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5 P.M., TUESDAY, JAN. 11, 2022, Portland State University — Ryan Matthews was at a reception in the president’s dining room at the top of the administration building. He sighed. He was a part-time, still interim, non-tenure-track faculty advisor. And he was 20 years younger than anyone else in the room. He looked around the room with narrowed eyes.
Thirty years younger than most of them.
Not even Tabitha Lake was here. And this was her baby. She should have been here, he thought. He made a mental note to add that to his debriefing session with Jacob Lewis, interim vice president for University Advancement.
Well, truth was he wasn’t here as the EWN faculty advisor, nor as a part of TIP or the Center for that matter. He was here because he was the heir to one of the larger fortunes PSU had counted on in the past for donations. Now it was his. He’d donated quite a bit to the university and its projects — including the Center for Experimental Journalism, although only two people knew about that rather large donation. At least there had better be only two people. But there were other donations, including one for this event. And this was a reception for donors. Ryan Matthews, God help him, was a donor.
Still, the catering was good, they had decent sparkling non-alcoholic wine for people like him, and the music provided by the jazz students was outstanding.
And he’d gotten to meet Dr. Crenshaw. They’d chatted briefly, then he introduced her to some others he thought she’d actually enjoy meeting — as opposed to all the elderly donors whose hands she’d been shaking. Actually, she clasped their hand in between hers. Smart, he decided. Less likely to get a bruising grip from someone who didn’t know how strong their grip was — or from someone who did. He filed that strategy away, although he suspected it worked better for a woman than it would for a man.
He was wearing a black suit, white shirt and a gray tie with maroon stripe. He’d adamantly refused Jacob Lewis’s suggestion of a tie in PSU school colors. Green? Not a chance. Not even for the interim vice president for University Advancement who he liked a lot.
So, he ate some of the canapes dining services had provided, sipped his drink and watched. He liked to people watch. Mostly though, he kept an eye on Dr. Crenshaw, and when she got a trapped expression on her face, he smoothly inserted himself into the conversation, flashed a bit of charm at the overly-talkative donor, and whisked her away to someone else she needed to meet. You understand, Mr. Anderson, don’t you? Mr. Anderson, flattered that he knew his name, agreed that he did understand.
“You do that very well,” Kimberle Crenshaw murmured.
Ryan smiled at her, a more genuine smile, although also practiced. “I’d happily monopolize your time myself,” he said, “but that’s not how things are supposed to work. Have you met the vice president for Student Affairs, yet? He’s at least pretty to look at.”
She laughed and let him escort her over to Steve Planck. “He is indeed,” she said under her breath, as she held out her hand to Dr. Planck. Ryan grinned at her. Steve Planck was a broad-shouldered Black man in his early 40s, and he was easy on the eyes. He could also carry on a conversation about critical race theory. Ryan rather thought that the elderly Mr. Anderson had CRT mixed up with CPR from the little bit he’d overheard.
Ryan drifted around the room, greeting the people he knew, getting introductions to those he didn’t know. Working the crowd. He’d been raised to it. And if his memories were still fragmented, this was apparently muscle memory. He had a brief flash, of how his grandparents had trained this and other things into said muscle memory, and he stopped until it passed.
The flashes were fewer and shorter. That was the good news. The nightmares had been gone for a week, a new record. Even better news.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, chasing away the last of it. He looked around and frowned. There was a campus security officer at the door talking to President McShane. He drifted that direction.
McShane glanced at him and then refocused on the officer. Ryan took that as an invitation to listen in.
“The Portland Police Bureau is recommending that the evening keynote speech be cancelled,” he was saying.
Whoa, Ryan thought. What the hell?
“Where’s Ramirez?” McShane growled and the officer flinched.
“He... an EWN videographer came in, and they left together,” the officer stammered. “Lt. Young went after him. There’s a problem at the EWN building, Lt. Young said. And then the Portland Police Bureau called. They said the protest is too great in the Park Blocks, and they’re pulling back. That’s their new policy, you know. Do not engage.”
“Interesting how that only seems to apply when the protesters are from the far right, isn’t it?” Ryan asked rhetorically, and then added with more urgency, “What problem at EWN?”
The officer shook his head. Ryan reached for his phone, silenced for a gathering like this, and saw the dozen messages. He clamped down before any profanity escaped.
“I’ve got to go,” Ryan said to the president. “But we can’t cancel the speech. We cannot give in to these people, sir.”
“He’s right,” Dr. Crenshaw said from behind him. “I will deliver my speech as scheduled. How do we make that happen?”
McShane frowned. He glanced at the older Black woman standing there as if taking her measure, and he didn’t argue with her. “One of two ways,” he said at last. “We can take you through the sky tunnels from here and down into Lincoln Hall. That’s how we would have gone anyway because it’s dark and damp out there.”
“Or?” she prompted with a half-smile as if she knew what he would propose.
“Or we walk right through the picketers, down the center of Broadway, and up the front steps to Lincoln Hall,” McShane said bluntly. “Your call.”
She laughed. “Broadway, of course.”
Ryan hesitated, torn. He sent a message to his editors: Is it under control?
He got a thumbs up from Blair. Good enough. And then he sent out a message to Bianca Parks who was wired into every student group on campus, and to Cinder, who was president of the Student Senate. He added Professor Roger Bellamy, presiding officer of the Faculty Senate, and J.J. Jacobs, because he had faith that young man would manage to get there to film it — somehow, someway.
It said: We’re walking down Broadway, escorting Dr. Crenshaw from the administration building to Lincoln Hall in 30 minutes. Join us? Pass the word.
McShane looked at him and sighed. “Do I want to know what you just did?”
Ryan grinned at Dr. Crenshaw. “What would a march be without supporters?”
She laughed. “Do you suppose they will know the words to We Shall Overcome?”
“Maybe,” Ryan said, looking at the jazz ensemble. “But I bet they at least know When the Saints Come Marching In, however.” He smiled at their guest speaker. “I’m known for a match/raise response to any challenge, so stop me if I start to make you uncomfortable.”
“He must really like you,” Planck said dryly. “The rest of us have never gotten a choice in the matter.”
Kimberle Crenshaw laughed. “You want them to lead the procession playing When the Saints Come Marching In, don’t you?” She considered it for a moment and shrugged. “How can a person turn down the chance to walk Broadway with a band leading the way — even if it’s in Portland and not New York?”
Planck groaned.
Ryan went to ask the student ensemble what they thought. They were excited about it, of course, he thought with amusement. People after his own heart. “Go ahead and go down. Wait for us in the entry. Don’t go outside until we’re there, too.”
They nodded. Ryan looked around and found Jacob Lewis since he was the host of this shindig after all. He briefed him on the plans. “Most of these donors probably should not go down Broadway, however,” Ryan said. “So, you get to escort them through the buildings, is that OK?”
“You asking me or telling me?” Jacob said. He sounded amused, Ryan thought. He hoped.
“Asking?”
Jacob laughed. “You owe me. Because I really would rather be marching arm-in-arm with her.”
“That is a very good visual,” Ryan said, pleased, and went back to his co-conspirators. McShane had his poker-face on as he talked to Dr. Crenshaw. Planck was listening. Yes, those were the three who needed to lead the walk.
He watched his time, and 30 minutes later, he escorted the three down to the ground floor.
“And where will you be?” McShane growled at him.
“I think I’ve got staff down there,” Ryan said quietly. “But in case I don’t? I’m going to grab a few photos on my phone. Jacob will never forgive me if we don’t have a record of this. And my staff? I don’t even want to think what they would do to me. So, I’ll be out in front, going down the street backwards.” He grinned.
His phone buzzed and he stepped away to take the call. Blair. “Will hasn’t come back,” she said anxiously. “Have you seen him?”
“No,” Ryan said.
“I’m supposed to cover the speech,” she said worriedly. “But I don’t know if I can leave without him here.”
“Is Bianca there? Delegate coordination to her. Delegate copyediting to Joe and to whoever is there from upstairs. Dona?” Ryan suggested. He knew Blair really wanted to be at the speech. “And I’ll see if I can find Will.” He dropped the call and called Corey.
“You still have that find me app?” he asked. “Where is Will’s phone?”
Corey swore. “I should have thought of that hours ago,” he muttered. There was a pause. “You’re not going to like this, but he’s at the Health Center.”
Ryan grimaced. “Where’s Cage?”
Another pause. “His phone is at the Health Center too.”
“OK.” Ryan thought through the logistics. He was obligated to do the march down Broadway since it was his idea. Then he’d go after those two. “Is the newsroom functioning OK? I got a flurry of texts, but I haven’t been in a place where I could take them.”
There was a pause, and then Corey laughed. “Do whatever you’re doing, then go after those two. We’ll hold down the fort here. But, you may want to come in the back way.”
Ryan was next into the elevator and lost the call. He started to call Corey back when they hit the ground floor but decided it would have to wait. He had a parade to organize.
And it was a glorious parade. Bianca and Cinder had come through as he knew they would. A hundred students were waiting for them, they cheered when McShane and Planck escorted Kimberle Crenshaw out of the building and into the street. The ensemble took their places, and Ryan glanced around. East side of the street looked clearer. He positioned himself to take the photos and bumped into J.J. in the same spot. “I’ve got it,” the young videographer said.
Ryan grinned. “Be prepared.”
And the familiar notes of When the Saints Come Marching In started. People laughed and cheered. And the procession started down the street. Ryan snapped a couple of photos and followed J.J.
Ramirez materialized out of nowhere. “Very nice,” he said dryly. “I see your fingerprints all over this.”
Ryan laughed. “You know anything about what went down at EWN?”
“You don’t know?” Ramirez said. “Where have you been?”
“Meet and greet for donors,” Ryan said. “You think I dress like this for work? What happened?”
Ramirez started laughing. “You owe Miguel a new jacket,” he said. “The rest you can learn when you get there.”
Ryan grimaced. “I’ve got to go to the Health Center next. Cage and Will are MIA, and Corey says that’s where their phones are. I’m going to miss the speech that I paid for!”
“You mean student fees and the Center paid for, don’t you?” Ramirez said. He looked like he’d just heard something interesting.
“Yeah, that’s the long form,” Ryan muttered. Oops. “Want to walk over to the Health Center?”
“Why were you at a donors’ reception anyway?” Ramirez said falling into step with him as they finished the walk to Lincoln Hall. There were protests, but the jazz ensemble was drowning them out. And now some of the students were dancing to the music. Ryan’s mouth fell open when Steve Planck and Kimberle Crenshaw did a brief two-step to everyone’s applause before they headed into the building.
Ryan laughed. Talk about a kindred spirit. The Reed professor who had set this up said they were. He’d have to tell Dr. Bates he was right.
“This way,” Ramirez said quietly. “The protesters are getting restless.”
“PPB pulled back and recommended we cancel,” Ryan replied. “One of your officers came up to tell us. That’s when we crafted this. McShane gave her the option of canceling, going through the buildings or marching down Broadway, by the way.”
“McShane did?” Ramirez was incredulous.
“I may have embellished on the original idea,” Ryan admitted. They had circled around to the south and were now headed toward the Health Center.
“I’m sure you did,” Ramirez said.
Ryan grinned. They went into the Health Center, which was another madhouse of people who had mostly minor injuries. He saw Cage first. Well, it was hard to miss his friend: He was 6-foot-2, broad-shouldered — a Black man who was dressed in black. And he wasn’t happy. Ryan made his way toward him.
“Will here, too?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, he’s in with the doctor— finally. Someone clobbered him over the head with a protest sign and it had a nail sticking out. I saw him go down and pulled him out. The protester was kicking him when I got there, but he ran. Will was bleeding pretty badly. Scalp wounds do, but I made him come here. He may have hit his head on the curb when he went down too. And that was a fucking hour ago.”
Cage glared toward the receptionist desk. “Now that you’re here, I need to go shoot some footage. OPB wants it.”
Ryan winced. “You just missed the parade down Broadway with the jazz ensemble playing When the Saints Go Marching In —Plank and McShane in the lead escorting Dr. Crenshaw to Lincoln Hall for her speech.”
“Damn it,” he said. “Tell me we had someone there.”
“Oh, we’ve got video,” Ryan said. “J.J. was there.” Cage grinned at that. J.J. had made that line famous.
“I’ll get some from him then and credit him, for OPB,” Cage said. “I’m headed back to the newsroom.”
“Use the back door,” Ramirez said.
Cage raised his eyebrows. “I miss out on something there too?”
“We both have, and he’s not talking,” Ryan said, with a nod toward the police chief.
Will came out of the back office with a bandage on his head, clutching a strip of pills. Pain killer, Ryan guessed. He winced. “There’s our guy,” Ryan said. He took a look around the waiting room and shook his head. “Let’s get out of here. And it looks like another ‘Health Center in disarray’ story is in our future.”
The four of them walked toward EWN. Ryan looked at Ramirez. “Chief? You’re coming with us?” he asked. The problem must have been more significant than he thought.
Ramirez nodded. He was looking a bit stressed, Ryan realized. A fit man approaching 40 and an Army veteran, he usually looked put together and a bit sardonic. Probably why he was well-liked in the newsroom — the fact that he came when they called him also helped. Ryan could count on one hand the times he’d seen the man stressed about something. And given the events of the last year, that was amazing. Ryan figured he showed more stress than that in any given week —during the course of a day in some cases.
“What happened?” he asked quietly. He glanced at Will, who was looking a bit glassy eyed, and Cage who was getting even grimmer as they approached the building.
“There were protesters with pickets,” Ramirez said. He sounded tired. “Miguel got the SOS and came for me. They threw a brick through the door. Your staff sent out most everyone through the backdoor and then barricaded the stairs. Miguel and I got there in time to see a protester throw a Molotov cocktail at the building. It bounced and went into the entryway through the broken door.”
He swallowed hard. “Miguel shoved his camera at me,” he paused and shook his head. “Tore off his coat and tossed it onto that thing. He pressed the buzzer, they buzzed him in and he smothered the flames before it could get going. Fool kid and a hero. He saved the building, Ryan.”
Ramirez took a deep breath as they neared the building. Ryan could see the broken door. They went around the back and buzzed to be let in. Someone opened the door immediately for them. “But we’ve got to talk. Did you know there was actually a triage plan in place for this kind of thing?”
Ryan nodded. Of course, he knew. He’d been part of the discussion.
“Students can’t martyr themselves for equipment,” Ramirez said, and he was getting heated about it. “They can’t risk their lives for a computer!”
“Chief, they aren’t talking about a computer. They aren’t even talking about the millions of dollars in equipment it takes to run a television station and radio station,” Cage said. His rumbly bass voice was always compelling, and Ramirez was listening. “It’s about the right to publish, to speak truth, to be on the air. We will not let them silence EWN. And yes, when it became obvious that last winter wasn’t a one-time thing, that EWN was a target, thanks to Larson Jones and people like him, we developed a strategy for how we would handle incursions. And it sounds like that preparedness paid off.”
“That and the heroism of Miguel Garcia,” Ryan said. When he envisioned what Miguel had done, he broke out in a cold sweat. If he’d been a second too late he would have gone up in flames with the entryway. The building was brick, but the interior of the first floor was wood. Wood floors, wood paneling on the walls. The counter to the advertising space. He swallowed.
“He could have died,” Ramirez said in a harsh whisper. “I stood there, holding my weapon on the picketers and his damn videocamera, while he risked his life. I thought I was going to watch him go up in flames.”
Ryan squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you for caring this much,” he said sincerely. They climbed the stairs to the third floor, slid through a space along one side of the boxes stored there and then into the Crow’s Nest. The elevator was open — both doors — and they passed through it to the third floor. Ramirez tipped his head at the doors. “What’s with that?”
“The elevator won’t operate like this,” Cage said briefly. “It’s part of the preparedness plan. We don’t need it, and it prevents invaders from being able to use it.”
“But there’s the stairs,” Will said. His voice was slurred a bit. Ryan looked at him.
“Did they say anything about a concussion?” he asked, and then frowned at the pain killer they’d given him. “I hope that’s just Tylenol?”
“Think so,” Will said. “Yes, concussion. Don’t sleep without someone there to watch me.”
Ryan and Cage looked at each other worriedly. He didn’t sound right.
Ryan held out his hand, and Will handed the drugs to him. Tylenol with codeine, the strip said. There were six of them. Ryan frowned. One was missing. Will snatched them back.
They went down the stairs to the second floor. Ryan watched Will closely. He was dragging one foot a bit, and he went down the stairs one step down, then the other foot, then down another step. This was not good. As soon as he could, he was taking Will up to OHSU.
“Holy shit!” Will said as he looked at the stairwell to the ground floor.
Holy shit, indeed, Ryan thought astounded. They’d shoved the counter — and he hadn’t even known it could be moved — in front of the stairwell, then piled both couches on top of it. It was going to take major effort to open it back up again.
And, it looked like one of the couches had the seat torn open somehow. Well, he’d been thinking for a year they needed to be replaced.
Ramirez just shook his head and looked grim.
Bianca Parks, their chief anchor, was seated where Blair usually sat. She looked up at them and smiled tiredly. “Hi guys,” she said.
Ryan snorted. “Where’s Miguel?”
“He’s in the Green Room,” she said. “Cindy’s sitting with him. And yes, that’s all they’re doing, Ryan Matthews. Not like some people I could name.”
Ryan grinned at her. He’d made the Green Room famous and earned the station an FCC warning when he cut the timing a bit close on exiting it — with a woman, both of them half-dressed — and viewers caught a glimpse of the new EIC’s half-naked body.
Alas, he had never made the room famous with Bianca, who was truly one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. She was Black and Latina — a Blacktina she called it — and wore her hair in a short ‘fro. She was currently living with Ben Waters, their station manager, who was also gorgeous. He sighed. The regrets of a monogamous married man.
“Pity,” he said lightly. “A bit of TLC is good for the shakes.”
Will was looking around worriedly. “Where’s Blair?”
“She’s covering the speech,” Bianca answered. “I got a text from her just a bit ago. She’s fine. And we’ve been getting J.J.’s video streaming in. He said he’d be over soon to download footage for the show.”
Bianca looked at Cage. “You may need to do the video editing,” she added quietly. “I’m not sure Miguel has a steady hand right now.”
“Understandably,” Ryan muttered. He looked around. The room was primarily empty. Joe Castro was back in the photo department instead of up front. He was focused.
Well, Folio still had to get out, Ryan thought. “Joe, you good?”
“Yeah, I pulled a photo from J.J.’s stream,” he said. “I’m going to add it to page 1.”
“I took a few with my phone,” Ryan offered.
Joe just held out his hand, and Ryan handed it over. He looked at Cage. “You want to do the videography work? And I’ll check on the other videographer?”
Cage nodded. Ryan looked at Chief Ramirez. “What about you?” he asked.
Ramirez sighed. “I’ll see about getting your door boarded up. And why the hell don’t you have a shatterproof door?”
“That’s a very good question,” Ryan said grimly. “I’ll ask about it tomorrow.”
Cage sat down at the editing station, and he looked at home there. It had been his home base for years after all. Ryan smiled, and then he squared his shoulders and went to see how the current chief videographer was doing.