The Anonymous Source (19 page)

RAK APPROACHED
THE DOOR
of the plane and squinted. The evening air was warm and he had never felt such humidity. He leaned back into the plane for one last breath of cold air, then took the stairs to the tarmac wearing dark blue jeans, a black blazer, and sunglasses. Within a minute, his skin was clammy. He knew right away that he did not like Hawaii.

After claiming his bags—a standard brown suitcase and matching laptop case—he took a taxi to the Marriott and checked in under the name Sven Goldberg, using an Israeli passport for ID.

A teenage bellboy took his bags and led him to the elevator. “Where ya from?” the bellboy asked.

“Am from New York, but I come from Israel originally.”

The elevator was empty except for the two of them.

“New York City?” the boy asked. “Boy oh boy. Were you there on 9/11? We felt for you all, even out here on the islands. That musta been some kinda thing.”

“Yes, I was there that day.”

“What was it like?”

Rak stared up at the boy, who was tall and smiled down on him. “I tell you a joke,” Rak said. “What is the favorite football team of the Al Qaeda men who flew into the towers?”

The boy looked away. “Uh, sir? I don’t feel comfortable hearin’ a joke about it, sir.”

“The New York Jets,” Rak said, laughing.

When the elevator stopped, Rak handed the boy a ten-dollar bill. “I can find the room from here.”

* * *

In his room, Rak ate a club sandwich while watching a bright green gecko crawl across the sliding balcony door. It crawled back and forth, stopping occasionally to touch its nose to the glass.

When he finished eating, he inspected the thickness of the glass door and the space it retracted into. There was about a quarter inch of space between the door and the doorjamb. He looked out the sliding glass door onto a vast lawn below, where a few staff members in crisp shirts were setting up a buffet under a tent. A woman stuck wooden torches in the ground every ten feet or so.

Rak looked back at the gecko, sitting still in the center of the door. With a sudden jerk of his arm, he slid the door open. The gecko slid with the door, its tail and the lower half of its body wedging into the thin space between the door and the opening, then exploding as the force of the door carried its body further in.

He picked up a cloth napkin from his room service tray and stepped onto the balcony, then closed the door and wiped the gecko’s guts off the glass. What was left of the carcass had fallen to the ground. Rak used the napkin to pick it up and toss it over the side of the balcony, then went back inside and put the napkin on top of his half-eaten sandwich.

After showering, he dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing earlier, then took the elevator down to the lobby.

ALEX AND
CAMILA
were sipping drinks in the pool, wearing swimsuits Juan had found them. Thick clouds had settled over the house and the sky was darkening, but they could see far out into the Pacific over the fruit trees. They heard pots and pans clanging in the kitchen and smelled smoke and pork.

“I didn’t know situations like this really existed,” Alex said. “I feel like we’re in a cheesy sitcom about a rich widow. Why do you think Juan asked us to stay?”

Camila swam to him and sat on the steps of the shallow end of the pool. “She knew something, right?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Maybe Juan wants to help us.”

“Maybe. I think she knows something about Sadie Green. Do you know of her?”

“I’ve heard the name,” Camila said, dunking her head in the pool.

When she came up, Alex said, “She’s the director of the Media Protection Organization. Right up your alley, actually. They lobby against media conglomeration and for things like net neutrality.”

“I’m not politically active.”

Alex smirked, “Yeah, no kidding. Why is that, anyway? From what you said in class, I would have thought you’d care about this stuff.”

“I do, and I’m happy people like her are out there. But we’re living in the path of an avalanche. Digital media will smother us in the next twenty years. There’s no stopping that on a political level. Anyone who thinks they know how it’s going to go—or how it
should
go—is naïve about how technologies develop. But, on a personal level, we can still protect ourselves from what’s coming. We can safeguard our inner lives against turning into ones and zeroes.”

Alex swam the length of the pool and back without coming up for air. Breathing a little harder, he said, “Sonia said Sadie Green was in touch with her after Hollinger died. Why would that be?” He swam another lap and came up breathing even harder this time.

“Didn’t you already work out today?” Camila asked.

“Yeah, but I’m drinking all these sugary cocktails. It wouldn’t hurt you to—you know—move your body in a manner that raises your heart rate. I’m not sure they have it in academia, but in the outside world we call it exercise. It’s like eating but without the food.”

Camila splashed him and swam to the deep end of the pool. Alex swam after her. They reached the wall at the same time and both hung on with one hand, facing each other.

“Can you stand up here?” Alex asked. Camila let herself sink to the bottom and extended her toes, leaving only her eyes above the water. “You’re short,” Alex said.

“Is that your way of flirting with me?”

“I guess so. I feel a bit like a first grader who throws sand on the girl he likes at recess.”

She splashed him again. “Yeah, that’s how you seem.” She fished a few leaves out of the water and placed them on the edge of the pool, then she turned to him and studied his face. “Do you know why you feel so much anxiety about me?“

He turned to look out toward the ocean. “Kind of.”

“You’re afraid of what you might feel, afraid of getting hurt, and you know I won’t take care of you.”

“Why won’t you?” he asked, sliding toward her along the wall but still not looking at her.

“I don’t do that.”

He turned to look into her eyes. “Why are you so . . . I don’t know . . . stiff, hard, distant?” He leaned toward her but she tilted her head away slightly.

“You just said three words that mean the same thing. Writers aren’t supposed to do that.”

Alex pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the pool. “What about your dad?” he asked. “Yesterday, you said that you needed to go see him.”

“I will,” she said. “I figured out yesterday that I will.”

“How? I mean, how did you figure it out?”

“Remember on the plane, what I said about the sadness without cause?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“It turns out it’s not my fault. None of it is. None of it is me.”

“Whose fault is it?”

“No one’s. It’s just what happens.”

“When will you go?”

“I want to give this another day or two.” She splashed him again. “Plus, you’d miss me too much if I left. You’d positively fall apart without me.” She spoke with a high-pitched English accent, the back of her hand against her forehead. “You wouldn’t know what to
do
without me, you’d—”

Alex looked up when he heard a door close. Juan was walking toward the pool.

* * *

Juan had led them to a spare bedroom. While Camila changed in the bathroom, Alex turned on the wall-mounted TV. He flipped to CNN.

A red, white, and blue graphic on the bottom of the screen read, “WMDs in Iraq?” Two men in their fifties sat at a desk, a moderator in a bowtie sat between them.

The man on the left said, “The International Institute for Strategic Studies is saying that Iraq does not have any nuclear weapons—a point our president has been trying to obscure for months. And our national media has printed dozens of anonymous quotes, all hinting at WMDs. But there’s no actual evidence.”

The man on the right said, “The IISS report is full of speculation and innuendo. Tomorrow the president will issue a new report detailing a decade of deception by Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military. It will show them to be an imminent threat to the United States. And—”

The man on the left interrupted. “But will it show
any
proof of WMDs?” He looked at the moderator. “And will your network
demand
any proof? And—”

The moderator interrupted. “And I hope we can have you both back to debate that report in the coming weeks. I’m afraid that will have to do it for today. Up next—”

Alex switched to Court TV and saw Cynthia Baker, Santiago’s lawyer, walking down the courthouse steps flanked by two assistants. Photographers and journalists snapped pictures and shouted questions at her.

Camila walked out of the bathroom, smiling. “Have you ever been in a bathroom with heated floors?” she asked. “They’re incredible.”

“Shhhh!” Alex held up a hand and turned the TV up as a reporter’s voice came in over the images.

“The fifth day of the murder trial of NYU student Eric Santiago concluded earlier today with prosecutors calling their second witness, twenty-four-year-old Tamar Joseph, a law student, who testified to seeing Santiago in Washington Square Park on New Year’s Eve 2001—the night that Professor John Martin was killed.”

Camila sat next to Alex on the bed.

“Defense Attorney Baker, in cross-examination, tried to discredit the witness, questioning whether she could have seen Santiago clearly given that she admitted to drinking heavily at a party that night.

“In one stirring exchange, lead prosecutor Daniel Sharp objected to Ms. Baker’s line of questioning, arguing that bringing up Ms. Joseph’s drinking was an inappropriate attempt to smear her. In his objection, he cited Matthew 5:10—’Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.’”

Alex muted the TV and looked at Camila, who was smiling.

“What was it before?” she asked. “John 12:25?”

THEY JOINED
SONIA
around a small black table in an informal dining room off the kitchen. Photos of Hollinger’s children hung on the wall next to a large, framed black and white photo of a boy standing in front of a dugout. Lou Gehrig’s arm was draped around his shoulder.

“Is that Mac?” Camila asked, pointing at the picture.

“Yes, it’s from 1927, when Mac was ten. He loved the Yankees, and Gehrig especially. Thought he embodied America. Excellent mind, excellent body, and a work ethic that wouldn’t allow him to waste it.”

Alex looked up at the photo, recalling Gehrig’s streak of 2,130 games played. Fourteen years without missing a day of work. “I wanted to ask you, Sonia, if you hate the papers so much, why do you invest in them?”

Sonia looked toward Juan, who was carrying in a steaming platter of shredded pork with handmade corn tortillas, guacamole, pineapple relish, roasted corn and peppers, and a half dozen stone bowls filled with garnishes. When he put the platter down, Sonia turned to Alex. “As I said before, Juan is a brilliant chef, among his many talents. Now, how long have you two been together?”

“We’re, um, not together,” Alex said. “About the newspapers.”

“Oh, I have nothing to do with the investments,” Sonia said. “Mac handled all that. We had our arrangement and I had plenty to live on, but I never got involved in the finances.”

Alex felt irritated and impatient. He didn’t know if it was the sugar in the drinks, his conversation with Camila in the pool, or the thought of Sharp using him to sabotage his own case, but he had an urge to get to the point.

“But you
are
involved now, Mrs. Hollinger. Sorry to be blunt, but you are still the single biggest investor in Standard Media. You own ten percent of the biggest media company in the world, which is about to merge with the biggest cable and Internet provider in the world. Surely you must know that.”

“Yes, I own a lot of things now.”

Camila layered a tortilla with pork, guacamole, diced cucumbers, and charred chilies, then squeezed some lime juice on top and took a bite. She looked over at Juan, who stood in the corner. “I would marry you,” she said to him with her mouth full. “
Te amo
.”

“I told you he was amazing,” Sonia said.

Alex continued, “Earlier today you mentioned being pestered by Sadie Green. Would you be comfortable telling us what she wanted?” Alex tried to sound casual, but noticed that his hands were shaking as he reached for the hot sauce and shook it onto his pork.

Sonia poured herself a tall glass of red sangria. “I knew of her before Mac’s death. She was one of many people my husband supported. She had some thing helping Africans. Personally, I never saw why we didn’t just donate our money to the Church, or at least to veterans. But Mac liked to support all kinds of things. She started calling me right after 9/11. Can you believe that? While we were still searching for Mac?” She looked down at her glass, then emptied it and refilled it. “She said that my husband had planned to donate five hundred million to her little do-gooder media thing. Five hundred million! She claimed that my husband had agreed to it a few weeks before 9/11.”

“What?” Alex said, almost standing up. He glanced at Camila, who was wiping tortillas in a pool of sauce on her plate. “Did she have any evidence of that?” he asked.

“No. I figured she was just trying to get me to feel sorry for her, trying to get me to give her some of Mac’s money. A lot of folks did that, you know. Half of being rich is turning people down when they ask you for money. But the way she did it! A few days after America had been attacked? While I was still searching for my husband? She was off-putting, to put it kindly.”

“Did you give her any money?” Alex asked.

“My husband’s will had her little group in there for a quarter million out of his cash reserves. So I
had
to give her that when his will was settled. But I wasn’t about to add anything to it.”

Camila said, “Sonia, when she approached you about the money, did she seem desperate or demanding? Did it
feel
like a con?”

Sonia picked up a long metal fork and stabbed at a grape floating at the bottom of the sangria pitcher. “You know how in Argentina you have big cookouts?”

“Well, I was raised in Iowa, but I know the tradition,” Camila said.

“What a pity, darling. In Brazil, we had
churrasco
the last Sunday of the month after church. The whole family came over and my father cooked. We talked some politics but mostly football—you know, soccer—and ate all day and drank beer and then whisky. Sometimes my father let my big brother tend the meat, which had to be done very carefully. Spray the fire, keep it just right, rotate the meat. It was the most important position in the family on
churrasco
day.

“My little brother always wanted to tend the meat, but my father never allowed it. My big brother would spray him with the water bottle if he even got close to the fire. He could drink sangria when he was twelve but could never get near the coals. He used to demand it, then beg, cry, and pout. He was not good at taking no for an answer.” She nibbled on a cucumber slice. “Sadie Green was like that. Anyway, even if Mac had been considering what she said, he didn’t actually do it. And I wasn’t going to help her. Not with the way she treated me.”

* * *

After the meal, they accepted Sonia’s offer to have Juan drive them to their hotel. Minutes later, they were speeding toward town in the back of a silver Mercedes convertible. Latin dance music blasted through speakers in the seats and they rode without speaking. Alex’s head spun.

When they got into town, Juan turned down the music. “You believe her story?” he asked.

Alex and Camila looked at each other. Alex said, “We, uh. I’m not sure what to think. What story?”

Juan made a sharp right turn into the hotel parking lot. “Green. The girl. You believe her story about the money?”

“We’re really not sure,” Alex said.

“Yes, I believe her story,” Camila said. “I think John Martin was murdered because he knew about Mr. Hollinger’s intention to sell stock and give the money to Sadie Green.”

Alex glared at her. She shrugged.

“But who knows what really happened?” Alex said loudly.

Juan stopped the car in front of their hotel, then turned in his seat and smiled. “I have to get back to Sonia now,” he said, “but there is something I need to tell you.”