Sarah leaned forward. “What about the Unabomber?”
Darcy waved a hand in dismissal. “A deranged type who hated technology and progress and had littered the landscape with letter bombs. But even he took his time and spread out his acts over months and years.”
“And the Polar Bear Bomber materialized overnight and then vanished like a ghost. I see what you mean.”
“Honestly, I doubt we’ll ever hear from the Polar Bear Bomber again . . . assuming we don’t catch him.”
Sarah cocked her head. “So what’s your next move?”
Darcy straightened and jammed her hands on her hips, feet spread apart like a determined policewoman. “I want to go talk to Catherine Englewood, the CNN field producer who gave everyone their first lead and exclusive video footage of the Polar Bear Bomber. And I want you to go with me.”
Sarah brushed sandwich crumbs from her business suit. “Done.”
They tossed their wrappers in the trash and headed out on their mission. The CNN building was only a five-minute walk. Once there, Darcy and Sarah didn’t flash their badges at the visitors’ desk in the lobby. There was no need. They only wanted to talk to the field producer, so the desk clerk called up to the newsroom. Catherine Englewood, a slim redhead who looked to be in her early twenties, showed up in the lobby a couple minutes later and walked briskly across the spacious foyer toward them.
“Darcy Wiggins, with DHS?” Catherine held out her hand, which Darcy took, then extended her hand toward Sarah. “And Sarah Worthington, with Justice?”
“Yes, we spoke by phone, after the incident at American Frontier,” Darcy said.
“I remember,” Catherine said. “And I sent you my video. I hope it was helpful.”
“It was. Thanks.” Darcy glanced around the lobby.
“I know a place,” Catherine said, as if sensing what the agent was looking for. “A quiet coffee shop that isn’t a Starbucks less than a block from here.”
Sarah had to laugh. Trying to find a seat at a Starbucks in New York anymore these days was a complete waste of time. They were always jammed, with lines out the door. And she knew Darcy’s opinion: “Why people pay five dollars for coffee in a dark, crowded, brand-name joint that never has any open seats is beyond my comprehension.”
Darcy gestured toward the door. “Lead the way.”
The shop Catherine took them to was lovely. It wasn’t actually a coffee shop. More like a combination ramen noodle and herbal tea place. But they had private wooden tables tucked away in different places, and they did have coffee as well.
“Can I get you something?” Darcy offered.
“A small coffee, black,” Catherine said.
“Anything to eat?”
She smiled. “No, but thanks. Coffee tends to be my breakfast. And lunch, for that matter. Learned the bad habit at journalism school.”
Sarah laughed. “Learned the same bad habit at Harvard Law.”
All three got small black coffees, then found a table next to the window.
“So I’ll bet you’re wondering why we’re here,” Darcy said.
Catherine tilted her head. “It crossed my mind. I figured I’d pretty much given you all at Homeland Security everything I knew about the case.”
“You did. We have no complaints there whatsoever. You were incredibly helpful. Sarah here is handling the American Frontier oil spill incident. We’ve been wondering if you can go back over that day some, what you saw, what you can remember about the Polar Bear Bomber.”
Catherine lifted a brow. “Are you any closer to finding him, by the way?”
“We’re making progress,” Darcy said. “But I’m curious. You refer to the bomber as him. Why is that, do you think? As far as I can tell from all the footage I’ve seen, the bomber was like a mascot at a college football game. No one ever saw his—or her—face.”
Catherine sat back in her chair and cradled her coffee in both hands. “You know, that’s interesting. I assumed, I guess. I mean, he was taller . . .”
“Women can be tall too,” Sarah mused.
“Yeah, they can, but this guy was taller than me. And I’m five feet nine. So that seemed to make me think he was a guy.” Catherine’s brown eyes turned thoughtful, as if she was remembering something. “But I don’t think that’s where I got the idea from. It was from something else . . . another conversation.”
Sarah’s investigative instincts kicked in. “After the bombing, you mean? Nearly all of the reporting talked about the bomber as a man. I think you even referred to him that way in one of your early reports.”
“I did,” Catherine agreed. “But no, I don’t think it was afterward. There was some reason . . .” She stared out the window for several seconds. Pedestrians streamed by in multiple directions. “I know I talked to a lot of people that day. I did a ton of interviews with folks who were there protesting.”
“So maybe it was one of those protesters?” Darcy asked. “Maybe one of them pointed out the person in the suit to you?”
Light sparked in Catherine’s eyes. “Now I remember. No, it wasn’t them. I’d been so busy with different interviews. I’d been laughing with the American Frontier press guy about the funny signs some of the protesters were carrying. He pointed out the polar bear suit and referred to the person as a guy, and I assumed from there. But there’s no way the AF press guy knew anything. He’s right out of college himself, like me. He was only there to babysit me.”
“Babysit?” Sarah asked.
“Yeah, you know.” Catherine waved her hands in the air. “Make sure I didn’t try to interview some AF employee without permission or try to take my camera inside the building. That kind of thing. He was clueless. He knew less about the oil spill situation than I did. If I remember, I spent more time telling him about what I knew than the other way around. He wasn’t very good at his job as a flack.”
“You’re pretty sure that’s where you got the idea from, then?” Darcy pressed.
Catherine paused, then stated confidently, “Yeah. But I’m telling you, he’s a nobody. There’s no way he could have known anything. We were both merely joking about whether the polar bear suit guy was sillier than the homeless lady with a Statue of Liberty hat on, or some other guy who’d come dressed up like Poseidon.”
“Poseidon?” Darcy asked.
Sarah nudged her friend. “You know, the god of the sea?”
“Oh yeah. That Poseidon. So there were lots of those folks around during that protest?’
Catherine nodded. “For sure. A number of them. It was like a party, with all the typical New York street-actor types. Happens all the time whenever there are cameras and an event. People get dressed up in wild and crazy getups and mug for the cameras. I interviewed a bunch of them myself that day, for fun. None would ever make it on the air, but I figured, why not? I had plenty of time to kill, and it’s all digital video anyway, so I can dump it at the end of the day.”
“But I’m assuming you never interviewed the guy in the polar bear suit, right?” Darcy asked. “I’m sure you’d have told us if you had.”
“Absolutely. But no, I never interviewed him. I even went back over my field notes to double-check. I kept a running tally on interviewees. That guy definitely wasn’t one of them.”
“I see.” Darcy had a glint in her eye, and Sarah knew what that meant. Darcy now had a thread to pull on and see where it might unravel. It might be something, or nothing. But it was one place to start. “So the guy from American Frontier you talked to, the one who’d pointed out the guy in the polar bear suit—can you send me his contact information?”
“Sure. I’ll email it to you first thing when I get back to the office. But seriously, he’s just a know-nothing suit. He was clueless.” She laughed. “About nearly everything.”
“I understand. I’m only trying to get a better understanding of what happened that day, that’s all. Every bit of information helps.”
Catherine put a lid on her coffee cup and prepared to lea
ve. “Didn’t I hear that they found the polar bear suit out behind some environmental activist offices?”
“We’re headed there next,” Darcy said.
“But we wanted to stop by here first,” Sarah added. “Fill out the picture. Make sure we were asking whatever questions were hanging around.”
Catherine pursed her lips. “I know what you mean. Reporters are like that too. We keep on asking questions when things don’t make sense.” Her brown eyes twinkled. “And we especially ask questions when things continue to not make sense.”
Now she’s singing our number, Sarah thought. She had to hand it to the young journalist. Catherine was a smart one, even this early in her career. And she had definitely been in the right place at the right time.
27
No one could live in New York City for long without running into a crazy—people who dressed in ridiculous getups and acted so insane that they drew notice to themselves. Some worked at it. To others it seemed to come naturally.
And that was what bugged Will. He couldn’t get his brief glimpse of the man in the polar bear suit out of his brain.
So what’s the deal? he asked himself. He saw crazies every day—on the street, in the subway. It was New York City, for heaven’s sake. But this particular crazy lingered in his thoughts. Finally, Will did one of the things he did best. He allowed his laser-like focus to zero in on the picture he remembered of the Polar Bear Bomber. Anybody who would wear a polar bear suit in a crowd—unless they were hired by a company to do so—was slightly crazy. But this guy’s wandering wasn’t just wandering. He was casual, yes, but very precise in the way he’d laid the backpack down by the building. He seemed to be going out of the way to be noticed by the cameras.
Will’s own thoughts circled back around and intensified. That’s it—he was hired by a company. Why else would a guy act the way the Polar Bear Bomber was acting—crazy but precise?
But if he was hired, who hired him? Will didn’t figure the ecological people who picketed buildings for things like oil spills could scrape up enough cash. And he knew enough about Sean’s Green Justice friends to know that wasn’t their way. They’d confront a situation head-on, not have some guy dress up in a polar bear suit.
What option did that leave? Will focused again. No one had been injured. And the location where the bomb went off was by a storehouse in the building, so nothing much was damaged.
A hard thought stopped him cold. Would Sandstrom stoop so low to get public sympathy back that he’d try something that crazy? Hiring a guy to blow up part of his building?
Just then his cell phone rang. It was Sarah. Usually she texted, unless it was something he needed to know right away. Then she called.
After concluding their short discussion—her report on the visit with Catherine Englewood—he mused, So things don’t make sense to DHS, Justice, or CNN. Maybe, just maybe, I could be right.
But he had to take a long, hard look at the facts before he shared the possibility with anyone—especially his sister, who was supposed to go after AF with everything she had.
28
THE ARCTIC OCEAN
The Russian ice cutter that was carrying Sean, Jon, and Kirk toward the oil spill had definitely seen better years. Sean could imagine what his sister would say. Something to the tune of, “You’re going to travel on that rust bucket? All the way across the Arctic Ocean? With no way to get off? Are you nuts?”
Well, yes, he was, but he’d made a career and a lot of money for the Worthingtons out of being just a little nuts. It was part of being an entrepreneur. You had to think outside the box and take some risks. Or, in his case, a lot of risks.
He laughed to himself. Over the years of growing up, Will had always tried to rein him in. But Sean wasn’t a cautious, precise Will clone, and he wasn’t about to let his older brother control him. In fact, Sean went as far in the other direction as possible. He couldn’t compete with his brother’s perfection in business and brilliant mind, but he had something Will didn’t—the ability to take phenomenal risks and go along for the ride. If he succeeded, great. If not, he simply tried another way.
So when his US contacts hadn’t worked out to get him and Jon a space on an American ship, he’d quickly contacted the Russians—a place where big American money really talked.
Now here he was, hands braced on the railing, catching up on life with Jon as they set out from the port at Reykjavík.
From the moment they’d met at the environmental symposium, the two men had hit it off. Truth was, even though Sean and Jon had vastly different careers, they were an awful lot alike. Both had older siblings who were like gods in their respective families—they’d always gotten straight As, were teacher’s pets, and were generally the types of older siblings that no one could measure up to, so why bother trying?
In Jon’s case, it was a sister who’d even been allowed to babysit him, though he was only two years younger. Jon had been stuck with almost every teacher she’d had in middle school and high school. There were a million pictures of her as an adorable baby in the family albums and “three of me, all of them with her hanging around in the background,” Jon had once said, shaking his head. “I don’t think I remember one of just me anywhere.”
Naturally, Jon’s older sister had gotten into an Ivy League school. Their parents had paid for her education. Jon, to be different, or maybe ornery, had gone in state to the University of North Carolina on a cross-country scholarship and hadn’t even bothered to ask his family to help out with anything other than some room and board. Even then he’d bailed out of the dorms after two years and paid his own way by working odd jobs and living off campus.
Sean had told Jon that Will had been the captain of every team in high school and then had captained an NCAA national championship lacrosse team at Harvard. He’d ruined any relationship Sean might have had with teachers as he came through. Everyone expected Sean to be a cookie cutter of his older brother, which he wasn’t, and that seemed to make them angry, depressed, or grumpy.
While Sean was used to it by now, it still bothered him from time to time that everyone simply paid attention to his older brother like it was Will’s birthright. He’d spent years feeling like a speed bump on the road to his older brother’s success, though he’d never mentioned that in public. But he had complained to his mom more than a few times about it. He didn’t dare complain to his dad, because he knew Bill Worthington would always back Will.
Still, Sean did have one thing that his older brother had no prayer of matching, and it turned out that Jon did too. Sean’s network of social and professional friends was deep, loyal, sophisticated, and almost endless. They would run their cars through a brick wall for him if he asked. In fact, Sean was like Kevin Bacon squared. He could access anyone on the planet with only three emails or phone calls.
As the men stood on the deck of the cutter, they fell into their usual pattern of comparing their social networking skills for fun.
“Okay, give,” Jon said, grinning. “How many contacts?” He pulled out his mobile phone and aimed it toward Sean like a weapon.
Sean took his out of his pocket and peered at it. “1,737.”
Jon’s face fell. “1,513.” Then he brightened. “How about LinkedIn? I’m at more than 1,000.”
Sean lifted his chin triumphantly. “More than 2,000.”
Jon sighed. “Twitter?”
Sean shrugged. “Only a couple thousand.”
“Yes.” Jon fist-pumped the air. “More than 30,000.”
“Unfair, man, unfair!”
Their favorite competition ended with comparing Facebook, where they were about equal.
Sean couldn’t resist a little taunting, though, as the cutter crunched its way slowly through some unexpected ice on their way toward the Arctic Circle. “You’re a New York Times reporter, for crying out loud. Aren’t you supposed to have a bunch of followers on social media? Isn’t that part of your job?”
“Yeah, kind of—though it’s
a mixed bag.”
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s still a daily newspaper,” Jon said. “The editors actually hate social media. They hate anything online, to be honest.”
“Because it’s ruined your industry?”
“Yeah, that, and . . .” Jon hesitated. “There’s this thing that all journalists have in their veins. We want to see our stories in print, not blinking away on some screen.”
Sean nodded. He’d heard the same complaint from a few of his author friends. He actually knew quite a bit about the newspaper, magazine, and publishing business. He had investments in six new digital or online news ventures right now. One was a potential game changer.
“But you don’t have a choice, do you?” he asked. “I mean, doesn’t the industry have to figure out the business model going forward if journalism is going to survive?”
“They’re trying,” Jon said. “Everyone has more viewers and readers, thanks to online. But we have a tenth of the ad revenue, which kills every business model. That’s why the publishers get crazy when you talk about online, and why the editors have this love-hate relationship with social media.” He smiled wickedly at Sean in the gathering darkness on the deck. “But I hear that some smart investors have money in some interesting, new digital aggregation companies . . .”
“You caught me.” Sean laughed. “You must have done your homework. Yeah, I know a bit about this subject.”
“Are we gonna make it—the news business, I mean?”
“You will.” He shrugged. “I mean, the New York Times will. People will always value branded content. They want to know where the information is coming from, who’s behind it. But there are other content creators that people trust as well, such as academics at universities, or scientists. The news media has competition now in the world of trusted sources of information, and it just has to get used to it.”
A Perfect Ambition Page 13