Electing to Murder

Electing to Murder - By Roger Stelljes


CHAPTER ONE

“What have we stumbled onto here?”

Wednesday, October 30th

Dara Wire sipped her coffee. The dashboard GPS on the Acadia said east bound on Interstate 24, now over twenty-five miles east of Paducah, Kentucky. The laptop powered up and glowing in the passenger seat displayed the motorcade of one limousine and two Chevy Suburbans a mile ahead. Wire had safely tucked the GPS tracking device, which was half the size of a dime, beneath the small rubber bumper affixed to the underside of the rear license plate of the limousine. The tracker allowed her to hold back at a safe distance. Nevertheless, she liked that as she looked up from the laptop and ahead through the light rain and windshield wipers, she could see the red string of taillights from the motorcade in the distance.

While unsure of all of the people in the vehicles ahead, Wire knew it at least consisted of Heath Connolly, the vice president’s campaign manager. She was surprised Connolly wasn’t riding with Donald Wellesley Jr., the vice president’s son. The two of them were thick as thieves, seemingly attached at the hip in running the Republican presidential campaign.

A source tipped Wire to the meeting late on Tuesday and the limousine service being used. Her contact claimed he didn’t know exactly what the meeting was about or who was going to be present beyond Heath Connolly. However, it was an unusual trip, one that piqued Wire’s interest. So she flew to Paducah early, planted the tracker on the limousine and patiently waited.

Six days, nearly five, before an election that would be extremely close, possibly Bush v. Gore close, the candidate’s campaign manager, his key political advisor, was a thousand miles from his candidate, taking a late meeting in the backwoods of Kentucky.

What was the purpose of the meeting? It wasn’t an official trip. Wire checked with her source in the vice president’s campaign travel office and the trip was not on anyone’s schedule and whatever arrangements had been made were not made through the travel office. This one was off the books.

There was no Secret Service detail either. Given how toxic his cutthroat approach to politics and campaigning was, Connolly received daily threats. For that reason, the political operative usually had one or two Secret Service men with him during the campaign, but not tonight. There was security, of course, but of the private kind, and it was riding in the Chevy Suburbans fronting and trailing the limousine. Wire could tell that the security was professional, most likely former military or intelligence based on the way they carried and conducted themselves. But the security wasn’t quite Secret Service quality. If it were, the tracking device would have been discovered. Nevertheless, Connolly must have thought the security was sufficient for what he was up to.

And he was up to something.

Wire could feel it in her bones, and so could the Judge.

Wire’s boss, Judge Dixon, was the campaign manager for Minnesota Governor James Thomson, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States. The Judge was a long-time political player, thoroughly acquainted with the vice president and his merry band of campaigners led by Heath Connolly.

Heath Connolly came off all aw shucks good ole’ boy on television, but he was a disciple of Karl Rove, all political hardball all the time. It didn’t matter how you won—as long as you got one more vote, no matter how you got it, you won. Connolly didn’t care about government or policy. He didn’t give a rip about the rules; losers played by the rules. He was the political equivalent of Al Davis—just win, baby. Connolly did whatever he had to do to win. The Judge wasn’t willing to go to the lengths Connolly would to win; his moral compass wouldn’t permit it. But that didn’t mean Dixon wouldn’t do whatever he could to stop Connolly.

The Judge called in a marker and Wire put her own private business on hold. For the past six months, she was Connolly’s shadow.

Wire reported to the Judge at least three times per day via a private cell phone that only she had the number to. She detailed who Connolly met with, where he went and what he appeared to be doing. That meant tracking him in and around DC as well as around the country, as Connolly liked to get out on the trail with his candidate. Wire collected enough frequent flyer miles in the last six months to last her ten years.

One such trip took her to northern Minnesota where she watched Connolly meet with what turned out to be a retired Minnesota Highway Trooper who’d pulled a young James Thomson over for drunk driving nearly thirty years ago, a violation that had long been buried. The day before the Wellesley campaign was going to spring the revelation, Thomson and the Judge defused it by leaking the arrest. The governor then held an hour-long news conference and answered any and all questions. Thomson stood before the press for an hour until they ran out of questions. The campaign took a hit, but only a little one, and certainly not as bad as if the Wellesley campaign, and Heath Connolly in particular, had controlled the story.

The motorcade’s taillights indicated they were leaving the interstate for Highway 124. The GPS system showed the motorcade turning east, which would take them towards the small town of Cadiz. Five minutes later, the motorcade was through Cadiz and a mile south of town, turned right onto Highway 274 and Wire started to wonder if they might be heading towards Lake Barkley.

It wouldn’t be the first time Wire trailed Connolly to water.

First there had been the Florida Keys.

Two months ago, Wire tailed Connolly and Wellesley Jr. to Florida, first to Clearwater Beach and a boat trip and then to the far western end of the Florida Keys. The two men took a boat to a small island that held an estate across a small bay. Wire set up shop on the opposite side of the bay at a small resort. It was Florida and she was in the Keys, so she took advantage of her tall, slender yet athletic look. She blended easily with the beautiful people and lounged on the beach in a series of string bikinis. While lying on the beach, she used a small high-test camera to snap photos and record video of Connolly and Wellesley Jr. as they partied on the estate across the bay. The pictures revealed the political operative and vice president’s son mingling with at least twenty other men, soaking up the sun, drinking cocktails and eating seafood while on the patio and decks of the mansion.

Each night, Wire uploaded the photos and video to the Judge. While the whole thing instinctively smelled to her, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at.

The Judge took care of that.

The Judge knew exactly what he was looking at, knew each of the players and knew precisely what to do with it all.

The United States Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision had rewritten the country’s campaign finance laws, allowing citizens to contribute as much as they wanted to political action committees. The old contribution limits, such as those found in the McCain-Feingold law, were no more. The campaign contribution spigot had been turned on full throttle and the money flowed like a flooded river into Super PACs across the country supporting candidates of both parties, although Republicans had the clear advantage in the largesse of contributions to such PACs.

The only catch was that Super PACs are not permitted to coordinate directly with the candidate or candidates they seek to support.

Now, nobody in their right mind thought that candidates and Super PACs supportive of them wouldn’t indirectly coordinate their messages in some way, shape or form. Yet this is where Connolly’s hubris got him. What Wire stumbled across in those two days with her pictures and video was Connolly and Wellesley Jr. clearly, unequivocally and blatantly coordinating with the Super PACs. It had been reported that during the summer, the Republican Super PACs combined had raised nearly $700 million dollars for use primarily on the vice president’s campaign. A tiny fraction of it had been spent prior to the meeting in the Florida Keys. Wire caught Connolly and Wellesley Jr. meeting with the leaders of the Super PACs with the intent of mapping out spending the hundreds of millions of dollars over the final two months of the campaign. It was clear that Connolly was shooting not only for the White House but a Republican majority in the House and Senate as well. He was shooting, not just for a win, but for a political sea change.

The photos and video that Wire took gave the Judge all he needed to feed a weeks-long fundraising scandal for the Wellesley campaign that moved the poll numbers in the governor’s favor, a place they remained.

The scandal in the Florida Keys made Connolly a desperate and dangerous man.

He’d never lost an election—ever.

He bore watching.

The laptop beeped. There was another course change. The motorcade now turned right onto a road named Forest Circle. Wire was approximately a half mile back. When she reached Forest Circle, she turned in and immediately pulled over to the side of the road and killed her headlights. She observed the computer monitor as the motorcade proceeded ahead of her. The GPS showed that the motorcade turned right onto Elmwood Drive. The vehicles advanced to the end of the road and stopped.

Wire punched in a search on the address; Raymond Hitch came up. Wire opened up another program on her computer and searched for Hitch in Vice President Wellesley’s database of campaign supporters and a few seconds later, there he was. Hitch was known as a Lone Ranger. In Wellesley campaign parlance, that was a fundraiser who committed to raising ten million dollars for the candidate. You had Super PACs and then you had individual donors and the people that bundled them. No matter how long she was around politics, the sums of money spent on campaigns bewildered her. Ten million later on would get you access to the president, perhaps consideration for an ambassadorship or some other plumb reward. Hitch was from Nashville but it wouldn’t be surprising that he had a lake place up in Kentucky.

If you wanted a private late meeting, this would be an ideal place. Kentucky lake country was quiet and lightly populated in late October, especially on a Wednesday night. There would be the odd year-round cabin dwellers still at their lake places, usually retirees or perhaps folks who worked back in town another few miles up the road. However, if Wire had to bet, the meeting place would be one where there was no chance it would be seen by a stray neighbor. If you were going this far out of the way, it was guaranteed to be private. Besides, it was late now, approaching midnight, and the rain was intensifying from a light drizzle to a steady downpour.

Wire looked at the roads leading to the Hitch place. The road she was on would proceed to the south a quarter mile or so and then turn left for a few hundred feet as a road to a half dozen other cabins and then would loop back to the north, bringing her back to Elmwood and within a few hundred yards of the motorcade’s location. Wire left the car lights off and slipped on a pair of night vision glasses. She dropped the gear shift and slowly followed the road as it looped around and stopped two hundred yards from where the road would run back into Elmwood. To be safe, she backed up twenty feet and into a small private driveway for a cabin now dark for the season. She grabbed her backpack from the backseat and did a quick inventory of her equipment, which consisted of binoculars, two cameras, a small handheld video camera and a handheld GPS system to help her find the cottage and navigate her way back to the SUV if need be. Wire quickly slipped on black rain pants and zipped up her short black raincoat. She tightened her ponytail and then slid it through the hole in the back of her black Washington Nationals baseball cap. Wire then pulled the raincoat hood over her head, buttoning up tightly to keep the rain off of her body. She had no idea how long she would need to be outside and there was nothing worse than being cold and wet.

She slipped out of the car and pulled on her night vision glasses. She walked back up to the road, turning right and making her way along the side of the road, hugging the tree line. There was no street or cabin lighting. It was pitch black.

Fifty feet from where the roads merged, Wire glanced right and noticed another car parked as she had, twenty feet back into a small winding driveway. She quickly walked down the road, took the glove off her right hand and felt the hood. It was cold. The cabin at the end of the driveway was dark, no lights. However, with the night vision goggles she was able to see fresh footprints leading back to the road. She followed them and they led towards Hitch’s cabin.

Perhaps she wasn’t alone. Wire took a quick photo of the car and the license plate.

* * *

Adam Montgomery had been sitting in the woods for a little over half an hour and was now miserable. His partner, Jason Stroudt, was equally so. Neither man properly planned for the rain. Sure they had on raincoats, but no rain pants or hats, and without those, the chilling rain water easily found its way to their bodies. The two were going to be cold, but they hoped it would be worth it.

They’d managed to arrive ahead of the motorcade and were well positioned to the south of the Hitch cottage, kneeling behind a fallen tree, ten feet into dense woods. They were looking out over a large open yard that led to the cabin. Of course, the cabin wasn’t really a cabin, it was a small estate. The home was well over seven thousand square feet and a look inside revealed the finest of cottage furnishings and the layout was perfect, especially if you were looking in from the outside. The main level was large and open, with high ceilings and three different distinct seating areas. The seating area drawing their particular attention was in front of the massive stone fireplace. Over the fireplace was a sixty-inch flat-screen television which was currently rerunning that evening’s The O’Reilly Factor. The seating area directly in front of the massive stone fireplace contained comfortable dark plaid couches which were situated around a massive handmade coffee table on three sides. A fire was roaring, with plenty of extra logs to keep it going for hours. Best of all for Montgomery and Stroudt, the front and front sides of the cabin were all tall windows. While the windows undoubtedly provided a wonderful view out to Lake Barkley during the day, they allowed for Montgomery and Stroudt to easily see inside.

“It sure would be nice to be in there,” Montgomery whispered while he quietly fiddled with the lens on his camera, sliding on a telephoto one. They were two hundred feet away from the cabin but there were at least four people patrolling the grounds that they’d seen and they didn’t dare move any closer.

“I would agree,” Stroudt replied softly, wiping the rain drops off the front of his binoculars for what seemed like the tenth time. “There must be someone important coming to meet Checketts,” he added confidently.

“Why do you say that?”

“The Johnny Walker Blue. You don’t break out the Blue for just anybody.”

Montgomery looked inside and his partner was right. On the massive coffee table were a dozen glasses, two buckets of ice and four bottles of Johnny Walker Blue. “What’s the Blue go for these days?”

“My dad bought a bottle last Christmas. He said it ran just north of $200 a bottle.”

“Who are these other two guys?” There was another short, stout, older-looking man pacing around the room in a black suit and shirt, and with a black fedora pulled down tight on his head. He had said perhaps three words to Checketts and spent the remainder of his time either on or reading his smart phone. The third man sitting at the table was thin with blond hair and high cheekbones. He spent his time alternately on his laptop and looking at his phone. It did not appear that the three men necessarily knew one another.

“I don’t know, never seen them before. Checketts carried in a briefcase and the other two look empty handed.”

Just then lights appeared to their left. “Let’s see who else is coming to dinner,” Montgomery said quietly. The blogger put his camera up and zoomed in.

“So who do we have?” Stroudt asked, letting the binoculars hang around his shoulders, his vision partially blocked by trees.

“Looks like,” Montgomery moved slightly left and looked through the camera into the cabin and started snapping and then stopped, quietly uttering, “Oh my God!”

“What?” Stroudt asked urgently.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“What? Tell me,” Stroudt answered, sliding left as well, the binoculars coming to his eyes.

“It’s Heath Connolly,” Montgomery whispered excitedly.

“No way.”

Montgomery simply nodded.

“Checketts and these other two guys are meeting with Connolly? Five days before the election? Out here in backwater Kentucky?”

“What have we stumbled onto here?” Stroudt whispered excitedly.

Montgomery didn’t respond, he simply snapped photos.

* * *

Connolly was inside now, Wire thought as she settled into position behind the base of a massive fallen trunk of a large tree. The tree was one of four or five on the ground in her immediate vicinity. All appeared to have recently fallen, probably the result of a strong storm from the summer now long since passed. The position provided her a clear view of the circular drive to the back of the cottage which would allow for the taking of pictures as everyone departed. Two private security guards were standing on the back porch, both with Styrofoam cups in their hands. Wire put the camera to her eyes, zoomed in and took pictures of each. Another man stepped onto the back porch and gave orders, casually waving the men off the porch and walking around the cabin. Wire snapped two photos of the man, who appeared to be in charge of the security.

Instructions given to the worker bees, the man moved back inside the cabin. And what was going on inside is what interested Wire. However, to see she would need to move to the front of the cottage. She turned to her right, took one careful step and she saw them, perhaps sixty to seventy feet away, camped behind a similar log, already taking photos.

Wire was really good at this but she wouldn’t be able to get into position on this side of the cabin without being noticed by the two men. Even if she could, if they made a mistake, she’d be caught up in the wash. The car she’d seen in the driveway must belong to those two. They’d beat her to the scene.

So who were they? Who did they work for? How did they know about this meeting? Those were questions Wire wanted to ask, and would, but in a different and safer time and place. She had the license plate and would track them down. However, for now, unless all she wanted was pictures as the meeting participants walked in and then out the back door, she needed another option.

Wire turned her gaze to the property on the opposite side to the north of the cottage. The topography of the land was not promising as it ran down away from the cottage, although she could make out what looked like another cabin perhaps a hundred feet north of the Hitch place. She carefully moved back to her left ten feet to get a better look. The cabin was older and much smaller, but was two stories with a steep pitched roof. The peak of the roof looked to be just slightly above the height of the main level of Hitch’s. If she could get up on top of that roof, she might be able to see into the cabin from the other side. Wire slid the night vision glasses back on and started carefully moving back towards the road.

It took her ten minutes to pick her way over to the property north of Hitch’s cabin. She was now peaking around the corner of the three-car detached garage sitting twenty or so feet lower than Hitch’s place. The backyard of the cabin was open and cleared like a yard you would find in the city, with just a few trees interspersed through what would be a finely manicured yard in the summer. Fortunately, the cabin appeared to be buttoned up for the year and the floodlights on the garage were dark. Nevertheless, she stuck close to the northern edge of the property and the tree line and scooted to the cabin.

There was an old metal television antennae tower that hugged the north side of the cabin. Wire suspected this was left over from a bygone era before cable or satellite dishes became prevalent. She looked at the base, which had cement footings. The tower itself was secured to the house in two places by metal brackets. Best of all, it had foot rungs. It was sturdy and would easily hold her one hundred twenty-five pounds. She put her left foot into the first rung, when to her right she noticed another set of headlights approaching.

Wire stepped back down off the antennae and slithered back to the rear corner of the cabin and peered towards the driveway behind Hitch’s place. Another limousine had arrived. She slipped off her backpack and kneeled down and took out her camera. She snapped a photo of the license plate. A man providing security opened the rear passenger door.

* * *

“Someone else has arrived,” Stroudt stated, seeing the headlights appear. “Who do we have now?”

“I can’t tell,” Montgomery answered, starting to stand up. “Let me see if I can get in position to take a picture.”

“Can you get one?”

“I need a little better angle,” Montgomery answered as he stood up. He moved to his left five feet, not looking down, and stepped awkwardly onto a branch.

The crack was loud—too loud.

* * *

Wire had her camera trained on the newly arrived limousine. A foot appeared from the rear passenger door, a man ready to step out.

“There’s somebody up there!” she heard a security guard scream as she slipped safely back behind the cabin. “Up in the woods. Up there! Up there! On the south side! On the south side! Up there!”

The two men had been discovered. She was instantly relieved she’d had to change positions. The security man holding open the limousine door was animatedly talking to the man inside the limousine. Then the security man took two steps away from the limousine, quickly pivoted to the south and ordered: “Don’t let them get away.”

“There they are! There they are!” one of the guards yelled.

Then she heard it, an unmistakable sound.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Three shots fired.

“What in the hell?” she muttered to herself.

Then she heard another series of gunshots.

The limousine that had just arrived peeled out of the driveway.

The meeting was over.

She sprinted back to the detached garage and took stock. With security focused on the south side of the Hitch cottage and away from her location to the north, Wire took a chance.

She jumped from behind the detached garage and bounded up the hill to the back of Hitch’s and knelt down in a small cluster of trees. She snapped photos of Connolly and others running out of the cabin, and into the waiting limousines and SUVs.

The motorcade quickly sped away.

Wire held her position for a few minutes in case she missed any straggling personnel hanging around. The cabin had gone quiet; most of the lights now out. Sure that it was now safe to move, she carefully moved back away from the cabin and up towards the road and picked her way back to the Acadia all the while wondering “What did those two see, anyway?”