment to create an avalanche, and if anybody slowed the avalanche it would simply crumble to pieces again.
Flicker had to keep the avalanche careening downhill. It had to be perfectly clear to every one of these minor campaigns that there was no time for negotiations. If they insisted on stopping and talking things over, they'd end up left behind, talking to themselves.
Today, the dramatic events that brought these various entities together to form MAEBE had to now be upstaged by anther dramatic event, and the event had to come now.
In one short hour, Orville Flicker would be raised up from comparative obscurity among the ranks of top MAEBE brass and, humble but determined, accept the nomination of his party as its candidate for President of the United States of America.
But Orville Flicker was frightened. He had never once shown discomfort in all his years as press secretary to the state governor who then became President. Even at the press conference after his firing by that -.same back-stabbing, narrow-minded President he showed nothing but self-control and iron resolve.
But all these past performances had been leading up to today, and in every public appearance he made from now on he had to be better than ever. So what to do about this stage fright?
What if exposing himself now was a fatal mistake? Somebody had come incredibly close to nabbing Flicker. He had been sitting inside that Victorian monstrosity in Topeka just hours before someone was there to intercept his White Hand cell charged with assassinating that adulterous swine Julius Serval.
The newspaper accounts were confusing. The reports Flicker received from his FBI sources were more credible and yet more unbelievable.