Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

He dropped his hands from the keyboard and turned back around in his chair. “Tell me everything one more time,” he said. “Slowly.”

Let me tell you a little more about John Tiernan.

John and I were old friends since our college days in the nineties, when we had met at j-school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. We were both St. Louis natives, which meant something in a class full of out-of-staters, and we worked together on the city desk at the campus daily, chasing fire engines and writing bits. After we had received our sheepskins, I went north to work as a staff writer for an alternative paper in Massachusetts, while John remained in Missouri to accept a job as a general assignments reporter for the Post-Dispatch, but we had stayed in touch. We married our respective college girlfriends at nearly the same time; I tied the knot with Marianne two months after John got hitched to Sandy. Even our kids, Jamie and Charles, were born in the same year. Things go like that sometimes.

About the same time that I bailed out of journalism, John moved into investigative reporting for the Post-Dispatch. When I began to seriously consider getting Marianne and Jamie out of the northeast, John had urged me to return to St. Louis, saying that he could put in a good word for me at the Post-Dispatch. I went halfway with him; my family moved back to Missouri, but I decided that I had had enough with journalism. A New York publisher was interested in my novel-in-progress, and Marianne had agreed to support us during the period it took for me to get the book finished. John made the same offer again after he left the Post to go to work for Pearl, but I still wasn’t interested. The novel was going well, and I didn’t have any desire to go back to being a reporter.

And then there was the quake, and Jamie’s death, and my separation from Marianne, and suddenly I found myself living in a cheap motel near the airport with only a few dollars in my wallet. I did as well as I could for a while, doing odd jobs for under-the-table slave wages, until one morning I found myself on a pay phone, calling John at his office to ask if his offer was still valid and, by the way, did he know of any apartments I could rent? John came through on both accounts, and he probably saved my sanity by doing so.

This all goes to show that John Tiernan was my best friend and that there was little which was secret between us.

Yet there were secrets; John was a consummate professional, and good investigative reporters don’t discuss their work even with close buddies. I knew that John played his cards close to his chest and accepted that fact as a given, and so I wasn’t terrifically upset when he wouldn’t disclose everything he knew.

“This ruby fulcrum biz … it’s important, isn’t it?”

He slowly nodded his head as he rubbed his chin between his fingertips. “Yeah, it means something.” He gazed out the window at the gothic steeple of St. Vincent de Paul, rising above the flat rooftops a few blocks away. “It’s part of the story I’m working on right now … and I think I know the person you met last night.”

“A source?” I reached across him to the pack of gum and pulled out a stick. “I take it you haven’t met her.”

John shook his head. “Just a couple of anonymous tips that were e-mailed to me a few weeks ago. I can see how she might have confused you with me last night, since you were obviously waiting for someone at the gate, but …”

He shrugged. “Darned if I know how you got sent an IM meant for me on your PT. The prefixes aren’t identical. That’s never happened before.”

“Some kind of screw-up in the net. I dunno. I received a message meant for you by accident, and …”

We looked at each other and slowly shook our heads. Yeah, and the Tooth Fairy was my mother-in-law. The odds of a random occurrence like this were as likely as trying to call your mother-in-law and reaching an emergency hot line between the White House and the Kremlin instead. Yeah, it could happen … oh, and by the way, you’ve just won the Illinois State Lottery and you’re now a millionaire, all because you happened to pick up a lottery ticket somebody had dropped on the sidewalk.

Coincidence, my ass … and neither of us believed in the Tooth Fairy.

“Let me ask you,” John said after a moment. “If you saw this woman again, would you recognize her? I mean, you said it was dark and rainy and all that, but-”

“If we had gotten any closer, I would have had to ask her for a date. Yeah, I’d recognize her.” I unwrapped a piece of gum and curled it into my mouth. “Where do you think we’re going to find her? Go over to the stadium and ask if they busted any middle-aged black women last night?”

John smiled, then he swiveled around to pick up his leatherbound notebook from his desk. Opening the cover, he pulled a white engraved card out of the inside pocket and extended it to me. “Funny you should ask …”

I took the card from his hand and looked at it. It was a press invitation to a private reception at some company called the Tiptree Corporation, to be held at noon today. I turned the card over between my fingertips. “Here?”

“Here,” he said. “She works for them.”

Coincidence City.

“But you don’t know her name …” He shook his head. I turned the card over and noticed that it was addressed personally to him. “Wonder why she didn’t just tell me she’d meet you at this reception.”

“There’s good reasons,” he replied. “Besides, she probably didn’t even know I was going to be there. The company probably sent a few dozen out to reporters in the city-”

“And I didn’t get one?” I felt mildly snubbed, even though I was fully aware that it was only senior reporters who got invited to things like this.

“It’s just one of those brie and white wine sort of things …”

“But I love cheese and wine.”

“Yeah, nothing gets between you and cheese.” I gave him a stern look, and he met it with a wide grin. Friendship means that you don’t deck someone for making asshole remarks like that. “Anyway, another one was sent to Jah. Apparently they want a photographer on hand. If you can finagle the other invitation from him …”

“I’m on it.” I stood up, heading for the back staircase leading to the basement. “When are you leaving?”

John glanced at his watch. “Soon as you get back up here. It’s out in west county somewhere, so we’ll have to drive. Don’t stop for coffee.”

“Not even for tea. I’ll see you out front in fifteen minutes.” John gave me the thumbs-up and I went straight for the stairs.

Pearl didn’t glance up from his desk as I slipped past his cubicle; for a moment I had the guilty notion that I should drop by, knock on the door, and tell him where I was headed. But if I did, he would probably insist that I stay put in the office until I had met the deadline for my column, even if it was more than twenty-four hours away. The notion, along with the guilt, quickly evaporated. My column could wait; for the first time in months, I had a real story to pursue, even if it was John’s byline that would appear on the final product.

I wanted a hot story.

For my sins both past and future, I was given one. When it was all over and done, I would never want to tag along on another assignment again.

(Thursday; 10:17 A.M.)

Craig Bailey’s darkroom was in the basement, down where a microbrewery would eventually have been located had his father been successful in opening a saloon on the ground floor. I found Jah slouched in front of his VR editor, wearing an oversized HMD helmet as his hands wandered over a keyboard, manipulating various pieces of videotape and computer-generated imagery into his latest work of interactive cinema.