The Righteous Men (2006) (6 page)

‘Thank you.’

I shall be expecting more from you, William. And I shall be following this
story with interest.’

With that, and a swish of his finely tailored grey suit, Townsend McDougal
was gone. The collective posture of the reporters who had previously been
sitting to attention now slumped. The City Life columnist opened up his top
drawer, reached for his cigarettes and headed for the fire escape.

Will had an equally instant urge. Without thinking, he dialled Beth’s
number. After the second ring, he abandoned it. A call about a triumph at work
would confirm everything she had said about him. No, he still had to do penance.

‘Now, William.’ It was Walton, his chair swivelled round to face
the common space that linked them with Woodstein and Schwarz. He was looking
upward, the lower half of his face covered with a supercilious smile. He looked
like a malevolent schoolboy.

Despite being nearly fifty years old, there was something infantile about
Terence Walton. He had the unnerving habit of playing hi-tech computer games
while he worked, rattling the keys as he zapped various alien life forms to ‘proceed
to the next level’. His fingers seemed to be in constant search of
distraction; the moment he had finished one phone call, he would be onto the
next. He was always fixing up extracurricular activities, a radio appearance
here, a well-paid lecture there. His work from Delhi had been highly praised and
he was in fairly regular demand as an expert. His book,
Terence Walton’s
India
, was credited with introducing the American public to a country they
barely knew.

Inside the building, Walton was held in slightly lower esteem. That much.
Will had picked up. The seating arrange ments alone confirmed it: a returned
foreign correspondent placed alongside the Metro staff’s newest recruit.
It was hardly star treatment. Quite what Walton had done to deserve this slight
Will did not yet know.

‘We were just discussing your front-page triumph. Good job. Of course,
there will be doubters, sceptics, who wonder what greater light this tale shed,
but I am not one of them. No, William, not me.’

‘Will. It’s Will.’

‘The executive editor seems to think it’s William. You might need
to have a word with him. Anyway, my question is this: why, I wonder, should
this little story be on the front page?

What larger social phenomenon did it expose? I fear our new editor does not
yet fully understand the sacred bottom left slot. It’s not just for
amusing or interesting vignettes. It should serve as a window onto a new world.’

‘I think it was doing that. It was correcting a stereotype about urban
life in this city. This man seemed like a sleaze ball but he was, you know,
better than that.’

‘Yes, that’s great. And well done! Tremendous job. But remember
what they say about beginner’s luck: very hard to pull off that trick
twice. I doubt even you could find too many “tales of ordinary people”—’
he was putting on a cutesy, Pollyanna-ish voice ‘—that would
interest The
New York Times
. At least not The
New York Times
I
used to work for. Once counts as an achievement, William; twice would be a
miracle.’

Will turned back to his computer, to his email inbox.
Woodstein, Amy
.
In the subject field:
Coffee?

Five minutes later Will was in the vast
Times
canteen, all but
deserted at this morning hour. He paced up and down by the glass cases which
housed
Times
merchandise: sweatshirts, baseball caps, toy models of the
old
Times
delivery trucks. Amy materialized beside him, clutching a cup
of herbal tea.

‘I just wanted to say sorry about all that just now. That’s the
downside of working here: lot of testosterone, if you know what I mean.’

‘It was fine—’

‘People are very competitive. And Terry Walton especially.’

‘I got that impression.’

‘Do you know the story with him?’

‘I know he used to be in Delhi and that he was forced to come back.’

‘They accused him of expenses fraud. They couldn’t prove it,
which is why he’s still here. But there’s certainly some trust
issues.’

‘About money, you mean?’

‘Oh no, not just about money.’ She gave a bitter chuckle.

‘What else then?’

‘Well, look, you didn’t hear this from me, OK? But my advice is
to lock up your notebooks when Terry’s around.

And talk quietly when you’re on the phone.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Terry Walton steals stories. He’s famous for it. When he was in
the Middle East they called him The Thief of Baghdad.’

Will was smiling.

‘It’s actually not that funny. There are journalists around the
world who could talk all night about the crimes of Terence Walton. Will, I’m
serious: lock away your notebooks, your documents, everything. He will read
them.’

‘So that’s why he writes like that.’

‘What?’

‘Walton has this very tiny handwriting, completely indecipherable.

That’s deliberate, isn’t it? To make sure no one reads his
notes.’

‘I’m just saying, be careful.’

When he arrived back in the newsroom he found Glenn Harden sticking a
Post-it to his screen. ‘Come up and see me some time.’

‘Ah, here you are. I have a message from National. Go west young man.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘To Seattle. Bates’s wife is in labour and National need us to
cover. Apparently they don’t have any reporters of their own, so they’ve
put out the begging bowl.’ Harden raised his voice. ‘I scraped the
bottom of the barrel and offered them Walton, but he’s come up with some
lame-assed excuse and suggested you.’ Walton was on the phone, not
listening. ‘Talk to Jennifer, she’ll fix you a flight.’

‘Thank you,’ Will stammered, a smile beginning to break on his
face. He knew this was a major break, a serious vote of confidence. Sure, it
was only cover, only temporary. But Harden would not want Metro disgraced in
the eyes of what he regarded as the Ivy League snobs over at National: he would
want to show Metro’s best face. Will gulped at the thought: that was him.

‘Oh and pack your galoshes.’

And I have shown you, Jesus Christ is the light and the
way. We have seen a miracle today …

Christian radio, along with country music, was the one staple
you could always rely on: even the remotest backwater, where there were no
other stations on the dial, would always be favoured with the word of the
gospel, beamed through the air. The mountain passes of Washington State were no
different.

He was getting closer to the flood scene, he could tell.

The roads were becoming clogged and soon he began to see the flashing lights
of emergency teams. Then, most reassuring of all, a fleet of white, liveried
satellite trucks: local TV, confirmation that he had arrived at the site of the
story.

He hooked up with a photographer who seemed to know what he was doing. For
one thing, he had all the right equipment. Not just the regulation photographer
jacket, with enough pockets to store the possessions of a nuclear family, but
industrial-strength, thigh-high Wellington boots, waterproof trousers, polar
ice-cap socks and gloves that looked as if they were custom-designed by NASA.

Will waded into the flood water after him, conscious of the chill creeping
up his trouser leg. Before long they had hitched a ride on a police dinghy and
were ferrying from submerged home to submerged home. He saw one woman winched
to safety carrying the thing she valued most: her cat. Another man was
standing, sobbing by his store front, watching a lifetime’s investment
wash away like leaves in a gutter.

A few hours of that and Will was back in the rental car, soaked and hunched
over his keyboard. ‘The people of the Northwest are used to nature’s
temper — but her latest mood swing has them reeling,’ he began,
before detailing the individual tales of woe. A couple of quotes from
officialdom and a nice closing line about the fickleness of the climate, spoken
by the man who had lost his stationery shop, and it was done.

Once back in the hotel room, he called Beth. She was already in bed. She
talked about her day; he uncoiled the full story of his sodden journey into the
flood lands. Both of them were too exhausted to restart the conversation they
had never really finished.

He flicked on the local news: pictures of the Snohomish floods; Will picked
out faces he recognized. His heart went out to the reporter doing the
live-shot: that meant he was still there.

‘Next up, more on the murder of Pat Baxter. After these messages.’
Will turned back to his computer, only half listening to the words coming out
of the TV.

The victim, fifty-five, found dead and alone in his cabin … police suspect
a botched break-in … much damage, but nothing stolen … Baxter had
been under surveillance for years … was briefly prime suspect in
Unabomber case … no family, no relatives …

Will wheeled around. One word had leapt out. Will Googled ‘Unabomber’,
getting an instant refresher course on a bizarre case which had foxed the FBI
for two decades. Someone had sent mail bombs to corporate addresses on the East
Coast, leaving behind a trail of obscure clues. Eventually, the culprit released
a ‘manifesto’, a quasi-academic tract which seemed to be the work
of a loner with a deep suspicion of technology. He also seemed to harbour a
profound loathing of government. There was a piece on The
Seattle Times
website, just posted.

That sentiment put the Unabomber in tune with an entire 1990s
movement, one in which the late Pat Baxter had been a reliable player. For this
was the age of the gun-toting militias — Americans arming themselves
against what they believed was an imminent onslaught by the US government. They
eventually spread throughout America, but they began in the Pacific Northwest.

Will started working his way through The
New York
Times
’ online archive. He was struck by the first pieces that appeared:
quite benign, depicting the militia men as ‘weekend soldiers’,
overweight, overgrown schoolboys huffing and puffing their way through war games.
But soon the tone changed.

The 1992 stand-off at Ruby Ridge, where a white supremacist lost his wife
and child in a Shootout with federal agents, like the siege at Waco, Texas a
year later, revealed a world that most Americans — certainly those in
media offices in New York — had never heard of. It saw Washington as the
centre of a shadowy, new world order, embodied by the hated United Nations,
which was determined to enslave free people everywhere. How else to explain the
mysterious black helicopters spotted over rural America? What other meaning
could there be to the numbers on the back of road signs; surely they were coded
co-ordinates that would one day help the US army herd their fellow citizens
into concentration camps?

The more Will read, the more fascinated he became. These civilian warriors
believed the craziest theories — about freemasons, the Federal Reserve,
coded messages printed on dollar bills, mysterious connections with European
banks. Some of them were so sure the jackbooted bureaucrats of the federal government
were out to get them that they had retreated into the hills, hiding in mountain
cabins in remotest Idaho or wooded Montana. They had severed their links with
the government in all its forms: they carried no drivers’ licences, they
refused to sign any official paper. Some moved, quite literally, off the grid
— generating their own power, rather than living off the national
electricity system.

And they were not playing games. On the second anniversary of the
conflagration at Waco, the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City
had shattered into dust, broken up by a mighty car bomb, killing 169 people.
The culprits turned out to be not Islamist extremists but all-American boys whose
heads had been filled with loathing of their own government.

The
Seattle Times
had an archive picture of Baxter at a rally in
Montana in 1994. Except it looked more like a trade fair, down to the stands
where exhibitors showed their wares. Baxter was pictured manning a stall that
sold MREs military-style, ‘meals ready to eat’. Apparently, he did
a fairly brisk trade in dried foods, portable tents and the like: survivalist
gear that would keep the freedom-loving American in food and shelter during the
coming confrontation. In the remote world of the anti-government movement,
Baxter was, if not a celebrity, then a fixture.

‘He was a great patriot and his death is a great blow to all those who
love liberty,’ said Bob Hill, a self-styled commandant of the Montana
militia.

Worryingly, the phone had not rung. When he finally awoke
at nine — noon New York time — he saw that his cell phone was
recording no missed calls at all. He reached for his BlackBerry; just some
unimportant email. This was not right.

He reached for his laptop, pulling it down from the table and onto the bed,
stretching its cable to breaking point. He checked the
Times
site: no
sign of his story. He clicked down to the National section: links to stories
out of Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, DC. He clicked and clicked. Here was
something, datelined Seattle. But it was only an Associated Press wire story,
written that morning. No sign of his own piece.

He phoned Beth. The hospital had to page her.

‘Hi babe, have you seen the paper today?’

‘Yes, I’m fine thank you. How kind of you to ask.’

‘Sorry, it’s just — have you got it there?’

‘Hold on.’ A long pause. ‘OK, what am I looking for?’

‘Anything by me.’

‘I looked this morning. I couldn’t see anything. I thought maybe
you were going to do more work on it today.’