“Are you all right?” The question came from Becky Beckeman, a fellow graduate of Radford University’s journalism school, though she one year before he.
“I’m fine.”
“You just got bad news on the phone,” Becky pressed.
“No, really.”
Becky’s desk was directly opposite his, and when she stood, her untethered boobs swayed behind her blouse, threatening to drown out any sound she might make with her mouth. “Is it about the attack?” she asked. She was an earthy Birkenstock gal.
The directness and the accuracy of the question startled him until he realized that she was speaking of the East-West Airlines attack at O’Hare. One hundred seventy-three dead people.
David shook his head. “No, it has nothing to do with that.”
But did it? He hadn’t connected those particular dots, but if there was an unreported attempt on the first family’s life last night, just a week after the airline attack, couldn’t they be related?
“Kirk!” Charlie Baroli’s voice boomed like a cannon across the vast expanse of the newsroom. “You! My office! Two minutes ago!”
Eighty pounds overweight, with an alcoholic’s nose that looked like it might have been chewed by a dog, Baroli was certain to stroke out one day. David just prayed that he could be present when it happened.
David killed his monitor and pushed himself away from his workstation. As he stood, Becky gave him a look acknowledging the torture that lay in his future, and that she was on his side. Becky was always on David’s side. He knew about the crush she had on him — everyone within twenty feet knew about it whenever they saw her look his way — but she wasn’t his type. He preferred his women less… free-spirited. He’d tried not to encourage her. Except sometimes, when she had a tidbit of a source and wanted to get his attention with it. On those occasions, it maybe was possible that he gave her a mixed message. Or maybe a wrong message. Maybe.
David didn’t dawdle on his way to the city editor’s desk, but he didn’t hurry, either. If you internalized Baroli’s perpetual angst, you’d end up beating him to the grave.
Baroli’s office was little more than a cube with real walls, and was decorated in Early Ceiling Collapse. Think hoarder. Think roaches. Think Taco Bell wrappers that were older than David. Baroli had already closed the door before David could arrive.
The door thing was a power play, a requirement to knock. David gave three quick raps with the knuckle of his forefinger.
Baroli made eye contact through the glass panel that ran the length of the door and motioned him in with his middle finger. His way of flipping off employees while maintaining plausible deniability.
David opened the door. “You needed me, sir?” In his mind, it was treacly irony, but he had every confidence that Baroli would miss it.
“Come in and close the door.”
He did, in that moment thanking the Holy Things for the fact of the window and the witnesses it created. If the two guest chairs had not been stacked with meaningless crap, David might have sat down. As it was, he remained standing.
Baroli filled his seat with flesh to spare. He pushed himself away from his desk and simulated crossing his arms across his ample man-boobs. “You know that if it was up to me we never would have hired you, right?”
“I believe that you might have mentioned it, sir. Sixty or seventy times in the last fifteen months. Sir.”
“You’re here because your father is a major shareholder.”
“Again,” David said. “Seventy-one times now.” In reality, his father would have been more than delighted to see him crash and burn, but Baroli wouldn’t care. David was supposed to be in law school now, on his way to a Wall Street job that would add to the Kirk family’s billion-plus-dollar legacy. “But I disagree,” David said. “I like to think that I’m here because I’m a talented journalist.”
Baroli laughed. “A journalist,” he mocked. If he’d been tasting the words, they’d have been long on sulfur and garlic. “You’re so green you’re still wet.”
David waited for the rest. He was in fact new to his profession, but he was damn good at it. He met his deadlines and was ahead of the curve on developing sources. He sensed that the trouble he was in had nothing to do with his job skills.
“Grayson Cantrell was in my office about a half hour ago,” Baroli said. Grayson owned the choice stories from the city beat. “He told me that when he contacted Malcolm Sanderson to get a quote on the DC City Council’s decision to walk away from school vouchers, Councilman Sanderson told him that he’d already spoken to a reporter named Kirk. He was disinclined to repeat himself.”
David gave the smug smile that he knew pissed Baroli off. “I’ve known Mr. Sanderson my whole life,” he said. “Peter Sanderson, his son, and I were best friends from elementary school through high school.”
“How special for you,” Baroli said. “But that was not your story. That story belonged to Grayson Cantrell.”
“Grayson Cantrell is lazy.” The words were out before David could stop them. He was like that sometimes when it came to stating the truth.
Baroli recoiled. “Grayson Cantrell was working sources before you were a viable sperm.”
“Yet I didn’t make my call to Councilman Sanderson until eight hours after the announcement,” David said. “The story is up on my screen now, if you want to take a look at it.”
“I want you to delete it,” Baroli said. “I want you to concentrate on the job you were hired to do.”
“I’m doing the Sanderson story on my time. If you don’t want to print it, I can put it on my blog. Mr. Daniels told me that he reads my blog regularly. I’m just sayin’…” Preston Daniels owned the Washington Enquirer, having inherited it from three previous generations of Danielses.
Somewhere below the layers of facial flesh, a muscle twitched in Baroli’s jaw. “You signed a noncompete,” he said.
David shrugged. “My words for you are work for hire. My words for me are mine to do with as I please. If it makes you feel better, I don’t pay myself very well.”
But his advertisers did. Kirk Nation, David’s blog, had just north of 172,000 subscribers now, and was viewed by well over a million people every day. He had influence peddlers lined up at the door to throw money at him in return for visibility on his masthead. David worked at the Enquirer for the 401(k) plan and the health insurance. And it didn’t hurt to pad your résumé with time served on one of the most read and most influential newspapers on the planet. He was in the Big Leagues.
Baroli would have made a shitty poker player. His eyes grew hot and his jowls trembled. A poster child for the old generation of editors who no longer understood the realities of their own jobs, he clearly couldn’t think of anything to say.
Baroli blurted, “Get out of my office.”
CHAPTER THREE
About five miles into the drive, Jonathan began suspecting that he knew where they were headed. As they drove through Virginia’s Piedmont, the relentless farmland was spotted with shacks and mansions, all of this in the vicinity of George Washington’s birthplace on the banks of the Potomac River.
His suspicions were confirmed when Shrom directed Boxers to pilot the Batmobile through the open gate in the stone wall that defined Meadowlark Farms, a sprawling spread owned by a freelance spook named Griffin Horne, with whom Jonathan had worked a few times in the past.
Boxers shot his boss a knowing look in the rearview mirror, but he said nothing. If Irene Rivers was in fact here to meet them, she would not want her Fibbie minions to know that Jonathan and the Bureau used the same freelancers. That was especially true of the likes of Horne, whose allegiances had everything to do with good guys versus bad, and less than nothing to do with the alphabet soup that defined inside-the-Beltway rivalries. Jonathan had no doubt that Horne had worked for the FBI against the CIA or State, and then switched teams to work the other way around. Inside the government, where everyone claimed to be on the side of God and country, the border between good guys and bad guys was more of a blurry stripe than a fine line.