Two days after the drone story was published, Will Gordon had headed toward Jill Bishop’s desk.
She saw him coming at fifty feet. With his shambling tall-man walk, head bowed, moving slow as if it were hard to stay balanced. It was her own damn fault, she thought. She should never have invited him into her thinking on the drone story. She now believed she had rushed that piece into publication. She should have held off on it until she’d made her source show her the video. Now she might never see it. That video had vanished. It had been two and a half weeks. Everyone in town wanted to get their hands on it, including Congress.
And when Congress announced it was moving the Oosay hearings up as a result of the story, she figured Gordon would want the paper to have something new to influence the conversation during the hearings.
Well, she sure as hell wasn’t going to talk to him about it in the middle of the newsroom. She got up and met him halfway to his office. Out of the corner of her eye she could see one of her newsroom rivals, Gary Gold, watching them. Gold was a good reporter, but he was absolutely the kind of person who had gone into journalism for the pure, feral rush of it—if he wasn’t involved in some big story, he felt a kind of death. He probably itched to get involved in the Oosay story.
“Your office,” Bishop commanded when she reached Gordon.
The editor half grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And for chrissakes,” she said, “don’t call me ma’am.”
They found space on the wreck of a sofa.
“I’m trying to get the drone video,” she began, “but the problem—”
Gordon crossed his long legs and, before she could finish her sentence, said, “The problem is if someone gives you a copy of the video, it would have a digital signature and be traceable. The government would go to court to ask for it. We would have to fight that. Even though we would, your sources would be frightened, and that would make you even more dangerous to work with. If the government filed papers, your picture would be all over the Internet, which would only make your work harder.”
“Right,” Bishop said.
“And every other reporter in town is trying to get that video right now. So is the Oosay Committee. Which puts about ten times more pressure on anyone in the intelligence community who has it.”
“That’s right,” said Bishop.
“And if everyone in town wants to know what’s on that video, if anyone does find out, it will be easy to confirm the first story because all these sources have been asked about it already. Which means the video is a lot of work for a story that will remain exclusive for about an hour.”
“That is also right.”
“I think the thing to do is work a different story,” Gordon had said. “Something no one else is working on.”
Bishop had to agree that made sense.
It amused Gordon that reporters always seemed shocked when you could see things from a distance they missed up close.
“What’s the biggest hole in the Oosay story?” he asked her. “What’s the missing piece that makes other pieces suddenly fit?”
“The whole thing is a missing piece,” she said.
“I often find it’s what we stopped looking at that’s important.”
“Beg pardon. What the hell does that mean?”
“Well, there is usually something we wonder about a lot at the beginning of a story. And then we may lose sight of it when we get into the middle. For me, it was the question of who was the mastermind behind the Oosay attack.”
“The man on the roof?” Bishop said, referring to a report in the early days that someone had seen a man on a roof near the Oosay compound looking through binoculars. That had never been confirmed.
“I know he might have just been a guy with binoculars up there by chance,” Gordon said. “But the question of who was the mastermind is still actually more important than anything Congress seems focused on. Who did this, and how, and what does it portend about ISA in Africa? Not what the kindergarten on the Hill is looking at.”
Gordon was becoming animated the more he thought about it. “Morat has slipped further into chaos since the attack,” he said. “Who gained by doing this? What are the best theories? Where’s the evidence point?”
Bishop had to smile. Gordon was not entirely useless, even if he was an editor.
“What questions mattered at the beginning that we’ve begun to forget about in the middle?”
Then Gordon stopped talking. It was better, he found, just to point his best reporters in a direction—not insult them with a lot of instruction about what to do after he’d pointed.
He stood up. “Just keep going, Jill.”
Back at her desk, Bishop thought awhile.
Then she called Avery Holland.