The Sixth Station (9 page)

Then, “Ali? It’s Donald.” (He
never
called the day after, before this.) “I’m around.”

Now that I’m famous, or is that genuine concern?

I was too exhausted to call him back.

I took a very hot shower, didn’t bother to remove my makeup, brushed my teeth until they bled, and turned on my tablet, saw the story hadn’t yet been put up (very odd), and called the desk again. Dickie had gone out for a smoke, and his next in line told the copy kid who had answered the phone to tell me my story had caused the site to crash from the number of hits, so they had to pull it but were working it out.

Satisfied, and even excited, I nonetheless fell into a coma of a deep sleep.

7

I woke up at 5:30 the next morning, desperate to see how
The Standard
had played the column.

I turned on my iPad and saw this:

EXCLUSIVE TO
THE NEW YORK STANDARD

Kiss of Death From the Lips of the Terrorist

By Alessandra Russo

I was violated, pure and simple.

Nothing would, could, should have, in my life, ever prepared me for what happened yesterday.

And by now you know what happened to me yesterday:

I was kissed against my will
as
Demiel ben Yusef, head of the Al Okhowa Al Hamima terrorist organization, responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people around the world, was “perp-walked” after exiting the armored van driven by our own American heroes—the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents—to the doors of the UN.…

I shut off the tablet without finishing “my” column. I knew the rest of it would be even worse than the lead. What had they done to possibly the most significant news story and column of my lifetime?

Within thirty seconds I was on the phone to the City Desk. A sleepy kid answered.
“New York Standard.”

“It’s Russo. Gimme Dickie.”

“What?” the kid said, mystified. I then realized he thought it was a dirty call.

“Dickie Smalls. Gimme Dickie Smalls!”

“Oh. Mr. Smalls doesn’t come in until nine
A.M
., Miss Russo,” the kid said, finally figuring it out. “It’s like five thirty.”

“Then gimme his cell number.”

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that.…”

“Allowed? Who is this?”

“Smalls’s cell is 917-221-9864,” the anonymous copy kid spat out, terrified.

On the fourth ring, a half-asleep Dickie answered. “Yeah?”

“Worm! Traitor! What happened?” I yelled. “Who rewrote—no, let me rephrase that. Who wrote my goddamned column? This crap is the opposite of what I wrote.”

Dickie was never one to back down. “Russo, it’s five friggin’ thirty. I was up all night with that goddamned column of yours. Don’t like it? Take it up with the editor. Yeah. Bob himself rewrote. Said it was a piece of terrorist propaganda and when he saw you, he was going to kill you.”

By 6:30
A.M.
I was putting my iPad back into my red bag, and by 6:45 I whipped open my door and stopped dead at the sight of my captors standing there. I’d forgotten all about them in my fury—but on the upside, they did offer to drive me to work. I’d be on my own from then on, they said. Too much going on in the city for them to be concerned with one reporter. Good.

By 7:15 I was sitting outside Bob Brandt’s office looking, but most definitely not feeling, like a kid outside the principal’s office. I felt more like the kid who wants to blow up the school and is waiting to take the principal hostage.

Bob’s secretary wasn’t at her desk, but the morning editors were just starting to trickle in.

“Nice work on the Yusef column, Ali,” Carly McNally, an editor, said as she passed by.

“Be sure to commend Bob,” I said, the sneer rising to a level I didn’t know I was capable of.

She turned back knowingly. Then out of conscience, I guess, she came back, put her hand on my shoulder, and said, “C’mon, honey. We’re too old for this. Think before you go off the deep end. There aren’t a whole lotta jobs out there anymore.”

“None, actually,” I answered, “but…” I didn’t finish and just let the sentence hang in the air, because gossip is to a newsroom what Big Macs are to fat guys. We are reporters, so that’s what we do—report. Even about one another. I could feel in my bones that I was about to do it again—really piss off another editor and end up on my ass. I couldn’t stop, though. What they’d done was so wrong on so many levels.

At 8:20, Bob came slouching in carrying his coffee and cursing because he’d spilled it all over his new tie. I knew this was the worst possible time to confront him, but the destruction of my column—the turning it into a right-wing rant against fairness and justice—had to be addressed.

“Russo, Russo, Russo,” Bob said wearily, spotting me clutching my iPad. “Well, you may as well come in and get it over with.”

OK—that wasn’t good. We went in and he sat behind his desk and put his feet up, leaving me to sit in the “bad student” chair in front. No matter, I still felt like the mad bomber despite the power-seating trick.

Bob went immediately on the attack. “I’d like to say ‘nice job’ but you should be down on your hands and knees thanking me for saving your sorry ass—and the good name of this paper! What you turned in was a lefty, amateur job that belonged in the NYU student newspaper.

“If I would have let it run as it was, we’d have picket lines around the block, and I’d be out there with them. What in hell were you thinking?”

“Wait a minute, here,” I growled out, sounding possessed, fear and loathing rising in equal measure. “I should be the one asking that question! I mean, for whatever reason Demiel picked me—
me
—out of the crowd—”

He cut me off. “Demiel? So you do know him personally?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not. I never laid eyes on him except in photos and videos, as you well know!”

“After that column, I know nothing about you.”

“Puleeze. Anyway, can I finish? As I was trying to say before you cut me off: Dammit, Bob, the world has the right to know exactly what I saw, how I saw it, what I felt, and how I was affected!”

He slammed his feet back onto the floor and slammed his fist onto the desk. “What are you—Patty Hearst? No. No more bullshit like that—and I don’t give a rat’s ass if the asshole confesses to you personally. We are not apologists for mass murderers who want to overthrow the U.S. and our right to worship as we please!”

He was up out of his seat, so red in the face he looked like he was on his tenth straight-up scotch at Langan’s.

“Are you telling me,” I screamed back, now standing up facing him too, “that I’m not supposed to write the truth?”

“Not if the truth is a lie,” he said implausibly, angrier than I’d ever seen him.

“I don’t even know what the hell that means,” I shot back.

He came around the desk and menacingly put his finger in my face and said low and dangerously, “It means
our
truth.”

“I can’t do
our
truth.”

Bob turned his back. “Then you can’t write for this paper.”

Again. But this time it was probably finished, the end. Yesterday I had the “get” of gets, and today I was out with yesterday’s paper.

As I was turning to go, he said, from behind his desk again, “You blew the biggest opportunity of your life, Russo. Maybe you never were as good as I thought you were.”

“May I say the same about you?” I snapped, and then: “Can I get my stuff?”

“You can get whatever you can carry in your bag.”

I went back through the newsroom to my desk, intending to pick up what few things I could carry, grateful that most of the staff wasn’t in yet. Why I was embarrassed for being canned for doing the right thing, I don’t know.

Not knowing what to pick up first, I hit the button for my voice mail, before the dreaded HR ladies cut that off and I wouldn’t be able to access what was already there. Maybe somebody was offering me a job, what with my new notoriety and all.

“You have sixteen messages,” the recorded voice informed me. “Your mailbox is full; please delete any unnecessary messages.”

“Hey, Ali, Tony Boxer, CBS, here…” “Hey, Alessandra, Morgan Stiffe, BBC America…” “Miss Russo, I’m a reader, and I just want to say you are so coura—” “Alison Rizzo? Hold on for Pierce James…”

Then: “Ms. Russo? This is Maureen Wright-Lewis.…” I hit the rewind button. I wanted to hear that message again, make sure it was real. Wasn’t that the name of a famous double agent who was involved—was it the Iran-Contra thing?—way back in the Reagan administration? I was a kid when it happened, but I remember either reading about it or seeing a PBS documentary about it. Wasn’t she dead?

The message replayed. “Ms. Russo? This is Maureen Wright-Lewis. I’d very much like to speak with you. I have some information about the terrorist ben Yusef. I know who he actually is. Or I should say I know who he is not.

“You’ll see that there is no identifying number on this phone. You can contact me at 012-292-766-8588. I think you need to hear what I have to say. And, Ms. Russo? Take care. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

Huh? Either she’d started whispering at the end or the connection had turned bad. I couldn’t be sure.
I don’t know what I’m dealing with? I think I already figured that out, lady.

I wrote down what I thought the number was on a scrap of paper, but when I tried to rewind, I heard, “This extension is no longer valid.”

The dreaded HR machine had cut me off already. I had no job, but I did have a lead: Maureen Wright-Lewis.
Maybe I could get a magazine to assign me the story—if I had the right number.

I Googled “Maureen Wright-Lewis” into the browser on my cell. Bingo! Big-time traitor—never caught. Double agent for the United States, who was accused of selling secrets to the Soviets. Traced as far as the netherworld of the backstreets of Luxor, Egypt. Alleged spottings over the decades in Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Tibet. The latest Wikipedia entries had her both dead and currently living in Fallujah. Right.

She gets around pretty good for a—what?—dead sixty-whatever-year-old.

8

Intrigued, however, and not wanting to read it on the small screen of my phone, I hit the power key on my desktop, and typed in my username and password.

“Invalid” popped up. Oh.

I guess Brandt was worried that I would, God forbid, steal my own e-mails. I’d become a non-person—one that Peg, the office manager, would “clean up,” by packing up my things as though I’d never been here.

Was there really anything I couldn’t live without on top of or inside that desk? Not anymore.

I rushed out through the newsroom past the dozen or so reporters who still, unaware of what had happened, either gave me half waves or “Hey, nice job” comments before turning back to their screens.

I walked as quickly as I could without raising suspicions and then bounded out the glass double doors and to the elevator bank, before HR had a chance to yank my press credentials. I knew the NYPD press pass and my standard ID door pass would be invalidated, but if I was successful in finding Wright-Lewis she’d never know they had been invalidated. But then again, she used to be a spy.…

I slowly made my way back to my apartment through the crowds that had re-formed while I was getting shit-canned, holding my press credentials high over my head. The police and agents along the way let me pass in the cordoned-off security lanes, but I wondered how much longer I could get away with it and whether I was committing some kind of crime in this terrorist-paranoid atmosphere.

I made it up to my apartment, opened the door, and walked in. The first thing I spotted was the overturned bookcase: Hundreds of books lay scattered; the coffee table, leg broken, was overturned and off to the side; clothes that had been in the front coat closet were thrown everywhere. Even the refrigerator was opened, with fresh produce and frozen food lying in piles on the floor, along with boxes of cereal, sugar, and you name it tossed from the cabinets.

I’d been to enough crime scenes to know that this was a professional trashing. Someone or
someones
wanted to scare me—let me know they’d been in and had violated my living space.

Trust no one.

I ran out, slamming the door behind me, and decided the monitored elevator was a better bet than the stairs, in case someone was lying in wait for me.

When the elevator door opened at “1,” I called out, “Larry!” to the day doorman, who hadn’t been on duty when I’d left earlier that morning. “My apartment’s been broken into! Who came into the building?”

“No one, I swear, Miss Russo, no one,” he said, rushing over and leaving the door unmanned. But we’d been notified that during the trial, the lobby entrance doors would be locked to keep protestors out. I could see the crowds outside pushing against the barricades.

I reached into my bag and rooted around until I found Sergeant Clements’s card, grabbed my cell phone, and dialed her number. Nothing. Right. My cell phone was company-issue, and it too had been turned off.

I asked Larry for his phone and dialed her up. It went directly to voice mail. I walked outside in the crowd, holding up my press credentials, and flagged down the first cop I saw.

“Alessandra Russo,
The Standard,
” I said, grabbing onto her uniform shirtsleeve to keep from getting shoved. “My apartment’s been broken into,” I screamed over the din of the crowd, who had picked up the chanting where they’d left off the day before.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but…” she said, gesturing to the crowd. “The precinct is just—”

“I know where the precinct is!”

“I’m sorry…” she said, and turned back to the crowd.

I spotted a man watching me. Short sandy-to-gray hair, fifties, well-cut suit. Not good. Was he the guy who’d trashed my place?