Page 60 of Hawk
Hawk has made my obsession his problem. In turn, so has his team. Jagger, Damon, Gunnar, Mattis, and Abby have all become my second family.
Mattis has worked with me diligently, spending more time helping me hunt down digital leads than whatever he is supposed to be doing for Aegis Tactical Solutions. The two of us have bonded over long calls about metadata and stale caches, like we’re trying to one-up each other for bragging rights of uncovering the most dirt for this story.He’s won.My inbox is a constant feed of chain-of-custody documentation, satellite overlays, and copies of the memos that have me swimming in redactions and signatures.
Being pretty much sequestered to this house—“for my own good”—Abby has been kind enough to take care of some shopping for me. Living in Chris’s boxers, T-shirts, and sweatpants was cute for a few days, but a girl needs to at least have her own underwear.
Jagger, Gunnar, and Damon are at my beck and call to physically run down any leads. They are all frequently at the house. It’s under the guise of social visits—so I don’t worry—but I know they’re checking the perimeter and ensuring none of the security measures they’ve put in place have been tampered with.
I finished writing the story three days ago, but I’ve been holding it tight to my chest because the responsibility is overwhelming. Mattis and I have been going through all of our evidence with a fine-tooth comb. If I get this wrong… If a single name is misattributed or a timeline is off by so much as a day, the entire story will collapse under the scrutiny. One tiny incorrect detail, and the horrors of what happened in that village will be erased again by skepticism and media spin.
Chris and I sit at the dining room table with my laptop open for a video call with Carl. For his own safety, we have kept him out of the loop for the past few weeks. He joins our meeting, the familiar decor of his office filling the space behind him. “Jesus, Reese. You look like hell.”
“It’s done. The story is finished.”
Intrigued, he leans forward, bracing his forearms on the desk. “Do I get to read it before I publish it?” he jests.
“It’s front page, Carl,” I insist firmly, not matching his jovial tone. “You can’t bury this.”
He exhales sharply and bites, “I know we’re close, Reese, but you don’t dictate where I run the story.”
“It’s front page, or she can take it to The New York Times, Newsweek,” Chris gruffs bluntly, putting his body into the frame. “Your competitors would all happily run this story.”
Carl sits in silence, his eyes darting between the two of us, and I can tell his mind is racing. “It’s that good?” he finally asks.
“No.” I shake my head. “It’s thatimportant.”
“I have a team en route to you,” Chris shares, the reasoning behind which makes my stomach knot. “They should be there in a couple of hours.”
Incredulity cracking through the veneer of his usually professional composure, Carl asks, “A team to bring the story?”
“No,” Chris answers before I can. “A team to protect you once you have it.”
“Jesus Christ. What is this story, Reese?”
“When you have protection,” I answer. “I’ll send you everything the minute we know you’re going to be safe with possession of it.”
Almost four hours later, Chris’s phone buzzes across the kitchen island. I know before he answers that Jagger and Gunnar have arrived in New York. “They’re with Carl,” he informs me, typing into his phone.
I email the story first, plain text with no attachments. The headline I’ve been ruminating on for the past week is brutal,concise, and incapable of understatement: Buried Beneath the Pipeline: A Village Silenced for Profit. The second email has attachments with all my source notes and the cross-references verifying their legitimacy.
I video call Carl again, and he answers as he is opening the files. His eyes scan across the screen, and the change that comes across his face is so vividly horrified that my stomach flips.
“You sure?” he asks after a long minute, because he has to. “We have to fact-check the hell out of this before I can run it.”
“Second email,” I inform him. “Sources. Details. Every last bit of my research. The only thing more damning would’ve been them all standing over the grave with shovels in their hands.”
“Front page tomorrow morning.” Carl gives a quick goodbye. He has hours of work ahead of him if he’s going to meet the print deadline.
It’s when I’m closing the lid of my laptop that reality hits me. People will read this. Men with power will react. Men with less of it than they thought will be held accountable.
I try to let myself finally breathe. The work that has consumed me for weeks has reached the hinge. A single print from Carl, and we move from research to reckoning. I’m both terrified and ferociously alive.
Chris crouches down beside me and places his hand over mine—his grip is the familiar anchor that has steadied me through the whole process. “I’m so proud of you.”
“I couldn’t have done this on my own.”
He looks up at me, and the raw tenderness in his eyes makes my throat close up. “Yes, you could have. I have no doubt you would have found a way.”
“Do you think Adeya will be okay?” I ask. While editors, politicians, and reporters matter when this plays out to the public, I know that isn’t the truth for the people who lost families in that massacre. Sadly, it is unlikely anyone in the media would realize—or care—if anything happened to her.