The Whole Truth (5 page)
The major television networks trotted out their enormous archives of grainy black-and-white images of nuclear bomb detonations. At least two generations of Americans for the first time saw pictures of wide-eyed 1960-s-era schoolchildren huddled under desks as though a bit of laminated wood and flimsy glass could actually protect them from a thermonuclear blast. Along with this came film footage of the communists parading their military might in front of the Kremlin. And it scared the hell out of everybody.
As one op-ed piece candidly, if tastelessly, stated, “If Moscow hits New York with nukes, it won’t just be
two
buildings falling down. It’ll be
all
of them.”
The U.S. military, the only viable counter to Moscow’s army other than perhaps China’s three-million-man machine, was beaten up, its numbers and morale down and its equipment destroyed by Iraqi sand and jerry-rigged IEDs. While it was true that the American air force and navy were far more than a match for anything the Russians could cobble together, the United States and the rest of the world were still holding their collective breath. No one knew what the crazy Russians would do next. Yet the planet did seem to know one thing.
The Evil Empire was back.
Nicolas Creel put down his newspaper and his coffee. He was presently flying seven miles above the earth on his way to a very important event. He’d been filled in on all the latest developments. Things were going along nicely. In the parlance of the perception management field, the world had firmly entered the “gripper” stage, where the majority of people embraced as true everything they were told. It was far easier to accomplish this than most would care or dare to believe. It was easy to manipulate people. Folks had been doing it pretty much forever with results that had taken the world right to the edge of destruction.
The digital images flowing across global networks right now, the faces of tens of thousands of supposedly murdered Russians looking pleadingly at the rest of humanity, was a tactical maneuver that Creel’s perception manager liked to call a “Vesuvius,” after the volcano that had erupted and destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Through sheer overwhelming bulk, it made whatever denials the government in Moscow was making seem absurd, even though it was the truth. It was part of a classic “mind manipulation maneuver,” something Creel’s man referred to as the “Triple M,” and that had worked in this instance to perfection. Not only did the Russians look like liars, but they appeared to be
incompetent
liars on top of it.
Creel looked out the window of his 767 wide-body jumbo jet. Designed to hold over 250 ordinary people, it was amazing how one could make the ordinary extraordinary by reconfiguring the aircraft to accommodate twenty privileged individuals, wrapping them in the embrace of private bedrooms with en suite baths, a gym, full-time masseuse, dining room, conference room, and even a movie theater. And at his beck and call were three leggy flight attendants in tight skirts with “Ares” on the back of their blouses. Not that Creel noticed this. Well, perhaps a bit.
He was a married man. In fact, he had been married four times and counting, the latest to a Miss World Hottie or something like that; he couldn’t exactly remember her title. It was absurd of course and wouldn’t last. He’d have some fun, though, and she’d get enough from the divorce to live comfortably. His first two wives had been elegant, smart, and opinionated and driven him absolutely insane. He now opted for the arm candy, trading in for a new model every so often with the security of an ironclad prenup seriously limiting what the lady walked away with.
He looked out the window. Down below was China, a country with more potential and more problems than any land on earth. Yes, a complex place, perhaps the most complicated of all. And what a superb place to start a war, thought Creel. Yet it was actually far more complicated than something that simple.
Nicolas Creel had never sought out the easy. He always went for the seemingly impossible.
K
ATIE JAMES GROANED
as sunlight flooded the room. Apparently the three wake-up calls had failed to stir her, even though she’d specifically asked for them, naively believing perhaps that one of them would break through the fog of her brain. She was exhausted from travel, time zone changes, and lack of sleep, and anyway, who wanted to get out of a comfy bed to go to a funeral? Groggy, she finally sat up, tugging the sheet high up around her neck. She coughed, rubbed her throat, and glanced at the clock.
Oh shit! I’m really late. Hold the body, I’m coming.
She leapt up, dashed naked into the bathroom, and in the span of ten blurred minutes was showered, dressed, and slamming the hotel room door behind her, wet hair and all. The life of the globe-trotting journalist had at least prepared her to move fast when she absolutely had to. Fine, she was attending a funeral. What she really wanted was a mojito. In fact she wanted about three of them, just to start. Then the bourbon would kick in. Then the martinis followed by the gin and tonics. She didn’t discriminate. She loved them all.
It had started with too much bar time trying to keep up with the boys covering the next big story overseas. Yet it was when she’d won her second Pulitzer, almost dying in the process, that the booze had gotten out of hand. Katie had very good reasons to drink after that near-death experience, but she kept them strictly to herself.
The alcohol had not become a career problem until her editor had noticed the slurred speech, the red eyes in the afternoon, and the occasional forgetting of places to go, stories to write, asses to kiss. He in turn had informed the managing editor, and up the line of command the lurid truth had galloped. They were all lushes themselves, having successfully extended the liquid lunch into the twenty-first century, yet the hammer had come down on her until she’d finally been reassigned to write about dead people. In Hollywood, going into rehab got you instant street cred. In journalism, she was damaged goods.
It’d been the talk of New York journalism circles for a few weeks and then everyone quit caring. Everyone except Katie.
So here she was covering a state funeral of a beloved Scottish leader who’d lived to be a hundred and four or some ridiculous age. To see a shriveled man with the face of a Shar-Pei dressed in a full kilt lying at the bottom of a gigantic coffin like a miniature doll in a massive toy chest made her want to laugh, not cry.
She’d tried AA, only because her editor had demanded it as a condition of her continued employment. He’d obviously forgotten the two Pulitzers she’d earned the damn newspaper or the wound in her left arm that had never really healed. Or the powerful stories she’d delivered, plumbing them over the years from every chaotic and wildly dangerous corner of the earth. This had been accomplished at enormous personal cost to herself, meaning, exactly, that she had no life outside of putting pen to paper. She’d been to eighty-four countries and experienced exactly one blind date, to a Pakistani who’d told her she reminded him of his favorite cow.
Bless him
. She wondered if his nose had ever healed from her fist colliding with it.
Then, three years shy of the big four-oh, she’d woken up in a room she didn’t recognize with a man she didn’t know, in a country she didn’t know how she’d gotten to, covered in what appeared to be her own sick. That had propelled her back to AA, where she’d stood up and told a roomful of strangers that she was a totally screwed-up basket case that hoped to get better. Her last drink had been six months ago. Yet every morning, afternoon, and evening the monster was there, urging her to break her pledge, take that one little sip. And here she was in Scotland, home of the world’s best whisky, or at least the most choices of it. Her lips quivered and her throat tightened at the thought.
It wasn’t until she arrived at the funeral that she realized she’d mistakenly dressed all in white, frantically grabbing whatever clothes she could find in her hotel closet. She looked like a lily amid the sea of dreary black. Katie was tall and slim, with shoulder-length blonde hair that was still wet even after hanging it outside the taxi window on the ride over. She’d been mistaken more than once for Téa Leoni. There might have been a time when Téa Leoni would have been mistaken for
her
, especially after the second Pulitzer when her picture was plastered all over the world, because she’d come seconds and inches away from losing her life getting the damn story.
One older man had suggested that she was actually a dead ringer for Shirley Eaton, the
Goldfinger
girl from the Bond film. He’d intimated that he wouldn’t mind seeing Katie in gold enamel paint and nothing else, even as his hand had slid to her rear end and squeezed tightly. She’d hurt her fist on his face too.
Hollywood of course had wanted to film her harrowing adventure in winning journalism’s top prize, and had even suggested Leoni as a potential lead to play her. Yet Katie had said no to all such offers. It was not for reasons of vanity, or privacy. It was for reasons of shame. Of guilt.
There had been someone else involved, someone who had lost his life while she earned her short-lived fame. A child. A little boy. And it had been somewhat Katie’s fault. No, perhaps mostly her fault. No one knew that part of the story. No one except Katie. That’s when the only solace she could find anywhere in life was while staring at a full glass of liquor and then pouring it down her throat, letting it burn the hell out of her, grafting scars onto her soul on the way down one highball at a time.
The little Afghan boy’s name had been Behnam. She’d been told the name meant goodness and honor. And he had possessed both qualities she’d found. Curly black hair, a smile that could melt the stoniest of hearts, full of life right up to the moment it was violently taken from him.
Her fault. He’d died. She’d lived. But not quite all of her had made it. A part of Katie had perished with the child. When she’d received the second Pulitzer her emotions had been such that no wordsmith, no matter how gifted, could have hoped to capture them in mere language. It was her night; everyone was telling her how brave, how wonderful, how talented she was. Her wounded arm bundled up in thick bandages and a brace, the really serious internal damage the bullet had done mostly hidden away in her emaciated, weakened body, had only seemed to emphasize in a dramatically visual way her unequivocal birthright to the prize. Yes, a deserving winner if ever there was one. She’d smiled, hugged them all with her one good wing, and generally given off the aura of someone perfectly at peace with herself and her exalted position in life.
She’d gone home alone that night to her apartment in New York and woken up the next morning in her underwear on her living room floor, an empty bottle of Jack on her gut, hating herself. Yes, perfectly at peace. Other than her very soul having been rent in two, she was doing fine.
K
ATIE SAT AT THE FUNERAL
and took copious notes that she would somehow fit into a story that people would read one minute and forget the next. Walking back from the gravesite she exchanged a few pleasantries with people she didn’t know. Her reputation had suffered such shipwreck that no one there recognized her other than one old codger from the
Times
who shot her a condescending smile. He was eighty-four. He should be covering the death page, she felt; it was a great way for him to check up on his contemporaries. Yet it was also very plainly true that he was here because he wanted to be. Katie was here because she had nowhere else to go.
Back in her hotel room she typed up her piece. The official bio of the departed Scot had long since been archived, as were those of all persons with even a remote connection to celebrity. Her story was simply to add atmosphere, her take on the proceedings. Yet there were only a few ways to describe the event of someone’s passing. People are sad; people cry. People go home and keep on living; the departed, out of necessity, stays behind.
Andrew MacDougal had enjoyed a long career in European politics but had been “retired” for over thirty years and thus he’d long since faded from the public eye. The whole story would encompass fewer than five hundred words and it would only be that long because the president of Katie’s newspaper was Scottish. If there was a picture attached to the story, it would no doubt show the dead man in this prime kilting years.
She shook her head at the thought of it. A nearly seven-hour flight to London and a ratty connector to Glasgow, with the same on the way back. All that for a man who’d ended his political career when Katie was still a child. And all while the news story of the millennium was playing out right before her eyes.
She of course had been following closely the events of Konstantin and all the rest. She had even sent carefully worded e-mails to her editor suggesting that perhaps since she was over this way anyway, a trip to Moscow might be worthwhile. She took it as a bad sign that he never bothered to respond.
I write about dead people while the story that could resurrect my career rolls on. Lucky, lucky me.
After she e-mailed her obit masterpiece off, Katie had the rest of the day free. Hell, she might even extend her stay. It wasn’t like she had anything to go back to. She could venture to the ancient city of Edinburgh, which was just a short hop to the east. Glasgow was Scotland’s largest city and not particularly inviting ground for a recovering alcoholic since it was filled with enticing pubs and clubs. By comparison, the capital of Edinburgh was a bit more sedate. And who knew, another hundred-year-old Scotsman worthy of obit page status might drop dead while she was here. She could bag two prone Scots with one roll of parchment. If she were lucky she might even get a bonus.
Katie made a wide detour around the hotel bar and hit the streets.
She’d never really spent much time in Scotland. Ireland was where all the news was, at least when the IRA was active. Very early in her career she’d once been caught in a crossfire in Belfast that had gone on for half a day. She’d phoned in the story while squatting behind a rusted Fiat and dodging bullets. After it was over, she’d made the bar rounds, and then taken a bath back at her hotel. It was only then that she’d found the flattened bullet stuck in her hair. It must have ricocheted off something. She’d kept that slug all these years; it was her lucky piece. Yes, she kept it, wore it around her neck in fact, despite it obviously having stopped working a long, long time ago.