Free Fall

Thirteen

Manhattan, New York

The next afternoon Kate’s subway train rumbled south out of the 125th Street station.

As it cleared the platform, she took a subtle inventory of her car’s passengers, without staring, then focused on her reflection in the window.

As the drab tunnel walls raced by, her pulse quickened. Living here still excited her; the people, the smells-cologne to urine to grilled food from the street vendors. Even the traffic-she’d once seen a guy stomp right over a cab that was blocking a crosswalk-and the sirens. The power, the glory and the majesty that was New York-she loved it all.

Kate checked her phone.

This was her day off but Chuck wanted her to come in. He’d promised more time off later and said it was okay to be in by 1:00 p.m., but he needed her in to produce a follow-up to her exclusive interview with the captain.

We have to keep hitting this one, Kate, Chuck had texted.

The train swayed and grated. Station after station flashed by as Kate ran through some ideas. She could contact a lawyer she knew who specialized in aviation litigation. Maybe he was hearing something on the grapevine about the Richlon-TitanRTs.

The brakes creaked and her car lurched as they came to Penn Station, her stop. She threaded through the vast, low-ceilinged warren under Madison Square Garden. When she surfaced, she headed to the Newslead building, picked up a coffee and an oatmeal muffin in the main-floor food court. That was lunch.

At her desk, she reviewed Newslead’s summary of the pickup of yesterday’s story. The suggested headline from the copy desk had been: “Pilot of Troubled EastCloud Buffalo-to-NYC Flight: Malfunction Puts Passengers at Risk.”

Pickup was rated “strong.”

Her exclusive interview with Captain Matson was used by 1,149 English-language newspapers and websites in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, parts of Africa, Europe, South America and the Caribbean.

The Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, The Times of London, the New Zealand Herald, South Africa’s Daily Sun and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post were among those who’d given it play.

This is pretty good, Kate thought.

She checked her public email box for the address tag at the end of her story. Readers could use the feature to contact a reporter directly. Most reporters loathed it because, while much of the spam was filtered, what they nearly always received were emails from political zealots, religious extremists, grammar experts, scam artists, nut jobs and idiots. It was rare that a story yielded a genuine lead.

But you gotta check. You never know what you can find there.

Usually, for Kate, an article would result in anywhere from a handful to more than a hundred emails, depending on the story. She was skilled at plowing through them quickly.

Like searching for buried treasure.

Her story had generated sixty emails so far and she’d sorted through about a third of them, flagging four to consider later.

“Why didn’t you use my work in the story, Kate?” Sloane F. Parkman stood over her desk, arms folded, tie knotted, every hair in place. He was not wearing the grin today.

“Because it was wrong, Sloane.”

“I wrote that according to litigation and FAA records. There was nothing of consequence regarding the actual plane for Flight Forty-nine Ninety, or the RT-86 in general.”

“You editorialized. I checked those very records and listed what the history was, what the facts are. Then I contacted an industry expert who put that history in context, saying all of the incidents and civil actions were in keeping with what was to be expected given the new model and EastCloud’s size as an airline. I put the facts on the record, Sloane. You chose not to report them. Why is that?”

“There was nothing of significance to report!”

“You’re not the expert to make that call! Why’re you downplaying the facts, Sloane?”

“We’re supposed to be working together on this story. Why did you remove my byline, Kate?”

“I didn’t. I put it on the story-”

“I took it off.” Chuck stared at them. “Let’s take this into my office. Now.”

They entered and Chuck closed the door.

“Nobody sits down. This will be quick,” Chuck said.

“Where’s Reeka?” Sloane asked.

“Got called to a meeting. Sloane, your effort was half-assed. Your contribution added nothing to the piece, so I removed your byline.”

“But I did what you requested, Chuck. I consulted the records.”

“What you submitted was akin to a street cop at a crime scene telling people there’s nothing to see here. You kept facts from the light. End of discussion.”

“But there was nothing-”

“End of discussion.” Chuck put his hands on his hips. “Senior management liked the story, liked that we challenged the New York Times, got it on the record and got serious pickup. It shows subscribers are paying attention. Now I’ve asked our business reporters to dig into EastCloud and Richlon, to look into their histories. And I’ve asked our Washington bureau to start pumping members of the House Transportation Committee and the House Aviation Subcommittee. Maybe they’re hearing something on the big players here. They’ll feed whatever they get to us. We need to keep digging on this.”

“Sounds good,” Kate said.

“Want me to keep checking with my aviation sources, too, Chuck?”

“Yes. But Sloane, we need to be sure we can put names on the record, like Kate did with the pilot. Kate, I want you to keep pushing all the angles. Work with everybody and keep us out front. You know the drill.”

Chuck let a few beats pass. His cell phone rang, but before answering it, he said, “Okay, that’s it. Get to work.”

Kate spent the next hour at her desk, putting out calls and messages to sources. Then she tried to reach Raymond Matson to see how he was doing in the wake of the story.

I hope he’s okay.

But she got no response. In fact, not much was coming back from anybody. Kate remembered that she hadn’t finished checking reader emails. The in-box showed there were now eighty. As expected, most were nothing.

That’s the way it goes, she thought, coming to the end, pausing at the last one.

The subject line read:

I know what happened to 4990.

She opened it.

Your story’s good, but it’s wrong. What happened to that jet will happen again. I know because I made it happen and unless you announce my triumph, we’ll make it happen again. This time it’ll be worse. Watch the skies. We are Zarathustra, Lord of the Heavens.