Floodgate: A Short Story
About this ebook
On servers. On the eve of the presidential election, a conspiracy threatens to alter the outcome of the vote—and the future of American politics.
At the heart of the plot is a powerful computer program, aimed at rooting out hypocrisy among politicians to expose their truths . . . and ours. Its creator designed the surveillance archive to strip away hypocrisy, yet the only immediate payoff was an assassin waiting in his office.
Left to unravel the conspiracy is a bitter, hotheaded former journalist, but he's just not sure he cares enough to get to the bottom of it. Once a Loeb Award-winning reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, Zach Coles now spends his days filing folders and his nights nursing gin.
Rival party operatives want the stolen drive badly enough to trade bullets across San Francisco, though neither side seems certain who they are protecting. Cornered between a blackmailer threatening a child and a killer with a gun, Zach takes the fight into the fog of the Presidio.
- Cyber Thriller: The hidden drive pairs private Internet search queries with unblinking webcam recordings captured directly from candidates’ laptops.
- Race Against Time: Given a strict twenty-four-hour ultimatum, Zach must decipher the encrypted files before an operative makes good on his threats.
- Family Secrets: The extortion hinges on a school photograph of six-year-old Ezekiel, the son of Zach’s long-lost love Meredith Canter.
- Reluctant Hero: Crammed behind the wheel of a raffle-won smart car, the six-foot-six former newsman relies on raw fury and street smarts to stay alive.
- Also by This Author: The Doomsday Equation, Cloud and Devil’s Plaything.
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About the author
MATT RICHTEL is a health and science reporter at the New York Times. He spent nearly two years reporting on the teenage mental-health crisis for the paper’s acclaimed multipart series Inner Pandemic, which won first place in public-health reporting from the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism and inspired his book How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence. He received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles about distracted driving, which he expanded into his first nonfiction book, A Deadly Wandering, a New York Times bestseller. His second nonfiction book, An Elegant Defense, on the human immune system, was a national bestseller and chosen by Bill Gates for his annual Summer Reading List.
