by A. C. Fuller
So, three years later, he'd co-founded NUM with Innerva Shah, already a notorious hacker at the time. Their plan was simple. James would figure out what information the world needed, Innerva would figure out how to hack it, then James would leak it to diverse teams of reporters throughout the US and Europe. Over the last twelve years, they'd done more for journalism—for genuine transparency between government, business, and people—than most newspapers do in fifty.
Esperanza was back at the desk. "Mr. Stacy, Ben is ready for you."
He thanked her and headed down the narrow hallway. As he walked, he wiped his forehead and casually dried his hands on his jeans, hoping no one would notice—not that there were many people around to notice. The only staff in the office were Esperanza, who was already chuckling at something on her phone, Deirdre Bancroft, the paper's tech-guru, Eric Kaczynski, an ad guy, and Huang, who was now standing in front of him.
Even thinner than James remembered, Huang looked like he'd been up for days. He wore an old polyester suit in hideous green, and his face was sunken and leathery, like a Korean Keith Richards. He extended a cold, shaky hand. James shook it, and they stepped into a ten-by-ten office with a single window facing into the hallway. Huang slid into a chair behind his desk and lit an unfiltered Camel, then waved at a busted-up recliner across from him.
James flopped down, the backpack on his lap. "Innerva told you why I was coming, right?"
Huang took a long drag from his cigarette, as if he were trying to smoke the whole thing at once. When he exhaled, a gray cloud filled the space between them, and he tapped the ash into an empty Budweiser can sitting on his desk. "Something about an antique hard drive, right?"
James eased the drive out of his backpack, cradling it in both hands. It weighed over ten pounds and looked like a rounded case of old vinyl records enclosed in clear plastic.
"Where the hell did you get that?" Huang asked.
After setting it carefully on the desk, James slid it toward Huang. "From a guy."
"And you want to know if I can extract the data?"
"I've heard that's something you're good at."
Huang popped a piece of Nicorette gum into his mouth, then folded the foil wrapper over the tip of his half-smoked cigarette, extinguishing it in the process. He picked up the drive and turned it over in his hands. "It's IBM, obviously. Double-sided magnetics. Probably from the late sixties."
"Is it possible to extract the data?"
"It's possible, but the data could be damaged. And even if the data is fine, extracting it won't be easy. What's on it?"
"I don't know."
"But you have a hunch. It's something important, right?"
James blinked, and a drop of sweat rolled off his eyelid, down his cheek, and onto his jeans. The smoke in the room was burning his eyes and he was growing more uncomfortable by the second. "Look, can you help us or not?"
Huang set the drive back down on the desk, unwrapped and relit his cigarette, then yelled, "Hey, Bancroft! Come check this out!"
James relaxed a little when Deirdre appeared in the doorway, because she looked like the kind of tech-hipster he was used to working with. She was in her early-thirties and had a bright face and short, spiky hair. An Ewok tattoo poked out from under the sleeve of her vintage Ramones t-shirt. James tried to make eye contact with her to calm himself down, but she locked in on the drive immediately.
"Wow. Is this real?" she asked after walking over to Huang's desk and picking up the drive. "It looks like one of those cake protectors my grandma brings to family reunions."
Huang said, "Cool, right?"
Deirdre turned it over in her hands, just like Huang had. "Late sixties?"
"That's what I thought, too," Huang said, "but there aren't any markings. Looks like they've been either peeled or scratched off over time."
"Assuming it is late sixties," Deirdre said, "there can't be much data on here. Twenty megs, maybe forty."
Huang nodded. "Probably just text files."
James remained silent.
Huang took a long drag, then blew a thin stream of smoke from the side of his mouth. "James, ya gotta give me something, okay?"
James crossed his arms and pulled them in tight across his belly. He hated negotiations. He hated confrontations of any kind. "Assuming you can find a way to access the data, and assuming we won't tell you anything about it once you access it, what do you want?"
"I know you and Innerva have a lot of stories you don't use. I want one of them. And I'm not asking for anything big. Just something."
"Can you help me with the drive?"
"I can. It'll take a few days, though. I think I know a guy with the parts."
"Okay. We'll get you a story."
Huang smiled. "And if it happened to shine a negative light on one of my competitors, I wouldn't object."
Deirdre put the drive down where she'd found it. "I don't see what the big deal is," she said. "It's fifty years old. Anything of value would have been backed up decades ago."
"Possibly," James said.
Huang lit a new cigarette off the stub of the old one, then crushed the tip of the old one between his thumb and index finger. He dropped it into the beer can. "But even if it was backed up decades ago, that doesn't mean it's meant to be public."
James relaxed into his chair and smiled for the first time. "Exactly."
And that's when he heard the first shotgun blast.
No words. No footsteps. He hadn't even heard the front door open. Just a single thundering pop, followed by a thud. Esperanza's head hitting her desk. James glanced at Huang, who was already on his knees, crawling under the desk. Deirdre peeked out the door, dove into the corner, and wedged herself behind a drooping potted plant.
James just sat, dripping with sweat and frozen in fear.
The shooter was Baxter Callahan, an unemployed recluse with a long rap sheet of minor crimes—reckless driving, vandalism, a couple disorderly conduct charges—but never anything serious enough to get him more than a month in a county detention center. He was just another angry white guy in his mid-forties—living alone, except for his dog Worf and a collection of guns he thought he might one day need to protect his fringe political beliefs. He was the type of guy the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department kept an eye on. The type of guy you'd expect to snap some day and shoot up a post office or a movie theater. For some reason, he'd chosen the morning of Tuesday, June 13, 2017. And for some reason, he'd picked the offices of The Las Vegas Gazette.
After shooting Esperanza, Baxter locked the front door, scanned the lobby, peered into the empty server room, and stepped into the doorway of Huang's office. Without a word, he murdered James with a shotgun blast to the chest. James's body slumped over in the recliner as Baxter reached into his belt and brought out an old nine-millimeter.
Huang's cigarette had fallen out of his mouth and Baxter ground it into the carpet with the toe of his old work boot. Deirdre was still behind the plant, now screaming and pressing herself into the wall. Baxter shot her twice in the back, and she went still.
Just then, Huang leapt up and tried to slide across his desk toward the door. Baxter caught him with a shot that passed through his right shoulder and spun him onto his side. One large step, and Baxter was next to the desk, pressing the pistol to Huang's forehead. He fired, and the bullet exploded through Huang's skull and brain, then exited out the back, lodging bits of bone in the faux-wood desk.
Eric Kaczynski was stumbling down the hallway toward the back door when Baxter caught up to him. Kaczynski got two bullets in the back, followed by a shot to the base of his skull. Baxter stepped over the body, checked the bathroom at the rear of the office, and made his way to the back door.
As he entered the alley, he heard the sirens.
Two minutes earlier, an old man had arrived at the front door of The Gazette and spotted Esperanza's body through the glass door. He'd come to cancel his subscription because his grandkids had given him his first smartph
one for his eightieth birthday, and, as it turned out, he could use it to get all the news and weather he'd ever need. He could also use it to call 911, and that's what he'd done.
The Gazette office sat along the eastern edge of the Spring Valley neighborhood, about a mile west of The Strip, and three miles west of Captain Shonda Payton's favorite Starbucks. She'd been pouring half and half into a Venti dark roast when the call from the dispatcher had come through. So, for the last sixty seconds she'd been screaming down west Charleston Boulevard in her black and white Ford P.I. Utility Vehicle.
She'd be the first officer on the scene, but she wouldn't make it in time. Maybe Baxter intended to kill himself all along, or maybe he'd planned to escape. But by the time Captain Payton arrived in the alley behind the Payoff Plaza, Baxter was lying in a pool of his own blood, the shotgun and the nine-millimeter next to him. Like most mass shooters, he took his own life as easily as he'd taken five others. A single shot through the roof of his mouth. Nothing for Captain Payton to do but call it in, secure the building, and sip her coffee until CSI arrived.
Like I said, that's what probably happened.
But I wouldn't try to piece together the details for another twenty-four hours. I wouldn't even hear about the shooting for another eight. For me, it was just another bright summer morning in Seattle. The coffee was hot, the Internet was fast, and the office was bustling.
Then my laptop dinged with an e-mail:
Alex,
James has a story for you. Can you get to Vegas tonight?
I.S.
2
Offices of The Barker, Pioneer Square, Seattle
I read the e-mail twice, closed my laptop, and strolled out of my corner office, grinning like a fool as I surveyed the eighteenth floor. My floor. Eight-thousand square feet of digital-media domination.
Damn, it was beautiful.
When I'm about to land a massive story, every detail in life becomes a little sharper, every color a little warmer. Like the feeling after the first puff of my first cigarette of the day, back when I smoked. Or the feeling of tingling anticipation I'd get on the walk home with a date before the first time we had sex, back when I went on dates. Back when I had sex. It's like I've discovered the perfect Instagram filter to transport the picture of my life from decent to extraordinary.
Every nook and cranny of the office was bright and shiny, imbued with new meaning. There were seventy desks in neat rows, stained black, but with little irregularities in the finish so that they matched the black mesh of the ergonomic chairs. On top of each desk, a beautiful shimmering iMac. Above each desk, cables of Seahawks green and blue ran along exposed steel beams. Behind each desk, one of seventy writers and coders and social media gurus that made The Barker one of the top independent Web sites on earth. We had men and women from twenty states and six countries—every race and religion, gay and straight, jocks and geeks, vegetarians and meat eaters, old and young.
Then there was the space itself, which I'd designed with Greta when I'd moved The Barker here ten years earlier, before our daughter Rebecca died and before Greta and I began our long, slow, drift apart.
We had a full floor in the Puget Tower overlooking Pioneer Square, with windows on all sides. Four-foot window after four-foot window, each separated by six feet of wall space. We weren't into walls at The Barker, so we'd mounted high-definition flat-screens to cover the blank space. But we weren't showing Netflix. The flat-screens were streaming live video from wide-angle cameras mounted on the outside of the building. As you scanned the room, the windows blurred into the screens, and the screens blurred into the windows, creating a panoramic view from the Space Needle and the San Juan Islands in the northwest, all the way to Mount Rainier in the southeast. We even had a wall of screens along the western wall showing Pike Place Market and the ferries coming and going in the port. You could practically smell the flying fish.
I soaked it in for a full minute before walking to the other side of the office and into the office of my number two, Wesley Byrd. He was the only person I could tell about the e-mail.
"Morning, Bird."
He didn't look up, so he didn't notice my ridiculous grin. He was typing fast. Even faster than usual.
"Um, Mr. Byrd, sir, may I speak with you about an important matter concerning our shared business venture, The Barker?"
No response. He knew he could get away with ignoring me.
I'd promoted Bird to the senior editor job three years earlier, and hadn't regretted it for a second. He'd started as an intern just three years before that, and had worked like a madman ever since, making the site better and smarter without losing sight of the bottom line. And he's a great balance for me.
Bird's a millennial, I'm a Gen Xer. He came from a tech background, I came from a journalism background. He grew up in the South, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He's short, gay, and black. I'm tall, straight and white. I call him Bird, because his name is Byrd, and he looks like a bird. He's small and lightweight, with angular features and a way of darting around—with his eyes if he's sitting, or his whole body if he's not—that reminds me of a hummingbird. I've been told I look like a bear—once a svelte grizzly bear, now one of those out-of-shape pandas at the zoo. Anyway, he's almost as good as I am at figuring out what stories people want to read, but much better than I am at figuring out how to get them to read them. He knows keywords, search algorithms, metadata, and social media like I know how to read sources. We make a perfect team.
He stopped typing, scanned the screen for a minute, and tapped one more time. The laptop let out a whoosh, the departure of an e-mail.
Looking up, he said, "Morning."
"What was that e-mail?"
"Guess."
"Just tell me."
"I thought you could read me, boss."
"I can, but I need to talk to you."
"Oh c'mon, Alex."
"I really need to—"
"Guess!"
"Okay," I said, studying his face, which he was trying to make as blank as possible.
Journalists get lied to all the time. So, if you don't get good at reading people, you don't make it very far. Years ago, I took a weekend class from a former FBI agent and learned the basics. First, you study visual clues like age, body type, the presence or absence of a wedding ring, and so on. Then you establish a behavioral baseline using the subject's normal facial expressions and gestures. Do they cross their arms or close their eyes at certain times? Do they discharge nervous energy with foot tapping, fidgeting, or excessive blinking? That sort of thing. From there, you ask questions and study reactions. You watch for deviations in the baseline. It's actually easy. But the basics only take you so far. Greta taught me that you can only truly observe someone if you're deeply grounded within yourself. If you're distracted or stuck in your own head, you're going to miss something. The deeper your own peace, the more you'll notice about the world, and the person sitting across from you. That's the theory, anyway.
I stared at Bird until he couldn't hold his blank expression anymore, and his face broke out in a devious smile. I said, "You were serious while writing the e-mail. Focused, but not worried. So, it was something important but not something difficult. Not something personal, because you'd do that by text. Unless it was to your dad, but you e-mailed him last week."
"How'd you know that?" Bird asked.
"Psychic powers."
"Really. How'd you know?"
"You ate three donuts last Friday. You only do that when you're stressed about Kevin or your dad. You only stress about your dad when you e-mail him, and things with Kevin are good."
Bird gave me his screw-you-for-being-right look.
"The e-mail wasn't to anyone here," I continued. "You'd relay that message in person just to have an excuse to walk around the office and burn a dozen calories. You were typing fast, for a full minute after I came in, but judging by how long it took you to scan the e-mail when you finished typing, you'd written a few grafs before I got he
re. You wouldn't have written a response that long just to accept or reject a pitch. So, it was something ongoing. Something important. Something we've been working on for a while."
Bird took a long swig from a can of Red Bull, then smiled.
I knew I'd been right. "Movie Buzz?"
A week earlier, a Stanford student had found a full-resolution screener of International Family Media's next big kids' movie on a bar stool. The student then sold it to Movie Grind, a site we owned down in the Bay Area. The movie was being marketed as Finding Nemo set in the world of plants, so, of course, we wanted to have some fun with it. It was illegal as hell to release the film, and we had no intention of doing that. Instead, we'd planned to do a Mystery Science Theater 3000 thing. We'd have our snarkiest staff members watch the movie while doing a running commentary, then upload it to YouTube with most of the copyrighted material blurred out. Skirt the law without breaking it. Right in line with our general policy at The Barker.
"Big news," he said. "We agreed to give the movie back in exchange for an exclusive with their CEO."
"On the record?"
"Deep background."
"We're giving up the screener for a deep background interview?"
"With the CEO."
"I get that, but—"
"Alex, you always say that journalism is about tradeoffs. A chat with a guy like that could fill out all sorts of stories for those guys, point them in a hundred directions that will pay off later."
I was going to object, but I was trying to dial back my micromanaging, and Bird knew what he was doing. "Fine," I said.
"You look happy, too."
"I am. And that's why I came in here. Let's see if you can read me."
He usually could. One of the things Greta used to like about me is that I'm pretty transparent. "As good as you are at reading people," she'd say, "you're exactly as bad at hiding things." Bird knew me as well as anyone other than her, but he wasn't gonna figure out about the e-mail.
He put his elbows on the desk, cradled his chin in his hands, and pressed his fingers to his temple like was activating his psychic powers. "You won the Seahawks season ticket lottery?"