Peabody laughed. “I’ve read some of Sensei’s posts,” he said. “I have to say I agree with a lot of what he says. But I’m not interested in the massive number of followers he has. I’m interested in a few who can step forward and lead.”
“And yet? Norton? He stepped forward and you — Sensei — smashed him to pieces,” Mac said. “Can you speculate why Sensei would do that? Seems like he’s what Sensei said he was looking for.”
“Norton is power-hungry. He didn’t want to lead under Sensei’s command,” Peabody said. “I’m speculating here, but my guess is Sensei didn’t see Norton as a worthy inheritor.”
“But why not? It seems to me, he was exactly what you — Sensei — would want. Or is Craig Anderson a better fit? Or Andy Malloy? Seems like you just burned all of your potential second in command possibilities,” Mac said.
Peabody laughed. “You don’t list yourself, Mac?”
“As a possible second in command for a white militia?” Mac said, shaking his head. “No, that’s not me. First, I think white supremacy is a sickness that will destroy this country. And second? Sensei isn’t strong enough for me to be second to.”
Mac shrugged; his eyes didn’t leave Sensei. “Sensei is too stupid. He doesn’t understand organizational structure. He just wasted his best men for entertainment. If I shared his values? The first thing I would do is take him out.”
Peabody flinched. “You dare!” He hissed and pulled his gun out and aimed it at Mac who just looked at him and smiled wickedly.
“I’m not working alone, Sensei,” he said. “You should have thought about that. See what I mean?”
Peabody looked behind him, where Rand was standing, his weapon pointed at the man. “Give me an excuse, Edward,” he said. “I thought you were an honorable man. When Mac said you were behind this madness, I argued against him. He said, let’s go see. And I still thought he was wrong. But there are dead men who shouldn’t be dead. There are families and men who are damaged and may never heal. So, go ahead, let’s make a bet. You try and pull the trigger? And I bet I can kill you before you can hit Mac. I’m betting he can move fast. So, go ahead. Or you can drop the weapon, and I’ll read you your rights, and we’ll do it by the book. Your choice.”
Mac watched Peabody carefully. He had his own gun out now and leveled at Peabody, but Peabody didn’t even look around to see. He dropped the weapon where he sat.
“Sorry, Rand,” Mac said.
“Yeah,” Rand said. He pulled Peabody out the chair and cuffed him. “Fucking sucks.”
Chapter 28
(3 p.m., May 30, 2014, Seattle Examiner conference room)
Mac walked into the executive conference room, uninvited. If they didn’t like it they could fire him. Because if this went south, he’d be out a job in short order anyway. He took the empty chair at the end of the table next to the door opposite the trinity: publisher, executive editor, managing editor. Steve Whitaker was to his left, next to the ME; Janet to his right next to the Exec.
“I apologize for coming in uninvited,” Mac started. “But in the last few weeks I’ve learned some things — besides the scary rise in anti-government extremists — that I thought you should know. A friend told me a newspaper has just as active a gossip grapevine as the cop shop does, and if I thought it was important to know cop gossip, I should also make it a priority to hear newsroom gossip.
“Mac,” Steve Whitaker began.
“Don’t interrupt, please,” Mac said. “So, I learned there are people who want Janet fired for last fall. Staff seems to fall into three camps. The biggest one was pro-Janet, and everyone here — and out there — knows I’m on that team. But there were two other groups that were joining up and might be her downfall —it’s an odd coalition. One group is the numbers crowd. The investigative journalists who like data-driven stories. The ones who did the big package on funding Emergency Pregnancy Care centers. And they’re disgruntled because they didn’t get a Pulitzer Prize for it. Finalist wasn’t good enough. And they blamed Janet.
“I’ll get back to the Pulitzer, but let’s look at the third group. It’s small, but there are a number of evangelical Christians who work here. And they were still unhappy with Janet because she was pro-choice and willing to say so. Even when they learned she’d put up her son for adoption rather than have an abortion after being raped as a teenager — exactly what they preach a woman should do. Even after her house was bombed, and she was kidnapped by Christian extremists — they still think she shouldn’t be news editor.”
Mac shook his head in disbelief. “But they were joining up with the data crowd to go after Janet. So, I took a look at the package more seriously,” Mac said, and he handed out his first exhibit — because that was exactly how he felt, like he was building a court case.
“First, you can ask to see judges’ comments on our entry,” he said. “I learned that the year before when my reporting was nominated, and we were a finalist selection for it too. I found the comments enlightening on my work, and so I wanted to see what the judges had to say about the Pregnancy Care package. Those are their comments. Steve, I know you’ve seen them, but I didn’t think anyone else had?”
Janet and the other men shook their heads and started reading. Steve just watched Mac as if he were a dangerous animal that ought to be caged. Mac grinned at him.
“The comments basically thought the series needed to put a human face to all the pieces not just regulate it to one sidebar. And one judge noticed, and commented, that the human-interest sidebar was the only piece written by a woman. The judge wondered why: why a woman for that article, and why only one woman?”
Mac looked at Whitaker. “You and I had a chat about objectivity once in regard to Janet. You asked me how I defined it, but I should have asked you the same question. Because based on the team you assembled, you thought only men could be objective about abortion. That somehow, men were untouched by the abortion issue.”
“Well, we can’t have one, can we?” Steve Whitaker interrupted.
“You mean to tell me you think men don’t have girlfriends who have dealt with a pregnancy scare or needed an abortion? That none of your team has ever had a sister, a friend, a daughter who needed one? Really?” Mac asked. “The right to easy, inexpensive, available birth control — including abortion — touches us all. And indifference to that issue isn’t objectivity, it’s appalling.”
“Now wait,” Steve said.
“No, you wait, because I’m not done,” Mac said, meeting Steve’s eyes. It was Steve who looked away. “I went to talk to Becky Truman, the reporter who supposedly fell apart under the stress of talking to the Planned Parenthood clinic workers and whom Janet replaced. It turns out she’s not a features writer at all, she writes for the business section. She was put on the team because the ME thought she’d be a good contributor: her specialty was non-profits and all of the paperwork they file.”
The ME nodded at that.
Mac continued, “Instead, you assigned her the personal piece that had nothing to do with her expertise and then abandoned her. And when she started getting death threats and came to you for support? You got her reassigned back to the business desk. Did you think that you’d be able to go without that piece altogether then? Instead, Janet was asked to finish it — by the ME again — and she did, because she thought the package needed a human face to it. At great personal cost, she wrote the piece.
“But here’s the thing: Janet got all the hate mail after the stories ran. I wondered then, and still do, how the right-wing Christian extremists made the link between Janet Andrews and Janet Brandt? But lately, I’ve wondered about something else: How did the extremists even know Becky was writing something about the anti-abortion movement, when the story wasn’t even out?”
The Trinity looked at each other and frowned.
“Go on Mac,” the ME said. “Did you find that out?”
“Yeah, I had a source from last fall who helped me with it,” Mac said. Timothy Brandt mi
ght be a prick, but he was a smart prick. He’d suggested they look at the boards of directors for the Pregnancy Care Centers and see what churches they attended. And then they’d done a social media search for the investigative team and newspaper leadership to find out who — if any — attended the same churches. Social media was a useful tool for a journalist.
When Tim found out Mac was doing this because Janet’s job was in jeopardy, he had done some follow-up work with some people he knew in the same church, and he pieced together what happened. Maybe Tim and Janet would develop a relationship after all, he thought.
“I’ll get back to that too,” Mac assured those seated at the table. “But there’s one other question that was bugging me, and that was: Why did any of this matter? Matter enough to try to get Janet fired over it? Or at least undermine her and lessen her credibility? I’m not a data-driven journalist, but I do remember a key principle: Follow the money.”
So, he’d ventured out into the other departments of the newspaper, and Lord, people liked to talk. Especially people in circulation and production who felt like their views weren’t listened to.
“Turns out it’s almost budget review time. And we’re hurting, just like all metro newspapers. It’s a miracle we still have things like a D.C. bureau and an investigative unit. And the talk is we aren’t going to be able to afford them for long.”
Mac looked at the Exec and nodded. “Talk says the Exec is going to take early retirement and not be replaced. The ME will take on additional responsibilities. Talk says there will be a city editor with two assistants replacing Janet’s position with her one assistant. The investigative unit will be disbanded, and people will be let go if there aren’t openings they can fill in the newsroom. And, painfully, the DC bureau will be reduced to one person, two at the most. Now Janet would be the obvious person for the city editor. It’s not all that different from what she does now. But where does that leave Steve? He sees the assistant city editor position as a demotion, even though he currently only supervises four people directly. And he doesn’t want to work for Janet, because they have very different ideas on news coverage and staffing.”
No one said anything. Janet was looking at him with a half-smile, as if she was amused at what he’d pulled together. He ignored her and went on.
“If Steve becomes city editor, Janet’s without a job because assistant would be a demotion for her. Steve, I’m told, is negotiating for the right to pick his assistant editors if he’s selected. And the talk says it won’t be Janet. It will probably be some of his current staff — which are all white men, I might point out.
And Janet won’t want to bump out someone in the D.C. bureau where she used to be when the cuts are going to be so deep there. So, she’d be out.”
“So, it behooves Steve to discredit her to make it easier for his promotion and her dismissal,” Mac said. “In fact, it makes it imperative.”
“The newsroom has to be led by someone the news staff can trust,” the ME said.
“And it is,” Mac said. “Janet has the confidence of her reporters. But back to where was the leak to the extremists? I’m sure Steve doesn’t consider his church extreme. But Steve, you confided in your men’s prayer group that you were struggling with the ramifications of this story, and you discussed it at length, and you mentioned Becky in particular.”
He looked at Steve Whitaker. “Maybe you didn’t know, or maybe you didn’t care, but one of those in that prayer group is on the board of directors of one of the Pregnancy Care Centers you were investigating. And the word was out. And I don’t know how exactly you knew what Janet’s maiden name was, but I suspect that link was made in the same prayer group.
“What I don’t get is why you took on this story in the first place? And how did you think you could look at it objectively when you have grave doubts about abortion rights and belong to a church that actively crusades against abortion from the pulpit?”
“It wasn’t Steve’s story idea,” the ME said. “It was mine. I’d been wondering for some time about the money behind it all. And the investigative team needed a good project. They haven’t been as productive as I had hoped. But I had no idea about Steve’s personal views or his connections.”
“They aren’t relevant,” Steve snapped. “What’s relevant is we’re listening to a reporter who seems to think good journalism involves blowing things up. And that’s not the kind of reportage we need at this paper. We need solid, data-based, reporting. Not the messy feelings crap that passes for news these days.”
“We need both,” Janet said, speaking for the first time. “And that’s exactly what these comments from the Pulitzer judges says. Why weren’t they shared with the rest of the editorial leadership until now?”
Steve didn’t answer her.
“Current thought in the investigative journalism world is that the best pieces come out of beat reporting,” Janet continued. “A beat reporter knows his sources, knows his topic and sees something to delve more deeply into. We would have had a stronger entry if we’d included some of the aftermath reportage, but you didn’t want to because the aftermath was so big of a thing it would have taken preeminence over your carefully crafted package.”
“None of which would have happened if it wasn’t for your personal background getting injected into news coverage,” Steve snapped.
“No,” Mac said. “None of it would have happened if your personal background hadn’t interfered with your news judgment. You were biased from the beginning, and then you outed and set up your reporters. I’ll even admit that it may not have been intentional, but who talks to a prayer group about a major investigation into a church-related organization? You set them up to fail. And I for one won’t work for an editor I can’t trust to back me up. At least twice you’ve called me into your office to question Janet’s objectivity and news judgment. I know she’s got my back. You won’t.”
“And the newspaper would be better off if it didn’t have your gonzo style of reportage,” Steve Whitaker barked. He stood up, and looked at the trinity. “You’ve got to decide what direction you want the newspaper to go: objective, data-driven reporting like it’s been known for? Or some kind of human interest, gonzo-style sensationalism? And that will determine who the newspaper hires — and fires.”
He stalked out of the room with one last glare at Mac.
The Exec sighed. “When we started the whole investigative reporter movement we didn’t see it as something separate from beat reportage, and most of it was driven by human sources. But Investigative Reporters and Editors as an organization realized that number literacy is a problem for most journalists, and so we designed a lot of training around that. And somehow the two components separated.”
“I’d be delighted to take their training camp next fall,” Mac said. “It’s in Vegas.”
Everyone grinned.
“Truth is, Mac, your blow everything up style of reporting makes me tired,” the Exec said. “But I’m an old man now. When I went down to Arizona to finish Bolles’ story? I was a young journalist, and I was blowing shit up, not mining a database. Not sure I knew what a database was.”
Mac knew the story: Don Bolles was a reporter who was murdered to prevent the investigation of mob activities in Arizona in the ‘70s. A group of reporters from across the nation took leaves of absence to go to Arizona and finish Bolles’s story. Later they formed an organization — Investigative Reporters and Editors, IRE — to keep investigative reporting alive in this country. The Exec had been one of them. It was one of the inspirational stories of modern newsgathering.
“So, I’m retiring, and the newspaper needs to find its vision for the future,” the Exec continued. He looked at the publisher. “Steve is right about that. But I don’t believe it is in dry data; we’re not the Financial Times. And we now have a second issue, because I am deeply troubled one of the key people we’re considering for leadership didn’t disclose an obvious bias and may have set his reporters up for harassment.”
“Thank you for listening to me,” Mac said sincerely. He and Janet got up to leave, and he held the door open for her to go first. He looked back at the three men. “One last thing,” he said. “It should be noted that without Janet this newspaper’s leadership becomes an all-white, all-male team. And that’s not healthy. I’d like to suggest that not only do you need Janet as city editor for her expertise, but also for her perspective as a woman. And that a priority for the assistant positions should be to hire a person of color.”
The ME nodded in agreement, and Mac left, closing the door gently.
Chapter 29
(June 14, 2014, FBI headquarters, Washington, D.C.)
Rebecca Nesbitt put a call in to Rand McDonald in Seattle. “So, are you sure you’ve got the right man?” she asked him.
“I’m sure,” he said tersely. It bothered him that he’d known Peabody and hadn’t seen it. “Why?”
“He’s still posting — Sensei is,” she informed him. “He’s losing followers, but he still posts. Is he still doing his newsletter to a select few?” It bugged her that she hadn’t been able to get past his gatekeeping to subscribe.
“Oh, yeah, the newsletter is still going out,” Rand said. She couldn’t see his smirk over the phone. “I believe this week’s theme was the importance of civic engagement and Little League baseball.”
She was silent for a moment. “Say again?”
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