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

by A. C. Fuller

  As I pondered this question, Bird and Shannon crashed through my door, jockeying for position in front of my desk.

  Shannon made it to the front and Bird acquiesced. "You know how Burnside was famous for not being online?" she stammered.

  "He had a work email."

  "But no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram. Nothing. Right?"

  "Right. He was old school."

  Bird jogged around to my side of the desk and shoved his phone in my face.

  "That was all a lie," Shannon said, her voice crackling with excitement.

  "A lie," Bird repeated. "This isn't even my story and I feel like I just smoked a hit of meth."

  I glanced up at him. "Meth?"

  "It's a millennial's metaphor. I'm excited. Look." He pointed at the screen, which was open to a Twitter Account.

  "What am I looking at?" I asked.

  "One of six Twitter accounts belonging to Holden Burnside."

  Shannon wedged herself around the desk and shoved her phone in my face. "This was his main Facebook page. He had three others."

  "Wait, slow down. What the hell are you talking about? Neither of those say 'Holden Burnside.' He didn't…I mean I thought he didn't…"

  "Alex," Bird said. "He had over a dozen burner accounts across every social media platform. Holden Burnside lived a secret life online."

  Chapter 15

  I looked from Bird to Shannon, then back to Bird. "Shut the door."

  I had no idea what they were talking about, but neither Bird nor Shannon were prone to exaggeration, and their excitement was palpable.

  Bird shut the door as Shannon explained. "The whole thing was a lie. At least, he's been lying since 2016. That’s the earliest account we found. He's…he's everywhere."

  "Start from the beginning. I saw you reading the journal, then Bird joined you. What did you find?"

  "He's everywhere," Bird said.

  I frowned. "Start. From. The. Beginning. Please."

  Over the next twenty minutes, Shannon and Bird stumbled over one another as they explained what they'd found. Going through Burnside's notebook, Shannon noticed what looked like a license plate number, written upside down on the top of a random page: 6QAS431.

  She'd recognized it as the form of license plate used in California: a number, three letters, three more numbers. Within five minutes, she'd paid a guy she'd met on the dark web $50 to look up the owner of the license plate in a search of California DMV records. I didn't ask whether it was legal. I was sure it wasn't ethical.

  Turned out, the license plate didn't exist. It wasn't registered to anyone. Though it followed the structure of a California license plate, a quick search taught Shannon that California, like many states, only uses the letter "Q" on license plates when it appears between two other letters, as in the format, 1AQA555. This is because, in other contexts, the Q can easily be mistaken for a zero.

  Her next leap, the one that proved fruitful, was that the mysterious string of letters and numbers was a password. Going back to the notebook, she saw something else, something she'd noticed before but now had new meaning. On another page, also written upside down was the phrase: Horace_Greeley_Lives.

  Greeley, the legendary founder of The New York Tribune, was one of the ten most important figures in the history of American journalism. He was also a progressive activist and served briefly as a congressman and was the unsuccessful candidate of the new Liberal Republican party in the 1872 presidential election. I'd noticed the phrase when leafing through the journal myself, and assumed it was absent-minded doodling. The kind of thing one writes when one is stuck on a project and is looking to the past for inspiration.

  Shannon saw it as a username.

  It had hit her in an instant. Taken together with the string of letters and numbers, she saw a username and password. If she'd asked me, I would have suggested slowing down before her next move. But she didn't. She tried the combination of username and password at the login page of every bank she could think of. Her mind had gone straight to "Follow the money," another journalism maxim. She'd figured that if the username and password got her into one of Burnside's bank accounts, she could piece together his last days through his spending patterns. When she'd come up empty, Bird arrived on the couch beside her just in time to suggest trying the combination on Twitter. Despite her objections—because Burnside was famous for not being on Twitter, or any social media—they'd tried it.

  And it worked. Horace_Greeley_Lives had opened a Twitter account in 2016, had never tweeted, but followed 491 users and had liked over a thousand tweets.

  The Twitter account led them to a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and a Gmail address. From the Gmail account they discovered three other Gmail addresses, all linked to other social media accounts. Bird used what he called "digital forensics" to track down the connections between the accounts.

  "Okay, so he had a secret online life," I said when they'd finished the blow-by-blow. "But to what end?"

  Shannon gave me a look I didn't understand, then gestured in Bird's direction. It took a moment, but whatever came next would likely get into the details of our investigation over the last days, details Shannon wasn't sure she wanted to share in front of Bird.

  "It's fine," I said. "Bird runs this shop. I'm window dressing at this point. You can trust him completely."

  She seemed satisfied, and relaxed for the first time. Taking the seat across from me, she said, "It's not only that he had a bunch of burner accounts. It's what they were. It's who he followed. Do you have a TV and a lightning cable?"

  "I know what you're getting at," Bird said. "Pull it up on your laptop. I'll be right back."

  Shannon got her laptop while Bird rolled a TV in on a stand. They connected her computer to the TV, which mirrored Shannon's screen. "Here's his main Twitter account." She pointed at the screen. "His username is @John_Peter_Zenger1735."

  "That's cute," I said.

  Zenger was one of the most influential journalists in America in the early 1700s, famous for railing against British colonial rule. In 1735, he was arrested and charged with libel in a case that helped spark the American Revolution and lay the foundation for future interpretations of the First Amendment. It was one of the first cases every journalism student learned about in school.

  "Forget the username," Shannon said. "Look at who he follows: The CIA, the FBI, the NYPD. And here." She tapped the screen, indicating a long list of accounts. Some were accounts of sub-agencies or regional arms of major agencies—like @CDCEmergency and @NewYorkFBI—but most were names I didn't recognize.

  Bird jumped in. "Some of those names are his own burner accounts. He followed his own accounts to amplify his message. He would like his own tweets, retweet his own tweets, and sometimes comment on other people's tweets from multiple accounts within minutes, to make it look like many people were chiming in on something when it was just him."

  I ran a hand through my thinning hair. "Holy hell."

  I'd heard of burner accounts. Athletes and celebrities had been caught using them to rip into teammates and co-stars without doing it on the record. They also used them to shape public narrative around their careers. As shady as it was, it was genius. Imagine you're Lebron James and you shoot three for twenty one night—a terrible game. The media is ready to rip into you, so you hop onto a burner account from the locker room, pretend to be a fan of the team, then make sure all the journalists covering the game know how bad your teammates played, or how a ref blew a call in the fourth quarter. It's not foolproof, but it can change the conversation in your favor.

  Burner accounts were a common part of modern life. But I'd never heard of anything like this. And Holden Burnside was the last person I would have expected it from.

  "What are the other names? You said some of those names are his other accounts. What are the rest?"

  "That's where things get crazy," Shannon said. "Bird took a couple of them and…you tell him, Bird."

  "Digital forensics. You
know Zach, our new social media intern. I hired him based on a story he did where he outed the Twitter burner account of JD Prichard, the banker."

  "I remember that story. CEO of National Trust Bank or whatever, using fake Twitter username to lie about the competition?"

  "Petty much," Shannon said.

  "Cost him his job," Bird said. "Anyway, Zach broke that story. I showed him what we were doing and in ten minutes he found the connections between @John_Peter_Zenger1735 and Burnside's other accounts. In fifteen minutes he'd figured out three of the other usernames, the people Burnside followed." He pointed at a username on the screen: @Davis_Florida23212. "Director of the FBI." He pointed at another: @TheRenegadeWidow_1787. "Deputy director of the CIA."

  "That's impossible," I said. "Why would the deputy CIA director need a burner account?"

  Shannon was ready with an answer. "Because every politician and businessman on earth uses Twitter now. Mostly, those accounts don't tweet anything, but I guess they consider it part of their job to follow the conversation."

  My head spun. My breath was shallow. "I need a sec."

  I took a few deep breaths, trying to calm myself. My head swam with images of Holden Burnside at a computer or, even more shocking, on a phone, switching between burner accounts frantically arguing with people online. It was incomprehensible. Finally, I looked up. "So in addition to his own burner accounts, he figured out the burner accounts of top officials and followed them?"

  "Exactly," Bird said. "And...he picked fights with them online."

  "What?" The thought of Holden Burnside picking fights on Twitter struck me as both impossible and hilarious. "Why would he do that?"

  "We didn't get to that," Bird said. "We haven't read through everything yet."

  "I know what he was doing," Shannon said. She pulled out Burnside's notebook and dropped it on my desk. "Don't you see? More research. A modern version of what he'd been doing for forty years. Damn!" She shook her head slowly. "He was good."

  "I still don't get it," I said.

  "He was working on a book outing himself as an unwitting CIA operative, right?"

  I nodded.

  Bird took a step back. This was the first he'd heard of Burnside's memoir.

  Shannon glanced at Bird, then continued. "Your dinner, the notebook, and the interview with Gunstott proved it. Burnside was looking at his whole life, every story, with a critical eye. Writing a memoir that would be the single greatest piece of journalism in American history. Not only would it address the biggest political stories of all time and his role in them, it would get to the deepest layer of the meaning of those stories. It would show us not only what happened, but why we know about what happened in the first place. Who benefited from the news, who the sources were, and what happened as a result."

  Bird staggered forward and leaned on the desk. "Is she serious?"

  "She is," I said, "but I don't have time to explain in detail."

  Shannon was on a roll. "Burnside used social media to rile people up, to get them talking, or to make people think they were talking. I think if we could get our hands on his personal diary, we'd see patterns. Like I bet he was trying to reach sources like the head of the FBI, and using fake social media accounts to try to get them to talk. Wait, here's one I saw earlier."

  She clicked over to another of Burnside's burner accounts: @SassySueFromMizzou, a "Proud housewife from Missouri, who fears God, loves her country, and doesn't take any sh*t from anyone."

  Last month, she'd replied to a tweet from the CIA, asking whether Operation Mockingbird was still alive and well. Burnside's fake @John_Peter_Zenger1735 account had replied that it was indeed. Sassy Sue then replied that the famed journalist Holden Burnside was a CIA operative, and he'd actually been a trained murderer running opium in Afghanistan in the late seventies. Zenger had replied that, though he hadn't heard that, it was probably true. Everyone knew the CIA trained men to kill, then got them top journalism jobs. A handful of other commenters added thoughts as well.

  "The point," Shannon said, "Is that either Burnside was batshit crazy, or he used all these burner accounts to try to spark controversy about himself. Controversy people in places of power could see. Even if they saw them from their own burner accounts and didn't reply, he could refer to the controversies when trying to contact them for his book."

  It made sense, but something didn't sit right. When a story fit together too perfectly, something was usually amiss. I could barely keep up with Shannon, and she had no intention of slowing down. "There's more. I'm gonna spend the afternoon going through these accounts with Zach—Bird already set it up—but there's one more thing. I'm sure we're going to find a bunch more CIA connections. We already know he was tracking various CIA and FBI people. My guess is he was tracking all his sources, interacting anonymously with all his sources. Anyone who'd fed him information is gonna turn up in his social media, or in his email. Between all the accounts, I expect to find the source of every one of his big stories. This is the biggest treasure trove in the history of journalism."

  "Or at least," Bird interjected, "in the history of journalism studies. If we simply published the usernames and passwords of his accounts on our site, it would be our biggest story ever. It would rival Wikileaks. Imagine knowing every anonymous source behind every major political story of the last four decades. We don't quite have that, but close. Our government, foreign governments, journalists and independent researchers—everyone would want to comb through them."

  This last piece was what didn't feel right. "Did you ask anyone before logging onto his email accounts?"

  "What?" Shannon scoffed. "Like who?"

  "His wife? His estate? I don't know."

  "Of course not."

  I glared at Bird. "And you let her do this on our servers?"

  "I helped her do it. It's not an issue, legally."

  "But what about ethically?"

  Shannon looked at Bird, who looked at the floor. After a moment, he shook his head. "No. I'm sorry, Alex. This is too big. Too newsworthy. It's an ethical gray area. We couldn't not pursue it."

  In their position, I probably would have logged onto the accounts as well, given that Burnside was dead and we were trying to solve his murder. And I likely would have agreed it was okay to do so without contacting Mrs. Burnside. But publishing the contents of the accounts was something entirely different. "We're not publishing anything based on what you found. Not yet at least."

  Bird looked offended. "I wasn't saying we should...yet. Shannon will keep digging and…Shannon?"

  She'd swung the door open and was in a full sprint across the office. For a moment I thought she was running away with the story, that she was going to ditch The Barker and I wouldn't hear from her again until the story—and all of Burnside's burner accounts—hit her site. Then she stopped next to a group of half of my staff and stared up at the flat-screen TV.

  Bird and I reached the group just as someone unmuted the news.

  Mia said, "It broke on Twitter five minutes ago and they're cutting into regular programming now."

  On the screen, Martha Ruiz Damonza, a stone-faced anchorwoman on Seattle's weekend midday news, sat at her desk, looking even more stoic than usual. "In what has already been a difficult week for the Seattle media community, another journalist has died, making this the third death in the last three days."

  The air left my chest as a headshot appeared on the screen. "No, no, no!" I shouted.

  A hand rested on my shoulder. Bird's hand. "Is that Suki?"

  Chapter 16

  Suki Takasago was the third dead journalist in the last three days, and the second I knew personally.

  I fell to my knees, eyes glued to the screen, as Damonza continued. "Full details are not yet being released, but according to police, her body was found at her apartment near Green Lake early this morning when a friend stopped by for their regular jog around the lake. Takasago was a thirty-year-old reporter for a variety of online publications, including the Huf
fington Post and Seattle Review. In print, her work appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. While young, she was considered a rising star in the journalism world. Last year she received the award for public service journalism from the Asian Women in Media Conference for her work exposing men's rights activist Massimo Brock—"

  I stopped listening. Oh, God. My mind raced to Greta. I ran to my office and dialed Greta's cell phone.

  Like Suki Takasago, Greta had roots in Japan, and we'd attended the Asian Women in Media Conference together. We'd watched Suki give her acceptance speech. Suki was one of Greta's coaching clients and in the speech she'd thanked her for modeling the confidence to report without fear of retribution. Without fear of retribution.

  I needed Greta to hear the news from me, not a news report.

  "Hello?" Her tone was cheerful enough to tell me she hadn't heard the news.

  "Greta, I…oh, God."

  "What is it Alex?"

  "I'm so sorry. I didn't want you to see it on the news. Suki is…she's dead. The news is saying she's gone."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I saw it on the news a minute ago. They're talking about it right now."

  "I texted with her last night though."

  "Something happened early this morning in her apartment. The news is saying she's gone."

  There was a long silence. I guessed it was because Greta was looking up the news online. It wasn't that she wouldn't believe me, but Greta was the kind of person who had to see for herself. "Oh no," she said after a minute. "I'm on Twitter and, people are saying. Oh...no, n—"

  Greta's voice cracked. She broke into muffled tears.

  "I'm so sorry," I said.

  "They're saying her throat was cut by a razor." She began to sob, and I felt sick to my stomach.

  "Where are you?" I asked.

  No response.

  "Greta, where are you?"

  "I'm…I'm at my office. I need to call her brother. I knew her brother, too."