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

that the range of possible outcomes wasn’t limited to either financial self-harm or institutional suicide.
    “Well,” he says eventually, dragging the word out, and then exhaling loudly, “I don’t know, do I?” He gets up. “ You fucking figure it out.”
    End of meeting.
    Ellen steps back to let the boys pass.
    Max remains standing and then waves Ellen in. “What’s the matter with me?” he says. “I’m not even forty, and I can’t get a handle on this shit.”
    “You were born forty, Max. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
    “I have to worry about it. These pricks are at the gate. It’s all very well me taking a stand, old man shakes his fist at Twitter, but how long is that tenable? Sooner or later—”
    “ Get a handle on it, Max. It’s not hard.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” He sits down again. “So what’s up?”
    “Jeff Gale. Bob Holland.”
    “What about them?”
    “In case you didn’t know, Max, someone shot them both dead over the weekend. I’m interested in who and why.”
    “No shit. ” He leans back in his chair and swivels from side to side. “What about Jane Glasser?”
    This was to be Ellen’s next subject in the presidential hopefuls series, the congresswoman from West Virginia whose own staff members were recently caught on a YouTube video calling her “the she-devil.”
    “Yeah, I’m on that, but … this is news .”
    Max groans. And she knows why. It’s the same argument as before, the same argument as always. Parallax calls itself a news magazine, but what does that mean anymore? The phrase is almost archaic, like “fax machine” or “long-distance telephone call.” The issue that’s coming out on Thursday, for instance, has some good stuff in it—a piece on China’s new mega-cities, and an interview with Alexandre Desplat—but for the next four weeks the magazine will sit on newsstands and coffee tables across the country blithely unaffected by anything new that actually happens.
    “I know,” Max says, “I know. We have to ramp up the online side of things. I know . In fact, I should call those three guys back in here right now, shouldn’t I? Give them the green light, give them the keys .” He pauses. “But you know what? It wouldn’t make any difference.”
    Standing there in front of him, listening, Ellen is torn between going, Yeah, yeah, Max, whatever, and leaning across the desk to slap him in the face.
    He winces. “Don’t look at me like that, Ellen. Not you .”
    Then she feels bad. They go back a long way and have never fallen out, which for her has to be some kind of a record. “What is it, Max?”
    He turns away for a moment and gazes out the window. Then he says, “Do you know who owns Parallax these days, Ellen?”
    She’s about to answer, but hesitates. Does she know? Maybe not. As a contributing editor, she should know, and certainly did know at one stage—it was Wolper & Stone, and was for decades. But then Wolper was bought out by MCL Media. Wasn’t that it?
    And now?
    “Isn’t it MCL?”
    “Sure, yeah, but who owns them ?”
    Penny dropping, she clicks her tongue. “Oh.”
    Max leans forward. “Last year MCL was bought out by the Mercury Publishing Group, who is owned by Offtech … who, in turn”—he squeezes his eyes shut for a second, as though in pain—“has just been bought out by Tiberius Capital Partners.”
    “Fuck.”
    “Exactly.” He leans back in his swivel chair. “Let the asset stripping begin.”
    “Oh, Max.” She feels even worse now. And stupid. For not having known. Parallax survives almost forty years as an independent organ, a supposedly fearless voice in print journalism, and then in the space of two or three years it disappears into a Russian nesting doll of corporate ownership.
    “They could switch us out like a light, Ellen, any time, and they’re going to, it’s simply a matter of when.” He taps out a drumroll on the edge of his desk. “So listen to me, start asking around for work,