“It isn’t?”
“No.” A rueful chuckle. “He said he hates white people’s BS.”
“Yeah, well…” said Doug. He finished the sentence with a little shrug that suggested he found it a distinction without a difference.
“Yeah,” agreed Bob. “You’re probably right. I mean, he could always be a little bit out there with the race stuff. Seemed like every other column was a rant about some racist conspiracy or other. But no, I never figured he had anything like this in him. Of course, that’s not the problem right now. We need to figure out how that column ever made it into the paper.”
“We already know how that happened.” It was Lydia. She swept into the room, trailed by Denis Lassiter, the executive editor, carrying a copy of the morning’s paper. Following them came Mindy Chen, who was in charge of newsroom systems, and Hector Mendoza, director of loss prevention. Two of Hector’s men followed him in.
Lydia took her seat at the head of the table, Lassiter sat to her left, directly across from Bob. Bob couldn’t help himself. “How did it happen?” he asked.
Lydia’s glance grazed him like a bullet. She did not answer.
This was not good.
“OK, everyone,” she said, “we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Let’s get right to it.” While everyone else sat, Mendoza and his two men preferred to stand along the back wall, Mendoza with his arms folded across his chest. This was very not good.
Lydia swept the room with her gaze, allowing a beat of silence to intervene. Then she said, “Malcolm’s column was published through Bob’s computer.”
Bob felt something hot spike right in the center of his chest. “What are you talking about? Like I told Doug, I didn’t do this!”
Lydia didn’t even look at him. “I never said you did, Bob,” she told him. And then she nodded down the table. “Mindy?”
Mindy Chen cleared her throat. “We traced it back. The digital record is pretty straightforward. The document was saved on Malcolm’s computer several times yesterday morning, then filed to the opinion basket at”—she read from a legal pad on the table before her—“12:37. It was accessed from Bob’s computer yesterday at 2:15, then Doug’s at 2:32, Denis’ at 2:56, Lydia’s at 4:16.”
“That’s when Malcolm was taking the column around the newsroom,” said Bob, “trying to get one of you to overrule me. That doesn’t prove anything.”
Still Lydia did not so much as glance over. Mindy cleared her throat. “The column was accessed for the final time last night at 11:16 from Bob’s computer. It was pulled from the delete basket and stripped across the bottom of the front page.”
“But that’s crazy,” protested Bob. “At 11:16 last night, I was home, asleep.”
Lydia sighed. “Bob, we already know you didn’t do this.” He turned toward her, surprised. She nodded to Hector Mendoza. He wasn’t a tall man, maybe 5’8” or so, but his shaved bullet head and a chest the approximate width of a Buick made him intimidating. Nodding to one of his men to bring the lights down, he produced a silver disc, which he plugged into a console in the back corner of the room. He pressed a button on a control pad and a screen lowered itself across the front of the room from a recessed slot in the ceiling.
“This is security camera footage from last night,” he said. On the screen, there appeared an overhead shot of the security desk downstairs, the light muddy, the colors washed out. There was nothing for a moment, and then a figure appeared, a man, and he wore a baseball cap bearing the logo of the Chicago Bulls. He almost could have been Malcolm, but the cap made it hard to say.
Then the man glanced up, right into the camera, and there was no mistaking. Mendoza froze the image for all to see. It was, indeed, Malcolm. The time stamp said 11:02.
Bob brought a hand to his suddenly open mouth. “Malcolm?” he said. He made it a question, though it no longer was.
Lydia’s nod was tight. “Yes,” she said. “There’s another camera at the elevator on this floor. It recorded him getting off 25 seconds later. As you all know, the newsroom is nearly deserted at that hour and nobody who was here recalls seeing him. But the cameras did.”
“Also my guy on the security desk remembers him,” said Mendoza. “I woke him up to ask him not half an hour ago. He says he remembers thinking it was awful strange to see Malcolm here that time of night.”
“Malcolm also came back,” said Lydia.
“What?” said Doug.
Mendoza nodded. “Before dawn this morning. Ricky here”—he nodded toward one of his men, a thickset black kid with no discernible neck—“was on the desk at the time and he saw him. That’s also confirmed by the security cameras and by Amy Landingham, who was in early to get a jump on some reporting. I’ve checked his office. It looks like he came in, started packing up, then thought better of it. There’s a box on his desk half-filled with pictures.”
Lassiter gave a tight nod. “Consciousness of guilt, sounds like to me.”
“Has anyone tried to reach him?” asked Doug.
“I called,” said Lassiter. “No answer. Can’t say I blame him.”
“What is there to say to him anyway?” asked Doug. “Beyond ‘You’re fired,’ I mean.”
Lydia’s chuckle was bitter as charred meat. “Oh, he is the most thoroughly fired human being in the annals of American journalism. You’d better believe that.”
Bob was relieved. But he was still confused. “How did he do it?” he asked. “Malcolm’s not an administrator. And there’s no way he hacked the computer. He doesn’t even like computers.”
A glance he didn’t understand passed between Lydia and Mindy. Then Mindy said. “He didn’t hack the system. He signed on, using your password. As far as the system is concerned, you made the change.”
“But I didn’t!”
Mindy, a petite, pretty woman with the medium-brown skin of an African-American mother and the almond eyes of a Chinese-American father, regarded him patiently. “We know that,” she said, softly. “But did you ever give him your password? Or is there some way he could have gotten access to it on his own? Is it written down somewhere?”
“It’s not written anywhere,” he said. “No need. I know it by heart.”
Still patient, she brought him back to the questions he’d ignored. “Did you ever give it to him? Or is there some way he could have gotten access on his own?”
“Gotten access? No. As I said, he’s no computer genius and I don’t have it written down.”
“Did you ever give it to him?” she pressed.
Her manner was quiet and deliberate as she brought him back to the question he had twice ignored. Bob felt cornered and small. “I don’t remember,” he said finally. “I don’t think so.”
And now, finally, Lydia looked at him. “You don’t think so,” she repeated.
Not a question, but he answered it. “No,” he said.
Mindy spoke. “According to our records, you haven’t changed your password since January.”
“Maybe.” Bob was numb. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You’re supposed to change it twice a year,” said Mindy. “We send out reminders.”
In his personal life, Bob Carson was a disciplined, organized man. He prided himself on this. He paid his credit card balance in full every month. He worked out three mornings a week without fail. He ate a lean, nutritious diet. He spent every New Year’s Day cleaning and reorganizing his closet.
But for all the years he had been in the newspaper business, he had never been able to bring the same sense of order to the office. The news, he had learned very early in his career, was a sprawling, unruly, unpredictable mess, careening every single day toward the brick wall of deadlines. To manage it, sometimes you had to simply go with the flow. Things were seldom as neat and orderly as he would have liked.
That was even truer in this new era of cutbacks and shrinkage when he had more to do than ever before and fewer people to do it with. So how, he found himself wondering for a brief instant, was he
supposed to have had time to stay on top of Mindy Chen’s reminders? How, when he had meetings every half hour on the half hour, a stable of columnists to edit, candidates to interview, editorials to write, a department to run, budget requests to oversee, even as his staff was shrinking like an iceberg in a global warming movie?
No one took Mindy Chen’s reminders all that seriously, not even Mindy Chen. And everyone knew it. Sure, they changed their passwords when they remembered, when they got around to it, but it was never anyone’s top priority. It wasn’t like the passwords restricted access to nuclear secrets or financial records, for crying out loud. This was a newspaper.
He looked across at Mindy Chen. “Yes,” he said, “I know.”
“So you don’t think”—Denis was leaning forward, speaking to him in the gentle, saccharine tone you’d use with someone who’d sustained a traumatic brain injury—“you might have given him your password at some point? Maybe to make a quick fix in the column when you were too busy to do it yourself?”
Without meaning to, Bob looked up to the screen where Malcolm was still frozen, his face unreadable.
“I don’t know,” Bob heard himself say. “I guess I could have. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve edited Malcolm Toussaint’s column over the years? Anything is possible.”
“But it would not have been possible if you had just followed protocol,” insisted Denis. Bob just stared. He felt wounded and alone.
Doug Perry had finally had enough. “OK,” he said, “Bob screwed up. We get that. He gets it. But that doesn’t help us now, does it? We can’t change the past, but we have to do what we can to manage the future. What’re we going to do about this?”
Bob breathed. It felt like the first time in a month.
“We are already doing what we are going to do,” said Lydia. “The presses are rolling on a new edition that does not contain Malcolm’s offensive column. We’ve begun recalling the paper from newsstands and racks all over Cook County. As you might imagine, that’s a very difficult undertaking. Some vendors, when we explain what’s going on, are extremely reluctant to give them up. It’s not exactly ‘Dewey Defeats Truman,’ which our friends down the street have been trying to live down for sixty years, but it’s still pretty bad. The vendors think readers will see it as a collectible. They’re probably right on that. We’re already getting reports of lines forming at some of the newsstands and readers buying by the armloads. I would be surprised if we got more than a fraction of them off the street.”
“Then why are we even trying?” asked Doug. “We’ll never get this toothpaste back in the tube.”
“We’re pulling them back,” said Lydia, “because doing so sends the message, in the strongest way I know, that we do not approve or condone what Malcolm Toussaint wrote. At this point, the effort is more important than the success.”
“Must be costing us a bundle,” said Doug with a low whistle.
“I haven’t seen the numbers yet,” said Lydia, “but yes, I’m sure it’s going to cost us plenty—and not just in dollar terms.”
“Credibility,” Bob heard himself say.
“Exactly,” said Lydia.
“We should be braced for a force-five media shit storm,” said Denis. “That’s surely coming our way.”
“It’s already here,” Lydia replied. “This has already been picked up by Drudge, and I expect Romenesko and Journalisms and any other journalism blog you can name will be all over it just as fast as they can type. Local radio is talking about it and I’ve already had calls and emails from the overnight editors at Fox, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, the AP, you name it. It’s going to really crank up once the business day starts in earnest. Thank God there’s another, slightly more important story unfolding today, or it would be even worse.”
“It’s going to be big,” said Bob.
She looked at him. “In the elevator on the way up here, I got a call on my cellphone from Telemundo. Fucking Telemundo! Yes, Bob, it’s going to be ‘big.’”
He felt himself shrink again. “We’re going to have to report the story,” said Doug, coming to the rescue again.
Denis was rueful. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m thinking maybe we should give it to Amy?”
“You think?” said Doug. “You know, she’s always looked up to Malcolm.”
“He was a hero to half the newsroom, especially the kids.”
“They’re all kids now,” said Doug, mouth twisting into a smirk. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.”
“You and me both. As to Amy, it’s your call, but I don’t think she’d be compromised by hero worship.” A shrug.
Doug nodded and Denis went on. “I’ll be drafting a statement as soon as we break here. It’s important that we speak with one voice on this. There will be a newsroom-wide meeting this morning so that people can ask questions about how this happened. I’m sure there will be some venting, too. But I intend to stress that nobody gives any off-the-record interviews to any other media outlets. We’ve got to control the message.”
“You really expect them to abide by that?”
“Hope springs eternal,” said Denis.
“This, too, will pass,” said Lydia. “That needs to be the tone we take with the staff. We’re in for a very difficult next few days, there is no doubt about that. But the way we’re going to get through it is by putting our heads down and concentrating on our core mission, which is to provide world-class journalism for the people of Chicago and Cook County. If we just do that, I am convinced the rest of this will take care of itself.”
There was a silence, people looking from one to another, their faces taut with the realization of what they were in for. On the screen above, Malcolm still stared up into the camera, mouth open, eyes wide, frozen in the moment of misdeed. Then the screen went mercifully white. Mendoza ejected the disc. Lydia said, “Very well, then, thank you all for coming in so early on such short notice.”
Bob stood to join the procession leaving the room. Lydia laid a restraining touch on his wrist. “Bob, you stay. Denis and I need to talk to you a moment.”
He sat. Just like a puppy, he would later think. Doug shot him a glance as he left the room. It was the sort of look you might give a mortally wounded man.
When the rest had filed out, Lydia turned expectantly to Denis, who cleared his throat. “Bob, there’s no easy way to say this and I respect you too much to beat around the bush.”
Bob felt his stomach lurch sideways. Oh, God. It was happening. Just like that. It was actually happening.
“We have to let you go.”
Oh, God.
“Denis, you can’t be serious.”
“There’ll be a generous severance package, of course. And I want you to know, this was not an easy decision for us.”
“Not easy for you?” A bark of laughter escaped him. “Trust me, it’s a lot harder from this side of the table.”
“I know that, Bob, and I’m sorry. But try to look at it from this side of the table. You caused a security breach.”
“No, I forgot to change my password.”
“Same thing.”
“When’s the last time you changed your password, Denis?”
Lassiter drew back. His cheeks glowed. “We are not talking about me, Bob,” he said.
“Look,” said Lydia, palms up in a peace gesture, “let’s get back to the business at hand, shall we? Now as Denis said, Bob, we’re not exactly throwing you out in the cold here. There will be a very nice severance package. You’ll have to talk to HR, of course. And I’m sure the office of the general counsel will draw up some papers for you to sign, a standard nondisclosure agreement and things like that.”
“I’m not signing anything,” Bob snapped.
Denis and Lydia glanced at each other. Then Denis said, “Bob, don’t be a fool. If you don’t sign the agreement, you don’t get the money.”
Bob stared hard at his former boss. “Denis, you can shove your nondisclosure agreement up your butt.”
Again the publisher and the editor looked at each other. Bob had the sense they had not expected this from him. He swelled with a momentary sense of triumph. Then, just as suddenly, he felt himself deflating like a leaky balloon. What did it matter if he said something that stung Denis Lassiter and Lydia Barnett? The victory wasn’t simply hollow, it was meaningless. All at once, it was as if he could see everything, as if he had a God’s eye view of the entire mess. And he knew: The paper needed to be able to say it had taken some action in response to this humiliation, something that went beyond the obvious point of sacking Malcolm Toussaint. In days to come, it would announce new computer-security protocols, new quality-control measures. But for now, it needed to show that it was taking this seriously, needed to put a face on this disaster. And his was that face.
Bob heard himself breathing. He felt his meticulously constructed world falling to pieces, everything he had worked for fluttering apart in a sudden gust. He was a 59-year-old man, suddenly out of work in a dying industry and a bad economy. He had a God’s eye view of that situation, too. It wasn’t pretty.
“This is all Malcolm’s fault,” he heard himself say in a soft voice. “I’m going to kill him.” He was startled by his own words.
“Bob,” said Lydia, “you are not to have any contact with Malcolm Toussaint.”
Bob almost smiled. “Beg pardon, Lydia, but I don’t work for you anymore, so I don’t take orders from you.”
There was some small pleasure in watching those words sink in. Lydia was not a woman who was used to taking no for an answer. But for once, he thought with bitter satisfaction, she had no choice.
Bob stood. Denis Lassiter stood in response. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “Sorry for all of it. Hector will escort you out. We’ll pack up your office and someone will run your things out to your house for you.”
“Yeah,” said Bob. And here was the point, in any ordinary parting, where they would have shaken hands, wished each other good life. But this wasn’t an ordinary parting. This was getting fired. So there was an awkward moment where a handshake would have gone. Then Bob said, “Yeah,” again, just to be saying something, just to fill the empty space.
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