The Last Journalist (An Alex Vane Media Thriller Book 5)

by A. C. Fuller

  She tapped the bench. "Yup."

  "Did you speak to the officers?"

  "The first two who showed up wouldn't talk to me. Next two were assigned to ask me questions. I told them everything I told you. Sanchez, a woman, and a guy, uhhhh—"

  "Mallory. Those were the two who came to my place, took me to the morgue. How come they wanted me to ID the body if you told them who it was?"

  She shrugged. "They asked me if I'd ever met him, I said not in person, they said they couldn't take my word for it. Plus…you said they found your address on a piece of paper. Someone dies with a guy's address in his pocket, IDing the body's a convenient excuse to go talk to that guy, right? Likely they were checking you out. But they probably didn't think you were a serious suspect, because they told you how they got your address. Did they tell you anything else?"

  The question hit me like a jolt to the brain. "Oh my God, I'm such an idiot."

  "What?"

  I searched my memory. "One-forty-one…Drew Place…apartment…apartment thirty."

  "What the hell is that?"

  "It's the other address Burnside had listed on the piece of paper. Mine was crossed out, that one wasn't. That address belongs to someone Burnside also came to Seattle to visit."

  Chapter 6

  We took a Lyft back to Pioneer Square and rode the elevator to the full-floor office that was home to The Barker. It was late morning, and the place was bustling.

  Shannon stopped and scanned the space, unable to contain her reaction. "Now I see why you don't have any money left for real reporting." Her tone struck a balance between awe and disdain.

  The office had large windows on all sides separated by six feet of wall space mounted with huge, high-definition flat-screens. But we weren't showing Netflix. The flat-screens streamed live video from wide-angle cameras mounted outside the building. If you moved your gaze steadily around the room, the windows blurred into the screens and the screens blurred into the windows, creating a panoramic view from the Space Needle and the San Juan Islands in the northwest, all the way to Mount Rainier in the southeast. We even had screens along the western wall showing Pike Place Market and the ferries coming and going in the port. It was an extravagance, to be sure, but it made quite the impression.

  On the ride over Shannon told me why she'd created Public Occurrences. Unlike most reporters, she didn't go to school for journalism. She didn't go to college at all. She grew up in Tacoma, a once-glorious industrial city an hour from Seattle. In high school she worked for twenty bucks a story for a tiny weekly, covering local sports, PTA meetings, and the parks department. She quickly became known locally as a relentless reporter, someone with the tenacity of the generation that ran the newspaper business before the internet changed journalism. The day she graduated high school she began work at The Tacoma News Tribune, the biggest daily in the city.

  When you're known as a relentless reporter in journalism circles, you're usually known as a pain in the butt in political circles. Shannon became a pain in the butt to local politicians within months. Apparently, she pissed off the wrong people. She was vague about the details of her firing, but said she got too close to a big story, a story the newspaper was complicit in covering up. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but she moved to Seattle at nineteen, determined never to work for another large news organization. As she surveyed our wall-mounted flat-screens, ergonomic chairs, and row upon row of iMacs, the look on her face was a clear sign she bore a certain amount of contempt for them as well.

  "C'mon," I said. "My office is in back." Bird stopped us before we reached the office. "Shannon, this is Bird, senior editor here. He's my number two."

  "Hello," Shannon said cautiously.

  "Shannon runs Public Occurrences."

  "Oh yeah," Bird said. "We tried to aggregate a few of your pieces."

  "I know. I declined."

  Bird smiled. "That's cool. We offer backlinks on everything we aggregate. We could throw some serious traffic your way."

  "I do just fine."

  Bird eyed her skeptically. "Do you, though?"

  Bird knew more about the state of digital journalism than anyone at the office, certainly more than me. We make a perfect team. He's a millennial, I'm a Gen Xer. He came from a tech background, I came from journalism school. He grew up in the South, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He's short, gay, and black. I'm tall, straight, and white. I call him Bird, because his last name is Byrd, and he looks like a bird—small and lightweight, with angular features and a way of darting around the office that reminds me of a hummingbird. He knows keywords, search algorithms, metadata, and social media like I know how to read sources. My guess was he could recite the web traffic of most news outlets in the country, including Shannon's.

  She was defensive about her site. The look on her face broadcast that she wanted nothing to do with Bird. She glanced at me impatiently, then glared at Bird. "Not all of us are willing to sell our souls for traffic and ad revenue." She turned to me. "Can we get on with this?"

  "Sure." I headed for my office in the back corner.

  We sat behind my desk. On my laptop I pulled up a public records search service and entered the address. One-forty-one Drew Place, apartment thirty.

  As I hit "Enter," I had no idea what to expect. The search would give us the legal owner of the apartment, which could either be an individual or a company. It could have been the home of another journalist, or an old friend of Burnside's from college. It was quite possible the house was owned by someone married to the person Burnside came to see. It was even possible that the address had nothing to do with Burnside's research.

  The name popped up after a few seconds, and that's when everything changed. It was a name I knew all too well. A name from the past. The last person on earth I wanted anything to do with.

  Dewey Gunstott.

  Hands shaking, I pressed the "Call" button on the intercom. "Mia, do you have a sec?"

  Shannon's eyes were on me, but she didn't speak. She knew something of my past with Gunstott and was as hesitant to bring it up as I was to face it.

  A moment later, Mia entered the room. "What's up?"

  "Hey there, Mia. This is Shannon Brass. Can you try Dewey Gunstott for us? His office, I mean. Try his office and see if…see if we can, I don't know, get in to see him today. Or tomorrow."

  Mia stepped toward the desk. "Alex, are you alright?"

  "Yes, fine. Can you give his people a call?"

  Mia had been our office manager for the last few years. She took care of a million things that made the office run smoothly and her presence had allowed Bird and me to expand the site rapidly, mixing in some serious investigative work with the clickbait listicles that made money. She had auburn hair and was short enough that she could disappear behind me if she wanted, but had a quiet, commanding presence when she needed it.

  She knew me well. She knew I wasn't fine. "Alex? What's going on?"

  "It's nothing." I forced a smile. "Just try to get Gunstott?"

  "I'll try." She studied me for another moment, then turned and left.

  I placed both hands on the desk, hoping to conceal how shaky I was. Inside, I'd panicked when I saw the name flash on the screen. But I was trying to play it cool.

  "Mia will…she'll try to get Gunstott and then we can talk to him about Burnside. I'm sure it's—"

  "Alex," Shannon interrupted, "I read the article you wrote about him. I know what happened."

  From the way she looked at me, she seemed to really know. I looked at the floor. "Nobody read that article."

  "I did." From the corner of my eye, I watched her stand and walk to the window. "Every word. Twice."

  I exhaled loudly and she turned back to me. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "I'm thinking a lot of things and, if you want the truth, I'm trying not to freak out."

  "You are freaking out, and that's not irrational. Alex, this is a CIA thing." She said it with certainty. More certainty than was w
arranted, given the facts.

  About two years ago, my friend and former partner James Stacy was murdered in what at first appeared to be a random mass shooting. Turned out he'd been killed by a team of rogue extra-governmental security forces who were really after a fifty-year-old disc pack, an early version of a hard drive. Why did they want to destroy a fifty-year-old hard drive? Because it contained proof that Dewey Gunstott had been a CIA asset. And why did that matter? Because Dewey Gunstott was the CEO and Chairman of Family Media Holdings, Inc., one of the most powerful media companies on earth.

  At the time, I'd assumed Gunstott himself had been behind the order to destroy the hard drive, the order that had gotten my friend murdered. But when I confronted him about it, he was genuinely clueless. It turned out that Gunstott was just a businessman—the beneficiary of a system designed to protect men like him from the consequences of their pasts, all in the name of "security." The people who'd killed James were part of the intelligence-industrial complex following up on a loose end.

  At The Barker, we broke the story in a number of ways. Bird and his team created a series of listicles about Gunstott's nefarious deals with Chinese media companies and the effect they'd have on the U.S. movie business. I wrote a 9,000-word narrative piece on my ordeal, including Gunstott's connections. Guess which one got more clicks.

  In any case, had Burnside wanted to speak with Gunstott, it could be about a number of things. Burnside had written his share of stories that involved the CIA, but Gunstott had his paws in news, movies, TV, video games, and more. He was a billionaire. Burnside could have wanted to meet with him about a hundred different topics.

  But none of that meant that Burnside’s death had anything to do with the CIA, as Shannon had just suggested. "Could be a lot of things." My voice barely rose above a whisper. "Besides, if you read my article like you said you did, you know it wasn't actually the CIA that killed James. It wasn't the CIA that locked me in a box and tortured me."

  The word 'torture' still made me wince. I'd done a year of therapy and worked hard to overcome the panic attacks, but I couldn't say the word without faint wisps of the experience rising up from wherever bodily memories are stored.

  Shannon returned to the desk and sat next to me. "I'm sorry. I know what happened."

  "You don't know everything."

  The intercom buzzed. "Alex, it's Mia. I got his secretary. Gunstott’s not taking visitors. Apparently he had a major stroke last week and was just released from Virginia Mason Hospital."

  "Thanks. Keep trying, okay. Twice a day until they say yes or take out a restraining order against The Barker. Try dropping the name Holden Burnside. We think Gunstott was supposed to meet with him." I faced Shannon. "So I guess now we just wait until we hear back."

  "Hell no," she said. "We start digging."

  Chapter 7

  I guess the quad-shot mocha had kicked in because Shannon found a new gear after Gunstott's people declined our interview request. "If Gunstott won't speak with us, let's try to figure out why Burnside would have wanted to speak with him."

  "Could be a million reasons."

  She shoved me aside and took control of my laptop. "We need to find where their paths may have crossed."

  She started with a simple search for "Holden Burnside + Dewey Gunstott."

  Articles popped up from mainstream publications that mentioned both of their names. In each, their connection turned out to be the article itself, nothing more. One was a list called the "Top-100 Influencers in Media." Another was a list of attendees of a Hollywood movie premiere for a film about The Washington Post. A third was a think-piece about journalism in the twentieth century in which both men were quoted by the writers, but not on the same subject.

  Sick of watching over Shannon's shoulder, I opened the browser on my phone and pulled up Gunstott's official bio. I already knew the basics.

  Gunstott, now ninety-two years old, grew up just outside Louisville, Kentucky, then attended an elite Connecticut boarding school and then Harvard. He'd flown Douglas A-26 Invaders in the Pacific and had returned home in 1947 to work at the Louisville Courier-Journal. From there, he rose quickly in the media world without doing much writing or reporting. That's because the job was a front. You see, after the war, the CIA was doing its best to ensure that some of their friends rose in the ranks of the U.S. media, a program called Operation Mockingbird. Dewey Gunstott had been an early piece of this operation.

  Three years after returning from the war, he was back on the east coast, moving from job to job at CBS, first in marketing and communications, later in programming. He ascended rapidly for about ten years before jumping ship to become the CEO of FMH. He'd been CEO for over forty years and had grown the company into a behemoth. Some called FMH the poor man's Disney, which was ironic because Gunstott was anything but poor.

  I knew Burnside's bio inside and out, and I thought by studying Gunstott's, I might find places they'd worked together that might not appear in a simple Google search. Shannon would be more likely to find recent connections in her search, and I wanted to find out if Gunstott had been Burnside's editor at some point, or had ever managed or employed him.

  Burnside had been at one paper—The New York Times—his entire career. Gunstott had no connection to The Times. In the late-1980s and 1990s, Burnside appeared regularly on cable news, but he'd never been employed by CBS, where Gunstott had spent much of his career. The closest connection I could find was that in 1989 Burnside had been interviewed at length on the CBS program 60 Minutes about that decade in politics, a decade in which he'd broken a few of the biggest stories. But that was ten years after Gunstott left for FMH. I saved the link to the video, just in case, then searched a list of all Burnside's books. None had been published by FMH or its subsidiaries.

  "Here's something."

  Shannon's voice made me look up from the phone. "What?"

  "So, I'm on the fifth page of Google results. I'm in this article about the 1988 Democratic primary elections. It's a retrospective thing written during the 2008 Democratic primary. You know, a 'Twenty Years Later' thing."

  "What's the connection?"

  "It's weird. It's like a six-thousand-word piece…Newsweek…and…hold on I'll read you a part from the middle. This is after going through the chronological blow-by-blow of the 1988 race. Here's the quote: 'One has to wonder how historians will look back on the doomed candidacy of Connecticut Senator Payton Rhodes. Rhodes, seen as a lock to win the nomination and the Democrats' best chance to defeat George Bush, saw a ten-point lead disappear after revelations that he fathered a child with his mistress, a waitress at a Greek diner in his home district. Rhodes, a centrist on financial issues with strong ties to the health insurance industry, was seen as a savior by social liberals for his controversial support of same-sex marriage, prison reform, and stronger media regulation. On this last point, he garnered the opposition of every power broker in the media world, including Michael Eisner of Disney and Dewey Gunstott of Family Media Holdings, both of whom donated to Rhodes' opponents. One can only wonder what the effects of Rhodes' policies would have been on the media landscape of the 1990s.'"

  She looked up triumphantly, as though she'd made a tremendous point.

  I shrugged. "I don't get it. I mean, I remember hearing about Rhodes having an affair and dropping in the polls but—"

  "Payton Rhodes was going to win the 1988 nomination. If he'd won, he likely would have beaten George Bush. If that had happened, he'd have strengthened the role of the FCC in regulating all sorts of TV and radio laws. That would have been a disaster for Dewey Gunstott, which is why he and others donated money to Rhodes' opponents."

  "I get all that, but—"

  "Holden Burnside broke the Payton Rhodes story," Shannon interrupted.

  I knew that, but not what Shannon was driving at. I tried to piece together what she meant, but before I finished the thought, Shannon continued. "Let me read from further down. I’ve read about this election, but this was
something I didn't know. 'At the time, many in the press assumed the story of Rhodes' affair and love child had been discovered and leaked by the Republican opposition, a theory that made sense. For decades, campaigns have tried to sway the results of opposition primaries in order to run against a weaker candidate. Famously, Richard Nixon and his team worked in secret to damage Edmund Muskie in the 1972 Democratic primaries because they believed liberal favorite George McGovern would be easier to defeat in the general. They were right, as Nixon won in a landslide. But Rhodes himself believed the Democrats—not the Republicans—sabotaged his primary run. In a rarely-cited interview in January of 1989, Rhodes said, 'Am I disappointed? Sure. I'm confident we would have defeated President Bush if given the opportunity. But I made a terrible mistake, and my primary opponents made sure everyone knew about it.' His primary opponents. That means he believes his opponents in the Democratic primary leaked the story of his affair. Alex, do you know what that means?"

  My mind had been racing, but clearly not as fast as hers. "It means—"

  "Holden Burnside broke the story—using anonymous sources—that brought down the man who likely would have become president. A story that benefited Dewey Gunstott to the tune of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars."

  "And you think—"

  "You said Burnside was researching his own past, right? Kinda makes you wonder whether Dewey Gunstott was part of that past, particularly a source in one of his past stories. Sure he'd never give up a source, but maybe he had doubts about whether he'd checked this one out well enough."

  We spent the rest of the afternoon investigating links between Burnside and Gunstott, and though we didn't find anything as clear-cut as the Payton Rhodes story, we found a few smaller connections. In the mid-nineties, Burnside broke a series of stories that won him a Pulitzer in public service journalism. It marked a departure from his normal beat as a political reporter. The stories destroyed a company called Detroit Estates, Inc., a housing development company that had started in Detroit and built hundreds of apartment buildings throughout the midwest—Cleveland, St. Louis, even Chicago.