She saw that she’d lost her nerve and wouldn’t be confessing anything today. If, as she now suspected, she’d been mistaken about Tom’s interest in her, there might be nothing so terrible about her situation that uninstalling Andreas’s spyware couldn’t fix it. When Tom emerged from his office, smiling, she took her phone to the ladies’ room and locked herself in a stall.
She sent the text and went to Leila’s work space, where Leila was on the phone again. Pip stood in the corridor with her head bowed, trying to look penitent.
“I’m sorry if I make you self-conscious,” she said when Leila was off the phone. “Are you too upset with me to let me help you?”
Leila seemed about to say something angry that she reconsidered. “We’re not going to talk about that,” she said. “You need to be a journalist this week. Not a researcher, not a houseguest. Do you think you can work with me?”
“I love working with you.”
The first task Pip was given was to gather basic facts about the execution-style killing of two women in Tennessee. The facts turned out to be consistent with the appalling story Leila told her. The women, sisters with the maiden name Keneally, had been abducted within minutes of each other in different cities; neither body showed signs of sexual trauma, and officially the police had no leads. As Pip proceeded to learn what she could about the hospitalization and disappearance of the sisters’ brother, Richard, she began to think she’d been petulant and childish in threatening to quit her job. Although living with Tom and Leila was clearly a mistake, the job wasn’t.
She kept retreating to the ladies’ room to check messages, but it wasn’t until she and Tom had gone home for a late dinner and she was in bed, at the usual texting hour, that Andreas’s reply came in.
She turned off the device without replying. She’d forced him to break his vow not to text her again, and she felt good about it. Less like a child, more like an adult who had some power. Not like a rigorously moral person, certainly; but moral absolutism was childish. Downtown, at her desk, Leila was gutting out some private misery, sitting alone at the office after midnight, drafting her story, because Leila was an adult. Her toughness made Pip see Andreas in a new light, as a kind of child-man, obsessed with spilling secrets. She squirmed with displeasure at the recollection of his hand in her pants. She could see — she thought she could see — that what adults did was suck it up and keep their secrets to themselves. Her mother, a gray-haired child in so many ways, was an adult in this one regard at least. She kept her secrets and paid the price. Pip imagined herself continuing to work at DI, knowing what she knew, having done what she’d done, and not confessing it, just as Leila had said: We’re not going to talk about that.
Her new feeling of adultness persisted through the days that followed, as Leila went back to Washington to confirm her story, returned home triumphant but even more anxious (one of her sources had uttered the words “You might not be alone”), and pulled yet another all-nighter to finish her draft. By Thursday morning the lawyer was on it. Pip had slept very little herself and was going to be rewarded with an additional-reporting byline. She hadn’t had an unexhausted moment to think about Andreas or whether the spyware was still installed; she was fact-checking like a madwoman. The suspense in the office seemed both silly and exciting. Silly because the whole thing was just a game that had nothing to do with social utility (what did it matter if they beat the WaPo by an hour or a day?) but exciting in the way the Manhattan Project must have been exciting: they’d been building their information bomb for months, and now they were waiting to explode it.
She was still checking less essential facts when the story went up on Friday morning.
THEFT OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON IN NEW MEXICO THWARTED BY ACCIDENT
MISSING PERPETRATOR TIED TO MEXICAN CARTEL AND DRUG ABUSE AT KIRTLAND AFB; ALARM FIRST RAISED AT WEAPONS PLANT IN TEXAS
Leila had gone home with a fever that she hoped to sleep off in time for interviews with NPR and cable news. The social-media team was manning its battle station, and more phones than usual seemed to be ringing, but the office was otherwise unshaken by the detonation of the information bomb. Other reporters still had their own stories, and Tom had been closeted in his office for more than an hour. The blast wave and radiation pulse were occurring in cyberspace.
Pip was on the phone with a Sonic Drive-In manager, trying to reach Phyllisha Babcock, whose tale of death-bomb sex had squeaked into the article in one-graf form, when the office IT manager, Ken Warmbold, came by her desk. He waited while she wrote down the hours of Phyllisha’s shift, and then he told her that Tom wanted to see her. She left her desk reluctantly. Fact-checking had tapped into her compulsion for cleanliness. It was making her crazy to have the article up with even tiny facts unchecked.
Tom was sitting at his desk with his fingers knit together and pressed to his mouth. His interlocked knuckles were white with the force he was applying to them. “Shut the door,” he said.
She obeyed him and sat down.
“Who sent you here?” he said.
“Just now?”
“No. To Denver. I know the answer, so you might as well tell me.”
She opened her mouth and closed it. She’d been so deep in fact-checking, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder why Tom was closeted with the IT manager.
“Obviously I’m upset,” he said, not looking at her. “But I’m willing to consider the possibility that you’re not entirely to blame. So just say what you have to say.”
She tried to speak. Swallowed. Tried again. “I wanted to say it. On Saturday. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
“So say it now.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why is that?”
“You’ll hate me. Leila will hate me.”
He tossed some stapled pages across his desk. “This is Ken’s report on the office network. We have extremely good security here. We’re protected against every form of spyware known to man. But apparently there’s one not known to man. It has a completely alien signature. It took some finding, but Ken found it.”
Pip’s eyes weren’t working right. The words of the report were just a blur.
“Did you know about this?” Tom said.
“Not for positive. But I did worry. I opened an attachment I shouldn’t have.”
He tossed another document at her. “What about this? This is the report on my home computer. Did you open any suspicious attachments at home?”
“There was one…”
He slammed his hand down on his desk. “Say the name!”
“I don’t want to,” she whimpered.
“My home hard drive’s been scraped for two weeks. My business network’s been an open book since three days after we hired you. And who brought me the story I just broke? Who was the intern who brought me the Facebook pictures? What is the name of the leaker who we now know had those pictures last summer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say it!”
She burst into tears. “I’m sorry! I’m so ashamed!”
Tom pushed a box of tissues toward her and waited, with crossed arms, for her tears to abate.
“I lied,” she said, sniffling. “I was in Bolivia for six months. The Sunlight Project. That’s where I got the Facebook pictures. From him. I lied to you about that. I lied about everything, and I’m so sorry. I know it’s a disaster.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes! All our confidential sources, all our databases, everything. I know. I get it. I’m so sorry.”
Tom’s eyes were fixed on some unseen presence, not her.
“I met this German woman in Oakland,” she said. “She wanted me to go to Bolivia. She said the Project could help me find my father. And so I went there, and he was—”