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  JUST THE TRUTH

  A novel by GEN LAGRECA

  Winged Victory Press

  www.wingedvictorypress.com

  Copyright 2019 by Genevieve LaGreca. All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover by Watson Graphics

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons is purely coincidental.

  Publisher's email: [email protected]

  NOVELS BY GEN LAGRECA

  available in print and ebook editions

  NOBLE VISION

  A DREAM OF DARING

  FUGITIVE FROM ASTERON

  JUST THE TRUTH

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR JUST THE TRUTH

  Our society needs more entertaining novels that bring to life the importance of a responsible and independent press, an accountable government, and the rule of law. Gen LaGreca's Just the Truth does just that. This book isn't only for those who care about modern threats to our country's founding principles, but for anyone looking for a great political thriller.

  Carrie Lukas, President

  Independent Women’s Forum

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  I want to thank David Lips, Russell Burge, and Cynthia Noe for reading the manuscript and offering valuable comments. In addition, I owe special thanks to my editor, Marcia Eppich-Harris.

  In the words of the fictional judge Daniel Redmond in Perry Mason, "The Case of the Witless Witness":

  If we refuse to fight for the dignity of truth, we have substituted expediency for justice.

  Prologue

  His teacher had told him to stop asking so many questions. They disrupted the class, she'd said. Although he asked them in earnest, and she tried her best to reply, his questions too often pushed the bounds of her knowledge. She squirmed, and the children laughed. The little schoolhouse he attended in rural Virginia eventually became like a shoe that no longer fit the growing footprint of Julius Taninger's intellectual curiosity.

  At age ten, he'd decided he'd had enough of the place. Instead of going to school, he worked on his family's small farm. On days when his chores were light, he walked the four miles of dirt road to town, where he borrowed books from the library of a local lawyer who took kindly to him. Julius devoured the titles he'd selected and returned them promptly, without so much as a smudge on any page, never wearing out the books—or his welcome. In 1948, with the country still recovering from the Second World War and his family nearly destitute, he read the histories of nations, the tomes of philosophers, and the classics in literature. These books lured him away from the dull landscape in which he chopped wood, fed hogs, and planted crops, toward a fresh canvas on which to paint his future.

  At age fifteen, his fascination with the printed word drew him to the office of the town's newspaper. He made himself useful by sweeping floors, emptying trash, filing papers, and doing other odd jobs without asking for or receiving any pay. The boss noticed his initiative and taught him how to set type and operate the press, which earned him a small salary. Soon he was contributing articles and making more money. After a hurricane struck the town, he set off another storm with his investigative reporting into a no-bid contract approved by the mayor for debris removal. He discovered that the contractor had a checkered past and the mayor was getting a kickback to ignore it. He also found that the mayor's real talent lay in smearing anyone he perceived as an enemy. After the mayor and his friends launched a campaign to discredit the young reporter—"He's a fool kid," "He's looking for attention," "He just wants to make trouble," "He lies"—no one believed Julius's story. When the town turned against Julius, the editor pressured him to retract his accusations. When he refused, the editor fired him. Vindication came a year later when more evidence was uncovered, and the mayor and others involved in the scheme were tried and sent to jail. This experience spurred Julius's drive to have his own paper—one that would never compromise the truth.

  At age twenty, Julius Taninger's footprint grew larger. He moved to Washington, DC, where he obtained a loan to buy his first newspaper, a struggling broadsheet named The Pulse of the People. He changed the name to Taninger News. The owner had a motto, which he never stated to his readers but shared with the young buyer: Capture the crowd at any price. Remembering how his former community had formed a gang of sorts that tried to crush him when he was a young reporter, he realized that his passions lay in capturing something else. He changed the motto to: Find the truth wherever it hides. Instead of keeping his slogan to himself as a marketing scheme, he printed it on the front page as a declaration.

  Within a decade, he had increased the paper's circulation to a national readership of millions, transforming his modest local daily into one of the highest-ranking newspapers in the country. He broadened the newspaper's scope by adding top-notch reporters and correspondents in key cities around the country and the world. When he acquired thousands of acres of timberland in Canada, along with paper mills, power plants, and a fleet of ships to transport megatons of newsprint to his giant, never-still printing presses in Washington, DC, he developed a corporate empire spanning two countries. In subsequent years, he ventured into sports and entertainment and had a building erected to house his growing company's headquarters. His holdings expanded to include television stations and a professional football team. Taninger News became part of a larger corporation, Taninger Enterprises.

  Julius Taninger was tall, handsome, and rich. His quiet self-confidence gave the appearance of calm, except for restless gray eyes like two steely perpetual-motion machines that took in everything and missed nothing. His straight black hair fell of its own will across his forehead as the only part of him not subject to rigorous self-control. He was the town's most striking bachelor, but no woman wanted him. His reputation for making enemies of the city's most influential people kept the women away.

  He kept his office on the newsroom floor, at the epicenter of the daily hurricane of activities that spewed the news, while the office suite designed for him on the top floor of his building sat idle.

  When one of his major corporate advertisers was caught in a scandal, and his editor asked him if they should cover the story or ignore it, Julius replied, "Run it."

  When a powerful businessman-turned-politician tried to buy advertising space for his companies in exchange for favorable coverage of his political adventures, Julius replied, "We put our advertising columns up for sale, but we never sell editorial pages."

  When a small newspaper in Philadelphia was shut down by a new law spearheaded by a local politician to silence his enemies, Julius financed the publisher's battle through the court system to get the law declared unconstitutional. He won.

  When the president of the United States, in the heat of a reelection campaign, sent an aide to implore Julius to end his newspaper's relentless attacks on the incumbent, and in exchange Taninger News would receive priority access to his administration and exclusive interviews with him, Julius replied, "No deal."

  When his fiery editorials excoriated the local mayor for proposing regulations and taxes harmful to business, Taninger Enterprises became victim to a truckers' strike and a plant fire. After doing his own investigation, Julius discovered that the mayor was covertly dri
ving the actions as retribution against a political enemy. The mayor feigned ignorance, claiming that coincidences happen. One actually did, and it was not to his honor's liking. Julius had finally found a woman who admired him for the very qualities that scared off other prospects. She was the mayor's daughter. To the indignation of her father, they eloped.

  Julius refused invitations to the parties, golf games, and country clubs of the city's social elite. He kept a chair's length away from the fangs and claws of the powerful, whom he oftentimes lashed in editorials printed in his newspaper. He signed those pieces with his iconic initials, affixed like a dare under his column: JT. Everyone called him JT, even his wife and the son and grandchildren they were to have.

  His business and his life were inseparable. Other men would take their families on vacations—JT took his family along on business trips. Sharing the excitement and fascination for his work was JT's version of family values. He took his son and later his grandchildren to corporate meetings with him, on trips to explore his vast properties, and on tours through his plants, explaining the business to them. When they grew up, they joined Taninger Enterprises.

  Sometimes JT could be spotted by the newsstand outside his office building, where he found a quiet satisfaction in observing customers buy Taninger News and in seeing the stack of his newspapers dwindle on the shelf. Once, a father and child walked up to the newsstand while JT was there. The man took a copy of Taninger News from the stack. It had a photograph on the front page of the president of the United States with the leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives. As the customer paid for his purchase, his daughter, who looked to be about five years old, noticed the tall stranger watching them.

  She pointed at the stack of papers and asked him, "What does a newspaper do?"

  With the glower of a teacher reacting to delinquent students, JT gestured at the photograph of the nation's leaders on the front page and replied, "It watches these rascals and keeps them in line."

  The years never softened Julius Taninger; instead, they hardened even more his crusty patina. Competitors feared him. Politicians smeared him. His wife revered him. As his son and grandchildren grew up in changing times and joined the business, they tolerated him, except for one granddaughter, who adored him. When other family members accused her of being just like her grandfather, they meant it as a criticism, but she took it as a compliment. Her name was Laura Taninger.

  Chapter 1

  Find the truth wherever it hides.

  Laura Taninger glanced at the motto as she walked into the office building. Years ago, her grandfather had arranged for his words to be engraved in stone and placed over the arched entrance to the granite and steel building that housed Taninger Enterprises. Walking under the motto every day reminded Laura of passing through the gateway of a temple she had toured in an ancient city. JT's words reminded her of why she was there—why they all were there, she and the staff who came through that doorway each day.

  The cool air inside brought her relief from the oppressive August heat. Was the weather in Washington, DC, more stifling than usual this summer, she wondered, or was it the heated politics of the town that tested her stamina? She wondered if her meeting later that day with a whistleblower in a key agency would turn up the political heat—and form storm clouds over those in power.

  Laura greeted the security guard at the reception desk and glanced at the wall behind him, where a large metallic sign with block letters announced the building's owner and resident: Taninger Enterprises. Under the sign, two rows of photographs displayed the corporation's executive management. Laura had always thought of that wall as her family album. Her late grandfather, Julius Taninger, the founder, and her father, Clark Taninger, the chief executive officer, were featured on the top row. Her sister Irene, brother Billie, and she were shown on the second row. There was room next to her portrait for her younger sister, Kate, now attending a local college, who would join the family business and become part of the executive management after graduation.

  Laura took the elevator to the television newsroom of Taninger News and walked past the electronic blur of studio sets, cameras, lighting tracks, and workstations wallpapered with monitors. She smiled at the staff members who noticed her arrival and greeted her with a hurried wave or a quick, "Hi, Laura," as they performed the daily miracle of ferreting out the news and broadcasting it across the country and the world. The small local newspaper business that Julius Taninger had founded seventy years ago had now grown into a corporation consisting of a major television news network, an online news service, and a still-vibrant national print newspaper, with sister companies in sports and entertainment.

  Laura entered her office and opened the blinds so that she could see the newsroom from the expansive window on one of the walls. Even though she was president of the news division of Taninger Enterprises, like JT, she kept her office adjacent to the cyclone of the newsroom, rather than in the distant calm of the executive offices on the top floor. Her office, like her home—and her life, in general—contained only a few essentials. A desk, a couple of chairs, a couch, and a coffee table were the only furniture. A map, a calendar, a clock, and two rows of television monitors occupied much of the wall space. Only one wall had the distinction of holding just a single item, a large poster of her on the set of her prime-time television program, Just the Truth. In the poster, the show's flamboyant logo, the initials JT, shone in the background. Two years ago, when her grandfather had died, she created Just the Truth, which she envisioned as a mixture of breaking news and commentary. As a tribute to the past and a promise for the future, she had taken Julius Taninger's lifelong attachment to the truth, as well as his iconic initials, and repurposed them in the show's name and logo.

  That morning, like many others, she tossed her purse under her desk and her suit jacket across a chair, then sat at her computer to check her email. She glanced at the clock. It was almost time for the weekly executive meeting of Taninger Enterprises, held every Friday.

  She looked comfortable and poised in her expensive business clothes, as though her job as president of Taninger News fit her as well as the clothes matching it. Her silk blouse over soft breasts and her above-the-knee skirt over shapely legs defined the boundary where fashion and business meet. At twenty-nine, she displayed an intriguing mix of intelligence and beauty that gave her the look of someone who could be brilliant at work, lighthearted at play, and seductive with a man she wanted.

  Laura scanned her computer monitor, her auburn hair falling to her shoulders, its shiny tendrils like a mirror catching every light. Her brown eyes—large, direct, inquisitive, thoughtful—dominated her face. The simplicity of her makeup was like the openness of her expression, giving those who knew her the sense that they were seeing the real person without pretensions. She seemed ready to smile if the occasion arose; otherwise, her face remained neutral, neither smiling nor pouting, but quietly assessing the world.

  "Laura, we did it!"

  A man with a broad smile and an energetic voice entered her open door. It was her producer, Tom Shiner, wearing his headphones around his neck like a doctor with a stethoscope. He waved a printed article at her.

  Tom said, "Stone Media Research has a story out today on our ratings. Just the Truth is now number one in television news!" He read from the article, "'In just two years, Laura Taninger has taken her prime-time program from an experimental start-up to the most-watched news show in the country.'"

  He tossed the article on her desk.

  She skimmed it.

  "This is really great, Tom!"

  They paused to smile at each other in a shared victory.

  She rose to go, and took the article, saying, "I'll bring this to my meeting!"

  Five people sat around the oval conference table. The plush carpeting, leather swivel chairs, and wood paneling gave the conference room a formal setting, but the similar facial features of the attendees gave it the air of a family gathering. The closed door provided the
executives of Taninger Enterprises with seclusion from the outside world, while television screens on the walls and laptop computers at their places gave them instant access to information from around the globe.

  At the head of the table, Clark Taninger faced his four children. They sat in their usual places, with Irene and Billie on one side, Laura and Kate on the other. Planning to join the family business after graduation, the youngest Taninger, Kate, came to as many of the executive meetings as she could while attending college.

  Clark nodded to his administrative assistant, Caroline Davis, as she entered, took her place next to him, and opened her laptop computer, ready to take notes. He preferred her minutes of these meetings to a verbatim audio recording. After years of working with him, the efficient, discreet Caroline knew what to note and what to leave unofficial in the sometimes heated debates among these family members who were also business associates.

  When everyone was seated, Clark began, saying, "Friday, August 18th, the executive management meeting of Taninger Enterprises will come to order."

  His custom-tailored suit and gold cuff links gave him the air of a diplomat while he studied columns of numbers on his computer screen with the attention of a businessman. He looked up from his monitor to announce, "Taninger Enterprises is doing very well!"

  The others smiled.

  Although he was announcing good news, Clark looked tentative. His smile was modest, as if he could reverse himself and frown on a moment's notice. His peppery gray hair mirrored his ambivalence, as if a contest between black and white strands had ended in a stalemate. At fifty-nine, his face still looked young, although a furrow on his brow kept deepening with the years, giving him a questioning look, as though the world had changed and was confusing to him.

  "Okay, Irene, let's hear from you first."

  He turned to his first born, the president of Taninger Entertainment.