He leaned forward and stared into the lens.
“And yes, I said murder. Because whatever else could it be? Two of the most powerful men in a city of powerful men, whose plane disappears over the dark Atlantic, a plane serviced just the day before, flown by top-notch pilots who reported no mechanical issues to flight control, but somehow dropped off radar eighteen minutes after takeoff—look at my face—no one on earth can convince me there wasn’t some kind of foul play involved.”
The ratings that morning were the highest in the history of the network, and they continued to climb from there. As the first wreckage was found, the first bodies washed up on shore—Emma Lightner found by a dog walker on Fishers Island on Tuesday, Sarah Kipling hauled in by lobstermen on Wednesday morning—Bill seemed to rise above himself, like a relief pitcher in the bottom innings of a too-close-to-call game seven.
That day Bill spun the grim discovery of human remains toward further intrigue. Where was Ben Kipling? Where was David Bateman? Didn’t it seem convenient that of the eleven people on the plane, passengers and crew, only seven bodies remained missing, including those of the two men most likely to have been targeted by as-yet-unknown forces? If Ben Kipling was sitting with his wife, as had been reported, why was her body recovered and not his?
And where was this Scott Burroughs character? Why did he still insist on hiding his face from the world? Is it possible he was involved somehow?
“Clearly he knows more than he’s saying,” Bill told the viewers at home.
Sources inside the investigation had been funneling ALC information since the first boots hit the ground. From this, they were able to break the seating chart before anyone else. They were also the first to break news of Kipling’s imminent indictment.
It was Bill who broke that the boy, JJ, had been asleep when he arrived at the airfield and was carried onto the plane by his father. His personal connection to the story, the marathon hours he spent behind the anchor desk, frequently having to pause to collect himself, made it hard for viewers to change the channel. Would he break down entirely? What would he say next? Hour after hour, Bill cast himself as a kind of martyr, Jimmy Stewart on his feet in the Senate chambers, refusing to succumb or surrender.
But as the days went on, even the back-channel leaks began to seem false. Could there really be no new leads on the location of the wreckage? And now that all the other outfits had the Kipling story—the Times ran a six-thousand-word piece on Sunday that showed in minute detail how his firm had laundered billions from North Korea, Iran, and Libya—Bill became less interested in digging for dirt there. He was reduced to opinion pieces, to going over old ground—pointing at time lines, yelling at maps.
And then he had an idea.
*
Bill meets Namor at a dive bar on Orchard Street—black box, no sign. He chooses it because he figures none of the grungy liberal elite of the nouveau riche knows his face. All the bearded Sarah Lawrence graduates with their artisanal ales who think every conservative pundit is just another friend of their dad’s.
In preparation, Bill exchanges his trademark suspenders for a T-shirt and leather bomber jacket. He looks like a former president, trying to be cool—Bill Clinton at a U2 concert.
The bar—Swim!—is defined by low lighting and glowing fish tanks, giving it the look of a mid-1990s sci-fi action movie. He orders a Budweiser (un-ironically) and finds a table behind a big saltwater tank, then watches the door for his man. Sitting behind the tank gives the illusion that he is underwater, and through the glass the room takes on a funhouse-mirror quality—like what a hipster bar would look like after the oceans rose and consumed the earth. It’s just after nine p.m. and the place is half filled with bro-clusters and hipster first dates. Bill sips the king of beers and checks out the local talent—blond girl, decent tits, a little chubby. Some kind of East Asian number with a nose ring—Filipino? He thinks about the last girl he fucked, a twenty-two-year-old intern from GW he bent over his desk, coughing his orgasm into her brown hair after six glorious minutes of watch the door! jackhammering.
His man enters in a raincoat, an unsmoked cigarette tucked behind his ear. He looks around casually, sees Bill’s comically oversize head magnified through the fish tank, and approaches.
“I’m assuming you thought you were being stealthy,” he says, sliding into the booth, “choosing this dump.”
“My core audience are fifty-five-year-old white men who need two heaping tablespoons of fiber to take a halfway-decent shit every morning. I think we’re in the clear here.”
“Except you came by town car, which is loitering at the curb this very minute, drawing attention.”