Harriman turned the knob, pushed the door open. He took a step in, then stopped. It took him a moment to process just what he was looking at. The small office was crowded with people: not just Petowski, but Petowski’s boss, the deputy managing editor; her boss, the executive editor; even Willis Beaverton, the crusty old publisher himself. Seeing Harriman, they all broke out into applause.
As if in a dream, he heard the ovation; he felt his hand being pumped; felt hands slapping his back. “Brilliant piece of work, son!” Beaverton, the publisher, told him in a blast of cigar breath. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“You doubled our newsstand circulation, single-handedly,” said Petowski, his usual scowl replaced by an avaricious smile. “That was the biggest Christmas issue we’ve had in almost twenty years.”
Despite the early hour, somebody broke out a bottle of champagne. There were toasts; there were plaudits and laudations; Beaverton made a short speech. And then they all filed out again, each congratulating Harriman in turn as they went past. In a minute, the office was empty save for him and Petowski.
“Bryce, you’ve stumbled on something big,” Petowski said, moving back behind his desk and pouring the last of the champagne into a plastic cup. “Reporters search their entire lives for a story like this.” He drained the cup, let it drop into the wastebasket. “You stay on this Decapitator story, hear me? Stay on it hard.”
“I intend to.”
“I have a suggestion, though.”
“Yes?” Harriman asked, suddenly cautious.
“This one percenter versus ninety-nine percenter angle. That really touched a nerve. Play it up. Focus on those one percenter predatory bastards and what they’re doing to this city. Guys like Ozmian in their glass towers lording it above the rest. Is this city going to become a playground for the uber-rich while the rest barely scrape together a living in the darkness below? You get what I mean?”
“I sure do.”
“And this phrase you used in the last piece, City of Endless Night. That was good. Damn good. Turn it into a kind of mantra, work it into every piece.”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, and by the way: as of now, I’m giving you a hundred-dollar-a-week raise.” He leaned over the desk and — with a final slap to the back — ushered Harriman out of his office.
Harriman stepped through the door and into the big newsroom. His shoulders stung from Petowski’s hearty blow. As he glanced slowly around at the sea of faces staring back at him — and, in particular, took in the sour expressions of his young rivals — he began to sense, with a kind of golden inner glow, the upwelling of a feeling quite unlike any he’d ever experienced before: intense, total, and consummate vindication.
31
Baldwin Day detached the five-terabyte external hard drive from the desktop computer and slipped it into his briefcase for the short journey to the top floor of the Seaside Financial Center building near Battery Park. He made the same trip once a day, carrying the precious data that kept the company, LFX Financial, speeding along the highway of profit and yet more profit. On that drive were the names and personal information of many thousands of people his data-marketing team’s research had turned up as leads, or, as they called them in the maze of call center cube farms that occupied three floors of the Seaside complex, “colonels.” The leads were mostly retired vets and the spouses of soldiers on active duty. Most precious of all the “colonels” were the widows of vets who owned homes with paid-off mortgages. Every day at 4 PM sharp, Day delivered this hard drive to the executive office suite on the top floor, where the founders and co-CEOs of the firm, Gwen and Rod Burch, had their offices. The Burches would peruse the lists of leads, and they had a nose for sniffing out the best from the extraordinary masses of data. They would pass along their edited and annotated list to the massive boiler room operation of LFX Financial, which would go to work on it, calling thousands of “colonels,” trying to land them as “clients,” although the more appropriate word, Day thought, might be suckers. Every boiler room caller had to sign up at least eight clients a day, forty a week — or be fired.
Day had been looking for another job almost from the moment he discovered what the company actually did. He was desperate to get out of LFX, not because he was underpaid or overworked — he had no complaints there — but because of the kind of rip-off scam they were engaged in. When he first joined LFX as team leader in the high-sounding Department of Analytics and realized what was going on, he was sickened. It just wasn’t right.
And of course, on top of that there was always a chance the government might take a stronger interest in the LFX shenanigans. After all, it was the Burches he was working for.
These thoughts went through his mind as he got on the crowded elevator, tapped his security card against the reader, and pressed the button for the top floor. Security was super tight at the company ever since a discharged soldier, suffering from traumatic brain injury caused by an IED in Iraq, barged into the lobby with a handgun, shooting and wounding three people before turning the gun on himself. His name had been on one of those lists Day had sent upstairs about three months before the incident. That was how long it took LFX to take away the guy’s house — three short months. After the shooting, nothing changed at LFX Financial regarding company practices and incentives, except that a fanatical security regime had been implemented and a sense of paranoia had thickened the air. Part of that security regime was the isolation and compartmentalization of computer networks, which was the reason why he now had to transfer data to the executive suite the old-fashioned way: by carrying it up on foot.
The elevator doors opened into the elegant lobby of the Seaside building’s top floor. The Burches went in for over-the-top opulence, lots of dark wood paneling, gold leaf, faux marble, plush carpeting, and fake Old Masters on the walls. Day passed through the lobby, nodding to the receptionists, and again tapped his card on the reader next to the door. At the prompt he pressed his finger on a fingerprint scanner; the wooden door swung open to reveal the outer executive suite of offices, bustling with the comings and goings of secretaries and assistants. This was the busiest time of day at LFX Financial, just as the contracts were pouring in from the boiler room.
Day smiled and nodded to the various secretaries and assistants as he passed by on his way to the Burches’ private suite.
He checked in with Iris, the head office honcho, just outside the door. Iris was a tough old bird, no nonsense, “good people” as they say. Anyone who could survive working this close to the Burches had to be both capable and tough.
“I think the Burches are in conference,” she told him. “At least, Roland just came out a few minutes ago.”
“You know I have to deliver this in person.”
“Just warning you, that’s all.” She looked at him over her glasses and gave him a brief smile.
“Thanks, Iris.”
He crossed the plush carpet to the set of double doors that led into the inner sanctum and placed his hand on the cold brass knob. He always felt a twinge at this moment, just before entering. Beyond lay a gilded monstrosity of a space, done up in gold and black and occupied by two truly horrible trolls. Nine times out of ten they never even looked at him when he dropped off the drive, but once in a while they’d throw out a random disparaging comment, and a few times they had dressed him down for some perceived infraction.
When he went to turn the door, the handle was locked. This was unusual.
“Iris?” He turned. “The door’s locked.”
The secretary leaned over the intercom on her desk and pressed a button. “Mr. Burch? Mr. Day is here to drop off the data.”