Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

“Shit yes. We found the original footage and ran the piece. You loved that story.”

David was standing again, fists clenched.

“When I thought it was journalism,” he said. “Not…”

Bill laughed, shaking his head with wonder at his own inventiveness.

“I gotta play these tapes for you. It’s classic.”

David came around the desk.

“Stop talking.”

“Where are you going?” Bill asked.

“Don’t say another fucking word to anyone,” David told him, “either of you,” and walked out of his office.

Lydia was at her desk.

“I’ve got Sellers on line two,” she said.

David didn’t stop, didn’t turn. He walked through rows of cubicles, sweat dripping down his sides. This could be the end of them. He knew it in his bones, didn’t even have to hear the rest of the story.

“Move,” he yelled at a group of crew cuts in short-sleeved shirts. They scattered like rabbits.

Mind racing, David reached the elevator bank, pushed the button, then, without waiting, kicked open the door to the stairs, went down a floor. He stalked the halls like a spree killer with an assault rifle, found Liebling in the conference room, sitting with sixteen other lawyers.

“Out,” said David. “Everybody.”

They scrambled, these nameless suits with their law degrees, the door hitting the last one on the heels. Sitting there, Don Liebling had a bemused look on his face. He was their in-house counsel, mid-fifties and Pilates fit.

“Jesus, Bateman,” he said.

David paced.

“Cunningham,” was all he could say for a moment.

“Shit,” said Liebling. “What did that wet dick do now?”

“I only heard some of it,” David said. “I cut him off before I could become an accessory after the fact.”

Liebling frowned.

“Tell me there isn’t a dead hooker in a hotel room somewhere.”

“I wish,” David said. “A dead hooker would be easy compared to this.”

Looking up, he saw an airplane high above the Empire State Building. For a moment his need to be on it, going somewhere, anywhere, was overwhelming. He dropped into a leather chair, ran his hand through his hair.

“The fucktard tapped Kellerman’s phone. Probably others. I got the feeling he was going to start listing victims, like a serial killer, so I left.”

Liebling smoothed his tie.

“When you say tapped his phone …”

“He has a guy. Some intel consultant who said he could get Bill access to anybody’s email or phone.”

“Jesus.”

David leaned back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling.

“You have to talk to him.”

Liebling nodded.

“He needs his own lawyer,” he said. “I think he uses Franken. I’ll call.”

David tapped his fingers on the tabletop. He felt old.

“I mean, what if it was congressmen or senators?” he asked. “My God. It’s bad enough he’s spying on the competition.”

Liebling thought about that. David closed his eyes and pictured Rachel and JJ digging holes in the backyard, planting old-world apple trees. He should have taken the month off, should be there with them right now, flip-flops on, a Bloody Mary in hand, laughing every time his son said, What’s up, chicken butt?

“Could this sink us?” he asked, eyes still shut.

Liebling equivocated with his head.

“It sinks him. That’s for sure.”

“But it hurts us?”

“Without a doubt,” said Liebling. “A thing like this. There could be congressional hearings. At the very least you’ve got the FBI up your ass for two years. They’ll talk about pulling our broadcast license.”

David thought about this.

“Do I resign?”

“Why? You didn’t know anything. Did you?”

“It doesn’t matter. A thing like this. If I didn’t know, I should have.”

He shook his head.

“Fucking Bill.”

But it wasn’t Bill’s fault, thought David. It was his. Cunningham was David’s gift to the world, the angry white man people invited into their living rooms to call bullshit at the world, to rail against a system that robbed us of everything we felt we deserved — the third-world countries that were taking our jobs. The politicians who were raising our taxes. Bill Cunningham, Mr. Straight Talk, Mr. Divine Righteousness, who sat in our living rooms and shared our pain, who told us what we wanted to hear, which was that the reason we were losing out in life was not that we were losers, but that someone was reaching into our pockets, our companies, our country and taking what was rightfully ours.

Bill Cunningham was the voice of ALC News and he had gone insane. He was Kurtz in the jungle, and David should have realized, should have pulled him back, but the ratings were too good, and the shots Bill was taking at the enemy were direct hits. They were the number one network, and that meant everything. Was Bill a diva? Absolutely. But divas can be handled. Lunatics on the other hand…

“I’ve gotta call Roger,” he said, meaning the billionaire. Meaning his boss. The boss.

“And say what?” said Liebling.

“That this thing is coming. That it’s out there, and he should get ready. You need to find Bill and pull him into a room and beat him with a sock full of oranges. Get Franken here. Get the truth, and then protect us from it.”

“Does he go on tonight?”

David thought about this.

“No. He’s sick. He has the flu.”

“He won’t like that.”

“Tell him the alternative is he goes to jail or we break his kneecaps. Call Hancock. We put it out there this morning that Bill’s sick. On Monday we run a Best Of week. I don’t want this guy on my air again.”

“He won’t go quietly.”

“No,” said David. “He won’t.”

At night, when Scott dreams, he dreams of the shark, sleek-muscled and greedy. He wakes thirsty. The hospital is an ecosystem of beeps and hums. Outside, the sun is just coming up. He looks over at the boy, still asleep. The television is on at low volume, white noise haunting their sleep. The screen is split into fifths, a news crawl snaking across the floor. Onscreen, the search for survivors continues. It appears the navy has brought in divers and deep-sea submersibles to try to find the underwater wreckage, to recover the bodies of the dead. Scott watches as men in black wet suits step from the deck of a Coast Guard cutter and vanish into the sea.

“They’re calling it an accident,” Bill Cunningham is saying from the screen’s largest box, a tall man with dramatic hair, thumbing his suspenders. “But you and I know — there are no accidents. Planes don’t just fall out the sky, the same way that our president didn’t just forget that Congress was on vacation when he made that hack Rodriguez a judge.”

Cunningham is smoky-eyed, his tie askew. He has been on the air for nine hours now delivering a marathon eulogy for his dead leader.

“The David Bateman I knew,” he says, “—my boss, my friend — couldn’t be killed by mechanical failure or pilot error. He was an avenging angel. An American hero. And this reporter believes that what we’re talking about here is nothing less than an act of terrorism, if not by foreign nationals, then by certain elements of the liberal media. Planes don’t just crash, people. This was sabotage. This was a shoulder-fired rocket from a speedboat. This was a jihadi in a suicide vest on board the aircraft, possibly one of the crew. Murder, my friends, by the enemies of freedom. Nine dead, including a nine-year-old girl. Nine. A girl who had already suffered tragedy in her life. A girl I held in my arms at birth, whose diaper I changed. We should be fueling up the fighter jets. SEAL teams should be jumping from high-altitude planes and sharking up from submarines. A great patriot is dead, the godfather of freedom in the West. And we will get to the bottom of things.”