Deadline Man

“You said get the story. That’s what I’m doing. If you don’t like it, clear me to take a flight down there. I can move faster.”

“It’s not safe.”

I soften my voice. “No lifeline yet?”

“No,” she says.

“Then I’ll do it the hard way.”

I hear her give a resigned shrug and she tells me to be careful. I wonder if she misses me.

At a drug store, I buy toiletries, then head back to the hotel. I take a long shower, dress, and go down to the business center. Can’t help myself: I read the story on the Free Press Web site: “Columnist Missing from Ferry.” It’s written by Amber Burke, and includes too much information for my taste. “He had been told his job was being eliminated and was despondent.” And, “His sister, Jill, committed suicide by jumping from a ferry into Elliott Bay.” I’m not really paying attention to the details about my career, my awards, my scoops, the people who said “he filled up a room,” was a “star” and “made non-business readers want to read the business section.” The publisher and executive editor express their concern. My briefcase and computer were found on the boat. A police officer said it’s not unknown for people to just leave their cars on the ferry and turn up later.

I take a quick spin through the Seattle Times site. It has an update on the Free Press troubles: How a buyer is unlikely to emerge when so many newspapers are in trouble. The mayor bemoans the potential loss of the newspaper but says there’s nothing city hall can do. No shit. Plenty of politicians and bureaucrats will join the dance on our grave. One less set of shoes kicking over their rocks to see what’s underneath.

My real work is drudgery, but necessary. Three hours on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR Web site and I have printed out a three-inch thick stack of documents related to Olympic International. I go to the Olympic site and print two of CEO Pete Montgomery’s most recent Power Point presentations and speeches to securities analysts. There’s another rich, married man who might have an inclination toward teenage girls and an account at Tiffany. It would tie up the connection between Megan and Olympic International, neat as can be. Probably too neatly. I take the paperwork up to my room, then I go down to the bar, where I drink two martinis and eat bar food. I’m famished. The high-ceilinged room is ornate and inviting, and it seems to have a high proportion of attractive, unattached professional women. They don’t give me a second look.

I return to the business center and spend another four hours, researching private contracting and national security. From the volume of material—credible stuff, not nut sites—the research I have time to do doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. Still, I find congressional and General Accountability Office reports, declassified Defense Department reports, think-tank papers, stories out of major newspapers and a couple of interesting Web sites run by former military men. I use the search function to go through 300-page reports in PDF form, looking for “Olympic” or “Praetorian.” I save useful URLs and email them to myself at my new Gmail account. It’s the drudgery of research you save readers from. I print out and add the relevant pages to my growing sheaf of reading material for the train. With luck, the work will save me from all the loose ends that pop out of my psyche when I’m not in the paper, when I’m not getting the daily rush of the news. Upstairs again, I shove a chair against the door, latch it, brush my teeth, put the gun under my pillow near my right hand, fall asleep early, and don’t wake up until 7:30 the next morning.

***

I change into a blue shirt and tan chinos, ones with enough give in t

he hips and crotch that my lightweight .357 is virtually invisible in the pocket. So is the money belt. Broadway is cool and blustery as I walk to the Portland train station. Amtrak’s Coast Starlight departs on time, south to Los Angeles, where I can change trains to the Sunset Limited for the ride into Arizona. Trains are wonderful. Nobody wants your ID. Nobody recognizes you from Sunday’s column. I am nobody. The train takes you places you can’t see from a car or an airliner, sometimes they are breathtaking in their beauty, or simply as a reminder that places exist in America that aren’t cluttered with houses, strip malls, and cars. And you get to see pieces of the economy. I see one when we leave Portland: An impressive compound of nearly new industrial buildings with Olympic International’s logo and the name on the side: Portland Litho and Lamination Plant/Portland Distribution Center.

Except the buildings look deserted and empty—just like the ones I saw on the train down from Seattle. While we’re still in cell range, I find the phone number for the Portland Litho and Lamination Plant of Olympic International and call it. After four rings, there’s a click and a new set of rings. “Thank you for calling Olympic International,” an automated voice drones. It’s the same recording you get if you call the headquarters in Seattle. I dig through the Olympic files because I remember seeing a press release that had mentioned that operation had won a sustainability prize just last month.

I’m a curious guy: that’s essential for a good journalist, and its loss is one of the things that has hurt our profession. Lose your curiosity and you’re just taking up the oxygen in the newsroom. So I call the Portland Chamber of Commerce and after a few dead ends finally get a woman who knows all about this Olympic site: it closed three years ago. I call the chamber up in Centralia and ask the same question: that paper mill closed four years ago—“you people in Seattle ought to get out more,” the man says. I keep saying that I’m with the Seattle Free Press. It opens doors, always has. But I’m really just with me now. I am a truant, a nobody without the newspaper. It feels strange. Almost as strange as a company whose active facilities are actually closed. The latest annual report lists the Centralia mill among Olympic International’s operations.

Just a boring, integrated paper company with a subsidiary in the defense business. A company that’s reporting operations on its books that are actually closed. A company the Seattle newspapers haven’t covered very completely for years. The train rolls through the peaceful farms of the Willamette Valley, toward the mountains, and I read. I read to get the story, and I read so I don’t go crazy with grief over Pam and the gaping absence of Rachel and Amber, Melinda the professor and Melinda my oldest friend, and everything in my old life. I miss a warm body and a warm voice that might miss me. Grief over the deaths of newspapers. Instead, I walk to the bar car and drink a martini, then another. Back at my seat, I make myself read.

Last year, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction released a report that showed ODS had over-billed the State Department for $50 million. It has a contract to protect diplomats in Iraq, but apparently didn’t fully staff and cover its obligations. ODS also over-billed the government for airfare and couldn’t account for government equipment it had received. I search through Olympic’s SEC documents. By law, it should have to disclose this to shareholders. There it is: Hidden in the fine print deep in the 10-K annual report. The scandals at Blackwater and Halliburton got all the coverage. This has never been in a newspaper.

By the time we arrive in Klamath Falls, I begin to understand Amber’s worry over whom to trust. I read Justice Department budget documents related to an advanced electronic surveillance program for the FBI called “Going Dark.” It’s an advanced program designed to allow the bureau to get control over new technologies. That’s what the report says. An old editor of mine would have asked, “What does that mean?” The report is unclear. But when I scan through the pages, I find a list of contractors for the $234 million program, and there’s Olympic Defense Systems getting a nice chunk of change. Yet it’s not reflected in the Olympic International reports to shareholders or to the SEC. I find this again and again. ODS is bringing in much more revenue than Olympic declares—and its mills and distribution centers sit shuttered. Apparently nobody on Wall Street or at the rating agencies cares as long as the cash comes in.

I fall asleep to the gentle rocking of the train, documents clutched in my lap. The next day passes and I barely notice the view across the bay to San Francisco, the ocean right by the tracks after we leave Santa Barbara, the long slog through the suburbs of L.A. My mind is on the story.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Thursday, November 4th

This is not Europe. We don’t have fast trains most places in America. My train doesn’t even go to Phoenix anymore, which is the nation’s fifth largest city. Instead, it lets me out in the desert in a little crossroads called Maricopa. I begin to wonder if I should have gone all the way to Tucson and taken a bus back, when I hear a woman’s voice, asking me if I need a ride. I walk across the dusty, hard ground, feeling the intense sun on my skin. She’s somewhere over fifty, sixty pounds overweight, wearing a tight pink pastel T-shirt, and sitting in an ancient Chevy van with the top of the dashboard covered with paperwork of some kind. She’s the only taxi service into the city and the fare is $60. I peel off three bills and climb in. The only other passenger is a big guy with an eye-patch and a ball cap that reads, “When I have sex, it’s so good the neighbor has a cigarette.” He reads a comic book and doesn’t talk during the trip.

It’s hot.

It’s early November and blistering. The sky is an enormous vault of dusty blue without a single cloud. I have never been to Arizona: the land is flat, treeless, brown, everything the Northwest is not. To me it’s ugly, but I’m sure they think it’s God’s country. It’s that way everywhere. Don’t ask me to be in a tourist frame of mind, anyway. I have a lot of enemies. Time is one. I’m grateful the dash clock is broken. We drive out of the little crossroads and enter a morbid landscape of new, close-spaced, dun-colored houses. They look cheaply built and deserted. Faded sales signs hang limp in the air. She tells me the place has been killed by the real-estate crash. A huge Indian casino whooshes past and then we’re on the freeway, doing seventy-five. I keep checking the mirrors. Nobody seems to be following us. We’re swallowed up by a city of subdivisions and big-box stores, surrounded by bare mountains. The scenery runs from shabby to breathtaking. There seems to be no zoning.

She lets me out downtown. This is the oddest big city I’ve ever seen, hugely spread out but with a downtown more modest than Bellevue’s. Still, I’m a city kid and step out on the curb beside a skyscraper from the 1970s. Without the van’s air conditioning, the heat instantly hits me again. No one is visible on the sidewalk for blocks. In the distance, a low range of blue-brown mountains keep the southern horizon. A light-rail line runs up what looks like the main drag. I walk toward a pub to grab some lunch and see a small men’s store. There, I use my federal money to buy a suit, white shirt, dress shoes, tie and belt. Lucky for me I’ve always been able to buy suits off the rack with minimal alterations. Forty-two long coat. Fits great. I add a natty straw fedora and throw away the ball cap.

The owner is named Barry and he wants to talk. Where am I from? Chicago, I say. He is, too. Good thing I know that city well enough to fake it. After lunch, I use his directions to take a light-rail train half a mile to a dry cleaner that Barry said could do alterations. I offer the woman an extra $200 if she can hem the pants while I wait: a full break and cuffs. Back on the train, I ride north, past skyscrapers and vacant lots until I am in shady blocks. There I get off and check into a motel, and finally unload my purchases and traveling bag heavy with files in a dim room with the air conditioning set on high.

***

An hour later I pay the cab to wait. We sit outside a sand-colored three-story office building in Scottsdale. It is both new and drab. The heat hasn’t abated, so I keep the suit jacket off until I step outside and walk toward the front entrance. I grew up poor, so I like to wear suits. I love their design and feel. I love not dressing like every casual Microsoftie in Seattle. And a suit still gets you entree—fewer people will ask questions when you walk in a place where you shouldn’t be wearing a suit. My beard is coming in now and I’ve trimmed it neatly. The straw fedora is on and I keep my head down. No reason to attract undue attention from anybody’s security cameras.

The glass entrance doors open with gold handles and give way to a tall atrium with elevators on each side. They have gold doors. Walk straight ahead and it’s the entrance to what was once a mortgage company. The name is still on the wall but the interior is dark and a discreet “available” sign is in the window. There’s no security desk or, as far as I can tell, camera. No one comes or goes as I wait. But the directory on the nearest wall confirms what I had learned from Olympic’s Web site, that the offices of ODS are on the third floor.

I ride up and the elevator door opens with soft bell and a quiet whoosh. The atrium is deserted. An insurance office sits in the main space and behind a spacious reception desk, I see people walk around doing whatever it is they do. The ODS office is located down a hallway painted off-white with dark wooden doors every few feet and a drinking fountain set back in an alcove that also contains the doors to the rest rooms. Nobody is out in the hallway besides me. The carpet is thick and yet I can hear my footsteps. The place smells like icy air. I pass a real-estate attorney, another real-estate attorney, a CPA. I dated a CPA once. She was much more fun than one might have imagined. These offices have large windows beside the entrance doors. I am re-running the lines in my head that I will say when I reach the ODS office and open the door. My stomach is tight. I take note of the door to the exit stairs at the end of the hall. It is fortuitously located near the ODS suite.