Chapter 1
Payoff Plaza Strip Mall, Las Vegas, Nevada
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Twelve years ago, Greta tiptoed up behind me in our tiny kitchenette in New York City, wrapped an arm around my waist, and asked me to marry her. Even at nine months pregnant, she moved elegantly and spoke poetically. “We have this one life,” she said. “Let’s use it to walk each other home.”
Her only demand was truth. She knew that we’d both change over time, and someday one of us was bound to change in a way that would fracture our marriage, at least temporarily. But as long as we were completely honest, we could work through anything.
I promised her that day that I’d never lie to her, and I never did.
About a hundred years before I met Greta, Joseph Pulitzer wrote three words on the newsroom wall of The New York World, his flagship newspaper. Accuracy. Accuracy. Accuracy. The founding principle of journalism. Above all, get the damn facts straight. I learned this on my first day of journalism school, and I’ve never had to retract an article. I haven’t once made up a detail to enhance a story.
But Greta kicked me out eight months ago, and I haven’t been a real journalist in years, so I guess truth and accuracy aren’t enough. At least, not anymore.
So here’s what probably happened:
James Stacy stepped out of his bright blue MINI Cooper, glanced left and right, then slowly rotated three-hundred-sixty degrees, eyes shifting from car to car, hands tight around the handle of an old leather backpack. He was pretty sure he hadn’t been followed.
He spotted the office of The Las Vegas Gazette between a Chinese restaurant and a liquor store, and huffed across the parking lot in the already oppressive heat. James had lost and regained the same twenty pounds ten times in the last ten years, but recently he’d regained the twenty, plus a few extra, so his jeans and blazer were too tight. His face quickly became slick and blotchy. The sun was hot on his back, and his shirt clung to his damp skin as he paused to read the paper’s credo on the glass door: IF YOU DON’T WANT IT PRINTED, DON’T LET IT HAPPEN.
He scanned the parking lot again. There were about a half-dozen cars in the lot, and none had come in after him. Traffic was light along South Rainbow Boulevard, and most of the businesses in the area wouldn’t open for another hour or two. Everything was quiet, which was how James liked it. It wasn’t that he’d expected to be followed—not exactly, anyway—but he was always a little anxious. And the stolen hard drive in his backpack wasn’t helping.
He stepped into The Gazette office and stopped at the receptionist’s desk. A young woman looked up from her smartphone and smiled. “Mr. Stacy?”
“Yes, I’m a little early. I’m here to meet—“
“Ben is expecting you. I’m his assistant, Esperanza. Let me check to see if he’s ready for you.”
James took a seat on a threadbare sofa against the far wall and watched Esperanza walk down a dark hall and disappear through a doorway.
The lobby was a dump. Two clashing armchairs faced the sofa, and between them sat a low coffee table littered with old magazines. In a corner, a small rock fountain buzzed quietly, out of water. The hallway looked to be only about thirty feet long, with two doors on each side and one in the back, which James figured led to a back alley. That was it. The newsroom and corporate headquarters of The Las Vegas Gazette. The fourth-largest weekly in Las Vegas, and there were only four. The whole place couldn’t have measured more than eight-hundred square feet.
Even without much of a sense of humor, the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on James. He was sweaty and nervous, but he was one of the most influential journalists on earth. And there he was, sitting in the office of a half-assed newspaper, waiting to meet its half-assed editor, Benjamin Huang.
In the mid-nineties, when he was an up-and-coming tech reporter at The New York Times, Huang had been caught inventing sources. Desperate to stay in print, he’d spiraled downward from The Dallas Morning News to The Boise Register to The Albany Free Times, until he finally bottomed out at The Gazette, a paper that only existed so its casino-mogul owner could use it to smear his competitors.
James, on the other hand, was part of the two-person team known as NUM, Next Underground Media. Fifteen years earlier, he had gotten his first newspaper internship and figured out within five minutes that he’d never be a regular reporter. He believed that the journalism of the future would be done by data leakers and computer hackers, the people who operated outside the media. The ones who could get to the bank statements, memos, and emails that were supposed to be private. And, like most young people in the early 2000s, he knew that newspapers were dying anyway. People weren’t going to keep paying a dollar a day to have someone throw yesterday’s news in the bushes when today’s news was available online for free.
So, three years later, he’d co-founded NUM with Innerva Shah, already a notorious hacker. Their plan was simple. James would figure out what information the world needed, Innerva would figure out how to hack it, then James would leak it to teams of reporters throughout the US and Europe. Over the last twelve years, they’d done more for journalism—for genuine transparency between government, business, and people—than most newspapers do in fifty.
Esperanza was back at the desk. “Okay, Ben is ready for you.”
He thanked her and walked down the narrow hallway, casually drying his sweaty hands on his jeans, hoping no one would notice—not that there were many people around to notice. The only staff in the office were Esperanza, who was already chuckling at something on her phone, Deirdre Bancroft, the paper’s tech-guru, Eric Kaczynski, an ad guy, and Huang, who was now standing in front of him.
Even thinner than James remembered, Huang looked like he’d been up for days. He wore an old polyester suit in hideous green, and his face was sunken and leathery, like a Korean Keith Richards. He extended a cold, shaky hand, which James shook as they stepped into a ten-by-ten office with a single window facing into the hallway. Huang slid into a chair behind his desk and lit an unfiltered Camel, then waved at a busted-up recliner across from him.
James sat down, the backpack on his lap. “Innerva told you why I was coming, right?”
Huang took a long drag from his cigarette, as if he were trying to smoke the whole thing at once. When he exhaled, a gray cloud filled the space between them, and he tapped the ash into an empty Budweiser can on his desk. “Something about an antique hard drive, right?”
James eased the drive out of his backpack, cradling it in both hands. It weighed over ten pounds and looked like a rounded case of old vinyl records enclosed in clear plastic.
“Where the hell did you get that?” Huang asked.
After setting it carefully on the desk, James slid it toward Huang. “From a guy.”
“And you want to know if I can extract the data?”
“I’ve heard that’s something you’re good at.”
Huang popped a piece of Nicorette gum into his mouth, then folded the foil wrapper over the tip of his half-smoked cigarette, extinguishing it in the process. He picked up the drive and turned it over in his hands. “It’s IBM, obviously. Double-sided magnetics. Probably from the late sixties.”
“Is it possible to access the data?”
“It’s possible, but the data could be damaged. And even if the data is fine, extracting it won’t be easy. What’s on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have a hunch, right?”
James blinked, and a drop of sweat rolled off his eyelid, down his cheek, and onto his jeans. The smoke in the room was burning his eyes and he was growing more uncomfortable by the second. “Look, can you help us or not?”
Huang set the drive back down on the desk, unwrapped and relit his cigarette, then yelled, “Hey, Bancroft! Come check this out!”
James relaxed a little when Deirdre Bancroft appeared in the doorway because she looked like the kind of tech-hipster he was used to working with. She was in her early thirties and had a bright face and short, spiky hair. An Ewok tattoo poked out from under the sleeve of her vintage Ramones t-shirt. James tried to make eye contact with her to calm himself down, but she locked in on the drive immediately.
“Is that real?” she asked, walking over to Huang’s desk and picking up the drive. “It looks like one of those cake protectors my grandma brings to family reunions.”
Huang said, “Cool, right?”
Deirdre turned it over in her hands, just like Huang had. “Late sixties?”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Huang said, “but there aren’t any markings. Looks like they’ve been either peeled or scratched off.”
“Assuming it is late sixties,” Deirdre said, “there can’t be much data on here. Twenty megs, maybe forty.”
Huang nodded. “Probably just text files.”
James remained silent.
Huang took a long drag, then blew a thin stream of smoke from the side of his mouth. “James, ya gotta give me something, okay?”
James crossed his arms and pulled them in tight across his belly. He hated negotiations. He hated confrontations of any kind. “Assuming you can find a way to access the data, and assuming we won’t tell you anything about it once you access it, what do you want?”
“I know you and Innerva have a lot of stories you don’t use. I want one. And I’m not asking for anything big. Just something.”
“Can you help me with the drive?”
“I can. It’ll take a few days, though. I think I know a guy with the right old hardware.”
“Okay. We’ll get you a story.”
Huang smiled. “And if it happened to shine a negative light on one of my competitors, I wouldn’t object.”
Deirdre put the drive down where she’d found it. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “It’s fifty years old. Anything of value would have been backed up decades ago.”
“Maybe, but I certainly don’t have the backup,” James said.
Huang lit a new cigarette off the stub of the old one, then crushed the tip of the old one between his thumb and index finger. He dropped it into the beer can and smiled at Deirdre. “And, knowing what I know of James, this drive might have been obtained illegally.”
James relaxed into his chair and smiled for the first time. “Might have.”
And that’s when he heard the first shotgun blast.
No words. No footsteps. He hadn’t even heard the front door open. Just a single thundering pop, followed by a thud. Esperanza’s head hitting her desk. James glanced at Huang, who was already on his knees, crawling under the desk. Deirdre peeked out the door, dove into the corner, and wedged herself behind a drooping potted plant.
James just sat, dripping with sweat and frozen in fear.
The shooter was Baxter Callahan, an unemployed recluse with a long rap sheet of minor crimes—reckless driving, vandalism, a couple disorderly conduct charges—but never anything serious enough to get him more than a month in a county detention center. He was just another angry white guy in his mid-forties—living alone, except for his dog Worf and a collection of guns he thought he might one day need to protect his fringe political beliefs. He was the type of guy the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department kept an eye on. The type of guy you’d expect to snap some day and shoot up a post office or a movie theater. For some reason, he’d chosen the morning of Tuesday, June 13, 2017. And, for some reason, he’d picked the office of The Las Vegas Gazette.
After shooting Esperanza, Baxter locked the front door, scanned the lobby, peered into the empty server room, and stepped into the doorway of Huang’s office. Without a word, he murdered James with a shotgun blast to the chest. James’s body slumped over in the recliner as Baxter reached into his belt and brought out an old nine-millimeter.
Huang’s cigarette had fallen out of his mouth and Baxter ground it into the carpet with the toe of his old work boot. Deirdre was still behind the plant, now screaming and pressing herself into the wall. Baxter shot her twice in the back, and she went still.
Just then, Huang leapt up and tried to slide across his desk toward the door. Baxter caught him with a shot that passed through his right shoulder and spun him onto his side. One large step, and Baxter was next to the desk, pressing the pistol to Huang’s forehead. The bullet exploded through Huang’s skull and brain, then exited out the back, lodging bits of bone in the faux-wood desk.
Eric Kaczynski was stumbling down the hallway toward the back door when Baxter caught up to him. Kaczynski got two bullets in the back, followed by a shot to the base of his skull. Baxter stepped over the body, checked the bathroom at the rear of the office, and made his way to the back door.
As he entered the alley, he heard the sirens.
Two minutes earlier, an old man had arrived at the front door of The Gazette and spotted Esperanza’s body through the glass door. He’d come to cancel his subscription because his grandkids had given him his first smartphone for his eightieth birthday, and, as it turned out, he could use it to get all the news and weather he’d ever need. He could also use it to call 911, and that’s what he’d done.
The Gazette office sat along the eastern edge of the Spring Valley neighborhood, about a mile west of The Strip, and two miles west of Captain Shonda Payton’s favorite Starbucks. She’d been pouring half and half into a Venti dark roast when the call from the dispatcher had come through and, for the last sixty seconds, she’d been speeding down West Charleston Boulevard in her black and white Ford P.I. utility vehicle.
She’d be the first officer on the scene, but she wouldn’t make it in time.
Maybe Baxter intended to kill himself all along, or maybe he’d planned to escape. But by the time Captain Payton arrived in the alley behind the Payoff Plaza, Baxter was lying in a pool of his own blood, the shotgun and the nine-millimeter next to him. Like most mass shooters, he’d taken his own life as easily as he’d taken five others. A single shot through the roof of his mouth. Nothing for Captain Payton to do but call it in, secure the building, and sip her coffee until CSI arrived.
Like I said, that’s what probably happened.
But I wouldn’t try to piece together the details for another twenty-four hours. I wouldn’t even hear about the shooting for another eight. For me, it was just another bright summer morning in Seattle. The coffee was hot, the Internet was fast, and the office was bustling.
Then my laptop dinged with an email:
Alex,
James has a story for you. Can you get to Vegas tonight?
I.S.
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