William Bell - Fanatics

“Let’s talk about these men you saw,” she said after we’d exhausted the basics. “You said there were ten.”

“Yup.”

“About ten or exactly ten?”

“Exactly. I counted them.”

“All dressed alike?”

I nodded. “And the clothing seemed, if not new, certainly not well used.”

“And they spoke a language you couldn’t identify. So we can rule out French, German, Italian-most of the European languages. Any others?”

“Latin.”

She almost smiled, but the poker face slipped back into place. “Polish, Ukrainian, Russian?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, let’s leave it at that. Now, don’t take this the wrong way but… skin colour?”

“Dark, but not black. Brownish.”

“All of them?”

“Yup.”

“Age?”

“The leader thirty-ish, or a little under. The others in their early twenties, a couple not even that old.”

“Teenagers. Maybe minors.”

I nodded.

She closed her pad. “Well, this looks like it’s worth a couple of hours’ investigation.”

That wasn’t quite the reaction I was hoping for, but I still had my aces.

“Speaking of Latin…” I began.

Mom nodded, and this time she allowed a smile. “Go on.”

“You’ve heard of quid pro quo ?”

“Of course. Something for something. You want something in return.”

“Yup.”

“Let me guess. I turn down the Herat assignment and work on this instead.”

I nodded. “The assignment you haven’t agreed to accept, yet. Or have you?”

Mom shook her head slowly.

“So it’s not like you’re cancelling a commitment.”

“Maybe not, but let’s be realistic. You don’t have much.”

“What I’ve given you is promising, though. Admit it.”

“Yes, it is. But it isn’t enough. It may all come to nothing.”

I reached into my pocket, then placed my cellphone on the desk beside her notepad.

“I have pictures. One of them shows the leader. And you’ll see it’s not a paintball gun hanging around his neck. I checked it out on the net. It’s definitely a machine pistol.”

Her eyes widened, then immediately returned to normal. “But I don’t get the pictures unless I take your deal.”

“You don’t get anything. I clam up.”

Mom looked over my head. A shadow crossed her face.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m trying to decide if this is a dirty trick,” she said sadly.

“It is a dirty trick. And I hate what I’m doing. But I have no choice.”

She threw down her ballpoint and watched it bounce off the desk.

“Mom,” I pleaded. “Listen, will you? This isn’t about Dad and me telling you what to do. He doesn’t even know about this, and I’ll never tell him no matter what you decide. Dad and I know how brave you are, Mom. More than the two of us put together. And we know you’re committed to showing the world what’s going on in the places you go to-especially what’s happening to the women. It’s your vocation. Mine is designing furniture. Dad’s is… well, old stuff. And you and me. If something happened to you, people would admire you. But Dad and I would have to live the rest of our lives in a different world, without you in it.”

She moved her gaze to the kitchen doorway.

“Do you know what I’m afraid of, Mom? I’m terrified that if you go there and get killed, I’ll spend the rest of my life hating you. So, yes, I’m bribing you.”

Slowly I took the cellphone, still in the sealed plastic bag, from my pocket and laid it beside my own. Mom’s eyes fixed on it.

For a few minutes, we sat as if someone had sprinkled fairy dust on us and frozen us in time. Mom thought her thoughts; I prepared myself to make the final pitch.

“See, Mom, I think your confidential source-me-stumbled on some kind of para-military group, or a militia, or whatever it’s called. I think I discovered their training camp. I’ve got a few photos. I’ve got a cellphone here that one of the soldier boys kept hidden from the others. I’ll bet it’s full of phone numbers and email addresses and other stuff that a renowned journalist could easily track down and use to flesh out a story. And you’ve got a whatchamacallit-an exclusive.”

She turned her face toward me. I focused on her eyes. They had softened. She leaned back in her chair, linked her fingers behind her head, and gazed up at the ceiling, puffing her cheeks and letting the air out slowly.

“My own son,” she said.

“Don’t try the guilt thing on me, Mom. I’m too old for that. Besides, Dad’s better at it than you.”

She tried not to, but she smiled.

“And you’re better at it than both of us,” she said.

MOM AND I SPENT the next hour discussing the implications of what I had told her. With her experience, she mentally hunted down what she called “ramifications” like a fox after chickens.

“The phone’s a bit of a problem,” she said. “If these guys are up to something deeply illegal, especially activity that touches on national security, then it’s evidence and our possession of it is a crime-even for a journalist. Withholding information is a crime. We could both end up in jail.”

“But we don’t need the phone or GPS after today.”

“Explain,” she demanded.

“I copied the GPS files onto my laptop and my own GPS before I junked it. Do you have software that will copy the data card in the phone I found?”

“No, but I can get it.”

“Okay. Problem solved. Download the data card onto your computer. I’ll take the phone back where I found it and leave it there.”

I would rather have stuck my hand into a blender than go back to the camp, but I had to persuade her.

“No, that’s too dangerous, especially if you’re right about the machine pistol.”

“Not really,” I argued, not quite honestly. “I can go out there, and if there’s anyone around I’ll take off and try another day. If there isn’t, I’ll replace the phone.” Recalling some of the crime movies I’d seen, I added, “After wiping it clean of prints, of course. And remember, those guys probably don’t even know about the phone. It had been hidden.”

“All this assumes that the GPS belonged to the drowned man, and that the phone was his, too.”

“True. But it’s a solid assumption. Whoever owned the GPS made a lot of visits to the place where the phone was stashed.”

“In any case, I need to have a long gab with Mabel Ayers, a lawyer I’ve worked with in the past. She’s up on all the national security implications for journalists. I may need to protect myself, and you. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, let me download your pictures, then I’ll erase them from your phone and give it back to you. The mystery phone stays here. Okay?”

“Okay, Mom.”

“And let’s keep this between the two of us for now.”

“The two of us?” I repeated, meaning I shouldn’t even mention it to Dad.

“Yup.”

As I was leaving her study, she called me back.

“Thanks, Garnet,” she said.

When I walked outside I felt like I was floating.

I TOOK ONE LOOK out the window the next morning and groaned.

The sun was off somewhere in a sulk. Drizzle seeped from the sullen grey sky and dripped off the limp leaves of trees and bushes. It was the kind of day that made me grumpy and tempted me to crawl back under the blankets.

But I forced myself through my morning rituals. Dad was out somewhere and Mom had been self-exiled behind her office door since yesterday afternoon, researching, writing, making calls, and recording interviews-a good sign that what I thought of as the “paintball gang” story had pushed Herat off her agenda. While I was making toast, she called me into her office.