Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  Lower still on the ground floor, a glass boxed auditorium looked out onto the moss-covered atrium with its silver birches that rose right back up to Marie’s fourth floor windows. For her, this was home. This was the place she understood best and the place she was happiest. When lesser journalists were all at sea – another one of those nautical sayings –she felt alive, commanding from the front like a bold admiral measuring herself against the storm waters. City riots. Natural disasters. Political coups and terror attacks. Moments of broil and churn, where the sharpest wits and best minds inevitably rose to the occasion.

  The morning meeting convened around the round table on the mezzanine with minimal fuss, the same as every other morning.

  ‘Okay,’ Marie said. ‘Anyone seeing past the weather?’

  She was softly spoken, but she was respected enough that the meeting settled to order immediately, bringing everyone into focus. They had fifteen minutes and no more. That was the rule. During that time, they had to chew through the entire world’s news and put it into some kind of order. Focus was good.

  The man sitting to Marie’s left looked up and cleared his throat. He wore a black designer t-shirt and had grey flecked hair.

  ‘The forecast is sharpening up,’ he said.

  His name was Ruslen Elm, and he had two jobs on the newspaper. First, his team populated the columns, webpages and smart apps with vital information: traffic reports, weather updates and currency exchange rates. Habit-forming stuff. The things that bought readers back to the product time and time again. Second, he made the call on safety issues when the weather looked wild enough to make reporting dangerous. Today, he would be a key player.

  ‘This is the latest satellite tracking data showing how the system is shaping up.’

  He held up his iPad for the rest of the table to see. Once everyone had looked at the screen, he skipped forward, and a bad picture got a hell of a lot worse.

  ‘This is two day's time,’ Elm said. ‘Predicted, anyway.’

  One of the editors wrinkled his brow and said, ‘Where’s New York?’

  Elm looked back at the iPad and the giant swirl of angry cloud.

  ‘Underneath all of that,’ he said.

  Marie took the tablet from him and studied the graphic closely.

  ‘Where’s this from?’ she asked.

  ‘National Hurricane Center in Miami,’ Elm said. ‘It’s accurate. They’ve been tracking it since it was a waft of warm air off the coast of Africa.’

  Aino Rehn looked up at this. She worked with pictures, helping to drag the traditional style of written reporting into something more palatable for digital audiences.

  ‘The storm gave us an impressive lightning show over the Nicaraguan coast,’ Aino said. ‘The slideshow did good volume.’

  ‘Numbers?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Top of my head?’ Aino shrugged. ‘Maybe forty thousand hits.’

  ‘Users or page impressions?’

  Marie knew the answer. Aino had volunteered the impressions, because that was the bigger number. And this meeting was all about showing off the numbers. And part of Marie’s job was to keep the rivalry in check.

  ‘It led the most popular chart for an hour, too.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Marie said, before turning back towards Ruslen Elm. She felt a pull in her stomach as she shifted, reminding her that her time in these meetings was limited. Looser clothes and bravado can only hide so much, and a room full of reporters is a tricky place to keep a secret.

  ‘There’s also a high-pressure cold front coming in off the North Atlantic,’ Elm continued. ‘Which is bad news. It’s a way out at the moment, about level with Baltimore. But if the two systems meet up and the chances are that they will, then we’re got a serious storm. And there’s a good chance that it’ll come straight in off the ocean and hit the City.’

  ‘What do you want to do with it?’

  ‘We pulled together a weather app recently,’ Elm said. ‘We’ve harnessed satellite pictures from NASA, they’re public domain, and crunched them into an hourly screen grab that readers can scroll through. It’s still in beta, technically, but obviously there’s an obvious opportunity for a good take up over the next few hours. I’ll get it released this morning. There’s a banner across the bottom, the promotion teams pitched it on a click-thru basis to some of our key clients.’

  ‘Are they paying for it?’

  ‘Not while it’s testing,’ Elm said.

  ‘Okay,’ Marie said. ‘Get it launched. We’ll give it some editorial too, to make sure there’s some traction. Pull the banners though. Give people a chance to fall in love with it first. What else?’

  Elm missed a beat.

  ‘Do I need to check that with…?’

  Even as he asked, Marie watched the silver birches bend in their protected atrium, and the first salvos of rain breaching the building’s grid-iron cladding.

  ‘Not today,’ she said. ‘Just get it done.’

  It only took an hour for nature to prove Elm right, and by the time Marie Saunders gathered her key reporters for a briefing on the Fourteenth Floor café the windows were provided a grandstand view of the gathering storm. The city’s famous skyline had begun to resemble the jagged edges of a sinking battleship and far below, the city’s roads had begun to flood and jam. Marie’s social media feeds were humming with rumors about problems on the transportation networks as she walked out of the lift and sashayed between the between the white tables polka-dotting the blood red carpet. Despite the height of the ceilings and the acreage of glass, the scene was claustrophobic. The rain and the gloom wrapped around the building and shrouded it with a sense of foreboding, like an ocean liner stranded on a stormy sea. The band of journalists in front of her looked like the passengers left on the Titanic’s deck after the last lifeboats departed.

  ‘The subway’s closing,’ Marie said. ‘I just got word from the City. Unless the eye of the storm changed direction soon, the tunnels will flood, and no city stands by and watches its commuters drowning like rats. That’s a direct quote, by the way.’

  A fresh wave of hail smashed violently into the side of the building as if to highlight her point. A swell of nervous laughter fluttered through the assembled team.

  ‘There is no state of emergency declared yet, but my hunch is that there will be within the next four to six hours, okay?’

  That drew their gaze back from the window. They focused in on what she was saying and the last of the laughter faded.

  ‘I’m not after gonzo reporting,’ she said. ‘You’re not Hunter S. Thompson, and you are not the story. We’ve got Twenty-five million residents with iPhones. They’ll find us the pictures. You find me the stories. Leave getting drowned to the cable TV guys.’

  As they dispersed, Ruslen Elm made his way towards her through the crowd of reporters. He was frowning.

  ‘What is it?’

  He was holding a large diary under his arm, and he opened it up on the table in front of Marie.

  ‘We’re all accounted for…’ he said. ‘Apart from the new guy.’

  ‘Glinka?’

  Elm nodded.

  ‘I grabbed his diary to see where he’s meant to be.’

  He flicked the pages until he found the last entry in the diary. Scratched into Glinka’s diary was a set of numbers, written freehand in blue biro.

  1215 / 408 581 738 56

  ‘Mean anything to you?’ Elm asked her.

  Marie shrugged, running her index finger along the entry and feeling the indentation. What did she know about Harry Glinka? Not a lot. He seemed like one of life’s outsiders, looking in. It made him a good reporter, but hard to read. He had arrived last month from some place she couldn’t remember and thrown himself into his new job. He was estranged from his family; she knew that. A messy divorce by all accounts. He worked long hours and kept his ideas to himself, in the way that reporters used to do, back in the day. Glinka was a back in the day kind of reporter. Actually, he was a back in the d
ay kind of guy.

  ‘You’ve called him?’

  Elm sighed. ‘About a million times.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Voicemail,’ Elm said. ‘I’ve left a message.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Saying that he’s a prick and that I’m going to murder his head off when he finally resurfaces…’

  Marie looked up.

  ‘Murder his head off?’ she said, sounding impressed.

  She liked Elm. But he was not a tough guy.

  ‘Words to that effect, anyway,’ Elm said, with a coy smile. ‘Listen, what do you make of the numbers?’

  Marie looked down again.

  ‘What do you make of them?’ she asked. ‘You’ve had longer to look at them than me.’

  ‘Well, the first part’s the time, don’t you think?’ Elm said. ‘Twelve Fifteen. Quarter past twelve. The rest of it, I’m not so sure.’

  Marie flicked back through the diary.

  ‘Here’s the thing that worries me,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else like it in the diary.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Elm asked.

  ‘When I was a girl,’ Marie said, ‘if I was going on a first date with a guy I didn’t know, or didn’t trust, let a friend know where I was going. Just in case.’

  ‘Like hookers do with their clients?’

  Marie Sanders stopped flicking, and the line hung in the air for a moment.

  ‘No, Ruslen. Not like that at all.’

  They both laughed, because they both knew that laughing in the face of adversity is a good journalistic skill. And sometimes there’s no better alternative.

  ‘It’s an insurance policy,’ Marie said. ‘Maybe Glinka knew he was headed somewhere dangerous, and he’s left a few breadcrumbs just in case. I’d put money on it, actually.’

  Elm frowned. ‘Why not just tell you where he was going?’

  Marie looked at Elm and raised a work it out eyebrow.

  ‘Right,’ Elm said. ‘You would have told him not to go.’

  ‘Sure.’ Marie said. ‘You know how it works. You ask permission for the things your boss will agree to. The rest of it, you beg forgiveness after.’

  Ruslen Elm frowned.

  ‘Okay, but that doesn’t make sense. If this message is a safety net, why’s he written it so that nobody can understand it?’

  Marie turned the diary back to the page with the numbers and smiled.

  ‘Because he’s an old school hack, and he’s got a story. He’s got something hot that he doesn’t want anyone else getting their hands on. Back in the day, when Glinka and I were young…’

  Elm made a polite protest about Marie’s age, but she waved it away.

  ‘… reporters were much hungrier for stories than today. When you found a good one, you guarded it with your life. And if you worked up through the regionals, then life could be pretty cut throat. Glinka’s probably worked with reporters who’ve stolen his ideas in the past. And so now he’s careful.’

  ‘Even here at the Times?’

  ‘Especially here at the times,’ Marie laughed. ‘We’re not all gentlemanly meteorologists, Ruslan.’

  Elm looked offended.

  ‘Hey,’ Marie said. ‘That’s a compliment.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  She pulled a biro from her pocket and drew brackets around the first three numbers in the diary.

  1215 / (408) 581 738 56

  ‘Maybe it’s a phone number,’ she said.

  Ruslen Elm watched as she pulled out her cell phone and started to dial.

  ‘Looks like the West Coast,’ he said, pulling out his own phone. Santa Carla maybe, or Santa Cruz. Maybe the phone number was to confirm the interview, and 1215 was his flight time.’

  He started searching Google for flights departing for LAX at 12.15.

  But Marie hung up her call before Elm had even finished typing, shaking her head.

  ‘It’s a funeral home in Santa Cruz,’ she said. ‘If Glinka’s after a story about a funeral home in Santa Cruz, I don’t want it.’

  ‘You think he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Elm said, closing Google. ‘There are literally hundreds of flights to the West Coast, anyway. It’d take forever to check if he was on one of them.’

  Marie turned and walked towards the wall of glass between her and the Manhattan skyline. The rain still slammed against the window and far below them taillights washed red across the shining city streets so that the buildings seemed like giant coals on a sea of glowing embers. Cop lights strobed at almost every intersection; the city grid locked as the waters rose.

  ‘Glinka came here to write about New York,’ Marie said. ‘He’s out there somewhere.’

  Elm looked at her. ‘Shall I call the cops?’

  ‘You really think they’ll have time to go sniffing round for a missing reporter tonight?’

  ‘Okay,’ he conceded. ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Get the network guys to look at Glinka’s web browser. See what he’s been researching recently,’ she said. ‘Oh, and call the editor at the place he was working last. They might know his code.’

  Elm looked skeptically at the numbers in the diary.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘It’s worth a shot,’ Marie said. ‘Besides, it can’t be worse than calling a funeral home in Santa Cruz.’

  29

  Harry Glinka headed down the worn concrete stairs of Pelham Parkway station. Each step had been worn away in the middle from years of people climbing up and down. The top of the handrail was smoothed down to the metal where thousands of hands had skimmed along it every day. Glinka did the same as everybody else did, and the metal felt cold to his bare palm. At the bottom of the stairs he paused before letting go of the handrail, like an astronaut building up courage for his first space walk. He was heading into Siberia. Into danger. It didn’t hurt to take stock before stepping out.

  He headed north along the Williamsbridge Road, and was surprised to find that it was wide and open, with red brick buildings set back from the street in a way that reminded him of his university days. Tall trees lined either side of the road, stretching above the two-story buildings and complaining as the wind twisted their aging bows. The wires stretching between telegraph poles slapped at one another, threatening to snap, and the rain blew straight into Glinka’s eyes. Once he had gleaned enough of a picture to describe the place in his article, he hunched over and pulled up his collar, hurrying along like everyone else. Once in a while, he risked a glance into the vicious wind and noticed the view becoming gradually less welcoming. Housing projects sprang up with spiked black wrought iron fencing until block after block began to look exactly the same, and he wondered if he had moved forward at all. Rain dripped from his hair into his eyes until it capillaried under his collar and ran down his neck.

  The iron railings disappeared when there was nothing left to protect, and the streets became littered with garbage. Glinka passed televisions and sofas that had been smashed on the sidewalk and left to die. Next time he looked up the red brick buildings had been replaced by a row of liquor stores and launderettes. Half of them had their shutters down. He pushed inside a small deli that was fronted with a torn blue awning. The place smelled of foreign spices and old stock, but it was warm and dry, and Glinka was glad to be out of the wind. He stood for a moment near the door, water still dripping from his hair and his clothes. He straightened up and looked around. Someone was watching him. Behind the counter at the far end of the aisle, the shopkeeper was staring, like Glinka was the most interesting thing he’d seen all day. The shopkeeper had an impressive moustache and hazel eyes, which registered neither sympathy for Glinka’s sodden appearance nor any concern about the amount of water that was pooling on the floor beneath him.

  ‘How can I help?’ he asked.

  The shelves behind the counter were stocked with smokes and cut price vodka.

  ‘I’ll take a bottle of Popov,’ Glinka
said. ‘To keep the cold out.’

  The shopkeeper turned and reached for it without getting up from his stool.

  He paid cash and slipped it into his pocket.

  ‘Anything else?’ the shopkeeper asked.

  Glinka figured he’d spent enough on the vodka to ask the guy a question.

  ‘Where’s Siberia?’ he asked bluntly. He was soaked to the bone, and he didn’t want to be waiting around for small talk. Besides, nobody turns on the charm when there’s rainwater dripping down their neck.

  ‘Not far,’ the old man said. ‘You’re closer than you think.’

  He held a wooden walking stick in one hand and pointed with it towards the walkway between the two buildings on the other side of the road. Glinka nodded and turned towards the door, bracing himself ready for the cold wind.

  ‘And don’t look so nervous,’ the old man called after him. ‘The place has as safe since the Albanian arrived.’

  Glinka stopped and turned. The old man was smiling.

  ‘The Albanian?’

  ‘Well, you look like a reporter. That’s who you’re going to see, isn’t it?’

  Glinka nodded and walked back towards the counter.

  ‘That obvious, huh?’

  The old man’s lips twitched behind his moustache, and his eyes narrowed.

  ‘If you know about Siberia, you avoid it. And if you don’t know about it… well… it’s not a neighborhood you walk into by mistake, you understand? You’re sniffing about in a place you don’t belong, so I think yes, you’re a reporter.’

  Glinka nodded.

  ‘Nobody will talk to you,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘I’ll tell you this though: the Albanian made us feel safe. Changed it all for the good. The people weren’t afraid anymore.’

  Glinka nodded.

  ‘But you’re in for a surprise.’

  The old man’s eyes betrayed his pleasure at realizing he knew something the reporter did not.

  ‘What’s that?’ Glinka asked cagily.

  The shopkeeper paused for a moment too long, they way they did on the reality shows on TV.