Lane swept sandy crumbs off the table and laid the pages out. He’d printed them off the website of the Retreat Examiner, the city’s local paper. Last year, the Examiner had run a perfunctory article about the opening of Rubicon’s office and the arrival of the Common Dreams charity, which aims to serve our most downtrodden citizens. In the Web 2.0 pivot every newspaper attempted in those years, the Examiner posted the article on their Community Forum and invited comment. Lane said no one had commented on the Rubicon item for months, until one user, SunshineRay, started using it to vent about the company.

I worked as a Jr. Technician and let me tell you R-con is 1000x worse than Enron

Why won’t the Examiner ask Real Questions???

Klausmeyer is on the take

What you don’t know could FILL A BOOK!

SunshineRay posted a dozen comments of this variety, his only contribution to the Examiner forum, Lane reported.

“Interesting,” I said. And it was. So far, I hadn’t read a bad word about Rubicon.

Lane pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. “I went a little deeper, and found the e-mail associated with the username: [email protected]. Turns out there’s a Raymond Rix who lives on Snowy Egret Place, in Retreat. If it’s the same guy, he could be a good source for you.”

“He sounds like a crank.”

“Some local color, then.”

Lane reclined in his seat, the lowest buttons of his shirt distressed against his gut.

“You know, I’ve always been curious,” he said. “Why Seattle?”

I gathered the pages together and told him I should really get back.

—

Things were strangely quiet at the office. When I asked what was going on, someone told me the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was dead. His killers had released a video on the Internet called “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” They had him recite some prepared lines before they sawed through his neck and held his decapitated head up by the hair.

Mort and a few other writers had watched it. Now they sat huddled together, mute.

That crime was the first I can remember of—for lack of a better word—a new genre: the Western journalist on his knees, reciting propaganda before an online decapitation. Later, the image would become almost commonplace, orange jumpsuits on the burning sand, but the Pearl video came with the shock of the new. The murder wasn’t by a stray bullet. It was deliberate, meaningful, like the war zone had no border and journalists were all unwitting soldiers—unarmed, fair game.

When I boarded the plane to Tampa the next day, I felt a new fear. I told myself it was just anxiety about the reporting, the dread of not nailing a story outside my expertise, but I kept thinking about Pearl, how the day of his capture began like any other on the job.

3.