November 9th 2016

Meg Patoski looked around the large room where everyone and everything with eyes was weeping. Meg knew that her mom, Natalie, was in one of the suites helping Valery McClintock write her concession speech. It was half past one the morning after election day, a day that the first woman to run as a major party candidate for President of the United States did not obtain the office. She knew that Val was as devastated as everyone else but not because she lost; rather, to whom she lost.

The President-elect, Ronald J. Bugle, was a man of singular, contemptuous character. A man craven for total loyalty and adulation of all and the least deserving human on the planet of any such respect. Unlike the majority of those in the hall, Meg knew what had happened. She was Val’s national security expert and was in the room three months prior when the Federal agents had informed the campaign of what the Russian’s were attempting to do. The evidence presented by the agents did not come as a surprise to Val but it did piss her off. Her sole mistake was that she trusted that the intelligence agencies would be able to counter the threat. Even the agents delivering the briefing believed the likelihood of the interference activities succeeding was remote.

Meg understood how wrong everyone had been; she knew long before they did. All the optimists, those hopeful that the system would somehow right itself, had underestimated the devious mind and the criminal insanity of Bugle. More than a criminal, Bugle was desperate. The evidence from both the ongoing FBI investigations and the opposition research dossier from the former MI6 operative, Christian Stainless, was compelling in making the case that Bugle had been laundering money for Russian oligarchs for a decade. In recent years, Bugle had outlived his usefulness to Vladimir Rasputin, the despotic Russian President.

Bugle was burning through more money than his cut of the laundry operation and faster than the oligarchs could steal it. Many of Rasputin’s cartel of global oligarchs were getting squeezed by sanctions put in place by the outgoing administration. Despite the Russians’ concerns, all Bugle seemed worried about was his three tower projects through which he intended to orchestrate his biggest heist yet. The corrupt real estate deal for super skyscrapers in Moscow, Kiev and Riyadh stood to make Bugle a billion dollars.

The aging philanderer’s biggest mistake was not trying to steal money; the Russians respected thieves. What got Bugle into trouble with the cartel was his ignorant attempt to become the kingpin among them. His offer to Rasputin of a penthouse in the Moscow tower was a slant beyond the pale. It was then that the Russian and Saudi oligarchs realized what the Americans did not: Bugle was suffering from several mental disorders.

The most useful of these psychoses were his narcissistic personality disorder and his extreme case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. The former meant that Bugle was easily swayed by flattery; it was one of the few things he liked almost as much as money. The latter ailment fed his feeling of superiority allowing him to believe that he was always the smartest person on any subject.

Meg knew that the Russians and Saudis would use this to their advantage in manipulating Bugle. There were dangerous times ahead and her mom was now the minority leader in the House. There would be no ability to check the office of President with the opportunistic Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress. Even they had sensed the danger in this man as he defeated each of them, one-by-one, in the primaries. Now that he’d won the general election, their lack of scruples would lead them deep into the sycophantic behavior they often awarded those who were tolerant of their fascist agenda.

Her sense of foreboding overcame the emotions of the room in which she had been wallowing. The tears stopped flowing and she steeled herself to the daunting task at hand. She believed there must be some mechanism by which she could halt the democracy destroying terror that was about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting American people. This was nothing more than another problem and Meg was a problem solver. The complexity of this problem meant that she would need allies, many allies. She would form a team of uncover resisters.

Crap, Meg thought, as the first of her necessary allies sprang to mind. She knew that she would be calling Samuel Abrams, her ex-husband. He was the last person she wanted to talk to at this moment but the first one she would need on her team. She considered Sam to be an arrogant ass but he had two qualities she required: he was the smartest person she knew and he worked as a senior analyst for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.