Deadline Man

“Huh. Interesting question. I’ll see what I hear.”

“Any of your friends invested with Troy who might talk?”

“Craig Summers.”

Great.

“Ever hear of an outfit called Animal Spirits?”

“No. Great name. Wish I’d have named a program after it.”

It’s a strange phone call and afterward I have a quick debate with myself about chasing Troy’s death and the status of his hedge fund. But the time calculus is against me: I don’t have time to call a bunch of rich people on spec and hope that someone calls back, much less that they were investors. I don’t have time to deal with the surly federal beat reporter, to see if anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s office would talk about why those agents were so interested in my conversation with Troy Hardesty. I don’t have time.

Next week I’ll start looking for lawsuits or enforcement actions against Troy’s hedge fund. For now, the better target is the Olympic follow-up. I go to the corporate Web site. It has elaborate pages on each of its business units, with top executives, plant locations, statistics, and history, and this is a company with a lot of history. But when I use the pulldown menu and go to Olympic Defense Systems, a bare bones page pops up with little of that information. I read, “ODS serves America’s war fighters at the front lines…” Then the computer screen goes black. I do all the things the technologically semi-literate do: hit the return key, run the mouse around. The screen stays as black as annihilation. The little green light on the computer stays on. I call tech support, tell them I’m on deadline, and in ten minutes one of the systems people comes down. She’s a luscious little wren with dark hair and oval, black-rimmed glasses named Faith. She’s helped me before.

“What did you do?” She always asks that.

She fiddles with the big box under the desk and in a minute the screen revives, at least a blank, blue sea of screen. She fiddles some more and folders start to appear. It’s all magic.

“Try to be good,” Faith says, tossing her hair without artifice, and walking out. Too bad about my “no fishing off the company pier” rule. But the ones her age are rarely interested in me. Back on the Olympic Web page, I learn little about the defense unit. Yahoo finance has a bit more: in addition to making night-vision goggles for the Army, ODS is a subcontractor on a new information services program for the Air Force, and provides “protection services,” whatever that means.

The newspaper morgue is all online now. Unfortunately, the last major article in the Free Press on Olympic International was three years ago. Nothing has ever appeared in this newspaper about the defense business. A Nexis search shows a Washington Post story about Olympic’s defense subsidiary making a $100 million settlement with the government last spring for selling defective night-vision goggles to the Army. We never ran it. Even Conspiracy Grrl knew. Not us. I take it personally. How did that fall through the cracks?

Hell with it. I open my filing cabinet and pull out paper files, and quickly scan the annual report, a couple years’ worth of 10-K and 8-K filings. The unit has been the fastest-growing subsidiary, thanks to the wars. It has “dig deeper” written all over it.

I send Heidi Benson an email asking again if I can interview Pete Montgomery. I send the business editor an email asking to travel to D.C. Better use the travel money before it’s cut off. Then I get a call back from an analyst in New York, returning my call from two days before. I put on my headset and take notes on the computer while he spends fifteen minutes filling in some gaps. He sends me a file with a PowerPoint presentation to analysts from earlier this year by the head of ODS, James Martindale. He suggests I contact a friend of his in D.C., who works at a defense think tank. I make the call and she picks up on the first ring. The newspaper gods are with me. I make more notes.

It’s noon and I’m starving but there’s no choice but to write. The column is due at one. I’m one of the few people who can write a publishable first draft. I can write fast. I can write like hell. I joke, if you can’t write well, write fast. I can do both. I’d like to outline and carefully plan every column. I’d like to walk through the evocative streets of the city and read Mencken or Liebling on a park bench, thinking great thoughts about the dying craft of columnist. Some days it’s not possible. Now I have to stand and deliver. The truth is that I never know if I can produce another column. The big white page on the computer just sits there, taunting. I wonder about the day I will freeze, the day I will have nothing more to say. So far it hasn’t happened.

What I need is a lede. That’s always the hardest thing. Some reporters fail because they can’t write decent ledes. Editors fool with them, piss on them, sometimes make them better and often don’t. I walk to the Coke machine, feed in a dollar, pop the can, take a swig, walk back. I am aware of how silently hyper I am, how inside I am insane with deadline, with the gathering and the writing and dangers of error or libel or readers just tossing you aside. I am insane with deadline.

It’s a fever inside. But I walk with my usual easy stride. I nod to friends. Pretty soon I am reminded of why I like to work from home. In addition to the noise of a dozen conversations in the newsroom, people drift by to talk. One of the metro columnists wants to speculate on how the layoffs will turn out. Somehow I think she’ll be fine. She trucks in easy emotionalizing and any outrage directed against her is short-lived. Me, I’ve pissed off some of the biggest executives in town and not a few advertisers. But I can’t think about that now. I gracefully break away and close the door to my office. I stare out at the street and figure out the next step. Now I know how I will start the column. Everything else will just flow.

***

By four-thirty, my column is through the copy editor and the slot. “Slot” is old newspaper slang, usually meaning a senior copy editor who checks headlines and copy one last time. Lots of eyes see these stories before they go in print or online. It’s amazing we can still make mistakes and nobody catches them. The copy desk is not as good as it once was, when it was populated by unsociable gnomes, the greybeards who had memorized stylebooks and dictionaries, who would question minute word use—“nobody knows what ‘recondite’ means”—and drive you crazy. But they would also save you from yourself and your errors. That’s why I hang around this afternoon. I want to make sure this column is absolutely accurate. Obviously the publisher is watching. On the CCI computer system, I can see it laid out on Sunday’s business front, in the usual spot, the left-hand column, with the five-year-old mugshot of me looking serious. The headline says, “Olympic’s quiet defense profit machine.”

I answer the phone on the second ring. It’s Rachel’s father.

I used to work for an editor who advised: unless you’re expecting a return call from a source on deadline, never answer the phone. It won’t be the Pulitzer committee calling to say they made a mistake and you actually won this year. It will be the angry reader, the special pleader, granny demanding bigger type for the obscure stock listing you haven’t carried for four years anyway. Somebody needs to talk to them, but that’s what editors are for. Otherwise it’s needless brain damage.

Rachel’s father tells me to meet him in thirty minutes.

***

Craig Summers grew up in hardscrabble British Columbia before immigrating to Seattle to work on the docks. He put himself through the University of Washington and then went east, studying and teaching at MIT. In the early ‘90s, he started a company that made software to track shipping worldwide. He sold it a decade ago for $75 million, started another company and sold that one for close to a billion. Then he quit to devote his life to philanthropy. My job involves dealing with liars, truth spinners, and phonies, among them rapacious executives that want the world to see them otherwise. But Summers is real. He’s a good guy. Too bad I have to brace for the worst.

I walk through the end-of-day crowds to Pike Place Market. Stalls are shutting down and discarded ice is melting on the cobblestones. Tourists take photos. It’s overcast, cool, and blustery. There’s a crowd in the Starbucks when I walk in. I see him instantly, he’s wearing a blazer and blue jeans, wearing the eyes that his daughter makes lovely. Once he sees me, he walks over quickly. He doesn’t extend his hand.

“I’m surprised you came, you’re such a coward, the way you treat people.”

His voice is not low, and the tourists and other patrons at this famous Starbucks location turn to watch us. I meet his angry glare. “Look…” My mouth is almost too dry to form the word.

“You think that normal rules of behavior don’t apply to you.”

He shakes his head slowly, the cords bulging in his neck. “I know your type, selfish prick. But you can’t get away with it when my daughter is involved!”

I came prepared to be contrite and conciliatory but I am starting to get angry. Then I wonder, like a selfish prick, if Rachel is pregnant. He doesn’t give me a chance to think about it. He advances on me, seizes me by the lapels and gives me several hard shakes, pulling my coat halfway down my arms. Then he gives me a sharp hand to the chest.