Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

I felt better after writing the article. Elena Jansen’s tragedy made the drama in my life seem silly and inconsequential…for a second or two, anyway. Maybe that was why I was writing these kinds of pieces, why I was drawn to these survivors. They reminded me that my own story wasn’t so bad. That other people had endured less survivable events. They made me feel as if one day I’d find my way back to a normal, happy life. Is that selfish?

Once I’d sent in the article, though, all the other stuff started nagging at me. I took the strange website address from my pocket and plugged it into my own browser. The same red screen popped up; I stared at it, transfixed for a minute. I dragged the cursor over the whole page, clicking randomly, like I had done at my parents’ house. Nothing. It started driving me a little crazy. I knew there was something there; if the website was down, the screen would show an error message. My father had been visiting this site every day. There must be a way in.

The phone rang then.

“Hey,” said Jake when I answered. “What are you doing?”

“Just working on an article due tomorrow.”

“Want me to come over?”

“Not tonight. I’m feeling pretty wrecked. And I don’t want to blast this deadline.”

“Anything wrong?” he asked after a pause.

“No,” I lied. “Nothing.”

“How are you feeling about everything? Max and all that.”

“Honestly,” I said, “I haven’t even thought about it today.”

The long silence on the other end told me he didn’t believe me. “Okay,” he said finally. “Talk to you in the morning?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, good night, Ridley.”

“Good night, Jake.”

After a terrible night’s sleep, I got up in the morning and made a few phone calls. Esme’s words and the things Agent Grace had told me about Myra and Allen Lyall were smoldering in my center. I’d seen a poster of their faces on the way back into the city the night before. There was an update on the morning news, which basically consisted of a downcast detective saying that there were no new leads and asking anyone who might have seen anything to come forward.

I felt connected to Myra Lyall now. I started to wish I’d returned her phone calls when I’d had the chance. And there was something else. I wondered if she’d found something out-something about Project Rescue or about Max-that had gotten her killed. It was a terrible itch. Of course, I had to scratch it.

I knew a couple people over at the Times: an Arts & Leisure editor named Jenna Rich and a sportswriter I dated briefly, a guy named Dennis Leach (unfortunate name, I know). I didn’t reach either of them, so I left messages. I made a few more visits to the mystery website, had the same experience I’d had the night before, and hopped in the shower. As I was finishing up and pulling on some clothes, my phone rang.

“Hey, it’s Jenna,” said a youthful voice when I answered. “How are you, stranger?”

“Hey, there. Thanks for getting back to me,” I said. “Can’t complain. You?”

Jenna was a talker, which is why I’d called her. She was a one-woman corporate rumor mill. She told me how she’d married last year, been promoted, and was pregnant with her first child. I knew we were about the same age, and though I was happy for her, it made me feel somehow behind, like she was clearing the hurdles with grace and skill and I was still hovering around the starting gate. As she chatted on, I spent a moment wondering how this conversation would have gone if I’d married Zack when he’d asked two years ago, if I’d be having this conversation at all. Would I be pregnant? Would I have taken one of the many staff writing positions that had been offered to me over the years? Would I be happy in the ignorance of my past, in marrying a man I knew I’d never love but with whom I was more or less compatible? I didn’t dwell on it too long; not much point in that. We make our choices. We forge ahead. Or we curl up and wallow in regret. Both alternatives have their appeal. At the moment I was forging.

“So what’s up?” she said after the niceties had been exchanged. “You have an idea for me?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m wondering what you know about Myra Lyall. I had some calls from her a few weeks ago. I suppose something to do with Project Rescue. I was thinking about returning her call but I wanted to see if you knew her first.”

She was quiet for a minute. “You didn’t hear?”

“What?” I said with concern and interest, playing dumb.

“God,” she said with a sigh. “She and her husband disappeared a couple of weeks ago. Apparently someone accessed our servers-which, by the way, is supposed to be next to impossible-and wiped her hard drive and all her e-mail communications. People here are pretty spooked. It’s just terrible, Ridley.”

“Wow,” I said, trying to sound suitably shocked. “That’s awful. What are the police saying? Does anyone have any idea what happened?”

“There are all kinds of theories floating around,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “One has to do with her landlord. She and her husband were at war with him. They lived in this rent-controlled apartment they’d been in since the seventies. The new owner had recently bought the building and wanted them out so that he could get the market rate for the apartment. Suddenly they had terrible mice and roach problems, the heat never worked. Apparently, they’d decided to put their rent in escrow until he fixed things; that sent him over the edge. Word is he has ties to the Albanian mob.”

“But that doesn’t explain how the Times server got wiped clean…or why.”

“No. It doesn’t,” she said softly.

“So…what else are people saying? I mean, what was she working on at the time?”

I thought Jenna might clam up. I could hear her breathing. She was a pretty woman with small, serious features and bright green eyes, peaches-and-cream skin. It had been a while since I’d had any face time with her, but I could imagine her frowning, tapping her pen on the desk.

“A lot of people around here think she stumbled onto something. It’s just a rumor.”

“Something to do with Project Rescue?”

“I don’t think so. She put that story to bed over a month ago. And that was more of a human-interest piece than her usual investigative work. She kind of got pushed into it by this new editor-you know, put-some-faces-on-the-crime kind of a thing. Besides, as far as news stories go, there wasn’t any new ground to cover.”

“So…what, then?”

“I dated one of the IT guys for a while ages ago. Grant Webster. He’s kind of ‘into’ his job-a little bit too into it, if you ask me. That’s one of the major reasons we broke up. On top of his job, he has this whole website devoted to the history of hacking, all this conspiracy-theory tech stuff. Anyway, he said it wasn’t the usual kind of hacking. It’s one thing to get in and read e-mail, or to try to steal subscriber credit-card info, or to take over the site for a while. It’s quite another to hack in to the level necessary to erase data from a server. He thinks it might have been someone in-house, someone who was paid to do it…” She let the sentence trail off.

“Or?” I said.

“Or it was one of the federal agencies.”

I let the information sink in. “Like the CIA or the FBI?”

“Right.”

“So the rumor is, she stumbled onto something she wasn’t supposed to know about, possibly involving one of the federal agencies, so someone made her disappear and erased all her e-mail correspondence?”

She didn’t pick up the skepticism in my voice.

“And her hard drive, containing anything she might have been working on now plus everything she’d ever worked on in the past, though of course most of that has been published. And her voice mail,” added Jenna. “Which, according to Grant, is a lot easier than erasing e-mail.”