“Just about there?” Colin asked.
“Wrapping now.”
“Good. We need to get this thing online.”
“Not a problem. I’m sending the final version to you now.”
“Splendid,” Colin said, then turned to Lew Macdougall, one of the last remaining copy editors. Lew was a balding little Scotsman with a pot belly and nicotine-stained fingers who now held the ludicrous title of chief producer. “Lew, give me 10 with this, then it’s yours. Get it online, then I want all of this in a special edition, one section only, 12 clear pages.”
“Just like we’re a newspaper again,” Macdougall said.
“Exactly.”
I leaned back in my chair and started to decompress as Colin scanned my story. My mind was still racing. Then I saw my colleagues turn away from me and look at a small, angry man in a brown suit surging toward us like a rat terrier with a stick up its butt. It was Thomas Putnam, the senior vice-president of whatever the fuck it was.
“Wendover!” he shouted. “What the hell is going on here?”
Colin turned toward Putnam with an expression that suggested the man was nothing more than a mildly annoying fly. “We got the detail on that Champagne story, just as you asked.”
“What? Why was I not apprised of this? I gave explicit instructions that not a word was to be published on this subject without my direct approval.”
“I was told by your secretary that you were in important meetings downtown all day. Not to be disturbed. I’m afraid we still need to cover the news.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Putnam said, his little hands curled into fists and his face twisted in an angry scowl.
Colin rose slowly from the chair beside me and stood about six inches from Putnam. He towered at least a foot over the little boss. “Is there a problem?” he asked.
“You’re goddamn right there’s a problem. Your office, now.”
The rest of the newsroom looked on with the combination of horror and glee that a public fight between bosses always created. I would have liked to have thought our colleagues were all behind us, but some looked uncertainly from one man to the other. That was what being a survivor of buyouts and layoffs did to you.
“Of course,” Colin said, showing the way to the office with a gesture of his hand, as if the whole thing was his idea. No one had asked me, but I followed them anyway. If this prick was going to try to take down my guy and my story, he was going to have to go through me first.
The two men entered Colin’s office and I squeezed in quickly behind them.
“No one invited you, Redner,” Putnam said.
Before Colin could interject, I said, “No, but I forgive your oversight. This is my story.”
Putnam scowled, then decided to save his ammunition for the main battle, not a skirmish with me.
“Did you want to see the story?” Colin said. “There have been some startling developments.”
Putnam twitched his head sideways, as if shaking off this awkward piece of information. “I don’t care what it says. It’s not going in my paper.”
Colin began to redden in that way he did on those rare occasions when he lost his temper. I expected it was the phrase “my paper” that did it. Myself, I felt an icy calm.
“I’ve just come from a meeting with the prime minister himself. Senior corporate and ownership were all in attendance. An undertaking was given to grant the industry rather generous tax credits for online advertising. This could be the thing that saves this company.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said, “but so what?”
“So you don’t get something for nothing in this town. We gave an undertaking ourselves, not to publish a word about Luc Champagne and this Chinese girl.”
“You what?” I said. “Are you telling me you sold us out?”
“No, I’m telling you that I might have saved your jobs.”
“So now we’re what, a PR arm for the government? Don’t you realize this story can bring the government down?”
“Of course I realize it. That’s the problem. We have a PM and a government that is very sympathetic to the industry’s situation. Were the government to fall, there is no guarantee that situation would persist. This story is spiked, or whatever the hell you call it. Have I made myself clear?”
“Perfectly,” Colin said. Suddenly, he seemed remarkably calm. I wondered what he had up his sleeve. Something, I hoped.
“Just so you aren’t surprised later on, you should realize that we have exclusive, top-secret documents from the CIA detailing Champagne’s career as an American spy. Oh, and Champagne threatened to kill Kris in our parking lot, then committed suicide when the police intervened. His body is still out there. TV news trucks have just arrived.”
Putnam plopped down in Colin’s chair and said, “Fuck. Now what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I am going to do one of two things. Either I’m going to publish this story or I’m going to go out front and describe the whole thing to the TV reporters live, including the conversation we just had.”
Putnam turned a sickly shade of grey. “You wouldn’t.”
“I beat two CIA agents with a tire iron already this morning, so yes, I would.”
Putnam ran a finger around the collar of his blue dress shirt, as if it had suddenly become too tight, and contemplated the end of his career. He looked as frozen and indecisive as a man on a window ledge, clinging to a tall building.
Colin didn’t wait for an answer, just stuck his head out of the office door and shouted, “Lew, print it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RANDALL DENLEY is the author of five novels, including One Dead Sister, the first in the Kris Redner series. He lives in Ottawa and is a political columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. Denley also got a look inside the world of politics as a two-time provincial election candidate.
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