Newton’s Fire

FORTY-EIGHT
I

Galia Michaeli printed off the flight map and the amended prisoner release document and hurried into the control room. Everyone was far too frantic to pay any attention to someone as lowly as her, however. They all waved her away. Her nerve failed her. These people were experienced journalists, after all. They knew what mattered and what didn’t. She was probably overestimating the significance of her find, she told herself. She retreated and went back out.

The editor of the morning show was on his mobile in the corridor, bawling out their hapless Jerusalem reporter for letting himself be scooped by Channel 2. He was infamous for his temper, her editor, for firing staff on the spot for the most innocuous offences. For all she knew, he’d seen the extra paragraph when the email had first arrived, had discarded it as nothing. The temptation to pretend she hadn’t found it at all, to keep her head down and not be noticed, almost overwhelmed her. But this was news, she realized; and news was her vocation.

She went to stand in front of him, nervously held out the two pages. He took them, scanned them, frowned. ‘What the fuck are these?’ he demanded.

She did her best to explain, though her tongue was a small mammal in her mouth. He glared at her as she spoke; he looked incandescent.

‘You’re trying to tell me this extra paragraph was in that fucking email?’ he asked.

She nodded, aware her eyes were watering. ‘They must have deleted it before they sent it out,’ she managed. ‘But not properly.’

He nodded. If possible, he looked even angrier. He marched straight into the control room, held the sheets up high. ‘Why the fuck did none of you pricks spot this?’ he yelled.

‘Spot what?’

They checked their own copies of the document as he explained, verified her story for themselves. For the first time, they looked at Galia with something approaching respect. It made her feel ten feet tall.

‘I want cameras in the air now,’ the editor said. ‘I want this fucking aircraft filmed all the way in.’

‘At this time of morning?’ asked Lev, his deputy, the only one who ever dared stand up to him. ‘Forget anything fixed wing. We’d never get it prepped and up in time. But maybe we could use the traffic chopper.’

‘What’s its ceiling?’

‘Three thousand metres, give or take. Enough to film their approach.’

‘Put them up now,’ he said. ‘I want to skull-fuck those Channel 2 bastards. You understand? It’s payback time.’ He turned to Galia. ‘You’re our new work experience girl, right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And all the shit we give you, it hasn’t put you off?’

‘I want to work here, sir. More than anything.’

‘Then congratulations,’ he told her. ‘You’re hired.’