“He wasn’t supposed to win. Don’t you see?”
The man paced back and forth a few times, then slumped into a chair. He lit a cigarette, and watched the level meters on the tape recorder for a moment, before taking a deep drag and exhaling.
“He was supposed to make it a close, divisive, and fractious race. She was meant to win, and then be weak, and weakened by the opposition from both sides for the next four years. That’s when the real guy was supposed to step in.”
In the silence that followed, the needles on the level indicators beat to the time of the ticking clock.
“He wasn’t supposed to win. Why would anyone want him there?”
The man kicked off his shoes, irritation writ in creases across his brow.
“They overreached. We overreached.”
The mechanical whirr of the tape recorder motors hung in the air, and the sound of traffic drifted in through the open window from a few storeys below.
“See,” he took a hurried drag, and blew it away. “They’re not a country. They’re a criminal enterprise. Of course it doesn’t make sense in geopolitical terms. It only makes sense when you realise everything they’re doing is to stop their enterprise being dismantled.”
The tape recorder exploded, and sent shards of plastic and bits of metal flying violently through the air.
No one knew how this was going to end.
But there were going to be many more endings before the end.
