Hack

by Graham Johnson

  ‘Yeah, course . . .’ said Steve nonchalantly. A twist of jealousy tightened in me. Already, down here, in the back of beyond, I was being kept in the dark and edged out. Me and Jungle Jim chasing shadows. While Steve was lapping it up under the bright lights, telling Trevor McDonald how great he was.

  However, he was far from gloating, to be fair. I could tell Steve thought it was all getting well out of hand. But what could he do? We were in for a penny, in for so many pounds by now that it’d pay the deficit off. Too deep. Too soon. So back-pedalling was out of the question.

  ‘I don’t know what the fuck Ray’s playing at, talking bollocks like that, when I thought he knew the fucking score. I suppose he’s just covering his arse like everyone else. But I told him to fuck off anyway,’ said Steve forcefully. ‘I blagged out of it, in front of everyone – there was a couple of Features’ reporters sitting by there – saying that it’d blow my cover if I did a TV ad and I’d never be able to work undercover again. So he got the message – he’s a cunt, isn’t he?’

  I didn’t like Steve slagging Ray but what the fuck? He was letting me know that he was taking the weight above and beyond. While I was sitting on my arse. Out of the firing line. Scratching my bollocks in a hotel room.

  Phone down. I was a bit freaked by all that officy, politicky stuff, to be fair. But I was too busy to get my head round it all – I had to crack on with honing the story, which intro’d something like this:

  ‘Today the News of the World publishes astonishing photographs of the Beast of Bodmin Moor. Our exclusive pictures prove the existence of the mysterious big cat once and for all. The explosive images show a dark-coloured, puma-like animal prowling around a foggy field in a remote area of Cornwall. The Beast was caught close-up on camera for the first time after a blood-curdling encounter with a crack News of the World surveillance team. Photographer Steve Grayson and reporter Graham Johnson had been tracking the animal’s movements for two weeks. But they suddenly came face-to-face with the monster shortly after dawn on Thursday morning. The Beast appeared close to the scene of several recent sightings.

  Steve said: “It was the scariest moment of my life.”

  His photographs show . . . etc. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks.’

  The copy wasn’t very well written because it was always harder to write falsehoods than true stories. But Ray was on the phone every two minutes with fresh queries.

  A couple of hours later Steve called back.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell, that was a nightmare.’

  ‘What?’ I said, heart in mouth, wondering what had happened. He told how Kuttner had called him in again. Then suddenly taken him out for lunch, to the brightly lit News International canteen. To rattle him up a bit.

  This time Kuttner launched into a solemn speech, to underline just how grave it all was. Saying how he and Steve had been in the business for a long time. How that made them understand how important it all was – the Beast, that is. To make sure that the paper got it right. That it was all kosher. Half this was genuine inquiry. But half of it was the old newspaper propaganda of pretending that even the stupidest of stories were very, very important.

  Reciprocating gravity, Steve replied solemnly: ‘On my life, I wouldn’t mislead you, Stuart.’ Kuttner put his hands together and looked him in the eyes: ‘So be it – well done.’ Then they shook hands to mark the momentous occasion.

  ‘Do you think he suspects?’ I asked Steve.

  ‘Course he does. You know what he’s like. But he chose his words carefully . . . In the end, we had to have close words, very, very close words, d’you know what I mean? I had to do this thing, to make sure he knew that I was being serious – that I wouldn’t bullshit him.’

  ‘What thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, forget about it, it’s nothing.’

  ‘Well, what thing? Tell me,’ I pushed, lightening up a bit because we seemed to be home and dry. ‘D’you mean like sexual favours? D’you mean you had to bend over for Kuttner to prove that it was all true?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Steve laughed. ‘It’s just a kind of Jewish thing. Between us, our thing, d’you know what I mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t but. . .’ I could tell Steve was kind of uneasy about revealing the secrets of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Especially to a gentile over the phone on the shabbat, so I laid off.

  ‘Just to say that it’s on the level. . . you know the score,’ Steve added.

  ‘Oh, I see. Wow, that’s mad. D’you mean like a secret sign?’ I said, taking the piss a bit. ‘Like a funny handshake type-of-thing. On the square and all that.’

  ‘No, fuck off. Just like something we say, it’s no big deal.’

  ‘I see. Wow! That’s fucking sound. So that swung it?’

  ‘Yes, he warmed up after that. He was OK a bit then.’

  But the cracks were beginning to appear. Steve was clutching at straws. Religious deal-breakers or otherwise, I could tell he was rattled. The thing about the £300,000 TV-spend shook him. As it did me. That was six times Steve’s annual salary and ten times mine. Steve desperately needed time-out to think everything through before his next move. As of now, the story had gone from being a knock-about Fleet Street caper in fancy dress, to knocking Princess Di off the record tables, to potential corporate fraud. World-wide corporate fraud – if they were shelling out 300 grand on ads then they’d be whacking out the pics on syndication to every paper on the planet – that was all big money. All alone, Steve needed to get out of the office hothouse, get home and get his head together.

  But on the way out, he bumped into his main story hombre Mazher Mahmood. Steve couldn’t face any more blagging – especially to his best mate on the paper. A bit of small talk then straight off. Not even mentioning the Beast. Mazher didn’t realise the dilemma raging on behind Steve’s unusually subdued manner. Steve needed to tell someone – but who?

  28

  A Night to Remember

  But no bother. If Mazher had failed to decipher the emotional semiotics, then Wapping’s very own Lois Lane certainly wasn’t going to let it lie. According to Rebekah, she was already on to Steve. Like Darth Vader, she believed she had a sixth sense. A supernatural gift for sensing when Rupert Murdoch’s interests were in danger. Later, as her stature went stratospheric, her followers spoke of a metaphysical energy field that some believed was God in action. Or at least Murdoch’s representative on earth. The Force was strong with Rebekah.

  Even so, Rebekah’s special abilities weren’t as powerful – or as consistent – as Darth Vader’s. Over the next 15 years, Rebecca’s sixth sense did not detect other forms of bad behaviour at the News of the World. According to her, she failed to pick up on crimes such as bribing coppers, mining illegal data on an industrial scale, and hacking phones – literally to death. All going on, as she looked on imperiously from the bridge. But despite her x-ray vision, on these occasions, Rebecca claimed she could see no evil. Nor hear it, in the form of tapped voicemails. Not even speak it, as part of her evidence, at those Parliamentary hearings which she got dragged along to. Saying fuck-all and tap-dancing through the raindrops. Except for the odd admission of paying policemen. After all that, despite all of her clever talk, it was apparent that her sixth sense had failed to alert her to the deadliest danger of her life – the one that would eventually bring her down and destroy her paper.

  But no such luck for Steve Grayson. On the day of reckoning, when he’d come into the office, to front one of the biggest stories in the paper’s history, unfortunately for him Rebekah’s sixth sense was beaming over Wapping like a death ray. Things started to warm up when Rebekah clocked Mazher and Steve chatting together in the newsroom late afternoon. Phones up. Curious, she rang Mazher to ask him what he thought of his best mate’s great success in snapping the Beast.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Mazher replied. ‘Do you mean the paedophile ring that Steve was investigating?’ Referring to an ongoing story that they had been working on.

 
; ‘No, not that kind of beast,’ said Rebekah. ‘I’m talking about the Beast of Bodmin Moor – the big cat that Steve got a picture of in Cornwall this week.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Maz.

  Fuck! Alarm bells. Rebekah said her heart sank. The scent of rats. Immediately, she put Maz up to ringing Steve, with a view to catching him out. However, by that time, Steve had also had time to think, taking his wife out to their favourite Indian restaurant, to mull things over. According to him, a kind of Last Supper before the balloon went up. The calm before the storm. Steve had already decided to confess. He’d concluded that there’s no way on earth he could let it go ahead – especially after learning of the £300,000 spend.

  But when Maz rang, Steve was taken by surprise. Mate or not, there was no way he was going to confess to Maz. The big heart-to-heart was for Rebekah’s ears only. Plus he needed more time to explain to his wife – and then ring me, to put me in the picture also. On the hop, Steve conceded to Maz that there were some problems with the story. But according to Maz, he also stuck to the original version of events.

  ‘Listen, I’m in the middle of a meal,’ Steve told Maz irritably, ‘I’ll call you back.’ Maz now claimed that he smelled a rat too. He also thought it was extremely odd that Steve hadn’t volunteered his scoop during the day.

  Maz rang Rebekah back. ‘Don’t run the story,’ he told her. Rebekah told Maz to ring Steve back. To put the pressure on for the full script.

  ‘Make sure that you tell him this,’ Rebekah instructed Mazher. ‘If we went ahead and printed a false story, not only would I lose my job, but everyone else involved would lose theirs as well for approving it for publication. ‘Therefore he has to say now.’

  Meanwhile, back in the Indian, Steve was telling his wife, for the first time, the whole truth about the Beast. Steve’s wife was shocked. She told him: ‘You’re in an awful position. You’re damned if you do reveal the truth and damned if you don’t.’

  Then Maz rang Steve a second time and told him the SP. ‘I think Rebekah’s on to you, mate. I think she knows that you lied.’ Phone down. Maz rang Rebekah and told her to ring Steve for the big showdown. It was 10 pm on Friday night – a tense time on a Sunday tabloid when the final stories are being knocked into shape and the pages are being laid out. At about the same time Steve was ringing her.

  ‘Isn’t it about time you told me the truth?’ Rebekah said.

  ‘I’m not saying anything,’ Steve replied. ‘All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t run the story.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘The pictures aren’t genuine.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re not genuine, in the sense that they aren’t pictures of the Beast of Bodmin Moor.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, what I’m saying is that, they are genuine pictures of a beast – but it’s a puma at Dartmoor Wildlife Park.’

  BOOM! They think it’s all over. It is now. The President is down. I repeat – the President is down. Tora! Tora! Tora! You name it – the sky had just fallen in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Steve. ‘But I’m glad it’s come out. It’s been playing on my mind heavily – the most important thing is that I didn’t want to cause you or the paper embarrassment. And I couldn’t go through with it all, knowing that you were going to spend a great deal of money on promoting the story.’

  ‘This is not a good situation,’ said Rebekah calmly.

  Then, according to her, Steve broke down in tears. According to Steve, he never cried.

  ‘It was the pressure,’ he sobbed. ‘The bullying from Ray Levine to produce a picture of the Beast.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ray insinuated that me and Graham stunt the photograph and the story.’

  But the walls had already come up. The emergency glass had been smashed. The klaxon was sounding the alarm. Dive! Dive! Dive! Rebekah was bolting for the panic room in Deep Carpet Land, letting off some light suppressing fire as she went.

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ she hit back. ‘I heard you personally speaking to Ray about the Beast. I heard you talking genuinely and seriously to him. What would be the point of pretending to Ray that the picture was genuine if he had asked you to stunt it in the first place?’

  ‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘me and Graham had agreed to stick to the story from the outset. Even if we were talking to Ray.’

  Conspiracies are hard to describe at the best of times. The dark, inscrutable shadows of human nature. So subtle that it takes years to get to the bottom of it. You can’t put your finger on it. It’s why fraud cases go on for five years – then fall apart because no one knows what the fuck is going on. Despite 5000 boxes of evidence and sixty lawyers sitting there scratching their heads.

  For Steve, it was his grassy knoll moment. Or, at least that’s how I imagined it later, when he recounted the ordeal to me, his face a contortion of white worry and sweat. Steve was pacing around the room animatedly. It reminded me of that scene in the movie JFK, in which Joe Pesci played conspirator David Ferrie. When the dark forces finally get too much for him. Steve was ranting under huge stress. ‘Oh man, why don’t you fuckin’ stop it? Shit, this is too fucking big for you . . . you know that?’ Trying to unravel the claustrophobia of unknown forces that were manipulating him. That had holocausted his material world off the planet. Steve was pacing around the room animatedly. ‘Who did the Beast? Who stunted the photographs? Fuck, man! It’s a mystery! It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fucking people who did it don’t even know! Don’t you get it?’

  But this wasn’t the movies. This was the reality of life inside a corporation so powerful that it didn’t have to whack the president. It simply told him what to do. Perfunctorily, Steve was ordered into the office. Before he left his wife, he tried to call me twice. To tip me off that the game was up. But I was engaged on the phone – Ray Levine had beaten him to it. Taking advantage of the fact that I was still totally in the dark about all of the day’s events. Sitting in my hotel room, 212 miles away, with my dick in my hand – literally. Not knowing any of this had happened. To tape me up while I’d still front it out like a fool.

  My position was simple – never fold under questioning. No matter what. Secret rendition. Abu Ghraib. Torture at the News of the World’s secret training camp in Libya. Didn’t matter what you threatened me with. I was strictly a name, rank and number merchant. Loyal to the last. Or at least I was in my own mind. Or on this occasion until at least I got the nod off Steve first. There’s no way I’d drop him in it. After extracting the verbals off Steve, Rebekah had glided over to Ray’s office.

  ‘The Beast story is a hoax,’ she’d told him.

  Ray’s first reaction was incredulity.

  ‘I simply can’t believe that’s the case,’ he told her.

  Rebekah: ‘Well, call Graham then and see what he’s got to say.’

  The conversation went something like this.

  Ray: ‘Hi Graham. It’s Ray.’

  Me: ‘Hi Ray. How’s it going?

  Ray: ‘Fine, thanks. Have you got anything to tell me about this Beast of Bodmin story?’

  Massive panic attack. Gulp! A kind of out-of-body experience.

  Me: ‘No. Why? What’s up?’

  Ray: ‘Was the picture stunted?’

  Me: ‘No.’

  Ray: ‘Well, in that case, why is Steve Grayson telling Rebekah that the picture has been faked?’

  Big gulping. World falling away.

  Me: ‘I don’t know, Ray.’

  Ray: ‘To your knowledge, are the pictures and story absolutely genuine?’

  Me: ‘Yes.’

  Phone down. Wow! Mad One. What the fuck happened there? Desperately, I tried to get hold of Steve. Speed-dialling like my life depended on it. Which it did. Engaged. Engaged. Calling him everything under the sun. Until eventually he picked up.

  ‘Fucking hell, Steve, what’s
happened?’

  ‘It’s all over, mate,’ he replied, his voice blank and heavy, as though he was on tranquillisers.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve told her everything.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, trying to suppress my bunker-style rage.

  ‘They fucking knew, mate. They fucking knew. There’s no point. It’s all got out of hand. I had no option.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, mate, what happened to bring all this on, all of a sudden?’

  Armageddon.

  ‘I don’t know. Fucking hell. Maz threw his oar in somehow and told her not to run the story.’

  ‘Fucking hell. Mazher?’

  The Angel of Doom. Death from Above. The Fifth Horseman.

  ‘What the fuck is he getting involved for?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know, mate. You know what it’s like. But then she came on. I told her about Ray.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, mate – I wish you would have told me. I’ve just had Ray on and I was holding out. Telling him flatly that it wasn’t a hoax.’

  ‘Well, I tried to call you – twice. I did. I did.’

  ‘Fucking hell, mate – why didn’t you try the hotel phone, in the room? You knew the number. We’ve been staying here for about two fucking years.’

  ‘I know. I should’ve. Fucking hell. I’m sorry. But it was too mad. My head was all over the place.’

  Memo to self: never let Steve become an international jewel thief or get involved with him in a raid on the Louvre or a heist on the Federal Reserve. You’d all end up in jail for a very long time. I was fucking livid – that was plain flaky. In the initial fury, I self-hated on myself to Woody Allen-style levels of soul-loathing for lining myself up with such a weak link. He was all over the place. What the fuck was going on with him? What the fuck was he doing? Letting the side down like that. Giving a bad account of himself. Crying and shilly-shallying all over the place like a big girl. What was he? A real man? Who could take the pain? Or a mouse that was going to squeal on his mates and start crying about it and saying this, that and the other? But that was just my anger. Trying to deflect the crisis away from myself. Steve had been put in a hideous position. What’s more he’d done the right thing. And what’s more he never fucking cried.