Graveland: A Novel (6 page)

“Meredith, hi.”

“Thanks for getting back to me, Craig.”

And then there’s that awful come-hither pussycat voice of hers.

“No problem. How’s Jimmy?”

“He’s not too bad, a little tired. I think he’s got a mild chest infection or something.” She pauses. “I wasn’t going to let him go in today.”

“Of course not.” Howley is about to say something here about calling a doctor when he remembers that Vaughan sees a doctor every single day—his own personal physician, no less, a man employed to monitor a serious blood condition Vaughan has, along with anything else that might come up.

Such as a mild chest infection.

“But listen, Craig,” Meredith says. “Jimmy wants you to come for dinner tonight. Is that okay?”

This is not a question. Or an invitation.

“Sure.”

“He just wants a quiet chat.”

Code for don’t bring Jessica.

“Of course.” Howley knows the routine here. Vaughan needs to eat early. “Seven good?”

“Perfect. We’ll see you then.”

We?

After he puts the phone down, Howley looks at his desk, at a big report on it that he has to read for an upcoming symposium he’s addressing on opportunities in the clean energy sector.

Wind turbines, solar power, shale gas.

He reaches for the report and skims through a few pages. He’s distracted, though, and his eyes glaze over. He glances out the window and replays the meeting in his head.

It was subtle, not much you could put your finger on, but he was right—the dynamic here at Oberon HQ has indeed shifted.

*   *   *

Ellen Dorsey wakes up tired. Technically, she got plenty of sleep, but it wasn’t the restorative kind, not by a long shot. It was more like eight hours of enhanced interrogation, but without any actual questions or clear notion of what her interrogators might have wanted her to reveal. It felt like one continuous garbled dream based on what she’d been doing over the previous sixteen hours—online research mainly, plus one or two brief phone calls (no more, solely because it was a Sunday) and a quick trip down to Bra on Columbus Avenue, with assiduous note taking throughout, countless pages of them scrawled on loose sheets of graph paper.

She hadn’t slept well on Saturday night, either, partly due to this heightened sense she’d had of what she might wake up to. And when she did wake up to something, to the Bob Holland killing—the Sunday morning newsfeed already engorged with it—she felt there was no route back.

She felt this was
her
story.

However irrational that may have seemed. And impractical.

And now, on Monday morning, mainly impractical.

Because as a news item it’s covered, everyone’s on it—it’s not like she’s got a jump on the story. In addition to which the new issue of
Parallax
will be out on Thursday, so anything she might come up with in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours would be too late anyway. And next month’s issue, in news-cycle terms, may as well be a century away. There’s always the online edition, but it’s not exactly a premium site for breaking news.

Even if she had any to break.

Despite all of this, Ellen feels energized.

She e-mails in her copy for the Ratt Atkinson piece and then heads out for some breakfast. Over coffee she goes through the papers, where it’s wall-to-wall Jeff and Bob. The pattern of coverage is pretty much the same everywhere, as it has been since yesterday morning—an outline of what happened, a profile of each victim, and some editorializing. The outlines are sketchy, because not much seems to be known, the level of detail in the profiles depends on which paper it is, and the editorializing is remarkably consistent—all of them reaching more or less the same, and perhaps obvious, conclusion, i.e., that Wall Street bankers are being targeted by a group of highly organized domestic terrorists. A single reference is made to a months-old report detailing intelligence-community concerns that al Qaeda operatives in Yemen may have been planning attacks against certain leading Wall Street institutions.

And beyond that, just yet, no one seems willing to go.

No mention is made of any possible connection with the Occupy movement, and very little is said about what—or
who
—might be next. In the blogosphere, predictably, things are a little different. Convenient lists are drawn up, after-the-fact manifestos are posted, and each-way conspiracy theories are formulated.

When she leaves the coffee shop, Ellen takes the subway to midtown, walks around for a bit with her earphones in, listening, thinking, and then stops by the
Parallax
offices to see Max Daitch. With the new issue almost—but not quite—put to bed, the place is fairly hectic.

“Hi, Ellen,” Ricky, the features editor, says as he passes her in the hallway. “Got the Ratt piece, thanks. Cutting it a bit fine, though, no?”

Ellen shrugs.

A deadline’s a deadline.

In Daitch’s office, there’s a meeting in progress, some minor crisis. She stands in the doorway, and waits.

Sitting at his desk, partly hidden behind piles of books and papers, Daitch looks tired, under siege. Standing in front of the desk, in a semicircle, are three young tech guys.

Two beardies, one baldy.

Lots of jargon.

Daitch doesn’t stand a chance.

The magazine’s website is fairly primitive, barely on the grid, in fact—no Twitter feed, no YouTube channel, no mobile app, no Facebook page even—and that’s more than likely the source of the problem here. Max claims to be a technophobe and a Luddite, and he probably is, but he’ll also argue in private that no one has yet worked out a convincing business model for any of this stuff. If he was going to commit the magazine to a digital future, he’d like to feel that the range of possible outcomes wasn’t limited to either financial self-harm or institutional suicide.

“Well,” he says eventually, dragging the word out, and then exhaling loudly, “I don’t know, do I?” He gets up. “
You
fucking figure it out.”

End of meeting.

Ellen steps back to let the boys pass.

Max remains standing and then waves Ellen in. “What’s the matter with me?” he says. “I’m not even forty, and I can’t get a handle on this shit.”

“You were
born
forty, Max. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I
have
to worry about it. These pricks are at the gate. It’s all very well me taking a stand, old man shakes his fist at Twitter, but how long is that tenable? Sooner or later—”

“
Get
a handle on it, Max. It’s not hard.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He sits down again. “So what’s up?”

“Jeff Gale. Bob Holland.”

“What about them?”

“In case you didn’t know, Max, someone shot them both dead over the weekend. I’m interested in who and why.”

“No shit.
”
He leans back in his chair and swivels from side to side. “What about Jane Glasser?”

This was to be Ellen’s next subject in the presidential hopefuls series, the congresswoman from West Virginia whose own staff members were recently caught on a YouTube video calling her “the she-devil.”

“Yeah, I’m on that, but … this is
news
.”

Max groans. And she knows why. It’s the same argument as before, the same argument as always.
Parallax
calls itself a news magazine, but what does that mean anymore? The phrase is almost archaic, like “fax machine” or “long-distance telephone call.” The issue that’s coming out on Thursday, for instance, has some good stuff in it—a piece on China’s new mega-cities, and an interview with Alexandre Desplat—but for the next four weeks the magazine will sit on newsstands and coffee tables across the country blithely unaffected by anything
new
that actually happens.

“I know,” Max says, “I know. We have to ramp up the online side of things. I
know
. In fact, I should call those three guys back in here right now, shouldn’t I? Give them the green light, give them the
keys
.” He pauses. “But you know what? It wouldn’t make any difference.”

Standing there in front of him, listening, Ellen is torn between going,
Yeah, yeah, Max, whatever,
and leaning across the desk to slap him in the face.

He winces. “Don’t look at me like that, Ellen. Not
you
.”

Then she feels bad. They go back a long way and have never fallen out, which for her has to be some kind of a record. “What is it, Max?”

He turns away for a moment and gazes out the window. Then he says, “Do you know who owns
Parallax
these days, Ellen?”

She’s about to answer, but hesitates.
Does
she know? Maybe not. As a contributing editor, she should know, and certainly did know at one stage—it was Wolper & Stone, and was for decades. But then Wolper was bought out by MCL Media. Wasn’t that it?

And now?

“Isn’t it MCL?”

“Sure, yeah, but who owns
them
?”

Penny dropping, she clicks her tongue. “Oh.”

Max leans forward. “Last year MCL was bought out by the Mercury Publishing Group, who is owned by Offtech … who, in turn”—he squeezes his eyes shut for a second, as though in pain—“has just been bought out by Tiberius Capital Partners.”

“Fuck.”

“Exactly.” He leans back in his swivel chair. “Let the asset stripping begin.”

“Oh, Max.” She feels even worse now. And stupid. For not having known.
Parallax
survives almost forty years as an independent organ, a supposedly fearless voice in print journalism, and then in the space of two or three years it disappears into a Russian nesting doll of corporate ownership.

“They could switch us out like a light, Ellen, any time, and they’re going to, it’s simply a matter of when.” He taps out a drumroll on the edge of his desk. “So listen to me, start asking around for work, okay?”

“Jesus.”

“I mean it.”

“Max.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Anywhere you go will be lucky to get you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But I’m just being realistic. You said it yourself, what’s happening out there is
news
. Once opened it has to be consumed immediately. Or it goes bad. Or needs to be refrigerated.” He looks up at her. “Something like that.”

When she gives it a little thought, Ellen isn’t surprised by any of this. It’s a combination of things—the current climate principally, but also the curious, gradual fact of Max’s diminished fearlessness. The Luddite thing, she believes, is part affectation and part defense mechanism. But what she really believes, and can’t satisfactorily explain, and definitely isn’t ready to articulate just yet, is that since she and Jimmy Gilroy wrote that piece on Senator John Rundle eighteen months ago, this magazine has been more or less doomed, with Max’s own doom—professionally speaking, at any rate—an unfortunate and inevitable piece of collateral damage.

She holds his gaze for what feels like a long time.

But there’s only one way forward here, and it applies to both of them.

“So,” she says eventually, “you want to hear what I’ve got?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He draws a hand across his thinning hair. “Shoot.”

Ellen pulls a chair over, sits down, and starts telling him about how she spent the weekend—about her quick visits to the two crime scenes, the first in Central Park, the second on the sidewalk outside Bra on Columbus Avenue. She describes how she met and spoke with various people at these locations, and then got follow-up texts or phone messages. She lists the different subjects she spent most of yesterday researching online, anything from algorithmic trading to real estate litigation to forensic ballistics. “And from all of which,” she says, summing up, “I did manage to extract at least one interesting and possibly relevant observation. It’s something I haven’t seen a single reference to yet, not anywhere, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before there’ll be one.” She pauses. “Or maybe not. You never know. But it
is
weird.”

“What is? What’s weird?”

“Okay, look, everyone’s saying that this is the work of terrorists, right? And maybe it is, but an assumption is also being made, and it’s based on nothing as far as I can see—”

“What assumption?”

“That these terrorists are highly organized, and professional, and that therefore the two shootings were carried out by the same people. Now maybe there’s an official narrative being put out for some reason, that’s always possible, I don’t know…”

“But?”

“Well … from talking to different people, and putting it all together,
my
understanding of it is that Jeff Gale took a clean shot to the forehead, and no one saw the perps, whereas Bob Holland had half his face and head blown off on a busy sidewalk with literally dozens of people watching.”

Max nods slowly. “Different MO.”

“Completely. The weapons were different, that’s clear from the ballistics, even to me … and the psychology of it was different. I mean, look at the whole approach.” She hunches forward a little more and lowers her voice. “So that can only mean one of two things—different perps, with no connection, or the same perps, but they’re a bunch of clowns and are making this up as they go along. Either way, what we’re being fed at the moment is clearly a line of bullshit, and this story isn’t even two days old.”

*   *   *

By the time Frank Bishop gets to work on Monday morning the feeling he’s had since he woke up—a low-lying sense of dread—has intensified considerably. It’s not a full-blown panic attack, not yet, but he suspects he’s getting there. And he tries to pin it down, to locate the starting point, the catalyst—because there usually is one, a specific moment when you see or hear or even just remember something, and it’s like a change in wind direction or a sudden shift in temperature. Was it a dream he had? He can’t remember. When you wake up feeling this shitty it usually
is
a dream, an insidious wormhole into some forgotten corner of your unconscious.

Though now that he thinks about it he actually went to bed feeling shitty, so …