When finally I found the phone on my night table, the familiar, haunting voice on the other end knocked the last remnants of fantasy from my brain and brought me back to a reality I wasn't sure I liked.
'You're a hard man to reach, Mr. Flynn,' the anonymous source said in that even, dignified voice that had echoed in my mind so many times over the last week.
My wife is dead, I thought, suddenly burdened anew with a sadness that I had shed for my dream. Before I could say anything to this voice, even extend a greeting, he kept talking.
'You must be careful not to be misled. You must realize, you are being fed lies, lies that mask important truths that will someday astound you. You must keep working, keep digging, and get at these truths.'
The world, or at least this conversation, was becoming clearer to me as the cobwebs gave way to the importance of the moment. I had prepared for this call in excruciating detail, actually thought of little but, and I knew I couldn't lose the opportunity because I was tired and grieving for my wife.
'That wasn't you who wanted to meet me at the Newseum, right?' I asked.
There was a moment of silence on the other end, and when he spoke, he sounded uncharacteristically flustered, his voice taking on a tone I had not heard from him before. 'The Newseum? No, I don't understand.'
This verified what Havlicek and I believed all along: that someone was trying to help me, even while someone else was trying to kill me.
I asked, 'So you're saying you didn't have a note delivered to me at a restaurant Saturday night asking to meet you at the Newseum?'
'No.'
I asked, 'Then who would try to kill me?'
'Mr. Flynn, given the sensitivity of the information involved, there are people who will go to extremes to make sure it does not find its way into the public realm. There are people who would kill rather than see you get to the bottom of this story. I must warn you that if you continue to accept my help and pursue these leads, you are in danger.
Imminent danger.'
I said, somewhat less than politely, 'You haven't given me any leads yet, only general guidance. I need specifics. If I'm going to be in danger, you might as well give me more help. It's not enough to encourage me. You know more than I do. You know more than you're saying. I need you to tell me what you know, or at least to guide me along so I can get there.'
'That's fair,' he said. He paused, and beside me, the dog, his head on the edge of a pillow and his body spread out on the bed like a person, rolled partially over to look at me, then closed his eyes again. I sat up in the dark on one elbow. The light from the telephone handset cast a small glow on my bed.
'I'm prepared to help you,' he said. 'I'm prepared to bring you to the core of this situation. But it's crucial for you to understand, as we get further along, as you begin to realize what has happened with this assassination attempt, your own life will be threatened anew.
Knowledge is power. That axiom is true. But in this case, knowledge is also danger.'
Obviously my Deep Throat had a flair for the dramatic, and I wondered, given the tone of his voice and the perfect sentences he formed, whether he had resumed reading from some sort of script. If he thought he was scaring me, he thought wrong, but I sensed he understood this.
The two most intriguing things you can say to any reporter worth the ink in his pen is that he may have to go to jail if he doesn't give up his source, and that his life is in danger. Best as I could understand at this early hour, he was offering me some version of a twofer.
'I've already accepted the danger,' I said, finding myself speaking as theatrically as the source. 'What I want is to get to the bottom of this story.'
There was another long pause, and I thought I detected the shuffle of paper. I could hear him breathing softly into the telephone.
Finally, he said, 'You've been to Chelsea, Massachusetts.'
It seemed more of a declaration than a question, though I wasn't really sure, so I said, 'Yes, I've been to Chelsea.' And indeed I had. It's a tiny city of less than two square miles just over the Mystic River from Boston, jammed with decrepit slums and abandoned storefronts. It was the birthplace of Horatio Alger, a fact that had provided hope to waves of immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Ireland. Now that hope had turned into little more than despair for the Jamaicans and Mexicans who found themselves not in a job but in a cycle of poverty, their only refuge taken in an occasional puff of crack cocaine.
'You should travel there,' he said. 'You should find out everything you can about a man named Curtis Black. Learn about him, and you will have dug to the core of this case.'
Chelsea. Curtis Black. The president of the United goddamned States of America. Silently, my finely honed reporting instincts were engaged in a full-blown war with my reverent tone toward this source. The instincts won, and I asked: 'Just a casual question: what the hell does a Curtis Black in Chelsea, Massachusetts, have to do with an assassination attempt on the most powerful figure in the world?'
I thought this might anger him. Instead, he barely missed a beat.
'Everything,' he said. 'I've given you all I can right now. It's up to you to find out why.'
I asked, 'Will you continue to help me?'
'As long as you're working this, I'll help you,' he said.
'Will you ever reveal yourself to me?' I asked that question just out of curiosity. I assumed a quick 'No,' but instead, he paused again and said, 'Perhaps someday, if I think it will help.'
I wasn't ready for this conversation to end quite yet, though I feared he was. I asked, more lightly, 'Have you seen today's Record?'
'No, I haven't.'
'We have two stories,' I said. 'We have a story saying the trigger man cannot be the same man the feds say he is. Their ID, this guy named Tony Clawson, has eyes of a different color from the corpse.
'The second story says that the FBI had a prior tip, confirmed by a federal informant, that a Wyoming-based militia group was plotting an attack on the president.'
There was another long pause. The house was totally silent, outside of Baker's soft, rhythmic dog snoring. The clock showed 4:40 A.m. now. I thought I heard my source breathing more heavily.
'You have it about half right,' he said, his tone slightly different, a little higher, with an edge, like a rubber band stretched thin.
'You're going to want to find out about Curtis Black even faster now.'
He hesitated, then, sounding more compassionate than businesslike, added, 'Just take care of yourself. Be careful.' Then he hung up.
At seven-thirty in the morning at the Washington bureau of a big-city newspaper, I should have been a good two hours out from seeing another human being. Except for the lawyers along K Street who bill by the hour and equate time in the most literal sense to money, this is a town slow to start at the beginning of the day. Congressional aides, federal officials, and news reporters don't typically arrive at work until just on the northern side of 10:00 A.m. Once they're there, they tend to work late into the evening, often until 9:00 P.m. or after, and invariably, once they are out, they will complain vociferously about the number of hours they dedicate to their job, because in a city that produces little more than monotonous debate-no automobiles, mutual funds, not even insurance-long hours are the closest thing anyone has to show for any sense of accomplishment.
On this morning, at the far end of the otherwise darkened newsroom, Steve Havlicek sat hunched under a single light at his computer terminal, staring intently at the words on his screen.
'One question,' I said as I approached quietly and roused him from some trancelike state. 'What the fuck are you doing here at this hour?'
'You know, that whole early-to-bed, early-to-rise thing,' he said, jovial as ever. 'Big story here. We've got work to do and no time to waste. Howaya, slugger?'
I just shook my head. I was holding a bag with two toasted bagels and offered him one. He didn't hesitate in accepting, and was already biting into the second half before I even got mine unwrapped.
