The Whole Truth (30 page)

“Front page! Front page! Four-inch headline, Katie. Just like we do when war’s declared. Send the story right now and I’ll call you after I read it.”

She put down the phone, hesitated for a moment, hit the send key, and the e-mail sailed to the man.
Just like when war’s declared.
She thought about Shaw’s words. What if a world war happened? She felt a tingle shoot down her spine.

Gallagher called back twenty minutes later; she could sense his drool from across the ocean.

“We’ll run this in the morning edition,” he promised. “We still have time.” He added worriedly, “No chance we’ll get scooped?”

“Lesnik won’t be talking to anybody else, if that’s what you mean. But look, Kevin, I can’t absolutely prove that my contact was actually in the building that day. It’s all circumstantial. I have no corroborating source. That’s not how I usually do things.”

“There’s no way in hell he’d have those details if he hadn’t been in there, Katie. The London police haven’t released any of that information, and believe me we’ve tried to get it. And the fact that someone killed him? I think that’s proof enough. I’ve led off stories with less, just like every other newspaper. I mean look at the Duke lacrosse team and Richard Jewell fiascoes.”

“Operative word being
fiasco
, Kevin.” Katie suddenly wasn’t that certain anymore.

“Don’t worry. Here’s to your third Pulitzer, Katie. Go have a drink on me.”

Katie flinched. “I actually have a little problem in that regard. I thought you would’ve heard.”

“I did, but so what? Get wasted. A story like this deserves it.”

Whether it was this callous remark or something embedded deeply in Katie’s soul, there was a definite pop in her brain.

“Wait a minute, Kevin!”

“What?”

“You can’t print the story, not yet.”

“Are you kidding?”

“You wait until I call back and give you the go-ahead. I have to check out something first.”

“Katie! My instincts are telling me—”

“Shut up and listen,” she screamed into the phone. “You don’t
have
instincts. It was my ass running all over the world getting shot at while people like you sat behind your nice safe desk, okay? You don’t give a shit about anything other than selling newspapers. You will hold that story until I tell you otherwise. And if you screw me, I will personally come to your house and rip your face off. And now I’m going to hang up and go have that drink you so graciously suggested, you bastard!”

She threw down the phone in disgust, took a deep breath, and tried to stop shaking. A few minutes later she was in the hotel bar steeling herself with a whiskey soda for what she was about to do. And then she had a second one. A third would have followed, but she somehow wrenched herself off the barstool after watching a guy next to her pass out in his own drool.

She walked outside, passing the Charles Dickens House. It was one of the many residences that the author had occupied in London but the only one now used as a museum. She wondered if even Dickens’s prodigious imagination could have contemplated the absolute nightmare she found herself in. Probably she would have had to look to Kafka to do it justice.

She reached a small park, sat down on a bench, took out her cell phone, and called him.

He answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”

“Can we talk?”

“I thought you made your position perfectly clear already.”

“I want to see you.”

“Why?”

“Please, Shaw. It’s important.”

The café was near King’s Cross Station. She sat outside and waited for him, watching the “bendy-buses,” as Londoners had dubbed them. They had taken the place of the double-deckers and were basically two buses joined together by a flex joint. They were not liked very much by Londoners because they often clogged the city’s narrow intersections when making a turn.

That’s my life
, thought Katie.
I’ve got a dozen bendy-buses blocking every possible direction I could take
.

She saw him before he saw her. Even with the wounded arm, he moved effortlessly, seeming to glide above the pavement like a heron over water, just waiting to strike. She rose and motioned to him.

She ordered some food; he only had coffee and a biscuit.

“Did you talk to the police?” he asked.

“Briefly. I only told them what I saw. I didn’t mention that I was there interviewing him. Not a can of worms I wanted to open. As far as they knew I was just a passerby.”

“They’ll know you lied to them when the story comes out. Which is when, by the way? I’m sure you’ve already written it.”

“I have. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

He sat back and looked expectant. “So talk.”

“I don’t want to start a World War III.”

Shaw took a sip of his coffee while Katie picked at her salad. Neither said anything for about a minute.

“What do you want to hear from me?” he said. “That you shouldn’t publish the story? I already told you that.”

“Do you really think the truth coming out will do more harm than good?”

“Yeah, I do. But let’s take a step back. We don’t know if what your story says
is
true.”

She bristled a bit. “How do you know? You haven’t read my story.”

“You didn’t let me,” he shot back. Then his tone softened. “Look, Katie, I’m sorry about what happened with Lesnik. I have no idea if he’s involved with the bad guys or not.”

“Someone gunning him down on the street probably shows he
wasn’t
involved with them. He knew the truth and so they tracked him down and killed him.”

“That theory has a few holes in it. How did they track him down? Why kill him? Because he might talk about the Russians? But it looked like they wanted him to.”

“We seem to be having the same discussion as last time.”

“Yeah, we do.” He sat back and looked everywhere except at her.

“Why did you come bursting into that hostel?”

“Let’s just say I was having a bad day.”

She gazed at him curiously.

He caught her look. “I went to see Anna’s body at the morgue.”

“Why would you do that?” she said incredulously.

“I don’t know. I felt like I had to. Then I went to her apartment and it didn’t get any better there.”

“All the memories.”

“And running into her parents, and having her father attack me.”

“Good God!”

“But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was him blaming me for what happened to Anna.”

Katie sat back, looking stunned. “Why would he do that?”

“If you see it from his perspective, it sort of makes sense. He finds out I run around the world and duke it out with men who have guns. And on top of that he’s told I’m basically a criminal. Then Anna gets shot. My fault.”

Another few seconds of silence passed. “Look, I’m going to hold off on the story. For now. Until I know more.”

“I think that’s a very wise move, Katie.” He paused. “And I appreciate it.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“My plan hasn’t changed. I’m going to find Anna’s killer.”

CHAPTER 64

N
ICOLAS CREEL WAS GROWING IMPATIENT.
He would have thought that the
Scribe
would have published the story by now. Lesnik was dead; he had told James all. She had the story of the century. The very thing she needed to take her back to the top. So what was the problem?

He had his people place certain tactful phone calls to various sources, including the
Scribe
. Creel was actually a passive investor in the newspaper and he’d been the one who’d discreetly behind the scenes orchestrated the assignment for her. There seemed to be some tension there, he had learned. She had submitted the story. But they were holding on to it for some reason. Well, he would put a stop to that.

He phoned Pender and explained the situation to his “truth manager,” as Creel liked to refer to him.

“I don’t want to be seen trying to influence the paper, so shake this story loose from them, Dick, any way you can.”

“Never fear, Mr. Creel. I have the perfect way to get it done.”

Pender hung up the phone. There was one surefire way to make a newspaper sitting on a story publish it. And that was make them think they were about to be scooped. In the age of the Internet, it was the easiest thing in the world to do.

By that evening, Pender had planted in several different but highly visible places on the Internet entries implying that a drastic turn of events regarding the London Massacre was about to be revealed.

“Startling new revelations,” one fake blog entry proclaimed. “Insider’s account to be revealed.”

Another said that “global consequences are resting on the murders in England and what really happened there and why,” and that it was connected to another recent murder in London. And that the story would be revealed in full any minute and the truth would be astonishing.

Pender had had these statements placed on sites that he knew most newspapers, including the
Scribe
, trolled hour by hour for material.

He sat back and waited for them to pull the trigger.

It didn’t take long.

Kevin Gallagher was made aware of the claims on the Web barely an hour after they’d been posted. Like other papers he had staffers posted there to snatch up items of interest. Well, what his people were dropping on his desk were not only matters of interest, they were slowly eating away at Gallagher’s stomach lining. When the higher-ups at the paper discovered that they were about to be beaten to the punch on the biggest story any of them could remember, Gallagher was told in crystal-clear terms that if the
Scribe
was scooped on this story, it would be the last thing that he ever did as an employee of the paper. And if Katie James wouldn’t agree to release the story, Gallagher had better damn well find a way to do it.

With thoughts of his career and a Pulitzer for the paper going down the tubes, Gallagher did what he felt he had to. And then he called Katie.

“We have to run the story, Katie,” he said. “We’re about to get scooped.”

“That’s impossible. No one else knows.”

“I’m looking at four different Web sources that say otherwise.”

“Kevin, we’re not publishing.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not right.”
And I gave Shaw my word.

“I’m sorry, Katie.”

“What do you mean you’re sorry?” she said sharply, her heart starting to pound.

“I didn’t call asking for your permission.”

“Kevin!”

“It’ll be in the morning edition.”

“I am going to kill you!” she screamed into the phone.

“They were going to fire me. I’ll take death over that. Sorry again, Katie, but I’m sure it’ll turn out all right.”

He clicked off and Katie sat there staring at the wall of her London flat. God, did she need a drink.

Then she stopped thinking about booze.
Shaw!

She called him, part of her hoping he wouldn’t answer, but he did.

“I have some bad news,” she began lamely.

When she’d finished, he said nothing. She said, “Shaw? Are you there?”

Then the line went dead. She did not take this as a good sign.

The next day the world learned that, according to an inside source, the killers behind the London Massacre were Russians sent there allegedly by Russian president Gorshkov. Their motive was as yet unknown. To say that this hit the earth like a molten-lava tsunami would have been the grossest of understatements.

Dozens of lawsuits were immediately filed by the victims’ families against the Russian government in British courts, even though those tribunals had no jurisdiction. A small bomb exploded outside the Russian embassy in London. Security was beefed up as protestors marched in front of the building, while the grim-faced ambassador was holed up inside burning up the phone lines to Gorshkov. On the streets of London thousands of marchers carried flags reading “Gorshkov is a murderer.” They’d been discreetly supplied by people working with Pender.

The families of the victims appeared on the BBC, all major U.S. networks, and also in several other countries. All denounced Russia’s atrocity, and their tearful faces and crushed hearts made a stunned world reach a level of apoplectic fury that had been seen very few times in history.

Stoking the inferno even more was the revelation that the inside source, Aron Lesnik, had been shot down in broad London daylight. In fact, he’d died right in front of Katie James, who’d just zoomed back to the top of the journalism world after her exclusive bombshell.

The Russians again issued stern denials of it all. And these statements made not a dent in the opinion of the world. Gorshkov was said to be so crazed that he was walking around the Kremlin carrying a gun and threatening to blow his and anybody else’s brains out at any moment.

Everyone wanted to find Katie James. As did the London police once they realized they’d been snookered by the intrepid journalist. Only she’d disappeared. There were rumors flying around that Gorshkov had ordered her killed.

Was she already dead?
A few billion people wondered.

As soon as Shaw had hung up on her Katie had packed her bag and fled. She’d found a room at a decrepit boardinghouse that accepted cash and asked no personal questions at all. She settled in—no, burrowed in was a more appropriate term. She vowed that if she survived all this, her first order of business would be to fly to the States and take a baseball bat to Kevin Gallagher’s knees.

CHAPTER 65

A
SHELL CORPORATION
owned by Nicolas Creel held title to a thousand-acre estate in Albemarle County, Virginia, within a short drive of Thomas Jefferson’s beloved University of Virginia. It was a working farm with stables of horses bred to run and then stud out. It had some cattle, some crops, and a mansion so large that it could fit several Monticellos inside of it comfortably. Creel had fl own in today and his chopper had delivered Dick Pender here to discuss and implement the next step in the plan.

The men sat at a small conference table in a room that was totally sound- and bugproof. Pender asked, “Did your wife come back with you from overseas?”