Deadline (39 page)

“All right,” she said. “Come in.”

He sighed with relief and thanked her and stepped inside.

“You’re lucky I decided not to go to church this morning,” she said, leading him into the living room. “Otherwise you’d have been stuck in the cold with nobody to call you a cab.”

“I’d have to have pestered one of your neighbours,” he said.

She stopped and frowned at him. “Yes. Well. So you were lucky. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to help you with anything else though. As I told you last time, I haven’t decided what to do about my husband’s files.”

Jack took off his coat and sat down and dug through his laptop bag.

“I know,” he said. “I understand that. All I want is to show you what I learned in Fort McMurray. Maybe it will help you make your decision. I may be stunned, but I’m not stunned enough to think I could sweet-talk you into doing something you don’t want to do.”

She sat down and appraised him coolly. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll have a look at what you found.”

He opened his laptop. “Do you have wireless?”

“Yes,” she said. “Erin set it up.”

“Can I have the password?” asked Jack. “It would be easiest if I can show you some things online.”

“Hm,” said Gushue. “I’ll have to call her to get it.”

She stepped out of the room to call her daughter and got the password.

“Gaga012,” she said when she returned, and then spelled it out. Her expression suggested she would rather not hear any comment about the password.

Jack smiled and typed it in, then turned the laptop so that they could both see the screen. He opened his web browser and a series of tabs opened up.

“I was up all night putting this together,” he said. “Then I caught the first flight out of Fort Mac. Jeez, I was glad to get out of there.”

The first tab came up. It was a story from
Fort McMurray Today
about the Second Chance program, with the picture of Redcloud laughing as she made a dream catcher. He told her about the girl, clicked through the murder stories he’d collected, and then opened an
Alberta Report
story about the SinoGaz deal, showing bulldozers clearing stunted spruce.

“The project had to clear two sets of hurdles, a foreign investment review panel and a federal-provincial environmental panel,” said Jack. “Both rejected it, but Stevens overturned both decisions. That’s not particularly noteworthy in itself. Stevens is very close to the Alberta oil people, and he has given a number of oil sands projects the go-ahead after regulators said no. Stevens likes the oil sands.”

He opened the next story, illustrated with a picture of two Mounties posing with some children in a classroom, part of a crime prevention program.

“What’s strange is what your husband and his partner, Constable Dwayne Brecker, found on Wi’s computer when they investigated the crime scene.”

He explained the emails, and the secret payments, then clicked to the story about Wi’s death.

“Wi was killed in remand in Edmonton a couple weeks after he murdered Redcloud,” he said. “It was a hit, carried out by the Indian Posse, a First Nations gang, contracted by some Chinese gangbangers from Vancouver. I suspect that SinoGaz ordered the hit to silence Wi.”

He clicked next on a group photo of the Stevens cabinet. “One of the people of this photo is a traitor, basically, someone who sold out his country. Your husband knew this, and was investigating it until two senior Mounties came to town, Inspector Duncan Wheeler and Assistant Inspector Emil Dupré. They showed your husband and Brecker a letter from the deputy commissioner, praising their investigation, and informed them that any further investigation would be handled by CSIS and senior Mounties. They reminded them of their legal obligations to keep quiet about the case, and they took all the case files with them.”

The next tab showed a number of photographs of men in full dress Mountie uniforms, standing at attention during a promotion ceremony.

“Three of the men – your husband, Wheeler and Dupré – received promotions within the next few months, and all three of them were transferred to headquarters here in Ottawa,” he said. “Brecker was drummed out of the force last year.”

“Oh my,” said Gushue. “He seemed like such a nice man. Earl had him over to the house a few times. What happened?”

“He was pushed out,” said Jack. “The suggestion is that there was some impropriety on his part, involving a quantity of cocaine and cash. He’s now the chief of security at Showgirls, a strip bar in Fort Mac.”

For the first time since he met her, Gushue looked rattled. “Oh my,” she said. “I hope Earl never heard about it. He would have been so disappointed.”

“I don’t think he ever did,” said Jack. “Brecker said he was glad your husband didn’t know.”

Jack clicked on one of the promotion pictures. “This man on the left is Emil Dupré,” he said. “He is now an inspector based here in Ottawa at RCMP headquarters, working for Wheeler, who is now the deputy commissioner of the RCMP.”

He zoomed in on Dupré’s face. He had a dark moustache and a scar on his eyebrow. “Did you ever meet this man?”

Gushue shook her head.

“Well, he tried to kill me,” he said. “I suspect he is also the man who tried to drown Ed Sawatski, although I don’t know exactly why.”

Jack pulled out the police report and the business card that Dupré gave him, and quickly told her about the fake story he’d fallen for and the attempt on his life.

“I suspect that Dupré wants to silence me. I don’t know if he will try again, but I’m afraid he will.”

He handed her the business card. “Do me a favour and call the number on the card,” he said.

She looked at him blankly, then picked up her phone and called, and held the phone out so that they both heard when the voice mail at the bowling alley answered.

“I need your help,” he said. “Your husband knew there was something funny about this file, and he kept a copy. Right now I have no evidence that I can use to show what these guys tried to do to me. My reputation is completely ruined. Everyone thinks I’m an idiot. I can’t go to the police, because they are the police. I don’t know who to trust.”

He clicked back on the photo of Stevens’ cabinet, standing with frozen smiles in Rideau Hall.

“It is very possible that Dupré was acting on the instructions of one of the members of cabinet,” he said. “Ed Sawatski worked for Jim Donahoe. He handled natural resources files, including oil sands files.” He zoomed in on Donahoe’s face. “Donahoe, the justice minister, could be the guy. It doesn’t look good for him right now, but funny things happen in leadership races, and he could be prime minister in three months.”

He moved the cursor over to Greg Mowat.

“Or Mowat could become prime minister,” he said. “As public safety minister, he could easily be directing Dupré or Wheeler.” He zoomed out. “Or it could be any one of the people in this picture, or maybe, maybe, one of their senior staff members, although I doubt it.”

He clicked another tab, and came back to the picture of Gushue and Brecker posing with a group of children.

“If you let me see the file,” he said, “nobody will be able to assume that I got it from you. They might wonder, but it could also be someone else in the Fort Mac detachment, or here in Ottawa, or they might think it’s Brecker.” He leaned back in his chair. “Brecker has nothing to lose. He likely has hard feelings about the force, or at least people might think that.”

Gushue looked overwhelmed. She slumped in her chair.

“Mrs. Gushue,” he said. “Please show me the file. I swear that I won’t do anything until we talk again, and you’ve had a chance to think it over, but if I know what it is I can talk to a friend of mine at the
Globe
and see if they’re willing to run a story.”

“You wouldn’t run it in the
Telegram
?” she asked.

Jack shook his head. “They suspended me,” he said. “And they have been burned already. This story is too big for them. I would go to my friend Dennis Burkley at the
Globe
. I would ask for a double byline, and let them check everything I’ve done. It would be up to you whether you meet with Dennis or not. You might prefer not to, so that only me and maybe a very senior editor at the
Globe
would know your identity. If I had a copy of the file they might not even insist on knowing where I got it.”

“Would they agree to go with the story?” she said.

“A story showing that a member of the cabinet sold secrets to a Chinese oil company?” he said. “I think they would have to go with it. It’s the kind of story reporters spend their careers hoping to uncover.”

“And you undertake not to do anything unless I give you the okay?” she said. “And to never reveal who showed you the file?”

Jack looked at her soberly. “I undertake to not go with the story unless I have your okay,” he said. “And I further undertake to never reveal who showed me the file, without explicit instructions from you.”

Gushue got to her feet and headed for the hallway. She stopped and looked back at him.

“I have a feeling somehow I might regret this,” she said. “But I’ll show it to you.”

Jack sighed with relief. “I don’t think you’ll regret it. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you don’t.”

She came back in a few minutes with a manila folder. She sat down on the couch and held it in her lap.

“As I think I told you before, my husband never brought anything home that he shouldn’t have,” she said. “Except this once.”

She put the folder on the table and held her hand on it. “He loved being a Mountie. He loved the uniform. He loved the history.” She laughed. “I think he actually liked the rule book. He liked knowing it and following it and, I guess, he liked the way that it made things clear. Some of the guys would complain about the rules, but Earl would tell them they should have gone to law school if they wanted to be judges. So I was shocked when I found this in his papers. There’s a letter in there, signed by him, that explicitly states that the whole file is all covered by the national security provisions of the Security of Information Act.”

She tapped her finger on the file. “The letter says that he understood it would be a violation of the law to disclose anything about the investigation. So I find it very surprising that he brought the file home. He would have had to smuggle it out of the office.”

“Perhaps he wanted to protect himself,” said Jack.

Gushue turned quickly to him and her cheeks coloured. “My husband was not one to cover his arse,” she said. “More’s the pity, but that was not his way. No. No, sir. He brought this home, I’m convinced, because he had misgivings.” She pushed the folder toward him. “That’s the reason why I’m agreeing to show it to you. My husband and I were very close, but he never spoke to me about this. I felt, at times, after he was promoted, that something was bothering him. But he never talked to me about it. So now I want to know why he did what he did.”

Jack smiled at her. “I can tell how much you miss him.”

She shot him a sharp look and got to her feet.

“Never mind that, boy,” she said. “I’m going to make us both some tea while you look through the file.”

As soon as she left the room, Jack reached into his laptop bag, pulled out his digital camera, and, as quickly as he could, photographed each page of the file. His hands shook.

He was reading quietly when she came back with the tea tray.

Fred Murphy liked to get his makeup done before any guests arrived, so he could sit in his office and go through his script for the show while they were awkwardly waiting with one another in the windowless makeup room, partisan foes making small talk or working their cell phones and ignoring one another.

Godin knew that Murphy was in his office, so he left Pinsent in the makeup chair and walked through the cubicle farm. He knocked on the door frame.

“Jim, how are you?” said Murphy, looking up from his computer. He had a white bib tucked into the collar of his shirt to keep the foundation on his neck from staining his shirt collar.

“Good, Fred,” said Godin, leaning in the doorway. “How about you?”

Murphy turned back to his computer, typing last-minute notes to the script put together by his young producer.

“Good, Jim,” he said. “Just finishing the damn script.”

“Look, I know how busy you are before the show,” said Godin. “But I want to have a quiet chat later.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the memory stick that Charbonneau had given him. “I have something for you. Something on the Meech II thing.”

“Sure, Jim,” said Murphy, looking up again from his keyboard. “Let’s have a coffee after the show.” He looked up and smiled. Godin thanked him and left.

Sunday Politics
didn’t have the best ratings, but it did far better than anything else on the dial in Canada at noon on Sunday, and it was important to Murphy. During the week, political reporters were lucky to get a two-minute story on the nightly news. For an hour every Sunday, Murphy was able to go deeper and explain two or three stories thoroughly, and that mattered, whatever the ratings, because the politicians, staffers and journalists who made Canadian politics function all tuned in. Murphy was dedicated to making it count.