This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
400 miles north, Thing 4 leaned wearily against an office copy machine at one in the morning—jacket long ago discarded, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, the accumulated stench of 18 straight hours of stress-filled work filling the room—as it printed paper duplicates of all 233 pages of the governor’s many daily briefs. Upon receiving the massive stack of papers, the first thing she did every morning was slide the whole thing across her desk and into a trash can with a gleefully unhinged look that made him think that she took visceral pleasure in increasing her carbon footprint. Regardless, copying briefs was Thing 4’s miserable task and he was now Thing 4, so fuck him.
His phone vibrated with a new notification. He opened it to find a Signal message.
“Harry Trask gave me your number. He’s a colleague. My name is Cynthia Burgos. I’m working on a story about the Bulge. I know Governor Santos called Griffin Elzos the morning of the Bulging to offer it to him to develop. Can you confirm this?”
Thing 4’s eyes narrowed as he pictured the governor literally throwing the last hour and a half of his work into the trash while Thing 0 lorded over it all.
“How do I know you’ll protect me if I do?” he typed.
“You’ll have full source protection. Absolute confidentiality. I won’t share your name or contact with anyone, even under duress. You’ll have ironclad deniability.”
The copier clanged and shuttered to a stop as it jammed for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. Thing 4 didn’t have to think very hard about his response.
“Yes,” he wrote. “I can confirm she called Griffin Elzos.”
“Did he offer him the Bulge as a development property?”
“Yes.”
“Did she do it in return for a campaign contribution?”
“Yes.”
“Is there another source in the office who can corroborate your account?”
Thing 4 considered Thing 2 in the next room over preparing a 200-page PowerPoint deck the governor would never read.
“Yes. And I can do one better.”
“How?”
“I can send you the full transcript of the call.”
400 miles back south, a woman in a Midtown Miami apartment gave a celebratory yell so loud that three different neighbors called the cops.
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