Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [119]
Sanders stared at her. Why was she telling him this? He said, “That’s an interesting story.”
Kaplan nodded. “I’ve never forgotten it,” she said.
On the stairs above, a door clanged open, and they heard footsteps descending. Without another word, Kaplan turned and continued up.
Shaking his head, Sanders continued down.
In the newsroom of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Connie Walsh looked up from her computer terminal and said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m not,” Eleanor Vries said, standing over her. “I’m killing this story.” She dropped the printout back on Walsh’s desk.
“But you know who my source is,” Walsh said. “And you know Jake was listening in to the entire conversation. We have very good notes, Eleanor. Very complete notes.”
“I know.”
“So, given the source, how can the company possibly sue?” Walsh said. “Eleanor: I have the fucking story.”
“You have a story. And the paper faces a substantial exposure already.”
“Already? From what?”
“The Mr. Piggy column.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. There’s no way to claim identification from that column.”
Vries pulled out a xerox of the column. She had marked several passages in yellow highlighter. “Company X is said to be a high-tech company in Seattle that just named a woman to a high position. Mr. Piggy is said to be her subordinate. He is said to have brought a sexual harassment action. Mr. Piggy’s wife is an attorney with young children. You say Mr. Piggy’s charge is without merit, that he is a drunk and a womanizer. I think Sanders can absolutely claim identification and sue for defamation.”
“But this is a column. An opinion piece.”
“This column alleges facts. And it alleges them in a sarcastic and wildly overstated manner.”
“It’s an opinion piece. Opinion is protected.”
“I don’t think that’s certain in this case at all. I’m disturbed that I allowed this column to run in the first place. But the point is, we cannot claim to be absent malice if we allow further articles to go out.”
Walsh said, “You have no guts.”
“And you’re very free with other people’s guts,” Vries said. “The story’s killed and that’s final. I’m putting it in writing, with copies to you, Marge, and Tom Donadio.”
“Fucking lawyers. What a world we live in. This story needs to be told.”
“Don’t screw around with this, Connie. I’m telling you. Don’t.”
And she walked away.
Walsh thumbed through the pages of the story. She had been working on it all afternoon, polishing it, refining it. Getting it exactly right. And now she wanted the story to run. She had no patience with legal thinking. This whole idea of protecting rights was just a convenient fiction. Because when you got right down to it, legal thinking was just narrow-minded, petty, self-protective—the kind of thinking that kept the power structure firmly in place. And in the end, fear served the power structure. Fear served men in power. And if there was anything that Connie Walsh believed to be true of herself, it was that she was not afraid.
After a long time, she picked up the phone and dialed a number. “KSEA-TV, good afternoon.”
“Ms. Henley, please.”
Jean Henley was a bright young reporter at Seattle’s newest independent TV station. Walsh had spent many evenings with Henley, discussing the problems of working in the male-dominated mass media. Henley knew the value of a hot story in building a reporter’s career.
This story, Walsh told herself, would be told. One way or another, it would be told.
Robert Ely looked up at Sanders nervously. “What do you want?” he asked. Ely was young, not more than twenty-six, a tense man with a blond mustache. He was wearing a tie and was in his shirtsleeves. He worked in one of the partitioned cubicles at the back of DigiCom’s Accounting Department in the Gower Building.
“I want to talk about Meredith,” Sanders said. Ely was one of the three Seattle residents on his list.
“Oh God,” Ely said. He glanced around nervously. His Adam’s apple