Purity (48 page)

“Sure feels like it.”

“Tom and I are having some trouble. That's all it is. Can I get you an Ambien?”

Pip took the Ambien and woke up alone in the house. In the windows was a pale gray Colorado morning sky of the sort from which she'd learned not to predict the afternoon weather—it could snow or turn shockingly warm—but she was grateful for the bright overcast; it matched her spirits. She'd been terminated by Andreas but also released; she felt both bruised and cleaner. After reheating and eating some frozen waffles, she went out walking toward downtown Denver.

The air smelled like spring, and the Rockies, behind her, all snowy, were there to remind her that she still had many things to do in life, such as going up to Estes Park and experiencing the mountains from close range. She could do this after she made her confession to Tom and before she returned to California. In the crisp air, she saw clearly that the time to confess had come. As long as she'd had her late-night textings and touchings, she'd had some
reason
to have planted the spyware and to avoid the awfulness of telling Tom about it: she was bewitched and enslaved by Andreas. Now there was no reason, nor any sense in trying to preserve the life she had going in Denver, however eagerly she'd taken to it. The whole thing was built on lies, and she wanted to come clean.

Her resolve was firm until she arrived at DI and was reminded that she loved the place. The overhead lights were off in the main space, but two journalists were in the conference room and Pip could hear Leila's pretty telephone voice in her task-lighted work space. Pip hesitated in the corridor, wondering if she could still avoid confessing. Maybe if the spyware disappeared? But whatever was upsetting Leila wasn't going away. If she was upset about Tom liking Pip too much, a full confession would certainly put an end to that. Pip took the long way around to his office, avoiding Leila.

His door was standing open. As soon as he saw Pip, he reached quickly for his computer mouse.

“Sorry,” she said. “Are you in the middle of something?”

For a moment, he seemed totally guilty. He opened his mouth without saying anything. Then, collecting himself, he told her to come in and shut the door. “We're in battle mode,” he said. “Or Leila's in battle mode. I'm in Leila-care mode. Her engine runs hot when she's afraid of being scooped.”

Pip shut the door and sat down. “I gather she got something big yesterday.”

“Ghastly thing. Major story. Bad for everyone except us. It's very good for us, assuming we're the ones to break it. She'll fill you in—she's going to need your help.”

“An actual weapon went missing?”

“Yes and no. It never left Kirtland. Armageddon was averted.” Tom leaned back in his chair, catching the fluorescent light on his terrible glasses. “This was probably before your time, but there used to be a countdown-to-Armageddon clock. Union of Concerned Scientists, I believe. It would be four minutes to midnight, and then there'd be a new round of arms-control talks, and the clock would go back to five minutes before midnight. It all seems vaguely cheesy and ridiculous now, like everything else from those years. What kind of clock runs backward?”

He seemed to be free-associating to conceal something.

“They still have that clock,” Pip said.

“Really.”

“But you're right, it feels dated. People are more advertising-literate these days.”

He laughed. “Plus it turns out that it wasn't actually five minutes to midnight in 1975, otherwise we'd all be dead now. It was nine fifteen or something.”

Pip's own countdown-to-confession clock was stuck at one second before midnight.

“Anyway, Leila's on the ragged edge,” Tom said. “She comes across as so unthreatening that people don't realize how competitive she is.”

“I'm realizing it, a little bit.”

“A couple of years ago, she was way out in front on the Toyota recall story, or she thought she was. She thought she had time to nail it down tight and break it complete. And then suddenly she starts hearing from her contacts in the agencies.
They're
calling
her
to tell her they just heard an amazing story from the
Journal
's guy. These were people who hadn't known anything, hadn't told her anything, and now they had the whole story! She's hearing that the
Journal
's guy was up all night drafting. She's hearing that the
Journal
is already lawyering it. And there's no worse feeling. No worse thing to write than a story where you have to credit the guy you were way ahead of until two days ago. Apparently the
WaPo
's on the Kirtland story—Leila found that out yesterday. We're still ahead, but probably not by much.”

“Is she drafting?”

“That's what sleepless nights are for. I'd almost rather get scooped than see her in the state she's in. You need to help me try to keep her halfway sane.”

Pip was starting to feel bad about having lashed out at Leila; to wonder if she was simply overstressed by work.

“But listen,” Tom said, leaning forward. “Before you go, I want to ask you a personal question.”

“I actually had something to—”

“We were talking about your dad the other night. And I've been thinking—you're a great researcher. Have you ever tried to find him?”

She frowned. Why did people keep asking her about her father? In her guilty frame of mind, she had the curious thought that
Andreas
was secretly her father. That this was why her mother was so hostile to him. That Tom and Leila had discovered the spyware and knew more about her than she herself did. Andreas as her dad: the thought was crazy but had a certain logic, the logic of ick, the logic of guilt.

“Yeah, I've tried,” she said. “But my mom covered her tracks really well. The only thing I've got is her made-up name and my approximate date of birth. I always seemed to be the right size for the grade I was in. But I know my birth certificate is fake.”

The look Tom was giving her was worrisomely loving. She lowered her eyes.

“You know,” she said, “I'm not a very good person.”

“What are you talking about? What's not good about you?”

She took a deep breath. “I don't always tell the truth.”

“About what? About your father?”

“No, that part is true.”

“Then what?”

Just say it
, she thought.
Say: I was in Bolivia, not California
 …

There was a tap on the door.

Tom jumped to his feet. “Come in, come in.”

It was Leila. She looked at Pip and spoke to Tom. “I was on the phone with Janelle Flayner. I was thinking last night about something she'd said to me. Something like ‘It's about time someone listened.'”

“Leila,” Tom said gently.

“Hear me out. This is not paranoia. She said that, and I called her, and it turns out that, yes, she did communicate with someone else. Before me. While Cody's pictures were still up on Facebook, she sent a message to the
famous leaker
. ‘The Sunshine Boys?' That's what she said. The Sunshine Boys. The place that everybody sends their tips to.”

Pip had one of those double blushes, a mild one followed by a burning whole-body wave.

“So what?” Tom said, less gently.

“Well, Mrs. Flayner didn't hear back. Nothing ever happened.”

“Good. Happy ending. He couldn't do shit from Bolivia. To cover a story like this, you need boots on the ground.”

“Well, but Wolf never put the pictures up. He puts up twenty things a day—there's no filter. But for some reason he didn't put this one up.”

“I'm serenely unworried.”

“I'm radically worried.”

“Leila. He's had the information for almost a year. Why would he suddenly decide to float it in the next five days?”

“Because these stories have a boiling point. Suddenly everyone starts talking overnight. If he gets one more leak, he can spit in the soup. It's bad enough if the
Post
does it to me. But if
that guy
gets there first—”

“The world looks very scary when you haven't slept. You're the one who's sitting on the elephant. You're the only one who can connect the dots from Amarillo to Albuquerque.”

“People steal elephants. It happens all the time.”

“If you want to worry about something, worry about the
Post
.”

Leila laughed raggedly. “I'm all over that, too. They've got to be days ahead of me on the Kirtland drug scandal. Probably weeks. There's no way I can cover it when I'm also confirming the nuke story.”

“You'll pick up enough of it collaterally. It's fine if the
Post
has more detail on it, so long as we're first. Let them add the salt to our soup. Worst case, they're out in front with a drug story, and we follow with an Armageddon story.”

“You're sure you don't want to do a co-op with them?”

“With a Jeff Bezos joint? I can't believe you're even asking.”

“Then prepare for me to be a wreck.”

Leila left, and Tom gazed after her. “I hate to see her like this,” he said. “It feels like the end of the world to her when she gets beaten.”

Pip wondered if she'd been mistaken. He wasn't seeming like a man in love with anyone but Leila.

“Do you have your phone?” he said.

“My phone?”

“I want to make some calls to the
Post
. Dial some numbers and see who's there on a Saturday. If the people I have in mind aren't there, she can worry a little less.”

Even though Pip had come here to confess, she was tempted to say she didn't have her device with her; it was radioactive with incriminating texts. But to claim not to have it was dumb and implausible. When she handed it over to Tom, it felt like a small bomb, and when she left his office she stationed herself outside the door, hoping her proximity would inhibit him from reading her texts.

She saw that she'd lost her nerve and wouldn't be confessing anything today. If, as she now suspected, she'd been mistaken about Tom's interest in her, there might be nothing so terrible about her situation that uninstalling Andreas's spyware couldn't fix it. When Tom emerged from his office, smiling, she took her phone to the ladies' room and locked herself in a stall.

She sent the text and went to Leila's work space, where Leila was on the phone again. Pip stood in the corridor with her head bowed, trying to look penitent.

“I'm sorry if I make you self-conscious,” she said when Leila was off the phone. “Are you too upset with me to let me help you?”

Leila seemed about to say something angry that she reconsidered. “We're not going to talk about that,” she said. “You need to be a journalist this week. Not a researcher, not a houseguest. Do you think you can work with me?”

“I love working with you.”

The first task Pip was given was to gather basic facts about the execution-style killing of two women in Tennessee. The facts turned out to be consistent with the appalling story Leila told her. The women, sisters with the maiden name Keneally, had been abducted within minutes of each other in different cities; neither body showed signs of sexual trauma, and officially the police had no leads. As Pip proceeded to learn what she could about the hospitalization and disappearance of the sisters' brother, Richard, she began to think she'd been petulant and childish in threatening to quit her job. Although living with Tom and Leila was clearly a mistake, the job wasn't.

She kept retreating to the ladies' room to check messages, but it wasn't until she and Tom had gone home for a late dinner and she was in bed, at the usual texting hour, that Andreas's reply came in.

She turned off the device without replying. She'd forced him to break his vow not to text her again, and she felt good about it. Less like a child, more like an adult who had some power. Not like a rigorously moral person, certainly; but moral absolutism was childish. Downtown, at her desk, Leila was gutting out some private misery, sitting alone at the office after midnight, drafting her story, because Leila was an adult. Her toughness made Pip see Andreas in a new light, as a kind of child-man, obsessed with spilling secrets. She squirmed with displeasure at the recollection of his hand in her pants. She could see—she thought she could see—that what adults did was suck it up and keep their secrets to themselves. Her mother, a gray-haired child in so many ways, was an adult in this one regard at least. She kept her secrets and paid the price. Pip imagined herself continuing to work at DI, knowing what she knew, having done what she'd done, and not confessing it, just as Leila had said:
We're not going to talk about that
.