Pip shut the door and sat down. “I gather she got something big yesterday.”
“Ghastly thing. Major story. Bad for everyone except us. It’s very good for us, assuming we’re the ones to break it. She’ll fill you in — she’s going to need your help.”
“An actual weapon went missing?”
“Yes and no. It never left Kirtland. Armageddon was averted.” Tom leaned back in his chair, catching the fluorescent light on his terrible glasses. “This was probably before your time, but there used to be a countdown-to-Armageddon clock. Union of Concerned Scientists, I believe. It would be four minutes to midnight, and then there’d be a new round of arms-control talks, and the clock would go back to five minutes before midnight. It all seems vaguely cheesy and ridiculous now, like everything else from those years. What kind of clock runs backward?”
He seemed to be free-associating to conceal something.
“They still have that clock,” Pip said.
“Really.”
“But you’re right, it feels dated. People are more advertising-literate these days.”
He laughed. “Plus it turns out that it wasn’t actually five minutes to midnight in 1975, otherwise we’d all be dead now. It was nine fifteen or something.”
Pip’s own countdown-to-confession clock was stuck at one second before midnight.
“Anyway, Leila’s on the ragged edge,” Tom said. “She comes across as so unthreatening that people don’t realize how competitive she is.”
“I’m realizing it, a little bit.”
“A couple of years ago, she was way out in front on the Toyota recall story, or she thought she was. She thought she had time to nail it down tight and break it complete. And then suddenly she starts hearing from her contacts in the agencies. They’re calling her to tell her they just heard an amazing story from the Journal’s guy. These were people who hadn’t known anything, hadn’t told her anything, and now they had the whole story! She’s hearing that the Journal’s guy was up all night drafting. She’s hearing that the Journal is already lawyering it. And there’s no worse feeling. No worse thing to write than a story where you have to credit the guy you were way ahead of until two days ago. Apparently the WaPo’s on the Kirtland story — Leila found that out yesterday. We’re still ahead, but probably not by much.”
“Is she drafting?”
“That’s what sleepless nights are for. I’d almost rather get scooped than see her in the state she’s in. You need to help me try to keep her halfway sane.”
Pip was starting to feel bad about having lashed out at Leila; to wonder if she was simply overstressed by work.
“But listen,” Tom said, leaning forward. “Before you go, I want to ask you a personal question.”
“I actually had something to—”
“We were talking about your dad the other night. And I’ve been thinking — you’re a great researcher. Have you ever tried to find him?”
She frowned. Why did people keep asking her about her father? In her guilty frame of mind, she had the curious thought that Andreas was secretly her father. That this was why her mother was so hostile to him. That Tom and Leila had discovered the spyware and knew more about her than she herself did. Andreas as her dad: the thought was crazy but had a certain logic, the logic of ick, the logic of guilt.
“Yeah, I’ve tried,” she said. “But my mom covered her tracks really well. The only thing I’ve got is her made-up name and my approximate date of birth. I always seemed to be the right size for the grade I was in. But I know my birth certificate is fake.”
The look Tom was giving her was worrisomely loving. She lowered her eyes.
“You know,” she said, “I’m not a very good person.”
“What are you talking about? What’s not good about you?”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t always tell the truth.”
“About what? About your father?”
“No, that part is true.”
“Then what?”
Just say it, she thought. Say: I was in Bolivia, not California …
There was a tap on the door.
Tom jumped to his feet. “Come in, come in.”
It was Leila. She looked at Pip and spoke to Tom. “I was on the phone with Janelle Flayner. I was thinking last night about something she’d said to me. Something like ‘It’s about time someone listened.’”
“Leila,” Tom said gently.
“Hear me out. This is not paranoia. She said that, and I called her, and it turns out that, yes, she did communicate with someone else. Before me. While Cody’s pictures were still up on Facebook, she sent a message to the famous leaker. ‘The Sunshine Boys?’ That’s what she said. The Sunshine Boys. The place that everybody sends their tips to.”
Pip had one of those double blushes, a mild one followed by a burning whole-body wave.
“So what?” Tom said, less gently.
“Well, Mrs. Flayner didn’t hear back. Nothing ever happened.”
“Good. Happy ending. He couldn’t do shit from Bolivia. To cover a story like this, you need boots on the ground.”
“Well, but Wolf never put the pictures up. He puts up twenty things a day — there’s no filter. But for some reason he didn’t put this one up.”
“I’m serenely unworried.”
“I’m radically worried.”
“Leila. He’s had the information for almost a year. Why would he suddenly decide to float it in the next five days?”
“Because these stories have a boiling point. Suddenly everyone starts talking overnight. If he gets one more leak, he can spit in the soup. It’s bad enough if the Post does it to me. But if that guy gets there first—”
“The world looks very scary when you haven’t slept. You’re the one who’s sitting on the elephant. You’re the only one who can connect the dots from Amarillo to Albuquerque.”
“People steal elephants. It happens all the time.”
“If you want to worry about something, worry about the Post.”
Leila laughed raggedly. “I’m all over that, too. They’ve got to be days ahead of me on the Kirtland drug scandal. Probably weeks. There’s no way I can cover it when I’m also confirming the nuke story.”
“You’ll pick up enough of it collaterally. It’s fine if the Post has more detail on it, so long as we’re first. Let them add the salt to our soup. Worst case, they’re out in front with a drug story, and we follow with an Armageddon story.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to do a co-op with them?”
“With a Jeff Bezos joint? I can’t believe you’re even asking.”
“Then prepare for me to be a wreck.”
Leila left, and Tom gazed after her. “I hate to see her like this,” he said. “It feels like the end of the world to her when she gets beaten.”
Pip wondered if she’d been mistaken. He wasn’t seeming like a man in love with anyone but Leila.
“Do you have your phone?” he said.
“My phone?”
“I want to make some calls to the Post. Dial some numbers and see who’s there on a Saturday. If the people I have in mind aren’t there, she can worry a little less.”
Even though Pip had come here to confess, she was tempted to say she didn’t have her device with her; it was radioactive with incriminating texts. But to claim not to have it was dumb and implausible. When she handed it over to Tom, it felt like a small bomb, and when she left his office she stationed herself outside the door, hoping her proximity would inhibit him from reading her texts.