Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace heard himself shout “No!” as he hurled the paper away. With little mass or weight, it barely cleared the coffee table, but as he watched it fall, his eye was caught by the address book lying on the table where he’d left it the night before. It was open to the list of names starting with S. Many of the addresses and phone numbers were scratched out, with new ones squeezed into whatever space was available. Sawyer, Severson, Scanlon, Sanchez, Simpson, Shohenney, Sachs. The last name on the page stopped him.

And then he remembered everything.

By the time Pace walked through the front doors of the Chronicle building, he’d figured out what had aroused Schaeffer’s fury. Somehow, word of the reporter’s call on Ken Sachs in the early hours of the morning had gotten back to the editor. Pace supposed he’d been a little hard on Sachs, essentially accusing him of complicity in a murder, with nothing but circumstantial evidence to support that belief. But even in the harsh light of day and under the cold eye of sobriety, Pace continued to believe it. Mike McGill had bet his life on the integrity of the NTSB chairman, and he’d lost.

Pace didn’t check for phone messages or remove his coat before going to Schaeffer’s office. There was no sense delaying the confrontation. He had no intention of backing down from the conviction that a conspiracy shrouded the crash of ConPac Flight 1117, a conspiracy that continued to take a toll in human lives. Schaeffer could rage all he liked, even fire him; Pace made up his mind to push the issue, regardless of the cost. The ConPac story had become personal. He owed it to Mike to solve the mystery. And he had made the promise to Kathy.

He found Schaeffer alone. “You wanted to see me, Avery?”

The editor looked up, and his face reddened. He jabbed the index finger of his right hand toward a point over Pace’s left shoulder. “In the Glory Room,” he ordered. His voice rumbled like the distant thunder of a developing storm.

Pace turned toward the editorial conference room, a dozen steps from Schaeffer’s office. He pushed open the oak door and left it open behind him. Schaeffer entered and closed it. Pace walked to the big window overlooking the heart of the nation’s capital and found himself wondering how many deals were being cut at this very moment in those buildings, and over what, and how many conspiracies were being hatched, and how many covered up. He sighed deeply and turned around, his face as neutral as he could manage.

Schaeffer was watching him closely, his lips drawn tight, his face reddened from above the slightly lanterned jaw to the top of the furrowed forehead. He was a man on a barely controlled burn. Without taking his eyes from Pace’s, he held out his hands toward the clusters of coveted prizes hanging against the rice-papered walls and sitting atop the polished-cherry credenzas.

“You see these?” he started, his voice trembling with anger. “These are awards for past efforts at responsible journalism. Responsible journalism!” The thunderstorm broke. “You stand in this room, amid these awards, and appear to feel nothing. You once won the most revered honor of all, yet you stand here now, the perpetrator of one of the most irresponsible journalistic acts I have ever had the misfortune to be associated with.” Schaeffer’s words echoed off the walls and crackled in Pace’s ears. The reporter felt himself flush. He hadn’t anticipated an attack based on idealism. “I am associated with it,” the editor continued, “because, ultimately, I am the one who approved hiring you. I am the one, ultimately, who gave you the aviation beat. I am the one, ultimately, who turned you loose on the ConPac story. And I am the one, ultimately, who will have to withstand the aftershocks of what you’ve done.”

“Just what is it I’ve done, Avery?” Pace interrupted, slipping his hands inside his coat and pushing them deep into the pockets of his trousers. He meant there to be an edge of challenge in his voice, but as he listened to himself, he wasn’t sure he heard it.

“What have you done? Are you that insensitive?” Pace knew then why Schaeffer had wanted this meeting in the conference room. The place was soundproofed, and Schaeffer was testing the outer limits of the envelope of that technology.

“I’m not insensitive at all,” Pace replied. “I assume this is about my visit to Ken Sachs last night. I don’t apologize for it. Sachs was the last one outside this newsroom and the restaurant to see Mike McGill and me together. He had to be the one who issued the order to kill Mike.”

“Oh, really? Let’s assume for the moment the shooting was, as you suggest, an effort to make McGill’s death look like an accident. I’m not convinced of it, but we’ll assume for the moment it’s true. Did it ever occur to you someone simply followed McGill all day, looking for an opportunity? Did it ever occur to you when your pilot friend left us at the restaurant, the goons saw their opportunity, formulated their plan, followed him into the drugstore and carried it out?”

“No. Mike would have noticed if someone followed him all day. I would have, too.”

“Why should he? Why should you? Were you trained by the FBI?”

Pace felt a twinge of doubt creep to the edge of his self-confidence. He defied it.

“Even if everything you believe is true,” Schaeffer continued, still wound tight in anger, “your visit to Sachs last night destroyed all the subtlety we agreed on. The idea was to let your story do the talking. Now you’ve blown that. You’ve blown it all. If Sachs is guilty, he’s going to send everyone else to ground. If he isn’t guilty, you’ve lost one of the most valuable inside sources you could have.” He paused and peered at Pace. “Does any of this make sense to you?”

“I believe what I believe, Avery,” the reporter said, but he could feel the doubt returning, gobbling up his self-confidence like an old Pac-Man game, and there wasn’t enough defiance left for a counterattack.

“I’ll tell you this: If you don’t straighten up—and that includes drying out—you’re history on this story, and maybe history on this newspaper,” Schaeffer warned savagely. He was so worked up that when he pronounced “newspaper,” drops of spittle sprayed the carpet. “Too many people spent too many years making the Chronicle into one of the most respected newspapers in the country. This paper is our identity, our greatest achievement, our lives. And your Pulitzer notwithstanding, I’ll see you gone and disgraced before I’ll let you bring this paper down.”

Schaeffer’s reference to drying out hit Pace like a slap in the face. He was drinking a lot. He had a clear mental image of a nearly empty Jack Daniel’s bottle in his kitchen.

“How did you find out?” Pace asked curiously.

“What? About your outing last night?”

Pace nodded.

“Ken Sachs was waiting for me when I got in this morning. If you think I’m angry, you should see him. He feels horribly violated, and I don’t blame him.”

“I thought he was supposed to leave at dawn on a political trip for the President.”

“He was. He said he canceled it on the pretext of an emergency. That’s pretty impressive, don’t you think? Would a guilty man come in here to confront me in front of most of my staff?”

“Maybe, if he thought he could get the kind of response from you I’m hearing.”

Schaeffer shook his head slowly, frustrated. “I’ve given you my ultimatum, Steve,” he said flatly. “You heed it and get your head straight, or you start looking for another job.”

Pace felt dazed. He’d walked into the Chronicle building confident in what he believed, but like it or not, Schaeffer had shaken his confidence. And there were, Pace had to admit, blurs in his brain, blank spots in his memory, chinks of doubt in his personal wall of fury, all of which, maybe, were signs that Schaeffer’s reference to booze was on target.