“That depends on what you do with it.”
The line went dead.
I am three weeks into the story now. I am not working alone — Leon has a second reporter across it and we have a media lawyer involved and the photographs of both lists are held in three separate secure locations. I have also sent a detailed summary of everything I have found, including the beneficial owner’s name, to two colleagues at different publications in different countries, with instructions to publish independently if they do not hear from me within thirty days. The story is no longer something that ends with me.
I think about my source. About what both means, and about the specific kind of person who would put a journalist’s name on a list of targets as a way of giving her information she would take seriously. A person who understood that being warned and being threatened could be the same gesture, if the person receiving it was the right kind of person.
I think about forty-three names. People who were careful, diligent, professional, who followed threads to their sources and did not survive the knowing.
The difference, my source said, is that I know I am on the list.
I have been thinking about what else I know that they might not have.
I know that forty-three people built this story before me, one thread at a time. I know that the shape of it is already partially visible in three years of work that my predecessor here started and didn’t finish. I know where the thread leads and I know whose name is at the end of it.
And I know that the best protection I have is the same protection a story always has when it is handled correctly: the moment it belongs to more than one person, it cannot be buried by removing any one of them.
I am not the forty-fourth name on a list of people who knew too much.
I am the person who made sure the list became a story.
There is a difference.
I intend to make it count.
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