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I close the door and watch him swing quickly through the parking lot and disappear.
YUCATAN: An old military slang acronym: “You’re Under Certain Annihilation, Throw a Nuke.”
I wonder if the young guys even use it anymore.
Chapter Forty
Saturday, November 6th to Sunday, November 7th
Briefs.
Editors love briefs, short stories that can run anywhere from two or three sentences to a handful of paragraphs. “Just brief it,” an editor will say. They’ve convinced themselves—always citing somewhat murky research—that readers love them, too. When used properly, briefs have their place, especially in a society with a terminally shrinking attention span. Unfortunately, like everything in the newspaper business except excellence, they’ve been done to extreme. Often the most important stories in the paper are briefed. This is certainly true in the Phoenix paper—boring stuff gets relatively long treatment with jumps. Two grafs are done for something really compelling—I keep thinking, “Tell me more”—but they don’t. They often don’t even put the “where” in the brief, beyond the name of the town. I wonder what’s going on that never even makes the paper.
I started out as a young reporter writing briefs and obits. I can still do them.
***
Early Saturday morning, I check out of the hotel and take a long cab ride to a civil aviation airport in the far north of the city. There I meet Fitz’s friend Bud. He doesn’t give me his last name and I don’t ask. He’s retired military and he’s willing to give me a lift to Portland.
We fly in a Cessna 350 Corvallis, sleek and showroom new. The comfy cockpit looks like what you’d find in a sports car, with the control sticks coming out of the doors. Normally, I am a nervous flier on a big jetliner, much less a single-engine propeller plane.
Somehow this time it doesn’t bother me, even as we encounter the up- and down-drafts crossing the mountains. Bud’s not a talker. By late afternoon, I have checked back into my favorite hotel and given them my credit-card for “incidentals.”
***
Government documents are waiting in my Gmail account, some sent by Amber, a declassified Pentagon inspector general report sent by Fitz. Both mention a Homeland Security program from 2003 called “Project 10/11.” It would have awarded no-bid contracts for private paramilitary forces to “assist” the military and law enforcement in the event of a new 9/11.
All the biggies were there: KBR, Blackwater, and one that never received publicity, Praetorian. The program was canceled after criticism over no-bid security contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
So maybe that’s what eleven/eleven is, just a new way to make money. People get killed over money all the time. But the contractors are getting squeezed now, by the recession, by the current White House. All my instincts tell me eleven/eleven is a D-Day for Praetorian, maybe for an entire shadow government.
A month ago I wouldn’t even have replied to an emailer who stated such a scenario.
***
I check Olympic’s stock price again. It ended the week at a dull, steady $35.25.
***
Now the risk becomes overgathering. It’s something that can afflict everybody from a cub reporter to a veteran—even a has-been columnist relearning the reporting trade. Overgathering sounds like the opposite of the one-source story, but it can result in the reporter being overwhelmed and producing a murky, overly long story.
It’s time to write, do it with authority and command of the material. I’m a columnist, and in an ideal world I would turn my notes over to the crack I-Team at the Free Press and be happy with a co-byline. There’s no time, and the team may not even be on the payroll any longer. It’s up to me.
***
I have enough now for the story, if not for the story—the killer series that will answer all questions.
What I have will shake trees, cause more things to fall out, bring phone calls and emails with new angles and information. This will be a news story, not an opinion column. It will do more. It will rock Olympic International’s fraudulent and murderous world. It will not be what journalists call a “thumbsucker” on the issue of privatizing national security. Those have been done, and done well. Nobody seemed to notice. No, I will write what one of my editors used to call a “hard news, put-‘em-in-jail’ story”—and I hope somebody will notice and care.
I think of a lede and start writing. No newspapers now. No books to distract myself. No Web news sites. I so love to read that I’ll read the Kleenex box if that’s all that’s in a bathroom. I will read nutritional labels in the kitchen. But for now I will allow myself no distractions.
***
I do not have Megan Nyberg. I do not know what eleven/eleven means. The Praetorian thugs who chained me down didn’t seem to give a damn about Olympic Defense Systems. They wanted to know where Megan was.
They would have asked about my knowledge of ODS eventually. After all, they slit open the wrists of James Mandir before he could tell me more. But it wasn’t their priority. They wanted to know where Megan was. And I told them she was safe.
Megan can hurt them.
