Deadline (22 page)

He had thought of all their possible arguments, and of his own. He had played it out a dozen times in his head. Was he willing to risk his name and reputation on what he had written? No doubt about it. But it wasn’t a fair comparison and he knew it. His name probably meant a lot less to him than their newspaper did to them.

Joanne Sayers knocked lightly and opened the door. She saw the notes on the table beside him.

“You did it.”

“I did it.”

She sighed. “Good.”

“Not good yet.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t know yet if they’ll print it.”

Walker called back a few minutes later. This time Jerry Wayne answered, and immediately switched him to Hiram Byrnes’ private line. Kanin was still back there, and they got on a three-way hookup.

“Walker? Hy Byrnes here. That’s quite a surprise you had for us this morning.”

Bad start, Mr. Byrnes. Walker took a deep breath.

“A couple of our lawyers are reading it over now. You understand that, don’t you? We’ve got to be right on a piece like this.”

“We are right. But I understand your concern.”

“It’s a helluva reader, Walker. Simply one helluva piece. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ll go with some of it today, across the top of One. What bothers us are the names.”

“I spelled them all right.”

“When they bury him, he’ll make a joke about it,” Kanin said.

“If we had the documents here in our hands, we’d feel a lot better,” Byrnes said. “How long do you think it would take you to get back here?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether we come right back.”

“How are you traveling? By car?”

“That’s right.”

“If we wired you plane tickets, for you and the Sayers girl, you should be able to get in here this afternoon. I wonder if it would hold till tomorrow.”

Walker didn’t say anything.

“You understand my position, Walker. Goddammit, I’d love to be able to go with the whole thing at once, but I’ve got to at least have those papers and that diary in house first. We’d want the lawyers to look through them. And we’d probably have to contact the people named…”

“I know the procedure.”

“Then what do you say?”

“I’ll have to call you back.”

“What for?” Kanin snapped.

“Because the documents aren’t in my possession. They belong to the Sayers girl.”

“The FBI would probably argue with that,” Kanin said.

“The FBI argues with everything,” Walker said. “Anyway, I’ll have to ask her permission.”

Now Byrnes had a strange edge to his voice. “Walker?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not aiding her in any way?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because if you are, we could get in one helluva bad light.”

“You? What about me? I know the laws on aiding a fugitive. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been her prisoner since Sunday.”

“You never really say that in your copy.”

“I like to stay out of my own copy if I can.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible, on one like this,” Kanin said.

Walker felt his warning sensors go off.

“Kanin, leave my stuff alone, will you?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t touch your goddamn precious prose. I know better than anyone how sacred every word is.”

“All right, you two,” Hiram Byrnes said. “Walker, Joe’s right. It’s going to be tough as hell trying to report this as though you weren’t even there. We’ll need all the details from you on this abduction bit. Maybe we’ll run it as a sidebar, and let the main story stand by itself. If we can ever get it straightened out. How does that sound?”

Lovely, he thought.

“Walker? You still there?”

“Sure.”

“Let me switch you back over to Wayne. Give him notes on what happened, everything that happened since last Saturday. Don’t worry. We’ll handle it right.”

That’s what the Watergate burglars said, Walker thought. He said, “All right. Give me back to Wayne.”

Byrnes clicked the phone. “Get back to me when you’re through.” The operator came on and Byrnes said, “Transfer to 222.”

Walker hung up. He looked at Joanne.

“Must have got cut off.”

“What’d he say?” She looked nervous, expectant.

“It’s not what he said. It’s what he is. They’re not gonna use it, Joanne. Not the part that counts. No way.”

It was light outside, and Diana fixed breakfast, and they sat around the table to talk about it. The gun had disappeared. Walker didn’t see it again. Joanne Sayers had made them part of her. If she bled, they bled; if she died, so did they. They all seemed to know that without ever saying it, and now the only conversation necessary was on what to do next. The idea of flying back to New Jersey bothered Joanne. “What guarantee do we have that they’ll print it even after we give them the documents?”

“None,” Walker said.

“Not even somebody’s word?”

“They can’t give us their word, Joanne.”

“Jesus!” she fumed. “How can they
not
print a story like this? Walker, I can’t believe this.”

“All right, look at it from their viewpoint. If you want to understand what you’re up against, you’ve got to do that. Even if they’ve got the papers, there are no guarantees. If the FBI can discredit this Dawes, if they can cast enough doubt over his mental state, we might have a big problem. Joanne, they’re a bunch of scared little minds. They live their whole lives for the big story, then one comes along and they don’t know what to do with it. They see it as going on the line, and that bothers them. It doesn’t bother me much. They know that, and
that
bothers them. I’m an oddball. I might take chances that they wouldn’t take. And they’re trying to make decisions, weighing all these things, a thousand miles away. You remember the Pentagon Papers case?”

“Sure.”

“Remember when Ellsberg first leaked that stuff out? There was a big flap at the
New York Times
about whether they should publish or not. I couldn’t believe it. Here was the best newspaper in the country, with the biggest story of the decade, and they were hassling about it. I remember thinking then, wow, that’s the big time. And I wondered then what would have happened if Ellsberg had leaked that stuff to any other newspaper. The
Washington Post?
Maybe. But the others? Forget it. There’s no way a newspaper in Dallas or Rapid City, South Dakota, is going to put itself at the fulcrum point of a story like that. It’s like a dinosaur eating its young. They might want it, but then they turn around and destroy it before it’s even had a chance to breathe. I don’t know a newspaperman in the country who won’t argue like hell about this. They’d come right up out of their chairs if they could hear me talking. They’d get red in the face and raise hell. Sure, they’d publish the Pentagon Papers, you bet, as long as they can look back and see all that glory from here. As long as they didn’t have to make the decisions all the way along the line. The hell with them. Ellsberg was right. He gave the stuff to the right paper.”

“Then why don’t we?”

“I’ve given that some thought. Yes, ma’am, I truly have.”

They were on the road again, drifting like a sailship on a windless day. The tide took them easterly, toward the sun, across the fertile fields of Indiana. They kept to the back roads now, speaking little, listening to newscasts when they could. There was nothing on the radio about Armstrong or Joanne Sayers.

“That’ll change by tonight,” Walker told her. “I don’t know what the
Trib
will use, but you can bet when I don’t call in again that they’ll get some hacked-up version on the streets. Both AP and UPI will carry it on their A-wires. You won’t have much time after that to make up your mind.”

“I can’t think like this,” Joanne said. “Maybe you can think under pressure like this, but I can’t. We need a place where we can stop and rest, without worrying about every car that passes. Will you help me?”

“I’ll help you if I can. I’m not too anxious to go to jail with you.”

“I want to get it in print. That’s the kind of help I need.”

“I’ll keep trying. That’s my job.”

“We need a quiet place. A place to think.” Joanne looked at the back of Diana’s head. “I think I know a place.”

T
HIS TIME, DIANA LET
herself be led home without comment. Seeing her father’s farm that first time had brought her to a turning point. The man at her side, the girl with the gun, all the events of the past week were absent from her thoughts. Some point of basic personal conflict had come to the surface at last. Now she had to make the choice she had never made. Her escape from the farm long years ago hadn’t involved free choice at all. She had been a terrified adolescent, and she had been running from those childhood ghosts ever since.

So once again they drove along that narrow blacktop road in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, looking out across the even-plowed fields toward the cluster of houses in the trees. It was midafternoon Friday, almost six days since Joanne Sayers had come to Walker’s and taken them hostage. They had driven late at night, and had started early in the morning. Now, they parked and sat for a long time at the side of the road, none of them certain of what to do next.

“What a lovely place,” Joanne said.

“My parents always worked hard to keep it up.”

“I can see that.” She rolled down the window and looked across the field. Far away they heard a voice, someone calling. They could see some movement in the yard behind the house, under the trees and around the barn.

“It’s dinnertime,” Diana said. “We always ate two meals a day. My father thinks that’s healthier than three. So we ate at dawn and again around three o’clock in the afternoon. Then nothing else till morning. My father especially believed in going to bed on an empty stomach.”

“Your father sounds like a wise man,” Joanne said.

“Wise and blind at the same time. He’s a tough taskmaster, and death on discipline. He doesn’t seem to understand feelings. If he does, he won’t tolerate letting them interfere with what he considers duty. God comes first. Then family.”

“And country third?”

“Maybe country not at all, I don’t know. I never really heard him say that much about it. My father’s no patriot. He’d never go to war for his country, if that’s what patriotism is. If the Communists took over, that’d just be God’s will. He wouldn’t ever kill a human being, even to save another. He wouldn’t think twice about breaking the laws of his country, if they crossed with the laws of his Church. I’m sure he appreciates America. I know he does, but it just doesn’t come first with him.” Diana turned in her seat and looked at Joanne. “You have to understand about the Amish. They don’t like systems of any kind much.”

A cooling breeze came in through the open windows. They sat for a while longer.

“What are you going to do?” Diana said.

“I don’t want to walk in on them at dinnertime.”

“It’s no big thing. They’ll have plenty of food, and they’ll probably invite us to share it. But you’ll have to be ready for some awkwardness. They may not speak to me, or eat at the same table. We may have to eat somewhere else. Do you mind eating in the barn?”

“Let’s go to a restaurant,” Joanne said. “We’ll come back later, when their dinner hour is done.”

They picked up the highway a few miles south and found a long row of restaurants on the way toward Lancaster. Walker bought a paper from a box and carried it to a table. The second-day story was boiling on the front pages everywhere. His piece had hit with a roar late yesterday. They had been somewhere in Ohio when they heard that first newscast. A New Jersey newspaper had reported that Joanne Sayers, longtime fugitive, had taken one of its reporters hostage, and had forced the reporter to drive her to Chicago. The man was Dalton Walker, Pulitzer Prize winner, who had been working on the story for several months. In Chicago, the Sayers woman was believed to have shot an FBI man, Joe Armstrong, in a confrontation late Wednesday. The
Tribune
believed, after talking with Walker, that Sayers was considering surrendering herself, but there had been no further contact since early Thursday.

The story of the assassins was carried sidebar fashion, as an unconfirmed but related development. The newspaper had run a story by Walker, which the Sayers woman had allowed him to dictate, and which was allegedly based on information from documents long believed to be in Sayers’ possession. The story charged the nation’s top investigative and intelligence agencies with harboring elite hit squads, comprised of professional killers working not only in foreign capitals but in the United States as well. The Director of the FBI had labeled the story nonsense. There had been no comment from the others.

It was the shell of a story, stripped of all its guts. Naturally, no names were mentioned. On the radio, it sounded like the work of a good fiction writer.

It looked a little better in print, though not much. Joanne was despondent. The stories contained a clear suggestion that Walker had been forced to write them, and vivid reminders that Joanne Sayers’ involvement in radical causes went back to Berkeley of the mid-1960s.

“They don’t believe it,” she said. “They don’t believe me, and what’s worse, they don’t believe you either. They think I’m holding a gun to your head.”

“To them it’s a clear possibility,” Walker said. “You’ve made some pretty big mistakes, Joanne. It’s going to take some work to undo them.”

“I wonder if that’s even possible.”

“Anything’s possible. You got me to believe you.”

“Big deal. No offense, but all that’ll get us right now are three coffins instead of one.”

In a restaurant near Lancaster, Walker read through each of the second-day stories twice. There were holes big enough to drive a truck through. Where was all the federal flap? There was no question of FBI involvement: burglary of an FBI office, bank robbery, kidnapping, transporting of hostages across state lines, shooting a federal agent. All those great things to sink their federal teeth into, but the FBI was nowhere in the stories. The few comments that reporters had gotten were pried out, word by word. And everything had been cleared through Washington. In two days of listening and reading, Walker had not found a single exception to this. Not a word out of the field office in Chicago. As of this moment, Walker didn’t even know if the man Joanne had shot was dead or alive.