Present Day
The Harlem Sentryhad begun as a conspiracy blog. A crazy bastard named Farrell Whitaker had started it to expose GMOs and lead levels in city water and Hudson River polluters and sleeper cells and anything else that occurred to him. He wasn’t even taken seriously enough for anyone to refute his claims—the occasional alien abduction story that peppered the pages did nothing to help. Then one day about five years ago, he thought he saw a congressman sneaking out of a certain out-of-the-way club. A certain out-of-the-way gay club. A certain out-of-the-way S & M leather bar gay club. A certain married, staunchly conservative congressman, in town for a UN event, sneaking out of a certain out-of-the-way gay club with, eh hem, a companion. And just like that, Farrell Whitaker had suddenly become the highly respected journalist who headed up the most reliable online investigative news source in New York.
Emma had been working there a month, which was almost enough time to prove to her colleagues that she was an ardent, intelligent NYU grad and not some ditz Farrell wanted to fuck. Almost. So, when he called her into his office that day and gave her the good news, she knew the other writers would give her a collective WTF, and she didn’t give one shit. Zero shits given.
Farrell’s office looked like one of those basement rooms in a police procedural where a stalker has established his base of operation. Only, rather than one object of fixation, Farrell’s obsessions ranged from political corruption to environmental toxins to animal abuse to secret government programs. A whiteboard in the corner had the ominous headline: “White Hat/Black Ops” scrawled across the top and pictures of kidnapped executives and young girls taped haphazardly beneath. Another had what looked to be a pharmaceutical pricing flowchart. Farrell could be the poster child for an ADD/OCD combo.
The charming, if neglected, arched, leaded-glass windows overlooked elevated train tracks where the subways emerged from Manhattan tunnels. His office, despite a huge cash infusion from one of the largest news media organizations in the country, had a gritty feel that Emma was sure Farrell loved. His desk was piled high with magazines, newspapers, and political pamphlets. Farrell, in his paranoia, felt that “lo-fi” was a safer way to research—Big Brother was watching online. A wall in the corner was tacked full of photos of congressmen, movie stars, news anchors, and athletes. There was a burial ground of outdated technology: fax machines, old laptops, and disk drives, some of which he still used. Farrell loved the looks on people’s faces when he showed up to an interview with a handheld analog recorder and asked if he could “tape” the meeting. Amid the chaos and the junk, Farrell sat behind his desk, black Adidas propped up dangerously close to a triple espresso, with a cutting-edge tablet nestled in his lap. His frizzy dark blond hair was pulled into a ponytail. He looked like a retired BMX racer. He glanced up with a warm smile, the eye of his office hurricane, and didn’t waste a second jumping in.
“Emma, take a seat. You may think you’re getting canned, but you’re not getting canned. No canning today. Just good news. Very, very good news.” Emma glanced over at his sideboard and spotted the nearly empty pot of coffee resting on the burner.
She often wondered if Farrell had a more serious undiagnosed mental disorder beyond his fixations. He rambled like a lunatic, but he said he had good news, so she just looked at him with a raised brow.
“Nathan Hamilton Bishop. Not Nathaniel, not Nate—Nathan. Born—Greenwich, Connecticut; age—twenty-eight; height—six-two; weight—185; hair—brown….”
She listened to Farrell rattle off Nathan’s stats and thought how incomplete the description sounded. He failed to mention that Nathan’s eyes were a captivating emerald green or that his eyelashes were so long that as a boy he had trimmed them. Farrell omitted that Nathan’s hair curled at the ends when he wore it long and that his crooked smile revealed a barely perceptible chipped incisor that he had never had repaired.
“Chestnut,” she murmured.
“Pardon?”
“His hair. Never mind.”
“Andover, Dartmouth, HBS. Current president, soon-to-be CEO of Knightsgrove-Bishop, arms dealer to the stars...”
“Defense contractor.”
“Tomato, tom-ah-to,” he continued as though she hadn’t chimed in. “Fuck buddy to the rich and famous, charlatan, bon vivant, womanizer...”
“I know who he is,” she snapped. Boy, did she know.
“Well then, grab a jacket because hell has frozen over.”
Emma waited.
“After routinely requesting an interview every month since he took office...”
“He’s the president of a company, not a country,” she corrected.
“My sweet, naive girl.” He smiled kindly and looked at her as though she had asked if Santa Claus were real. Emma mused that he would have patted her head if she hadn’t been sitting across the desk.
“Where was I? Ah, the interview.” Are you sitting down?”
“Sitting.”
“Seatbelt buckled?”
“Farrell.”
“Sorry. Nathan Bishop has agreed to not one, but a series of interviews, a six-week series on himself and the love of his life.”
She thought she might throw up for a second.
“Who?” she choked meekly, not wanting to know the answer.
“Nathan Bishop. Emma, are you even listening to me?”
“No, I mean the ‘love of his life’ part.”