Authors: Nina Mason
Desperation laced with outrage surged through
Osbourne’s bloodstream. “Can’t we buy him off?”
“We’ve tried that,” Gibson said. “But no
go.”
Osbourne
, blood pressure shooting up, gripped the edge of the table. “But why? What is he after? What is his motive? Any theories?”
“Simple greed is my guess,”
Dogan interjected, “like most of these takeover artists.”
It seemed
like more than greed to Osbourne. Robert Sterling behaved as if he had a score to settle. But why? And why did the man seem so familiar? Had he worked for one of the papers acquired by Golden Age? Had he been laid off like that pain in his backside Alex Buchanan?
Taking a breath,
the CEO checked his phone again. Still no bloody answer, damn it all.
Inside a silver Honda Civic parked across the street from the target’s building, Al-Jaafari seethed with rage—toward himself, the journalist, and his partner, who was playing with something making a lot of annoying bleeps and blips. Turning a heated glare on the man behind the wheel, he asked, “What in the name of Allah is that infernal contraption?”
“It is a Game Boy,”
Sahid replied with a shrug. “For my grandson back home.”
Al-
Jaafari, who had no grandchildren of his own, vehemently disapproved of such frivolities. As far as he was concerned, they encouraged “western” ways and led to sloth and idiocy. Sahid should know better than to expose his grandson to such spiritual corruptions.
When the cell in Al-
Jaafari’s pocket beeped, dread tied his intestines in a knot. He knew who was calling and could not, in good conscience, put off answering any longer. Fishing out his phone, he took a few minute to type the most judicious reply he could come up with:
Our sincerest apologies, but unforeseen circumstances have forced a slight delay.
* * * *
Buchanan emerged from the bar, surprised to find the sky a luminous shade of charcoal. Jesus, how long had he been in there? It was twilight—
the gloaming,
they called it back home. Launching himself up Sixth Street toward his flat, he started singing under his breath: “In the gloaming, oh my darling, when the lights are soft and low…”
The whisky had
both taken the edge off his anguish and warmed his blood, but it was still damn cold out. Shivering, he hurried along, yearning for the overcoat he’d bought two Christmases ago in Edinburgh. He could smell frost in the air. Had there been snow in the morning forecast? He could not recall. This morning felt like eons ago.
“When the trees are sobbing faintly with a gentle unknown woe, will you think of me and love me, as you did once long ago?”
The song, one his mother used to sing at the piano, was making him feel sappily nostalgic. People in groups of two and three squeezed past him on the sidewalk, some in street clothes, others in costumes—“guise” as they called it in Scotland. In all the furor, he’d completely forgotten it was Halloween. All at once, he missed Edinburgh fiercely, missed his mum, missed the “guisers,” the wee ones trick-or-treating door to door, and missed “dooking fir aiples.”
The next moment, he was a lad again, running down Raeburn Street toward the shops: The
bakers on the corner with their cases full of mouth-watering French fancies, cream buns, and meringues; the News Agent and Sweetshop where he’d buy Highland Toffee and Parma Violets for his father—to mask the smell of alcohol on his breath (so his mum wouldn’t give the old man any Shite about it); the
Evening News
offices where he and Kenny would go late on Saturday afternoons to pick up
The Pink
, a special edition listing all the football scores; and, of course, the model shop.
He and Kenny
used to save their pennies for weeks to buy an airplane kit, then spend hours and hours gluing the wee plastic bits together. Thinking back on it now, he could almost smell the glue. It was a wonder they didn’t both develop brain damage from all the fumes they’d inhaled.
As Edinburg
h faded, fear began to claw at his insides. He badly craved a cigarette, but couldn’t bring himself to let go of the Glock long enough to light one. The assassins could be anywhere, damn it. Watching. Waiting. Preparing to strike.
He
trundled on, images from earlier flashing through his mind like machine-gun fire. Baghdad. Kelsey. Bodies. The gunman. He should have felt outraged, aggrieved, devastated, but he only felt like an empty biscuit tin. As per usual.
“
In the gloaming, oh my darling, think not bitterly of me…”
When
his mobile started buzzing, he gave up singing and popped the device out of the holster on his belt. Squinting down at the wee screen, he checked the caller ID, but didn’t recognize the number. With considerable trepidation, he accepted the call.
“So
, did you mean what you said? Or, were you just handing me a line?”
It was a
female voice with a youthful cadence.
“Who’s this?”
“Who do you think?”
He
took a breath and spewed it in a white cloud of frosty vapor. He was so
not
in the mood to play guessing games.
“G
osh, I’m deeply flattered, Alex.
Not
.”
His mind
dialed up a coltish young woman with long blond hair and big blue eyes—the co-ed who’d tried to seduce him the night before.
“Forgive me,
Mackenzie,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve had a bit of a rough day.”
“No shit,” she said. “
I saw it on the news. Are you okay?”
“That depends on your definition
.”
Mackenzie started prattling on about something
meaningless. As he walked, half-listening, he scanned the parked cars lining both sides of the street for anything suspicious while scenes from the night before replayed inside his brain.
After his speech,
he’d hung around for a couple of hours talking to some of the student editors about the best way to break into journalism. He tried to be encouraging, despite his own creeping cynicism brought on by so many professional disappointments. In this age of profit-driven corporate media ownership, he knew what those new to the profession would be up against, knew that any idealistic young reporter who dreamed of making a difference was in for a rude awakening.
He certainly had been.
“My parents, my dad especially, are pitching a royal fit that I want to go into journalism,” Mackenzie told him. A small circle of her fellow student editors were gathered around them, mostly listening, but also putting their two cents in now and again. “I keep telling my dad, I’ll only do it for a couple of years and, if it doesn’t pan out, then I’ll go to law school…”
“Journalism’s a dead end, Mack,” a gangly lad
in spectacles put in. “Everybody knows that. Don’t waste your time.” He threw a guilty look at Buchanan. “No offense, dude. I mean, you look like you got into it a while ago. And, well, obviously you thought you were going to change the world, speak truth to power, and all that other noble Don Quixote bullshit. And then, well, along came the Internet and like, bam, you were totally hating life. But no worries, right? Coz you started the
Voice
. And now, maybe you’ll get lucky and someone’ll buy you out like they bought out Arianna Huffington.”
He thought about telling the kid where he could shove it
. He also considered telling him about the offer from Milo Osbourne, but why waste his breath on some know-it-all wanker?
“So, is the invitation still open?
”
Drawn back to the
phone conversation, he squinted in confusion. “And what invitation is that, then?”
“
Well,” she said coyly, “I was thinking of driving down for the weekend.”
H
e swallowed hard. He vaguely recalled giving her his card and saying something, purely out of politeness, about looking him up if she was ever in town, but he’d hardly classify it as an
invitation
. She’d given him tawdry looks all evening and he’d tried to let her down easy to avoid the inevitable failure with which younger women were utterly unprepared to cope.
While he searched f
or the words to brush her off again, another call started beeping in. Seeing an out, he said hurriedly, “Sorry, Mackenzie, there’s a call coming in, and I really need to take it.”
“Will you call me later?”
He grunted non-committedly before switching over.
“I saw what happened on the news,” said a man on the other end.
The voice—American with a slight southern drawl—was unfamiliar. “I’m sorry about your staff, but glad you’re okay.”
Buchanan
knitted his brows, gaze sweeping the street. “Who’s this?”
“My identity is
unimportant.”
“What do you want?”
“Let’s just say there are things going on in this country,” the man said, “things involving powerful people that would make your skin crawl.”
Buchanan’s
skin was already crawling. “Such as?”
“Things that could destroy the constitutional freedoms we all enjoy,”
the caller replied.
The Scot
rolled his eyes. “What’s this about?”
There was a long
, uncomfortable pause before the caller said, “Find Frank Aslan.”
Frank
Aslan? Buchanan felt gob-smacked. Frank Aslan was a professor of journalism at Columbia University who, twenty years ago, wrote a book warning about the dangers of runaway media monopolies.
“
Aslan? What the hell does he have to do with this?”
“He’s got the proof,” the man said. “And you need to get your hands on it before they do.”
As he listened, Buchanan visually patrolled the street for any sign of the gunmen, but found nothing out of the ordinary. He was approaching home and feeling more apprehensive with every step. What if they were waiting for him outside? Or worse, inside the apartment?
“Who are you? At least give me
a name.”
“Call me
Lapdog.”
Buchanan
recognized the alias as one used by a frequent commenter, meaning this guy, whoever he was, read the
Voice
with some regularity. The editor searched his brain for anything the man had posted, but couldn’t seem to retrieve it.
“Why don’t you find
Aslan yourself?”
“I have my reasons,”
Lapdog replied. “Besides, he’s gone into hiding.”
Buchanan
, still scanning, let out a disgruntled scoff. “If he’s in hiding, how the hell do you expect me to find him?”
“
Try asking his granddaughter.”
Even in the
cold, Buchanan could feel the heat of blood rising in his face. “And what makes you think this granddaughter of his, whoever she may be, would tell me a goddamned thing?”
“
She likes you.”
He
checked his mental list of female acquaintances. Mackenzie, Helene, Kelsey. He flinched at the last one, recalling how brutally she’d been crossed off the list, which had been depressingly short to begin with.
“Who?”
“Thea Hamilton.”
Bloody hell.
Ms. Ball Buster 2008 was Aslan’s granddaughter? Of all the bleeding luck.
“Find
Aslan and find out what he knows.” Lapdog hesitated. “And Buchanan—watch your back.”
There was a click and
he was gone. The next moment, Buchanan felt something whizz past his ear. He crouched down and drew his gun, but held his fire. He could not see where the shot had come from. And there were too many people around to just open fire. Maybe the gunman didn’t care if he hit innocent bystanders, but the journalist sure as fuck did.
Another bullet zinged off the building just above his head
, spraying brick dust. Buchanan trundled toward the corner, around which was the street-level entrance to the building’s underground parking garage. Maybe, if he got to his vehicle, he could get away long enough to ring the police.
No sooner did he reach the door than
he heard a car peel away from the curb. Heart lurching, he raced down the stairs, clutching the railing for support. The garage, empty of people, smelled of exhaust, petrol fumes, and motor oil. The fluorescents overhead washed the space in a surreal yellow glow. One of them flickered in a way that bothered his eyes.
Mu
scles tense, nerve-endings tingling, he dug in his pocket for his keys. Luckily, he had them with him. As he depressed the unlock button, his vehicle—a Galway Green Land Rover—chirped. He hurried toward it, mindful of the car coming down the ramp. He broke into a run, wincing at the pain in his bum knee. A few feet from the car, he dropped and slid underneath.