Jericho Iteration by Allen Steele

could she have mistaken me for you?” John offered me a stick of Dentyne; I shook my head and he unwrapped the stick for himself. “Does she sound familiar?”
    “I dunno. Could be anyone, I guess.” He shrugged as he wadded up the stick and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully as he used the computer’s trackball to save the story he had been working on. “And she said she wants me to meet her at Clancy’s tonight at eight?”
    “Right, and not to believe any other messages you happen to receive from Dingbat …”
    John grinned from one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, right. I suppose I’m not to believe anything I hear on the phone, either. Weird.” He shook his head, then dropped his feet from the desk and swiveled around in his chair to face the screen. “Well, I gotta finish this thing, then I’ve got a press conference to cover at noon …”
    I snapped my fingers as another thought suddenly occurred to me. Chalk it up to my hangover that I buried the lead. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “one more thing. When I asked her what this was all about, she told me two words … um, ‘ruby fulcrum.’”
    John’s hands froze above the keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen, but I could see from the change in his expression that he was no longer concentrating on the minor news item he had been writing.
    “Come again?” he said quietly.
    “Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated. “I checked it out with Joker, but it couldn’t tell me anything. Why, does that ring a bell?”
    He dropped his hands from the keyboard and turned back around in his chair. “Tell me everything one more time,” he said. “Slowly.”
    Let me tell you a little more about John Tiernan.
    John and I were old friends since our college days in the nineties, when we had met at j-school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. We were both St. Louis natives, which meant something in a class full of out-of-staters, and we worked together on the city desk at the campus daily, chasing fire engines and writing bits. After we had received our sheepskins, I went north to work as a staff writer for an alternative paper in Massachusetts, while John remained in Missouri to accept a job as a general assignments reporter for the Post-Dispatch, but we had stayed in touch. We married our respective college girlfriends at nearly the same time; I tied the knot with Marianne two months after John got hitched to Sandy. Even our kids, Jamie and Charles, were born in the same year. Things go like that sometimes.
    About the same time that I bailed out of journalism, John moved into investigative reporting for the Post-Dispatch. When I began to seriously consider getting Marianne and Jamie out of the northeast, John had urged me to return to St. Louis, saying that he could put in a good word for me at the Post-Dispatch. I went halfway with him; my family moved back to Missouri, but I decided that I had had enough with journalism. A New York publisher was interested in my novel-in-progress, and Marianne had agreed to support us during the period it took for me to get the book finished. John made the same offer again after he left the Post to go to work for Pearl, but I still wasn’t interested. The novel was going well, and I didn’t have any desire to go back to being a reporter.
    And then there was the quake, and Jamie’s death, and my separation from Marianne, and suddenly I found myself living in a cheap motel near the airport with only a few dollars in my wallet. I did as well as I could for a while, doing odd jobs for under-the-table slave wages, until one morning I found myself on a pay phone, calling John at his office to ask if his offer was still valid and, by the way, did he know of any apartments I could rent? John came through on both accounts, and he probably saved my sanity by doing so.
    This all goes to show that John Tiernan was my best friend and that there was little which was secret between us.
    Yet there were secrets; John was a