Before the Fall(16)

Gus stands.

“Later,” he says. “Right now I think Mr. Burroughs needs to rest.”

The others stand. This time Scott gets to his feet. His legs are shaking.

Gus offers his hand.

“Get some sleep,” he says. “I saw two news vans pull up outside as we were coming in. This is going to be a story, and you’re going to be at the center of it.”

Scott can’t for the life of him figure out what he’s talking about.

“What do you mean?” he says.

“We’ll try to shield your identity as long as possible,” Gus tells him. “Your name wasn’t on the passenger roster, which helps. But the press is going to want to know how the boy made it to shore. Who saved him. Because that’s a story. You’re a hero now, Mr. Burroughs. Try to wrap your mind around that—what it means. Plus, the boy’s father, Bateman, was a big deal. And Kipling—well, you’ll see—this is a very messy situation.”

He extends his hand. Scott shakes it.

“I’ve seen a lot of things in my day,” says Gus, “but this—”

He shakes his head.

“You’re a hell of a swimmer, Mr. Burroughs.”

Scott feels numb. Gus herds the other agents out of the room with his hands.

“We’ll talk again,” he says.

After they’re gone Scott sways on his feet inside the empty lounge. His left arm is in a polyurethane sling. The room is buzzing with silence. He takes a deep breath, lets it out. He is alive. This time yesterday he was eating lunch on his back porch and staring out at the yard, egg salad and iced tea. The three-legged dog was lying in the grass licking her elbow. There were phone calls to make, clothes to pack.

Now everything has changed.

He wheels his IV over to the window, looks out. In the parking lot he sees six news vans, satellite dishes deployed. A crowd is gathering. How many times has the world been interrupted by the cable buzz of special reports? Political scandals, spree killings, celebrity intercourse caught on tape. Talking heads with their perfect teeth ripping apart the still-warm body? Now it is his turn. Now he is the story, the bug under the microscope. To Scott, watching through tempered glass, they are an enemy army massing at the gates. He stands in his turret watching them assemble their siege engines and sharpen their swords.

All that matters, he thinks, is that the boy be saved from that.

A nurse knocks on the door of the lounge. Scott turns.

“Okay,” she tells him. “Time to rest.”

Scott nods. He remembers the moment from last night when the fog first cleared, and the North Star became visible. A distant point of light that brought with it absolute certainty about which direction they should go.

Standing there, studying his reflection in the glass, Scott wonders if he will ever have that kind of clarity again. He takes a last look at the growing mob, then turns and walks back to his room.





Chapter 5


List of the Dead




David Bateman, 56

Margaret Bateman, 36

Rachel Bateman, 9

Gil Baruch, 48

Ben Kipling, 52

Sarah Kipling, 50

James Melody, 50

Emma Lightner, 25

Charlie Busch, 30





Chapter 6


David Bateman





April 2, 1959–August 23, 2015




It was the chronic chaos that made it interesting. The way a story could spark from a cinder and race through a news cycle, changing speed and direction, growing wilder, devouring everything in its path. Political gaffes, school shootings, crises of national and international import. News, in other words. On the tenth floor of the ALC Building the newsmen rooted for fires, both literal and metaphoric, betting money on them like a back-alley dice game.

Anyone who could guess the length of a scandal down to the hour got a salad spinner, David used to say. Cunningham would give you the watch off his wrist if you could predict a politician’s apology word for word before it happened. Napoleon offered sex with his wife to any reporter who could get a White House press secretary to curse into an open mike. They spent hours establishing the ground rules on that one—what constituted a curse? Fuck, sure. Shit or twat. But what about damn? Was hell enough?

“Hell will get you a handjob,” Napoleon told them, feet stacked up on his desk, left over right, but when Cindy Bainbridge got Ari Fleischer to say it, Napoleon told her it didn’t count because she was a girl.

If you were lucky, what started as a brush fire—a governor’s name found on the client list of a call-girl ring, for example—quickly became a raging inferno, exploding in backdraft share points and swallowing all the oxygen out of the broadcast market. David used to remind them constantly that Watergate started with a simple B&E.

“What was Whitewater, after all,” he’d say, “but a bush-league, Podunk land scandal?”

They were twenty-first-century newsmen, prisoners of the cycle. History had taught them to dig for scandal in the fringes of every fact. Everyone was dirty. Nothing was simple except for the message.

ALC News, with a staff of fifteen thousand and a viewership that hovered around two million a day, was founded in 2002 with a hundred-million-dollar investment by an English billionaire. David Bateman was its architect, its founding father. In the trenches they called him The Chairman. But really what he was was a general, like George S. Patton, who stood unflinchingly as machine-gun fire strafed the dirt between his legs.