The Day of the Donald by Andrew Shaffer Read Free Book Online Page A

the only man who appeared to work at the Royal Linoleum Hotel besides the housekeepers. Jimmie explained that he wanted to file a noise complaint.
    “I’m trying to get some sleep, and these guys—well, you can hear for yourself,” Jimmie said, holding the phone receiver up to the wall. The pounding continued. “You hear that?”
    “I can hear it from here,” the man at the front desk said wearily.
    “Well, aren’t you going to do something about it?”
    “It should be over soon. In my experience, these things never last more than eight or nine minutes. Especially with how vigorous they are going at it. By the time I got up from my desk and walked over there—well, they’d be vaping on the balcony.”
    Jimmie slammed the phone down. Eight or nine minutes? The sex tape went on for a full two and a half hours. It was as long and grueling as Batman v Superman . In fact, the tape was so grim and gritty at points that some believed it had also been directed by Zack Snyder.
    It had been played so many times during the jury trial that it was burned into Jimmie’s mind. Sometimes at night, when he closed his eyes, the candidate’s smarmy visage slithered acrosshis field of vision. In night-vision green, which impossibly made him look even creepier. To this day, Jimmie couldn’t hear Pitbull’s “Timber” without thinking of the rattling venetian blinds, Cruz’s saggy pecs, and the squeaking.
    Dear God, the squeaking.
    It wasn’t surprising somebody was watching it in the next room. The video had spread far and wide after he’d posted it in full on the Daily Blabber . Once a sex tape gets out, there’s no putting that genie back into the bottle of lube. Everyone and their mother had seen it; some people had probably watched it with their mothers. Jimmie wasn’t one to judge.
    What bothered him, however, was that whoever was on the other side of the wall had started playing it just as he arrived home for the day. Was somebody taunting him?
    There was something else nagging him, too. It took him a few more minutes to figure it out. When he did, it was as obvious as Jimmie’s day had been long: The knocking of the headboard against the wall didn’t have the regular ebb and flow of a couple making whoopee. It came and went in odd fits:
    BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.
    BUMP-BUMP.
    BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.
    It reminded him of the rhythmic code used by the human traffickers in California, the ones he’d been embedded with. They’d used it over the phone, though, and not through a wall. Was someone tapping out a message?
    Listen to yourself, Jimmie , he thought. Only in Washington for a week, and already you’re seeing conspiracies. Get your head checked, or get out of town .
    That was one thought—that was what he wanted to think. But what he wanted to be true and what was true were probably two very different things. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory if it checked out; it was just a conspiracy.
    BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.
    BUMP.
    BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP—
    Jimmie searched for a pen and paper. Inside the bedside drawer, he found a Royal Linoleum Hotel ballpoint pen. No paper—the closest he could find was a Gideon Bible.
    He opened it to the title page and began recording the knocking on the wall as hash marks.
    After he’d filled two pages of the Bible, a pattern emerged. He’d recorded the same message twice now. Whoever was over there was going to keep banging it out (pun intended), but he had enough to go on now.
    It was definitely the same code used by the smugglers: Morris code. It had been invented by some woman named Katie Morris, who felt that Morse code was too complicated. (Jimmie happened to agree with her.) The idea was simple: The number of taps between each pause corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. One tap for A , two for B , and so on. He translated the message as:
    MEETMEINCLINTONPLAZA​ATMIDNIGHTTELLNOONE​LEAVEYOURPHONEBEHIND​YOURLIFEISINDANGER
    Which could be parsed as:
    MEET ME IN CLINTON