Martin, on the other hand, seemed not even to notice. Staring not so much at me but through me, he said finally, "You use tape?" he said.
"No."
"You took contemporaneous notes?"
"Well, right afterward, from memory, in the briefing room on my way out the door."
His questions made me question myself, but I had done the best I could.
I knew that much.
"Incredible," he said, softly. "This whole thing is incredible." As he spoke, he leaned over and picked up the telephone. Punching out a number, he added, "Appleton's not going to like the circumstances-your involvement when you were supposed to be sitting in your hotel, the lack of a tape recording-but I have no doubt you did exactly what you should have done."
He talked on the telephone for a few minutes with Appleton, hung up, and said to me, "Write something out. Appleton wants to see it before he figures out what to do. He says there are no guarantees."
No guarantees. I wasn't sure whether this proclamation was infuriating or hilarious. Here we had the president of the United States, dead to rights, in an absolute lie that defined his entire life. I had risked my life for this story. Havlicek had lost his. And we had some pencil-pusher of an editor in chief sitting in his million-dollar house in a wealthy suburb of Boston impatiently telling us that there were no guarantees he would run the most important story in the country. Screw him, and while we're at it, screw this entire newspaper business as well. But not before I write this story and get it into print. Call me a fool, but I'd rather like to inform the voting public that the guy they were about to elect as president is a former armored car robber.
So I settled in before my computer and began to write. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, what I immodestly consider one of the best stories I've ever put together under deadline pressure. My fingers danced like magic across the keyboard. My mind clicked on more cylinders than I knew I had. It was a complex story with a very simple core: The president of the United States is not who he said he was. I wrote of the Oval Office interview, of his belief that the FBI was behind the shooting, and how the intended target was me. As promised, I talked of his successes as president and the lofty approval ratings that came along with it. I explained the 1979 Wells Fargo heist, the deal that Curtis Black struck with the U.s. attorney, his disappearance from the program in 1988.
When I was done, I punched out the number to Martin's office, where he had wandered to watch television and pace nervously while I did my work. He came out to my desk, and for fifteen minutes he sat in front of my computer in absolute silence, his fingers not typing in a single change as he paged through the story. That silence was finally broken by my ringing telephone. Again, dead air on the other line, followed by a click. I didn't like that at all. I looked suspiciously across the expanse of the bureau, at the empty chairs and the dormant computers. It all looked like some sort of barren Broadway set after the actors had long ago gone home.
"Fucking brilliant," Martin said as I walked back to my desk. "If we don't run this story, I don't want to be a part of this company anymore. You have my word that I'll quit."
"Let's just all calm down," I said. "It's only the president and the future course of America at stake." Neither of us laughed. "Let me give it another quick read," I added.
Martin stood up, told me to hurry up, and nervously walked back and forth behind me. I sat down at the terminal and scanned the words. By now, concentration was difficult. The two telephone hang-ups nagged at the core of my brain. All around me, the silence wasn't so much deafening as frightening. Outside in the hallway, a buzzer began sounding, and my stomach knotted up, until I realized it was just the facsimile machine. Another phone rang in the far corner of the bureau.
At that exact moment, the oddly melodic sound of shattering glass spilled into the room from the hallway beyond. My skin tingled from the noise and what it likely meant. Martin and I looked at each other in silence, and without a signal or a spoken word, I started walking slowly, quietly, across the room toward the door. I don't know why I got up and he stayed with the story. Probably we were just further defining our lifetime roles.
As I got halfway toward the hallway, my body so tense my arms and legs may as well have been wooden boards, the murky figure of Kent Drinker appeared in the doorway, looking much as he did that night when he emerged from the dark while I threw a ball for my dog, only here I suspected he wanted to do something more conclusive than chat. As nervous as I may have been, the very sight of him in my newsroom, daring to invade a place I always considered a sanctuary in the self-important and even corrupt culture of official Washington, made me livid-not so much defensive as emboldened.
"What are you doing here?" I yelled. It wasn't an inquiry but a warning.
He continued walking toward me, maybe fifty feet away, holding a gun in front of his chest with one hand, the barrel pointed at what I estimated to be my forehead.
"You don't fuck with me, and you don't fuck with the FBI," he said, answering my question, even if he hadn't actually tried.
"I want you the fuck out of this building," I replied.
That demand didn't seem to hold any sway. Drinker continued to walk toward me, around a clutter of desks. I stood frozen in the middle of the room. I'm not sure what Martin was doing behind me, because I didn't dare turn my back to look.
In the heat of the moment, I figured it was best to try to engage Drinker in any way possible. Conversation buys time. Time buys the opportunity to be creative. Creativity might help me get out of this situation with some semblance of my health, or at least life.
So I asked, "What is it you want?" Of course, I knew the answer to that already. Unfortunately for me, his intention was to make sure that I wasn't about to transmit a story to the Record that would include details of Hutchins's past life and suspicions that the FBI-SPECIFICALLY he-had killed Havlicek and tried to kill me in an attempt to block the truth from being known. Even less fortunately for me, he also wanted to make sure that I wouldn't live to tell anyone about what I knew. Of course, the reason he hadn't killed me in the prior twenty seconds was because he didn't yet know if I had sent the story yet.
"Fuck you," he said, maybe twenty feet away from me by now.
I was standing by Michael Reston's computer. I knew this because on his desk was a metal-framed photograph of Reston standing in front of the Supreme Court with the chief justice, both of them smiling as if they were soul mates. The picture spoke volumes about our favorable court coverage, but no need to get bogged down by such journalistic issues right now.
Drinker was circling desks in silence, still coming at me. He was hunched down, as if ready to do battle. I thought about picking up the photograph and flinging it at him, in expectation that he wouldn't shoot back because if I were dead, he would never know the damage I may have already done. Then I thought, if I ruined this photo, Reston would kill me anyway, so either way, I lose. My eyes quickly drifted over his desk, to a huge, hardcover legal volume, and then to his telephone. I could throw the book, which weighed more, but the fluttering paper might slow the velocity. I saw that on television once. The telephone was sleeker and harder. Of course, there was the general problem of the cord, which might slow down the throw, or even stop it in midair. I knew for a fact, though, that the cords on these phones stretched about a dozen feet, because I often liked to walk around my desk and talk at the same time.