Graveland: A Novel by Alan Glynn Read Free Book Online Page A

notion of what her interrogators might have wanted her to reveal. It felt like one continuous garbled dream based on what she’d been doing over the previous sixteen hours—online research mainly, plus one or two brief phone calls (no more, solely because it was a Sunday) and a quick trip down to Bra on Columbus Avenue, with assiduous note taking throughout, countless pages of them scrawled on loose sheets of graph paper.
    She hadn’t slept well on Saturday night, either, partly due to this heightened sense she’d had of what she might wake up to. And when she did wake up to something, to the Bob Holland killing—the Sunday morning newsfeed already engorged with it—she felt there was no route back.
    She felt this was her story.
    However irrational that may have seemed. And impractical.
    And now, on Monday morning, mainly impractical.
    Because as a news item it’s covered, everyone’s on it—it’s not like she’s got a jump on the story. In addition to which the new issue of Parallax will be out on Thursday, so anything she might come up with in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours would be too late anyway. And next month’s issue, in news-cycle terms, may as well be a century away. There’s always the online edition, but it’s not exactly a premium site for breaking news.
    Even if she had any to break.
    Despite all of this, Ellen feels energized.
    She e-mails in her copy for the Ratt Atkinson piece and then heads out for some breakfast. Over coffee she goes through the papers, where it’s wall-to-wall Jeff and Bob. The pattern of coverage is pretty much the same everywhere, as it has been since yesterday morning—an outline of what happened, a profile of each victim, and some editorializing. The outlines are sketchy, because not much seems to be known, the level of detail in the profiles depends on which paper it is, and the editorializing is remarkably consistent—all of them reaching more or less the same, and perhaps obvious, conclusion, i.e., that Wall Street bankers are being targeted by a group of highly organized domestic terrorists. A single reference is made to a months-old report detailing intelligence-community concerns that al Qaeda operatives in Yemen may have been planning attacks against certain leading Wall Street institutions.
    And beyond that, just yet, no one seems willing to go.
    No mention is made of any possible connection with the Occupy movement, and very little is said about what—or who —might be next. In the blogosphere, predictably, things are a little different. Convenient lists are drawn up, after-the-fact manifestos are posted, and each-way conspiracy theories are formulated.
    When she leaves the coffee shop, Ellen takes the subway to midtown, walks around for a bit with her earphones in, listening, thinking, and then stops by the Parallax offices to see Max Daitch. With the new issue almost—but not quite—put to bed, the place is fairly hectic.
    “Hi, Ellen,” Ricky, the features editor, says as he passes her in the hallway. “Got the Ratt piece, thanks. Cutting it a bit fine, though, no?”
    Ellen shrugs.
    A deadline’s a deadline.
    In Daitch’s office, there’s a meeting in progress, some minor crisis. She stands in the doorway, and waits.
    Sitting at his desk, partly hidden behind piles of books and papers, Daitch looks tired, under siege. Standing in front of the desk, in a semicircle, are three young tech guys.
    Two beardies, one baldy.
    Lots of jargon.
    Daitch doesn’t stand a chance.
    The magazine’s website is fairly primitive, barely on the grid, in fact—no Twitter feed, no YouTube channel, no mobile app, no Facebook page even—and that’s more than likely the source of the problem here. Max claims to be a technophobe and a Luddite, and he probably is, but he’ll also argue in private that no one has yet worked out a convincing business model for any of this stuff. If he was going to commit the magazine to a digital future, he’d like to feel