CHAPTER
1
“What journalist lives like this?”
The question from Mack Davis, opinion editor of the New York Herald, saunters across the spacious first-floor living room of a nineteenth-century, Uptown Manhattan brownstone and nudges a smile out of Sid McDaniel.
Sid sinks back into the ornate white sofa, his legs crossed and his arms stretched across the top, waiting patiently for Mack to get to what might as well be a ticking time bomb between them.
Across the room, Mack is on the edge of an identical white sofa, only he’s all lit up like Times Square as he speaks with his hands moving and his eyes darting.
“Are you some kind of combination of Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent? Are you just waiting here for an emergency beacon so you can spin into a superhero to save the city?”
Sid shrugs and offers another easy smile. He knows this room, even the entire building, is an opulent front. He chose and carefully decorated the place to give both his friends and his enemies pause.
Still, he likes that, despite its old-money feel, this building is comfortably filled with wide-open rooms you can have a whole thought in. Indeed, it fits him wonderfully as both a home and an office in this grand, dirty, corrupt, dangerous, complicated, rotting city. It is just close enough to Wall Street for him to take the subway downtown to do his undercover work for Fortune 500s that have been hacked, shackled with ransomware, or infiltrated by foreign spies doing corporate espionage—and it is just far enough from all of that to give him perspective.
“What I mean,” Mack continues, as if he is addressing an audience, “is this place is almost a museum set of an early twentieth-century man’s Uptown pad. But then there’s that modern-looking spiral staircase right in the middle. I think you should take out that staircase and put in a fire pole, Batman, so you can slide down when some siren goes off.”
Sid shrugs again, without taking his arms off the top of the couch. Clearly, given just a little time, a scotch or two, and some flattery, he could get Mack to talk and talk and so would learn nearly anything the editor has to tell. But there isn’t time for that, so he says, “Just keep me off page six.”
“Gonna be hard,” says Mack, smiling broadly for emphasis. Then he sighs and says, “Sid, you’re like an old-fashioned, reluctant movie sleuth. Like Nick Charles, but without Nora and the Jack Russell—just tripping along good-naturedly into wealth and scandal.”
“Sans the martinis this morning,” Sid replies with a chuckle.
Mack rubs his chin, nods agreement, and says, “In this place, I do feel like I should have a touch of brandy in my coffee.”
“That can be arranged.”
Sid is enjoying his editor’s practiced flamboyance, as honest as a child playing a card game. He even likes that Mack takes his look right out of GQ. He has his suit jacket off without a tie, his collar unbuttoned two down, and his pink shirtsleeves rolled up, showing off a silver watch almost as shiny as his whitened teeth. His receding hair is dark and slicked back with too much product, causing the top of his head to reflect the chandelier’s white light. He thinks this look on Mack showcases a kind of predictable conformity that can be trusted. This man, after all, isn’t a walking fraud. He clearly isn’t unsure of who he is. He is a veteran editor, adept at finding, and then drawing out, sordid tales across weeks, or even months, of scintillating coverage that almost brings a story to a climax, over and over—before pulling back again and promising more in the next edition.
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For his part, Mack is excited about this developing story. It’s like a scandalous novel—all about what a sitting president, and his family, did and didn’t do in a previous administration and in his campaign. It has intrigue, espionage, possible coming court actions, and foreign governments that can and will protect their interests. It has an FBI investigation, an active coverup, and both political parties caught up in its salivating clown grin. And, unlike the previous dossier on a sitting president, this one is being suppressed by the U.S. intelligence agencies, which gives the aching scandal a drip-drip, conspiratorial flavor.
Meanwhile, this tech guru sitting in front of him—who is also the Herald’s most-popular columnist—is somehow central to this delicious affair.
With all of this as background, Mack isn’t sure how to even begin this explosive conversation, which is why he is dodging around behind classic film references. He certainly didn’t expect this silent treatment. Not knowing Sid firsthand, he expected forgettable, if nervous, small talk—first over coffee, then a feeling-out process that would border on an interrogation before they really got into it. As it is now, he really isn’t sure how to proceed. He knows that amateurs immediately seek conclusions or answers, whereas a good editor at an urban newspaper is a tease, a dramatist, and a lovable sort of con artist, all in one. Mack has worked to become all of those things, and now those skills are simply a part of him.
So he makes a big show of taking in the room’s hand-painted Iksel wallpaper; its marble fireplace, unlighted on this lovely spring morning; its three-leaded, stained-glass French doors: one leading to a walled garden filled with budding red roses; another to a bijou powder room; and the last to a service kitchen, where someone is clanking white porcelain cups onto silver as they gather coffee, butter, and brioche. His eyes finally settle on a chessboard sitting on a marble-topped coffee table between them. The board is filled with dark and light stained squares. Its black-and-white marble rooks, bishops, kings, and queens match the table, and the pieces are in play. A few have already been taken. He wonders if it’s just there for show as he raises his eyes to Sid.
“Playing against yourself?”
“Someone online, a fast-chess champion. Ironically, we had to stop suddenly, but we’ll pick it up again.”
Mack decides not to pursue the topic as he continues to take the measure of this tech-whiz kid who calls this museum home, or headquarters, or something. Given what is going on, he thinks Sid looks too relaxed in loafers, linen pants, and a white polo. The man’s posture is both casually disarming and self-confident. It’s as if Sid’s body is saying he doesn’t have a care in the world, while his eyes are saying he’s really a lion in the long grass. He can’t quite figure out what gives Sid this aura. Arrogance? That doesn’t fit. Sid doesn’t talk about himself. He doesn’t even want to be talked about. Naivete doesn’t fit either. This man seems anything but naive.
But dammit, he should be more upset, more vulnerable. He may well be a lion in the grass, but truckloads of hunters are coming for him. Doesn’t he know he could lose everything? A lot of powerful people want him to take the bullet for this dossier.
As they eye each other, a woman’s heels come clicking down the spiral staircase and onto the wide planks of the hardwood floor between them. Her dark hair is up, and she is in midnight-blue slacks and a red satin blouse tailored to her athletic figure. She wears black-framed eyeglasses. Her complexion is Latin, and a scent wafts in with her. Bulgari?
She smiles at him before handing Sid a tablet device.
“Need your signature.”
Sid looks it over, nods, and signs.
Mack’s eyes follow her figure as her heels click back up the wooden spiral staircase to the second floor. When he turns back to Sid, he sees that Sid has been watching him watching her, amused.
“Was that Lois Lane?”
Sid smiles. “Gloria is an accomplished attorney.”
Mack raises his chin, incredulous.
“She was a fighter pilot in the Navy,” Sid says simply. “She got out with an earned disdain for male chauvinism and went to Yale Law. She graduated from that elite academic institution with a healthy distrust of the bureaucratic system and decided to practice civil-liberties litigation. She wound up in a nonprofit with people more detached from the real world than even those in academia. She came to me after that whole Verity incident and told me she wanted to do something real; she wanted to apply old-fashioned freedom to the new tech world. She is doing that now. I’m lucky to have her here.”
“Lucky all around,” Mack replies.
A thirty-something Hispanic man with the physique of a personal trainer comes into the room through a swinging kitchen door. He places a silver tray on the coffee table, beside the chess board, and asks Mack, “Coffee?”
“Please.”
“Nothing for me, Jorge,” says Sid.
Jorge pours steaming coffee into a small white cup on a saucer and leaves it on the tray next to cream, strawberry jam, and warm croissants.
“Where’d you find him?” Mack asks after the man disappears.
“Jorge? Oh, he spent ten years on a Green Beret A-Team. His specialty was intelligence—eavesdropping on enemy communications, hacking systems, running surveillance equipment, and gathering intel. He has been training me in mixed martial arts and some small arms tactical stuff. We’ve even done some 3-gun competitions together—you know, timed stuff with AR-type rifles, pistols, and shotguns on scenario-based courses. He can still move, too, though he had a piece of Humvee steel the size of a saucer go through his gut from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. He should have died. No one thought he had a chance. He told me he even saw a medic shaking his head and waving his hand under his chin after another Green Beret—and this during a firefight—asked if he’d make it until a chopper got there. After a year in a hospital in San Antonio, they retired him. Rather than take a desk job somewhere, he came to me, thanks to a shared contact. He’s invaluable. I like him close.”
“Quite the team. How about that lithe fellow in the dark suit who took my phone at the door?”
“Adam. He’s Israeli. He was in Mossad. Worked in embassies mostly. That’s all I can say about him.”
“How’d he come to you?”
“Oh, I met him on a job, a Wall Street-listed firm that had been hacked. The malware was directing a tiny fraction of profits to an offshore account. The guilty party was an Israeli national.”
“Was?”
Sid shrugs.
Mack Davis swallows his next question, knowing Sid has told him all he will, but also wondering why he had told him anything at all.
This pause gives them a moment more to consider each other. Mack thinks Sid is too young for his resumé. Is he even thirty years old? As they eye each other, still circling and feinting, Mack opts to jab to the body.
“Look, Sid. We run your column. We’re the only paper in New York that would, but it would help if you’d stick to a schedule—say, a column every Wednesday.”
“Schedules force things. I can’t force out the facts.”
“Well, then, how about at least giving us a heads-up once in a while?”
“I don’t want the pressure of expectation.”
Mack drops the smile. “You sure are a strange sort of columnist.” He glances aside for an instant, as if checking the countdown clock on the time bomb they’re both ignoring. He looks back at Sid, unsure how to broach the topic without shouting, “It’s gonna blow!” So he stalls with: “Our readers would like to know more about you.”
Sid nods and looks down, in a manner some would take for bashful humility, but that Mack decides is an act. He knows he has been allowed in this room only because someone leaked that Sid McDaniel is involved in what Washington’s chattering classes are calling “The Dirty Document”: an unflattering fifty-one pages of opposition research into the president. Word is Sid’s digital fingerprints are all over the sordid thing. But as yet, neither Mack nor any other journalist has been able to verify this, or to get sources to back up the many dirty details within it—such as its claims of seedy and unscrupulously lucrative activities the president and his family allegedly had with foreign governments and state-controlled corporations.
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Sid had been tipped about his own alleged involvement in the so-called Dirty Document just a few days before. Now he needs more, and he needs it fast, as any connection to this—even a false one—could destroy his firm. Still, impatient as he feels, he has learned not to push people with words. It’s always better to prompt them with silence and presence. If you give them quiet moments, most people get nervous and start saying what’s really on their minds. Whereas if you push them, if you bully them with tough talk, they often get apprehensive or mad and shut up. As Sid eyes Mack, he is sure this editor won’t tell him a thing in the few remaining minutes they have together, but he is just as sure Mack will give him everything he needs.
And he needs a lot, fast. Sid devoted the whole past weekend to digging into the dossier’s metadata and tracing it to its sources. His team spent the past two nights here, napping occasionally on these couches, trying to understand who is behind this and what these people want. He has yet to answer even those basic questions. But they found that its sources do point to him, though it is too obvious a setup. No one in cyber security would believe Sid McDaniel wouldn’t cloak his own IP address. Only the media would swallow and push such a blatant frame. But why would they even want to pursue this story? The president is a Democrat.
So, is this an NSA attempt to discredit and destroy him? ...
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