Her watch pinged a calendar reminder of her Zoom call in five minutes. Then she’d have to hustle not to be late for an interview in Redmond with the new Microsoft CEO. On the way, she’d call the school to make sure Ellie didn’t go home with anyone but her. Later, when she had time to spare, she’d definitely call the police. If past experience was any guide, reporting a threat would eat up two or three hours.
Sure, she’d been scared for a hot minute. But that was letting the dickheads win. So now she was just annoyed at the distraction and, yeah, maybe a little amused at the whole low-rent ransom-note quality of the thing. She took out her phone and snapped a picture of the letter, then texted it to a journalist friend in Milwaukee. “Can you believe this shit?”
After her Zoom call, the amusement lasted until she walked out to her bright orange Honda, thinking about the note again, telling her not to call the police.We are watching. We are Legion.
That was totally something a crank might write. How would he possibly know if she contacted the police? Her phone had decent security. The letter writer wasn’t listening to her calls. The government, maybe, if they had a court order, but not a run-of-the-mill lunatic.
But if hewaswatching, would she even know? She lived on the north end of Queen Anne, in one of the last single-family houses on a busy commercial strip. In the way of Seattle real estate, someone had torn down the houses across the street and built mid-rise apartment buildings with boutiques and restaurants on their ground floors. It would be easy enough for the letter writer to wander from shop to shop, maybe linger over lunch at the falafel place, then move down to the Starbucks. The whole time with a view of her door.
Anyway, if she did call the cops, the detectives would want to talk in person. From her time on the police beat, she knew how it worked. They’d want to see the note, check it for fingerprints and other trace evidence. They’d come to the house. And if the letter writer was actually out there somewhere, watching, he would see the detectives knock on her door. Even in plainclothes, cops always looked like cops.
She could always drive to the West Precinct station in Belltown, she thought. But if the letter writer had eyes on the house? He could simply follow her car.
That was when she felt it. A weird prickling sensation between her shoulder blades. What if hewasout there, watching?
She told herself she was paranoid. Imagining things. This didn’t happen in the real world. Although she wasn’t imagining the death threat. That letter was real.
She opened the car door and climbed behind the wheel, looking around for someone who seemed to be looking at her, someone shedidn’t recognize. But Seattle was a big city. She didn’t recognize anyone.
On her way toward the freeway, she found herself looking in her rearview mirror. A lot.
Had she seen the same car, a small gray hatchback, jockeying through traffic behind her? From Queen Anne all the way across the floating bridge to Redmond?
And wasn’t it behind her again three hours later, a hundred yards back, when she left the Microsoft parking lot?
It was hard to say. A lot of hatchbacks looked alike. A lot of them were gray.
But she was pretty sure it was the same car.
2
Outside the coffee shop, the rain eased up a little.
She looked around the place for the umpteenth time. In the sixty minutes she’d allotted for the mystery whistleblower meeting that didn’t happen, quite a few customers had cycled through. Some grabbed a cup to go, others stopped to sit for a while. None of them seemed to pay the slightest bit of attention to a middle-aged woman with a laptop.
So why did she still feel that prickle between her shoulder blades?
After sending the photo of the death threat to her journalist friend in Milwaukee, they’d texted back and forth a few times. June Cassidy was fifteen years younger, but she’d been through a few things. She’d asked if KT needed help.
KT was scared, yes, but she still wasn’t sure if she wasn’t simply being paranoid. Aside from an ill-considered and mercifully brief marriage whose only positive outcome was her daughter, Eleanor, KT had been essentially on her own since college. She’d done a prettygood job of taking care of herself and Eleanor so far, thank you very much. And that’s exactly why she told her friend June that she was handling it.
June had asked her to share her phone’s location, just in case. Which wasn’t weakness, KT thought, just an overabundance of caution. So she’d done that.
The truth was, KT had more than her share of enemies in tech. Just in the United States, the sector was valued somewhere between fifteen and twenty trillion dollars. Which meant that a bad earnings call or product review or funding round could drop company valuations, and personal fortunes, by hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. KT’s aggressive reporting had caused many such drops. Most people killed over money had died for far less. Not to mention the fact that the men running these companies—and they were almost always men—tended to be emotionally stunted assholes who were prone to a wide variety of bad behavior. Taken as a group, tech founders had a long record of being willing to do pretty much anything to expand their empires and increase their net worth.
Another problem, along with wondering whether to call the police, was that the letter had given her exactly zero indication of which investigation she was supposed to stop. None of the stories she had in the hopper seemed to connect to a reason someone might want her dead.
The Microsoft CEO profile was basically three thousand words of cotton candy she’d pre-sold toThe Wall Street Journal. She had a litigation follow-up to her July piece about a hardware startup that had gone bust because the battery in their signature product had a tendency to explode, but she wasn’t breaking any new ground there. She was doing preliminary reporting on several stories, including one about a social company that had basically been bought for parts, and another on OpenAI’s big spend on data centers, plus a dozen otherideas on her tickler list that she’d barely started thinking about. It was true that you never knew where a story might take you, but as far as she could tell, none of these seemed likely to result in a scoop that would be worth killing over.
She’d barely even considered the whistleblower who’d failed to show for today’s meeting. A successful journalist was a magnet for unsolicited and anonymous tipsters. Mostly they were offering a thousand varieties of useless crap. But there were enough gold nuggets in the steaming pile to make it worth sorting through occasionally. Of the latest batch, the format of the recording the whistleblower had sent was sufficiently unusual to get her interest. Except Ellie had clomped downstairs demanding her dinner before KT had a chance to listen to it.
The only story that didn’t fit that same pattern was a tip she’d gotten about something called Gun Club. She’d asked around for a few months, called every source she had, but came up with nothing. Which in itself was a little strange, because tech was awash in strange drugs, biohacking fads, and bizarre political ideas, not to mention actual orgies at some of the fringier conferences. There had to be at least a few tech bros who’d discovered the joys of firearms.
In fact, the lack of response was interesting enough that, for the last few months, whenever she was working another story, she’d drop in a question at the end of the interview: Have you ever heard of something called Gun Club? The funny thing was, aside from a straight no, the most common answer was: Is that like Fight Club? Making it evident that her interview subjects knew even less about it than she did. But recently, she’d had three guys clam up and look very guilty about something, which, to KT’s well-honed reportorial senses, was a signal to dig deeper. But because of her current workload, she hadn’t had time to start. Currently, that story was going exactly nowhere.
Anyway, even if she did know what story to step away from, shecouldn’t help hearing the growly, critical voice of her very first editor, Jim Higgins, who had burrowed deeply inside her reporter’s psyche.What kind of journalist would let some crank scare her off a story?
A live journalist, she told herself. With a daughter, safe from harm. But still. It rankled.
