Happy Endings

by Sally Quinn

  “Where’s Tyson?” asked Walt, sidling up to her so the others wouldn’t hear. “Is everything okay?”

  “I told you I talked to him night before last and he said he’d be here at nine-thirty.”

  She hadn’t meant to sound irritated, it was just that she was so nervous.

  “I think we’d better go ahead and start,” she said and turned to the others who were still getting their coffee.

  “Okay everyone, we might as well get this thing going. Sprague’s the only one not here.”

  She sat down at the table and the rest of them joined her.

  “I think the purpose of this meeting is to figure out where we are on all this,” she began. “What we know, what we don’t know, share all the information and divide up what’s left so we don’t have two people working the same angle. I’d like Estrella to give us a briefing for those who are walking in on the second act. By the way, does anyone know where Sprague is?”

  She tried to sound casual. She hoped somebody actually did know.

  “He said something about an interview with an FBI source,” said Robin. “He said he’d be here though.”

  Once again relief turned to anger.

  “Okay. Until he shows up, Estrella, could you fill us in on what you’ve been doing on your end here in Washington while Sprague has been concentrating on his project?”

  “Exactly what is Sprague’s project?” asked Rod Taylor. “He’s been straight-arming most of us around the newsroom every time we get near him or any of his sources, but he bigfoots around our agencies and departments as though he owns the story.”

  She hadn’t expected such overt hostility toward Sprague but it didn’t surprise her.

  “I’d rather wait until he gets here and let him talk about it,” she said.

  “What’s the deal with the death threats, the bomb threats, and the bodyguards?” asked Lauren Hope. “Everyone knows about it but nobody has bothered to tell any of us what’s really going on.”

  “It’s not that complicated,” said Walt. “Sprague is working on drugs, and threats just go with the territory. Sprague doesn’t take it seriously but we do. We’ve insisted that he send his family away and we’re providing the guards. And he’s moved to a hotel. The bomb threats at the paper, we believe, are a nuisance threat, but we’ve reported them and beefed up security. The Miami paper gets them all the time and they’ve just learned to live with it.”

  “Let’s get back to Estrella,” said Allison.

  “I’ve been making the usual rounds with the FBI guys,” said Estrella. “And the DEA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the White House, as well as nosing around up on the Hill. Robin’s been running names through the research center’s data bases of all the big papers, as well as some of the foreign press, trying to put together a chronology for us as well as figure out what’s been in the press and what hasn’t. Basically we’ve been focusing on these two guys who met in prison in Connecticut, Juan Bader and Chuck Skinner. We think they’re the key to the whole thing, or at least we can use them to illustrate the big picture.”

  “Wait,” said Walt. “I’m confused. Bader and Skinner. Their names don’t sound Colombian. And why Connecticut?”

  “Bader was born in Colombia,” said Estrella. “His father’s a German engineer, his. mother’s Colombian. He’s a real psycho, hates the United States, calls it an imperialist police state. His two heroes are Che Guevara and Hitler—if that gives you any idea. His favorite magazine is Soldier of Fortune. He’s power hungry. He’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants and he’d steal his mother’s purse if he thought there was something in it he needed.”

  “Sounds like Tyson,” said Taylor.

  Everyone laughed. Allison felt defensive but she was too pissed at Sprague to say anything.

  “What about the other guy?” she asked, trying to get away from the subject of Sprague.

  “Chuck Skinner? Born and raised in Lincoln, Mass, the classic rebellious rich boy. A hippie in the sixties, a stoner in the seventies, and a dealer in the eighties. He got caught transporting grass from Mexico and California back to East Coast Ivy League schools. His best customers were the fraternities. He’s not as scary a character as his buddy Bader, but he’s no girl scout. He got busted and sent to Danbury for four years and he drew Bader as his cellmate the first year. Bader got out a year ago and Skinner about six months later. Apparently they set the groundwork for their present operation while they were still in prison. But Sprague can tell you all that. If he ever gets here.”

  Allison ignored the dig.

  “Have you found anybody official to tell you how and when and if they’re going to nail them?” she asked.

  The phone rang. Allison answered. It was Warburg for Walt. She passed the phone to him and watched his face closely to see if it was bad news. He hung up and she turned back to Estrella. The doorbell rang. She started to rise but Robin was already headed toward the door. It was a copy aide from the paper with some information they had requested for the meeting. She turned back to Estrella.

  “Now where were we? Oh, yeah. Have you found anyone official…?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve been doing a dance with the widow of one of the DEA guys who recently got his body parts permanently rearranged, compliments of Bader. I think he was on to them in a major way.”

  “Why would she talk?” asked Lauren.

  “She’s pissed off at the DEA,” said Estrella. “She thinks they sent her husband into Medellin without adequate protection. He was gunned down during cocktails with an informant at Las Margaritas, one of the trafficker’s chief watering holes there.”

  “Yeah, well, even if she’ll talk,” said Taylor, “what makes you think she knows anything?”

  “You’re obviously not married,” said Allison. “Ever hear of pillow talk?”

  Everyone laughed and she blushed. It was not lost on any of them, her relationship with Des, the fact that they had had problems working for competing news organizations.

  “She’s hinted around that she’s got some internal DEA memos and other documents that her husband brought home,” said Estrella, ignoring the distraction. This was his big moment, with Sprague absent, and he wanted to make the most of it. “I’m this close to getting her to let me see them.”

  “Just don’t get too close,” said Allison to more laughter.

  “Too close to whom?”

  It was Sprague’s voice and she practically jumped out of her chair when she heard it.

  “Estrella’s just giving us a few tips on some in-depth investigative reporting techniques,” said Malkin. Everyone laughed.

  Sprague threw his canvas shoulder bag down on the chair reserved for him and went to the buffet for coffee. Robin poured him a cup, suddenly turning flirtatious. Sprague responded in kind. Allison decided to continue as though he weren’t there. Neither she nor Sprague had looked at each other.

  “Lauren, what about that report the Senate committee on drug trafficking is supposedly working on?”

  “I hear rumors that it’s three hundred pages,” said Lauren, “which is beyond the pale even for Washington. Anyway, I’ve been unable to get an advance copy. It must have some pretty sexy stuff in it because they’re practically keeping it locked up in a Brink’s truck. It’s Senator Gordon’s baby. Rod went to Harvard with Gordon’s press secretary, Jim Bates, so he’s been working on him.”

  “Have you been able to empty Bates’s pockets?” asked Walt.

  “I don’t know if I emptied them,” said Taylor, laughing. “I don’t know if anybody’s ever emptied them.”

  “He has very deep pockets,” said Lauren.

  “If you shake the tree hard enough the leaves will fall off,” said Sprague mysteriously. His tone wasn’t arrogant but he seemed to bug the rest of them anyhow.

  “As an interesting aside,” said Taylor, “Bates told me that nobody from the New York World has shown any interest at all in this story. He said he was at a bo
ok party the other night and heard a World reporter say, ‘You know, this Colombian drug story is not intellectually stimulating.’ ”

  This was met with hoots.

  “Yeah, but it sure makes the juices flow,” said Estrella, grinning.

  “Anyway, seriously,” said Taylor, turning to Robin, who was tape-recording the session, “—and don’t put it on the tape—Bates sort of said that one of the sexier parts of the report is they’ve got an agent…”

  “They?” asked Allison.

  “The CIA,” said Taylor. “They’ve got an agent who’s of Colombian descent—name, face, the whole thing, but born and raised in the Bronx. Anyway, he’s been on the inside for about six months as a bodyguard for Bader. Bader loves him, calls him ‘mi hermano,’ which means my brother in Spanish.”

  “Jesus. If that isn’t a ten on the holy-shit scale I don’t know what is,” said Malkin.

  “Ten and a half,” said Rod. “But that’s not all. He managed to get wired for a torture session of this DEA agent they kidnapped several months ago.”

  “A tape, not a transcript?” asked Walt.

  “Right,” said Rod. “The real thing. Apparently it’s pretty gruesome, begging for mercy, screaming.”

  “So what’s the deal with him now?” asked Estrella, going a little pale around the gills. “Did he get out?”

  Rod shrugged.

  “He’s dead as a doornail,” said Sprague, speaking for the first time. “They sent his testicles to his mother. He wasn’t married so they sent them to his seventy-eight-year-old mother.”

  Taylor first looked stunned, then annoyed that Sprague knew about the DEA captive. It was supposed to be his big scoop.

  Allison could see a storm brewing. Sprague was not a team player, but it was her job to be captain of the team even if the quarterback refused to cooperate. This was about as far as she could take the football metaphor.

  “So, Sprague,” she said, turning to him for the first time. “Why don’t you tell us how you got that tan?”

  She was trying to be nonchalant. She thought he flushed slightly under the tan. He did look especially handsome and he knew it. She just wanted him to know that she knew that he knew.

  “Okay. This guy Bader needed a place between Florida and Colombia where his planes could refuel and the drugs could be sorted and shipped to the States. He found a small island in the Bahamas with an airstrip called Jenkins’s Cove, a one-day sail from Nassau. He bought a big compound there and then started intimidating the locals to get them off the island. He finally scared off the owners of the yacht club and some cottages. A few people tried to fight him but he had the local police in his pocket within weeks. Pretty soon the whole island was like a ghost town.”

  “What were his scare tactics?” asked Allison. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Huge, mean-looking bodyguards, a squadron of Doberman pinschers, stuff like that. A whole family lost in a suspicious fire on a boat. Then a mysterious drowning of a local retired businessman. After a while, nobody wanted to live there, or even visit.”

  “No shit,” said Estrella.

  “So what did you do?” asked Lauren.

  “I rented a sailboat in Nassau and went over there.”

  “By yourself?” asked Lauren.

  “I had my trusty bodyguard, Ralph, who unfortunately can’t swim. But I had him stay in radio contact with Nassau. Once I got close enough to the island I could see with binoculars these pickup trucks on the shore paralleling my course. They were watching me through binoculars, too. I jumped overboard and swam to shore. Then I walked up and down the beach, careful to stay on this side of the high-water mark…”

  “How do you mean?” asked Lauren. She was the only one who would admit she didn’t know, though by now everyone was listening with rapt attention.

  “In the Bahamas the sand below the high-water mark is property of the queen and therefore public,” he explained. “So this big thug appears and says I’m on private property. I tell him the law about the queen’s property and I keep walking. Then he comes back with two Germans and one Colombian. They tell me I’ve got to go. I repeat the thing about the queen’s property. Surprisingly they seemed unimpressed. I could see their guns tucked into their pants. They pointed out if I stayed they couldn’t guarantee my safety. I was very low key, thanked them, and swam back to the boat.”

  “That’s a great story but what did you learn?” asked Rod.

  “Well,” said Sprague, unperturbed by Taylor’s tone, “I got to see these two guys and the island firsthand. That beats sitting around the newsroom waiting for the State Department lapdogs to call me back with ‘no comment.

  A little dig at Taylor.

  “I sailed around to the tip and saw the airstrip. The next couple of days I drifted around, keeping a log of the planes flying in and out. I spent the last two days poking around the Bahamian Police Department. I got a couple of leads.”

  Allison could see he didn’t want to go into that and she wasn’t going to push it.

  “So where do we go from here?” asked Walt.

  “I want to go back,” said Sprague. “I need to rubberhose some of my leads in the Bahamas.”

  “Don’t you need an assistant for that?” asked Robin.

  Everyone laughed except Allison. Robin was getting too aggressive for her taste. However, she noticed that Sprague didn’t seem to mind.

  “I don’t want anyone going back to the Bahamas, or Colombia for that matter. It’s too dangerous.”

  “That’s ridiculous. We can’t limit ourselves like that.”

  “Look, Sprague,” she said, her tone was testy, as much from his little flirtation with Robin as from his challenge. “We’ve got enough to write the first story and there’s plenty to be mined right here in Washington, on the Hill and in the agencies. We don’t have any money in the budget for funerals.”

  “Well, fine,” he said, picking up her tone, “but I’ve got to talk to the CIA station chief in Bogotá. I can’t get anybody here to talk to me. I need to track him down. I hear there’s been some infighting between DEA and CIA. The DEA apparently doesn’t appreciate this CIA guy being on the inside of Bader’s operation—DEA suspects that the CIA is hot to start neutralizing Bader’s gang one by one and that’s not the way the DEA wants to handle it.”

  “Neutralize?” asked Robin, looking up from her notetaking.

  “That’s CIA for assassinate. I have good sources on this; I know this is part of the Hill report that Lauren’s trying to get… there are laws being broken left and right. Whether or not the attorney general or the President’s involved is the big question. Whether or not any of it’s on paper is obviously crucial to us in being able to prove anything. If either the AG or the President knows about it… there could even be a presidential finding on it. If that’s the case then this could be big; bigger than any of us can imagine. We’ve got to get that report.”

  “Lauren’s not going to be able to get the Senate report,” piped up Estrella.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She was clearly insulted.

  “What I mean is that there is something in that report that the White House has to protect—at all costs. I’m not sure what it is but we’ve still got our eye on the attorney general—he’s connected in some way—we can’t figure it out but…”

  “Sprague?”

  For some reason Allison knew better than to say anything more. She wanted to give him the opportunity to share his theory about Antonia and Foxy and the Foreign Minister with the team. She wasn’t at all sure he wanted to or would. She knew it would not be wise to force him.

  Everyone looked at him. He shot her a warning look.

  “It’s too early to say. I have a few leads on that front I’m looking into, nothing solid yet.”

  Allison felt the tension mount. They were beginning to realize that Sprague was deeply into the story and had no intention of sharing what he knew.

  “Could it possi
bly have anything to do with the AG fucking Antonia Alvarez?” asked Estrella in a hostile tone.

  “You’re kidding?” said Robin in surprise.

  “I’ll talk about what I’ve got when I’ve got something,” said Sprague. He stood up and reached over for his papers.

  “I’ve got an interview on the Hill,” he said, this time glancing at Allison quickly as he turned to leave. She thought she detected a look of gratitude. She had not blown his story for him. If she had, she knew every reporter on the Daily would have been all over it before story conference. Of course, by not doing so she had defeated the purpose of the meeting. Which may not have been the worst tragedy in the world.

  “Well, fuck him,” said Rod, after Sprague had left.

  “Not a bad idea,” whispered Robin under her breath.

  “Let’s keep our eyes on the Prize,” said Allison, trying not to show her annoyance at Robin. “As you may remember, it’s been a long time.”

  * * *

  She rarely had lunch with Alan Warburg. When she did it was never much fun. Alan was the most sober person she had ever known. He was an intellectual who had little time or interest in small talk or gossip. He had no patience with those he considered intellectually inferior. Which was almost everyone. It always amazed her that he had managed to become editor of the Daily, given his lack of touch for “the people.” Though not particularly well liked, he was highly respected because he was so smart and an undeniably brilliant editor. His saving grace, and what had probably propelled him into this job and kept him there, was that he was a crafty political operator. He was famous for decapitating people and leaving them unaware until they tried to move their heads.

  Allison was lucky. Alan Warburg liked her. Which was one of the reasons why he decided to drop off the Pulitzer Prize advisory board and maneuver her election as his replacement. It was already no mean trick to pull that off, but as he had explained to Allison, they needed a woman, and if they didn’t get her they’d pick somebody else and then the Daily would be without representation on the board. He had only two more years to serve. Members were appointed to three three-year terms so he was willing to step down to assure the Daily a position, at least for the next nine years.