Up and Down (26 page)

“Then why the hell didn’t he?” he demanded.

“Crawford, reality check, please. We’re a
PR
agency, not the
CIA
. It never occurred to me and I doubt very much if it would have occurred to you. Did your people pull the cloak and dagger routine when vetting the American winner?”

“I handled the American winner personally so that there was no chance of botching it,” he said pointedly.

Diane scowled and flipped him the bird, which would have had more impact had we been video conferencing. Amanda was so steamed she was vibrating in her chair, itching to enter the fray. Diane gave her the stop-sign hand. Diane was very good with her hands.

“Crawford, let’s focus on what we’re going to do now to resolve this. We can do the autopsy on how it happened later. And we do have a recommendation …”

“I know exactly how we’re going to resolve this!” Crawford shouted into the phone. “You are going to issue a news release dismissing and denouncing the
Sun
story and reiterating that the Canadian winner will be announced by
NASA
within the week. Then you are going to pick another goddamn winner!”

Diane picked up the phone so we could no longer hear Crawford’s tirade.

“Crawford, calm yourself and please listen to reason, for the sake of the client. The
Sun
story is breaking across the country. Unfortunately, we’re in a bit of a slow news cycle up here right now, so this is going to go big. All the major news outlets are leading with it online and
CP
has already put a story on the wire
about it. If you check
CNN.COM
, you’ll see it there as well. This will not go away just because we pick another winner. We’ve got to make lemonade here.”

She paused again, presumably so Crawford could tear a few more strips off her. She remained calm, holding the phone away from her ear and rolling her eyes.

“Crawford, read the piece again. This woman actually has an amazing story. It’s a very Canadian story. We have no doubt that the public is going to be behind this Landon Percival woman one hundred per cent. She’s a perfect Canadian citizen astronaut on paper, other than the age factor. She’s a doctor, a bush pilot, and she applied to our astronaut program nearly thirty years ago and was rejected as too old. This has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s priceless.”

She had to stop again to listen.

“Hold on, Crawford, stay with me. Our strong recommendation is to kill all this speculation and controversy and give Canadians what they surely want. We need to have
NASA
announce that Landon Percival is in fact the Canadian Citizen Astronaut contest winner and will be flying aboard the shuttle if, and only if, she can complete the training program. That’s how we turn today’s unexpected story into a win for us and a win for
NASA
.”

Diane stopped talking and looked at us. Then she tilted her head a bit.

“Hello? Crawford?”

Then she held the phone away from her ear again.

“Okay, I’m sorry. I thought we’d lost the connection,” Diane said. “No, it’s fine. You go right ahead and think. I’ll wait.”

She gave us a hopeful look and then bided her time, tapping the desk, as Crawford apparently mulled over what I thought was the only way to go. Several minutes passed until Diane suddenly sat a little straighter in her chair.

“Yes, we can pull that off overnight. Just gen pop though, right?”

She paused again. Other than the classic Bob Newhart routines, I really hated hearing only one side of a telephone conversation.

“Yes, we can do an online gen pop panel of a thousand Canadians and have you the results mid-afternoon tomorrow. We can make the final call then. Yes, that seems fair.”

More silence.

“Crawford, we wouldn’t have won this business otherwise. We need him to make it go. And don’t forget,
NASA
asked for him.”

She gave me reassuring looks as she parried what was clearly my execution order.

“Look, Crawford, you run
D.C.
, and I’ll run Toronto. Okay? He stays.”

After the week I’d had, learning that Crawford Blake wanted me toasted barely even registered. I no longer really cared. Frankly, I probably should have been fired and certainly would be if my morning’s behind-the-scenes work were ever discovered.

After a few more pleasantries, Diane hung up and then collapsed on her desk, banging her tiny fists on the glass top. Amanda and I were beside ourselves with curiosity.

“Okay, we’re not dead yet,” Diane reported, lifting her head and pushing herself back into a sitting position. “Crawford hates to reverse himself, but as I’ve said before, he’s not a complete idiot. Despite his anger, I think he was starting to see the logic in our recommendation. But we have to do a quick and dirty overnight poll to prove to him that Canadians are four square behind our girl Landon and that we’d be in for a rough ride if we rejected her. If the numbers are strong enough, I think we just might avoid having to pick a new winner. So we have a twenty-four-hour stay of execution. Let’s not waste it.”

“David and I can rustle up a few questions and get our guys in research to pass them through our online panel tomorrow,” Amanda proposed.

Diane nodded.

“Can we wait as long as possible in the day before hitting the online panel?” I asked. “We want tomorrow’s media coverage to have had its impact before we pop the questions.”

“Good idea,” Diane replied. “We can get top-line numbers in minutes after the panel closes, so let’s wait to start it until early afternoon.”

Amanda and I spent the rest of the day together working through the questions we would pose to the online panel of average Canadians across the country. It was the first time I’d really spent an extended period of time with her. It was nice. She was nice. Really. The hard professional edges she kept sharp in more formal business settings seemed to soften when we were working one on one after everyone else had gone home. It was almost as if the real Amanda emerged after dark. I’d noticed it first when we’d gone for a drink a while back. It was a shame that she seemed to feel that only “tough Amanda” could succeed at
TK
. I actually made her smile several times and caused her to burst out laughing at one point. Unfortunately, the laugh came when I was taking the inaugural bite of my take-out dinner. The greasy barbecue-sauce–covered chicken breast squirted out from between the obviously well-lubricated buns. Luckily, I caught it deftly, with my lap, so it fouled my Hugo Boss suit rather than the ugly green carpet. I learned that spending ten minutes vigorously rubbing your crotch with a damp dishrag while your colleague laughs hysterically is an excellent bonding exercise. I doubt I’ll ever be able to wear the suit again, and I reeked of barbecued chicken for the rest of the evening. On a positive note, I was escorted all the way home that night by three stray dogs and a family of hungry raccoons that clearly favoured southern cuisine.

While I’d been working with Amanda, I made sure I “stumbled upon” the growing Landon Percival presence in the social media channels, pointing out the Facebook fan page and Twitter stream.

“This is big,” Amanda said, scanning the positive comments overflowing on the Facebook page.

We were up to 2,349 Facebook fans and had attracted 3,124 Twitter followers. I needed some quiet time to keep up the tweeting or we’d start to lose some of them.

Amanda then clicked on the YouTube link that one Facebook commenter had left and watched in wonder as Landon Percival pulled several Gs in her backyard merry-go-round. Just watching it again made me a little queasy. Or perhaps it was the scent of barbecue sauce that clung to me.

“Unbelievable,” was all she said.

Before long, we discovered another Facebook fan page somebody else had created entitled “Hugh Percival’s Last Flight.”

Again, Amanda uttered, “Unbelievable.”

“Um, there’s something else you should know about Landon that I haven’t mentioned to anyone else yet,” I started, deciding to take a chance.

“Okay,” Amanda replied, her eyes narrowing in trepidation.

“She’s a lesbian. There, I said it.”

Amanda gave me a funny look.

“That’s it? She’s a lesbian? Who cares? She’s seventy-one years old. We’re in a new century.”

“Amanda, I’m not worried so much about Canadian reaction, if it ever comes out at all. But if we pull this off, Landon will be in Houston, Texas, for the training, deep in the Bible Belt. After being a communist, being gay is next on the anti-American list.”

“Again, I say, she’s seventy-one. She’s lived alone on a remote lake for the last forty years or so. It’s a non-issue,” Amanda concluded. Then she smiled at me.

To say that by lunchtime the next day Landon Percival was a household name in Canada would be an overstatement, but not by much. The media coverage was intense and almost universally positive. Nearly all the stories accepted Sarah Nesbitt’s research as fact and didn’t even bother to question that Landon’s name had actually been drawn. I thought this was rather slapdash journalism, although a few outlets called her the “still unofficial Canadian citizen astronaut.” But it sure helped our cause. This made it even more difficult for
NASA
or
TK
to toss her overboard and pick a new winner.

I’d spoken to Landon after I’d finally made it home from the office the night before and she confirmed that the
CBC
had sent a camera crew to Cigar Lake. They got some great shots of Landon waving them away from her dock. She looked pretty good and had put on a clean pair of coveralls to pump out the water that inevitably seeped into the pontoons of the Beaver. Then Landon taxied out onto the lake and took off. I knew that because Amanda and I had watched the footage on
The National
on the boardroom flat-screen
TV
. When I’d asked Landon if she’d actually had anywhere to go when she’d taken off for the camera, she reported that she’d been flying her regular search
pattern “hunting for clues, just like Sherlock Holmes, flat on his stomach looking for footfalls in a rug.”

Only the
CBC
and its affiliates had the Cigar Lake shots, but all the other outlets pulled down the YouTube clip I’d helpfully already uploaded. If Crawford Blake had any doubts about how the country would respond to Landon’s story, the media coverage banished them, even before the poll results.

By 5:00 p.m., Amanda and I were once again sitting in Diane’s office for the most important call of all. We’d already sent media coverage summaries to the
D.C.
office and fully briefed Crawford on the online panel results. None of that really mattered if this call went awry. Crawford had made it clear that he was running the call and that we should speak only in response to direct questions. What a jerk.

Elevator music played over the speaker phone as we waited for the conference call to start. I don’t know who makes the on-hold music selections, but a xylophone cover of “Smoke on the Water” should never, ever have been recorded, let alone aired on a teleconference. It mercifully ended a few seconds later as the call officially started.

“Hey, you all. It’s Crawford Blake here in Washington. Thanks for making the time. I know Diane Martineau and the Toronto team are on the line. Who have we got at
NASA
?”

“Hello, Blake and everyone, it’s Kelly Bradstreet here and I’m flying solo today. Actually, I wanted it that way. I’ll brief the leadership here afterwards, but I’d like to be the filter and not burden
them with the deliberations until we’ve made a decision here.”

“Understood,” replied Crawford. “Okay, let’s get started. I know we have a hard stop at 6:00. From our call yesterday morning, Kelly, you know that we have our American and Canadian citizen astronaut candidates. For reasons that are obvious, particularly if you happen to live up there in Canada, we’d like
NASA
to announce the winners as quickly as possible so we can start the next phase of the program and head off a sliver of controversy. But let’s review each candidate to make sure we’re all on the same page. It won’t take too long to consider the American winner. He’s exactly what we were looking for when we conceived this idea in the first place. Eugene Crank, thirty-eight years old, a deputy sheriff in the town of Wilkers, Texas, just south of Sabine near the Louisiana border. He’s youngish, good-looking, in great shape, and a real patriot. He was born singing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and served in the National Guard. He’s a model citizen, Republican of course, just had to slip that in, and is admired and respected by the people he serves and protects. End of story. He is the perfect American citizen astronaut.”