Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
MALLORY
Brewster didn’t slow down as he pushed the door open to the office, stepped inside, and turned just long enough to make sure I followed before letting it swing shut behind me. No waiting. No checking. His presumption still irked.
The room was spare. Desk. Two chairs. A corkboard with nothing pinned to it yet. No personal effects. No tells. It looked like a space designed to be temporary—which I supposed it had to be. Who lived in a safe house permanently?
He gestured to the chair opposite his desk, then didn’t take his own right away. Instead, he leaned a hip against the edge, arms folding loosely as he studied me.
Not assessing.
Listening.
I sat.
“Say it,” he said.
“Say what?”
“The thing you didn’t say in the kitchen,” Brewster replied. “The part you swallowed.”
I smiled thinly. “You like to make a lot of assumptions.”
Instead of responding, he merely stared at me. Waiting.
I exhaled once, slow. “If he went to that much trouble to reach me privately, then the worst thing I can do is pretend it didn’t happen.”
Brewster nodded. Not approval. “Agreed.”
“But—and this is a big but—if I overreact,” I continued, “I validate whoever in the FBI and at the network who decided to muzzle me.”
“Also agreed.”
“Well, don’t get all verbose with me, Brewster. You might talk my head off.” The dry remark earned me a slight flicker of a smile.
When he continued to say nothing, I almost rolled my eyes.
“We need to discuss what being on the same team means, later.” But since he merely raised his eyebrows, I spread my hands as I crossed one leg over the other.
“Fine, if my current options are antagonize him or validate someone else, I choose the third option.”
That earned me his full attention. “What third option?”
“Well, what do you know, you found three words for me.”
His scowl actually made me smile. Then he pushed off the desk, circled it and took his seat. The hard jerkiness of the motions betrayed his irritation and that also made me feel better. I hated being anyone’s marionette. Once seated, however, Brewster pinned me with his gaze.
“Explain.”
I didn’t sigh. One step forward, two syllables back.
Gaze locked on mine, he continued to wait. A stubborn part of me wanted to force the impasse. What petty satisfaction I might get from the contest wouldn’t advance the rest of my agenda.
With that in mind, I leaned forward, “I don’t need a camera to communicate. He already proved that. Which means I don’t need to wage a war with Flint or the network to go back on air.”
Brewster’s eyes narrowed.
Letting him stew on that, I settled back in my seat again. “Which also means I don’t need to fight it out with your superiors either. That eliminates the two largest road blocks.”
The crease between his brows deepened and his nostrils flared. A small tell, but definitely one. I’d gotten to him by dragging it out.
Good.
Happy enough with that small bit of success, I spread my hands. “All I really need to do is let him know that I heard him—and that I’m not gone.”
Surprise flickered across Brewster’s face. “So, you don’t go back on the air, yet.” He seemed to sound that out like he was considering the angles.
“I don’t go back on the air, at all.”
That startled him. “So how do you plan to move the conversation?”
“Well, since we both decided he’d already chosen an elegant method, I thought I might lift the page right from his book… or my transcript as it were.”
Now I had his full attention. “How?”
“I’ve been thinking about it since I found the message,” I confessed. “It’s how I work out problems, let them percolate in the back of my brain while I focus on other things.”
Why I felt the need to explain that, I wasn’t sure, but details mattered.
“He annotated the transcript of the broadcast where I delivered a message to him. Not the broadcast where I called out his actions or even gave him the name Auditor.”
That earned me a disgruntled look and a long sigh. “Naming a serial does nothing to help catch them, it just sensationalizes them and makes ratings.”
Not willing to entertain that particular argument at the moment, I returned to discussing my plan. “His choice was minimalistic. He didn’t cross out or try to replace my words, but answered it.”
Leaning back in his chair, Brewster transferred his gaze from me to the ceiling. I could almost hear the gears turning and the whine of the wheels as he considered my words.
“That tells me… that he is opening that dialogue and that he believes we were having a conversation. Now, I’m not a psychologist…”
“I agree with your assessment,” he said, waving that off. “Continue.”
I almost snorted at the command in his tone, but accepted it for the hurry up that it was. “It also tells me that he’s unhappy—” I considered that word choice, then just went with it. “Unhappy,” I repeated, “with the interruption.”
“Perhaps,” Brewster murmured. “I suspect it goes a bit further than that, however.” He refocused his attention on me. “Yes, he doesn’t like that someone interrupted your conversation, but I have a feeling that he resents the implication that someone else is preventing you two from talking.”
“That someone else being you, Flint, and the FBI,” I pointed out. That only earned me a droll look.
“You don’t include your network in that?”
“With Reardon frothing at the mouth over ratings and ad share revenue?” I snorted. “What do you think?”
He grunted and the lack of a verbal confirmation spoke a lot louder than words.
“Based on that, I don’t think this message is about escalating anything.” I pursed my lips, then said fuck it and finished my thought. “Maybe I’m being arrogant, and I don’t mind that particular accusation. I think he just wants to talk to me—and not publicly.”
“No, he made his response to you intimate, behind closed doors almost. If you go on the air, you turn his communication into spectacle.” The speculative expression on Brewster’s face turned grim.
“That’s what I thought,” I said slowly. “He’d hate if I did that, particularly when he went to such trouble to reach out to me in a way that didn’t flag anyone else.”
“Whether he thinks you did it or not, he’d likely want to punish someone for it.”
That was the first-time punishment entered the conversation. “If he thought it was me making it a spectacle,” I said slowly. “I think he would be angry. But if he thinks it’s—”
My phone buzzed on the desk between us.
Flint.
I didn’t pick it up right away, instead I focused on Brewster. “If he thinks it’s someone else, then he might react…” Honestly, I wasn’t sure how he would react. Look for another method to get to me? Get rid of the obstacle?
The last was more than enough to make me pause, especially when my phone buzzed again.
“Flint?” Brewster hadn’t glanced at my phone, but he’d definitely clocked my pause.
“Yes.”
“What does he want?”
With a sigh, I picked up the phone and tapped the screen.
Meetings finally wrapped. We need to talk plan. This silence is making everyone nervous.
I snorted softly. “He wants to make a plan.”
“And you?” Brewster hadn’t moved his gaze off of me. “What do you want?”
I didn’t answer immediately, clicking the phone screen off and putting it face down on the desk. “I am making a plan.”
“You said you had an idea.”
“I do, I want to do something small—like his annotation—but something he would notice.”
“Because he’s paying attention,” Brewster said slowly, like he was testing the concept out.
“Yes,” I continued. “So, I thought we could get a pulled clip from the archive, an older segment and recirculate it without update or commentary. Just…put it back out again. Dribble it through the network’s TikTok and social media channels as well as a new upload on the website.”
Eyes narrowed, Brewster sat forward again. “Which clip?”
Smart man knew I already had one in mind.
“This one would be from before the Auditor ever appeared, from an older broadcast, clearly, and from a time when if he was active here, he wasn’t actively a media story.”
“Why would this clip interest him?”
“On the surface,” I said, spreading my hands. “It wouldn’t. It has nothing to do with him. It wouldn’t send up flags anywhere else if I ask for someone to pull it and put it back out there.” I touched my tongue to the back of my teeth.
He waited a beat, eyebrows raised.
“You need to play avid audience better,” I said by way of a scold.
“The story I’m thinking about related to some politics at the time, a wider sweeping investigation into various rumors of financial misappropriations as well as personal indiscretions without naming names, because the moment one is named, then the story is about the story and not actually about the facts. ”
Frowning, Brewster nodded slowly. “Go on.”
“In this case, the investigation worked to debunk several rumors over the past few years that derailed campaigns, and while some proved to be factual—the majority were not. The rumors did what they were intended to do, create a storm of scandal and pushing candidates out of the way.”
That story had taken a lot of fast dancing and talking on my part to even get on the air.
Because the meat wasn’t delivered until the final segment when I did name names, reclaiming reputations and proving allegations false—although in a couple of cases, I threw a bone to the mob in the form of the ones that were true.
“In the end, the reputations might have been exonerated, but they were never fully restored because more people remember the scandals and the whispers, than they do the facts. It’s why restraint matters. It’s why facts matter. It’s why investigation matters.”
Head tilting to the side, Brewster looked considering. “You’re using an older story and series of clips to tell him that restraint mattered long before you began this conversation with him and that it still matters now.”