Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  Still in wi-fi range, I check several papers online, including the Wall Street Journal. I’m a news junkie. No news is out concerning Olympic International. Its stock price has settled around $35. Maybe the takeover has fallen through. Maybe I was wrong about it.

  The day is starting at the Seattle Free Press: the clerks dropping newspapers before the closed doors of the editors with glass offices, the early reporting staff straggling in, phones ringing, the section chiefs preparing for the morning news meeting. One thing is sure: my column won’t be on the business department’s budget for Tuesday.

  Even the scenery won’t let me alone. The train takes a siding at Centralia to wait for a passing freight train, and along the tracks line up long buildings bearing the logo and name of Olympic International. The name shouts out from the tall structure that is the centerpiece of the plant. They’ve seen better days. The paint is fading and part of one building’s roof is gone. The place looks deserted, the parking lot and truck loading dock empty.

  I know this much: I am rusty. It has been years since I was a reporter.

  The train trundles over the Willamette River bridge and into the historic red brick station on time at eleven. I check my bag at the baggage counter and walk out front to wait for the light rail train. Portland is beautiful and compact, but to me it always feels small and stifling. That’s a prejudice from growing up in Seattle, I guess. But the MAX Green Line train shows up almost instantly—Seattle should be so lucky to have such a system. The train is new and crowded. It takes me down the transit mall to the busy center city.

  I stop by a luggage shop, then check into my favorite hotel, a lovingly restored monument on Broadway. It’s filled with memories from weekend trips here with two different lovers over the years. I’ll pay cash for one night—but I have to be careful how I handle it. Terrorists and drug dealers pay cash—cash attracts attention. So I say that I was a victim of identity theft, how it makes me prefer cash. I can be a good actor. But I have to take a chance and let them run my credit card for “incidentals.” Up in the room, I break down the small brick of federal money Amber packed for me: plenty of twenties, then hundreds. Some of it goes in the newly purchased money belt, a little in my wallet. Other bills are stuffed into the pairs of socks she packed.

  Thirty minutes later, I walk back outside. The day is clear and cool. A short walk and I pick up the MAX train to Portland State University.

  At noon, just as Amber promised, I see Megan Nyberg.

  The woman lingers uneasily near a half-circle of benches that look like concrete pallets. She’s medium-height, petite, angel face. She drops a backpack on the bench and looks around.

  I say, “Are you Tori?”

  She turns and looks me over uneasily. Her movements are of a bird about to take flight. And I am not the columnist in the suit and tie. I’m not even what Amber may have promised her. I’m just a guy in jeans and a leather jacket, topped by a ball cap. Stubble is coming in on my face, per Amber’s orders. On the other hand, I look like every third guy walking down a street in the Northwest. I introduce myself to Megan Nyberg’s older sister.

  “Are you with the FBI?,” she demands. “I want to see your identification.”

  “Let’s sit down.”

  I sit on the cool concrete. She takes a step back.

  “Agent Burke asked me to meet you. Let me see your identification.”

  I knew this was coming, but I hoped it wouldn’t come so soon. So I tell her who I am and hand her a business card.

  It’s a lousy handoff. The card flutters to the sidewalk and she’s already running away. I chase her, giving her a safe distance but keeping up. I call her name.

  “I’m working with Amber Burke. It’s okay for you to talk to me.”

  She turns on me and stands with her fists clenched. “You people in the media will stop at nothing! You think she’s already dead. You just want to see our tears!”

  I want to say, I’m not in the media—I’m in the press. It would make no difference to her. So I just let her rage. I get it. We’re eight feet apart but at least she’s stopped and is interacting with me.

  “I wish there were a different way,” I say in as soft a voice as the city noise will allow. “I respect your privacy. I only want to find your sister and we’re running out of time.” She stares at me. “I’m just a business columnist. I’m not a police reporter. I just want to help find your sister.”

  I’m also lying. I want to find Megan, but I also want the story. Those are the breaks. Tori turns away, crumples onto the damp grass, and sits with her knees folded, arms around them, rocking back and forth. “Why can’t you people just leave us alone.”

  I let her sit like that for a few moments and then gently sit next to her. It makes my knees hurt. For a long time neither of us talks. She’s not an exact copy of her sister. Her hair is parted on the side and wavy, shoulder length. She’s tan, with her skin young enough to take the exposure and still look perfect. Her eyes are big, brown, and knowing.

  ***

  “The police and the FBI want to make this somehow Megan’s fault. They want to make her some kind of junkie or slut. Why did she drop out? Why did she move to Seattle and live with her boyfriend? As if I know! As if any of us knows! I’m sure their badgering caused Ryan’s suicide just as much as you people did.”

  She looks at me as if I have running sores. Yet she sits next to me and vents. “When mom couldn’t reach Megan, she knew something was wrong. Ryan didn’t know where she was, either. You know what the police did? Nothing. Just another runaway. We’d have to wait. If dad didn’t know the deputy mayor, who knows how long we would have had to wait before the police took this seriously.”

  I ask her when Megan disappeared. October 1st—one month ago. About the same time Heather Brady was last heard from.

  “The truth is,” Tori says, “I’m three years older and Megan and I are very different. She’s dreamy and curious about the world. But mom and dad never pushed her. When she dropped out of high school and moved to Seattle, I wasn’t surprised. I knew she’d have an adventure and then get on with life.” Her voice sounded suddenly raw.

  I let the silence envelop us before I speak. “But you didn’t personally talk to the police, right?”

  She nods. There was no reason. The parents had handled it. And although Tori came home on weekends, they all thought it would be good if she stayed in school and tried to carry on normally. Nobody in the media feeding frenzy even knew she was here.

  “There are some things sisters tell each other.”

  She looks at me sharply. I keep my voice soothing.

  “Like new friends she had made?” I added, “New friends she and Ryan made.” I don’t want to hit the “sister is a slut” nerve and cause her to walk away. “Anyone named Heather?”

  She nods. “She told me about a girl named Heather. She was from Texas, I think.”

  She pushes her hair out of her face and stares up at the buildings. “I’m so worried about her,” she says. “We would talk occasionally, but we were drifting apart. She thought I was judgmental because I disapproved of some of what she was doing.”

  Now I want to back off. We’re making progress, but I don’t want to push it too hard. I will ask about her life, about Megan as a young girl—softball stuff. Cool the interview down. I don’t want things to get so intense she runs away. Maybe find some common ground between a mongrel like me and a pretty girl from Mercer Island money. Then I can ask if Megan talked about any threats, any stalkers. My body language says I have all the time in the world and there’s nothing on my mind but her. My face says, talk to me.

  She watches me, then stares at nothing, eyes straight ahead as two cops ride slowly by on bicycles. They don’t even look at us.

  Tori throws the softball herself. “Why are you a business writer?” She looks at me curiously, like an exotic creature in a zoo. I start talking about wanting to hold power accountable, and how much m
ore power is concentrated in business than in the government, but when all the youth drains out of her face, I shut up.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Tori says. “You said you wrote about business. The FBI agent sent you.” She screws up her face in thought, looks past me. “You’re not telling me everything.”

  I lie, of course, telling her that she knows everything I do. That I am just trying to help FBI Special Agent Amber Burke.

  “Have you ever seen one of those Tiffany key pendants?” she asks.

  I nod. I vaguely recall seeing a newspaper ad and thinking it was a sign that some people still had way too much money.

  “The last time I saw Megan, she had one around her neck,” Tori says, pantomiming. “And it wasn’t the cheap one. It was white gold. Later I checked, and it retails for $1,500.”

  “I couldn’t have afforded that when I was seventeen.”

  “Neither could Ryan. And you know all about this, so I don’t know why you’re playing games with me.”

  “I honestly don’t.”

  Tori mashes her lips together, struggles to get it out. “Megan was in something…deep, I don’t know. She’d started seeing someone. Someone other than Ryan.”

  “Someone who gave $1,500 gifts.”

  She nods and her eyes grow wide with tears.

  “She made me swear to keep it a secret.”

  Tori shakes her head, anticipating my question. “She never told me his name. Just Mister Big. She was a major Sex in the City fan. Mister Big. She was dazzled. An older man, I learned that much. Probably married—men are such pigs. A wealthy businessman.” She wipes her eyes and draws herself up. “So when you said you were a business writer, I thought you might know.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Monday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 3rd

  Back at my favorite hotel, I try hard not to jump to conclusions. Megan was with a rich, married man who gave her expensive presents. Troy Hardesty would fit the profile pretty well. If I were jumping. Troy had the money to have it all: multiple houses, sailboat, Maserati, wine cellar, stunning blond wife, Rainier Club membership—and a teenage mistress, perhaps? I knew all the other things from the profile I had written about Troy, one of the hedge fund managers who had not only survived the crash but was profiting from it.

  And yet—if I were jumping—Troy wouldn’t strike me as the type. He had all the goods. He was a walking Robb Report. But he didn’t really seem to enjoy it. He struck me as the least sensual of men. He loved the game of making money. And yet, he was dead under mysterious circumstances. He had asked about eleven/eleven and then I had found the numbers tattooed on Ryan’s leg. Tori didn’t react to my question about the numbers except to plead ignorance. I ignored her answer, as if those numbers didn’t really matter, watching her face, finally believing that she didn’t know their significance. But, as she said, Megan was into something deep.

  Amber answers her cell on the first ring and I give her an update. She tells me the Free Press and the Seattle Times both have stories online about me disappearing from the Bremerton ferry. I don’t want to know more. I just hope it shakes my pursuers.

  “What are you going to do next?”

  When I tell her, the phone carries a long pause.

  “Please don’t do that,” she says.

  “You told me to get the story. I can’t get it by hiding out here and surfing the Internet. I’m at a dead end on Megan. I’m going after Olympic.”

  “There’s not enough time.”

  “So you believe something’s going to happen in eleven days.”

  After a pause, Amber says, “I don’t know. Like I told you a long time ago, maybe eleven/eleven is a meme that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s a report number.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  Silence.

  “What if there’s a terrorist attack planned for November 11th? You’re the FBI, for God’s sake.”

  Her voice is calm, explaining that the bureau is an investigative agency that gathers evidence for the Department of Justice. It’s all bureaucratic and evasive. Then she reminds me of the agent in Minnesota who brought forward evidence pointing to the 9/11 attack, and how she was ignored.

  I say, “You never have told me why you were posing as a reporter.”

  “I will someday. For now, I need you to stick to the plan we agreed to.”

  “You said get the story. That’s what I’m doing. If you don’t like it, clear me to take a flight down there. I can move faster.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  I soften my voice. “No lifeline yet?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Then I’ll do it the hard way.”

  I hear her give a resigned shrug and she tells me to be careful. I wonder if she misses me.

  At a drug store, I buy toiletries, then head back to the hotel. I take a long shower, dress, and go down to the business center. Can’t help myself: I read the story on the Free Press Web site: “Columnist Missing from Ferry.” It’s written by Amber Burke, and includes too much information for my taste. “He had been told his job was being eliminated and was despondent.” And, “His sister, Jill, committed suicide by jumping from a ferry into Elliott Bay.” I’m not really paying attention to the details about my career, my awards, my scoops, the people who said “he filled up a room,” was a “star” and “made non-business readers want to read the business section.” The publisher and executive editor express their concern. My briefcase and computer were found on the boat. A police officer said it’s not unknown for people to just leave their cars on the ferry and turn up later.

  I take a quick spin through the Seattle Times site. It has an update on the Free Press troubles: How a buyer is unlikely to emerge when so many newspapers are in trouble. The mayor bemoans the potential loss of the newspaper but says there’s nothing city hall can do. No shit. Plenty of politicians and bureaucrats will join the dance on our grave. One less set of shoes kicking over their rocks to see what’s underneath.

  My real work is drudgery, but necessary. Three hours on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR Web site and I have printed out a three-inch thick stack of documents related to Olympic International. I go to the Olympic site and print two of CEO Pete Montgomery’s most recent Power Point presentations and speeches to securities analysts. There’s another rich, married man who might have an inclination toward teenage girls and an account at Tiffany. It would tie up the connection between Megan and Olympic International, neat as can be. Probably too neatly. I take the paperwork up to my room, then I go down to the bar, where I drink two martinis and eat bar food. I’m famished. The high-ceilinged room is ornate and inviting, and it seems to have a high proportion of attractive, unattached professional women. They don’t give me a second look.

  I return to the business center and spend another four hours, researching private contracting and national security. From the volume of material—credible stuff, not nut sites—the research I have time to do doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. Still, I find congressional and General Accountability Office reports, declassified Defense Department reports, think-tank papers, stories out of major newspapers and a couple of interesting Web sites run by former military men. I use the search function to go through 300-page reports in PDF form, looking for “Olympic” or “Praetorian.” I save useful URLs and email them to myself at my new Gmail account. It’s the drudgery of research you save readers from. I print out and add the relevant pages to my growing sheaf of reading material for the train. With luck, the work will save me from all the loose ends that pop out of my psyche when I’m not in the paper, when I’m not getting the daily rush of the news. Upstairs again, I shove a chair against the door, latch it, brush my teeth, put the gun under my pillow near my right hand, fall asleep early, and don’t wake up until 7:30 the next morning.

  ***

  I change into a blue shirt and tan chinos, ones with enough give in t
he hips and crotch that my lightweight .357 is virtually invisible in the pocket. So is the money belt. Broadway is cool and blustery as I walk to the Portland train station. Amtrak’s Coast Starlight departs on time, south to Los Angeles, where I can change trains to the Sunset Limited for the ride into Arizona. Trains are wonderful. Nobody wants your ID. Nobody recognizes you from Sunday’s column. I am nobody. The train takes you places you can’t see from a car or an airliner, sometimes they are breathtaking in their beauty, or simply as a reminder that places exist in America that aren’t cluttered with houses, strip malls, and cars. And you get to see pieces of the economy. I see one when we leave Portland: An impressive compound of nearly new industrial buildings with Olympic International’s logo and the name on the side: Portland Litho and Lamination Plant/Portland Distribution Center.

  Except the buildings look deserted and empty—just like the ones I saw on the train down from Seattle. While we’re still in cell range, I find the phone number for the Portland Litho and Lamination Plant of Olympic International and call it. After four rings, there’s a click and a new set of rings. “Thank you for calling Olympic International,” an automated voice drones. It’s the same recording you get if you call the headquarters in Seattle. I dig through the Olympic files because I remember seeing a press release that had mentioned that operation had won a sustainability prize just last month.

  I’m a curious guy: that’s essential for a good journalist, and its loss is one of the things that has hurt our profession. Lose your curiosity and you’re just taking up the oxygen in the newsroom. So I call the Portland Chamber of Commerce and after a few dead ends finally get a woman who knows all about this Olympic site: it closed three years ago. I call the chamber up in Centralia and ask the same question: that paper mill closed four years ago—“you people in Seattle ought to get out more,” the man says. I keep saying that I’m with the Seattle Free Press. It opens doors, always has. But I’m really just with me now. I am a truant, a nobody without the newspaper. It feels strange. Almost as strange as a company whose active facilities are actually closed. The latest annual report lists the Centralia mill among Olympic International’s operations.