Frontline

by Warren Hately

  Anna helped herself to a pen and a piece of paper and started taking notes.

  “No,” Irene replied. “Won’t they have to call the National Guard … you know, if this keeps up?”

  Her desk phone started again and Irene smiled sheepishly as she returned to work. But her question stayed with Anna as she sleep-walked back to the newsroom.

  Since no one understood the reason for the massive spike in emergencies, no one could say if it really would “keep up”.

  At that stage, no one considered the real question was if it would ever stop.

  The other reporters in the newsroom were on their phones, Charlotte shooting Anna a frazzled look as if expecting sympathy while she took down the caller’s details and promised to get back to her.

  But even now, they knew they were lying. Anna thought, There’s more news here than we could ever file.

  Her thoughts went to Tom, wondering where he was in transit to Knoxville right now and if he was safe. The desktop she awoke showed just before five o’clock.

  Melina was hard at work. O’Dowd was still on the road. Charlotte was busy filing her filler pieces for the actual newspaper. And Demien Christopher had left an email to say he would use the studio as she suggested for the interview with his artificial skin expert, with Serik Iskov’s help.

  There was plenty for Anna to do, including the edit for Melina’s online video.

  Wanting to witness the studio’s inauguration firsthand was another. But her unrequited worries about Tom Vanicek wouldn’t abate. After diligently checking the viewership figures for Charlotte’s piece, Anna snatched up her phone and drifted back into the hall.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the live studio, so Anna played it slow, feeling like a college student lingering despite running late for classes once again. But it only took a second to get the message Tom’s phone was off. The disappointment left her thoughtful, and after a brief guilty thought about her own family in Philadelphia, and her brother overseas, Anna nodded to a gray-haired man in a cardigan emerging from the restrooms before she veered towards the studio door.

  The activity light showed above the entrance. Anna entered quietly with a slight sense of excitement, confident in the cladding and double glass entry she’d personally ordered for the construction. Red padding covered the door to the sound stage, but Serik Iskov sat in the open booth to the left, gently drumming his fingers on the edge of the control desk and only half-resting on one of the room’s two swivel stools as he eyed the science reporter in the live studio through a glass screen.

  Soft, but focused lights made the sound stage as good as any TV studio and with only a tenth of the equipment. An LD1 camera on a tripod fed images to one of several screens, and the comfortable black seats were close together for the single-angle view capturing the one-woman panel interview underway.

  Despite Serik chuckling quietly at Anna’s rapture, the interview wasn’t quite as fascinating itself. Demien knew his stuff, and his delivery wasn’t terrible, but he lacked the charisma needed to lift the energy in the discussion with the bookish-looking female scientist who’d gone with a lavender pants suit for her big day. The woman kept adjusting her glasses while dismissing a few myths about the psychotropic content of the hemp used in industrial medicine, and Anna glanced to Iskov, who then looked back at her.

  “Grab a seat, if you like,” he said. “This is your show.”

  Anna looked to the long plush sofa against the back wall to her left.

  “You’re doing pretty well in here on your own,” she answered. “You can spare the time?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  The tattooed young Kazakh looked like an extra from one of the Taken movies. His apparent general disinterest in everything unsettled her, including the way he directed his eyes back to his work so quickly, tapping a few keys and summoning the lighting controls and gently bringing them up a notch.

  “They have you wearing a few different hats here, huh?”

  “That’s OK,” he said. “I get bored easily.”

  Anna snickered, but not at Iskov’s remark. She remembered Tom’s comment from their earlier conversation and had a fresh pang of not understanding why they hadn’t spoken for longer.

  Unlike London, Knoxville wasn’t that far away.

  “I hear you sometimes layout pages too,” Anna said.

  “When needed,” Iskov said and shrugged and looked back briefly at her just out of minimum politeness. “It’s just page design. Not that hard. I don’t read the text.

  That’s for the journalists to check.”

  It was the longest speech she’d had from the reluctant figure, and for some reason Anna didn’t want to press him for any more than he was ready to give. Clearly, the fit-looking technician appealed to some – Charlotte Francis, for instance, however much he’d rebuffed her – but Anna had plenty of other more important duties.

  As she quit the studio, her phone lit up again, and she was delighted to think it might be Tom – but it wasn’t.

  Instead, it was Douglas O’Dowd calling from downtown.

  ANNA ANSWERED THE unknown number by identifying herself as she always did.

  O’Dowd sounded flustered as he hurried along a noisy street.

  “It’s Douglas,” he said. “They’ve just called a press conference at City Hall.”

  “Yes, we heard.”

  “Really?”

  “Lenore told me,” Anna said.

  “Good of her to let me know,” O’Dowd grumbled. “I’m heading there direct.”

  “I need you with one of those cameras,” Anna said.

  “Sorry,” the older reporter said. “I don’t know if you can hear it, but it’s crazy out here. And it’s rush hour. You don’t know how hard it is to cross the city at the best of times, and they’ve closed off the whole area down here.”

  Anna exhaled slowly, wondering if now was the time for her patience with the Gazette’s self-appointed star reporter to wear thin.

  “We have to stream the conference live,” Anna said. “It’s too late for us to get it into print. Do you have any idea what they’re going to say?”

  “No, but I finally got through to senior police.”

  A painfully loud siren interrupted, and it took twenty seconds before O’Dowd could make himself heard. Anna took the chance to head into the women’s restroom, impatient now to finish the call so she could pee. Clean glasses rested along the wash bench and she filled one and slammed it back as O’Dowd resumed.

  “How many times do you think Springfield PD discharge their firearms each year on average?”

  “I don’t know that,” Anna said.

  “OK,” Douglas replied. “What about in the past forty-eight hours?”

  He didn’t really give her a pause to answer.

  “Twenty one.”

  “Twenty-one police shootings in forty-eight hours?”

  “You heard me.”

  “And … forty-eight hours?”

  “That’s right,” O’Dowd said. “Sounds like these incidents started yesterday, and they’re only getting worse. We have at least two dead cops, and a dead paramedic.”

  “Good God.”

  “I don’t think God’s on duty right now,” O’Dowd said, sounding more bitter than even a lapsed Catholic should. “Something happened at a McDonald’s around the corner where I had my meeting. Police wouldn’t let anyone through. I need someone to chase it up. Witnesses told me there were multiple fatalities. We heard gunshots.”

  Anna’s head was spinning – all while still annoyed at the belligerent O’Dowd refusing to get on board with the Gazette’s real needs.

  “Douglas,” she said to him. “We have to be able to stream the press conference. You don’t want to stand there like a dick holding up your phone for Facebook Live, right? Your arm gets really tired, let me tell you.”

  “There’s no way in hell I’d do that.”

  Virulent horn honking cut through the conversation, albeit mercifully br
ief.

  O’Dowd clambering back into his car came through as grunts and rustling noises. The car door slammed shut.

  “Douglas,” she said again. “We need someone there with an LD1.”

  “Then send Melina in a taxi,” he said and actually chuckled. “I have to go.”

  And then he hung up on her.

  THEY WERE CUTTING it close if the downtown gridlock was as bad as O’Dowd described it. Thankfully, one of Springfield’s more tech-savvy retirees ran a city traffic website which had suddenly come into its own amid the chaos, and Anna and Melina gave it a quick once over at Demien Christopher’s booth.

  “I’ll have the skin report ready as soon as you don’t need me,” the science reporter said.

  “Yes,” Anna replied slowly. “Listen, Demien … about that.”

  “You’re pulling my piece, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not quite like that.”

  “Mr Casabian wants the science report to run.”

  “And it … will.”

  “Isn’t this Ms Barrett’s decision?”

  Anna was surprised to hear Charlotte’s voice behind them.

  The young woman stood just on the edge of their discussion. Anna’s eyes betrayed her annoyance to Melina, but the other reporter was too professional to let any allegiances show, folding her arms in apparent disinterest. Anna swiveled back to Charlotte Francis.

  “I’ve been asked to come in to integrate the newsroom with our audience online,” she said carefully and then motioned to Melina.

  “Melina has to get to City Hall in time for the conference or we’re screwed,”

  Anna said. “We can’t lose share on this to TV. Tomorrow’s paper’s going to be redundant almost straight away.”

  “Redundant?”

  It was Melina’s turn for the unexpected remark. She was about five years younger than Anna’s thirty two, and it showed in her mild expression of hurt as Anna tried to soften what she’d said.

  “This situation’s unfolding so fast, a daily edition can’t do an adequate job,”

  Anna said. “At best, it’ll be the history of yesterday. The readers we want are online right now. We really … do you guys get that this is really unusual?”

  The others nodded. For the first time, Anna felt like she was holding school, and wondered if this was how it’d felt for Tom when she was just a junior. And she wondered as well how he’d play it, were he here too.

  “We’re on top of something really big,” Anna said quietly.

  She turned to Demien.

  “What we need from our science reporter is to find the science angle on this,” she said with as much flattery as she could muster. “I’ll also need you to edit Melina’s video package, I’m sorry, because I’m just not going to get time.”

  Demien was joined by Charlotte making faces. As entry-level reporters, they knew a buck-pass when they got one, and Anna didn’t have time or willpower to bother explaining why she wasn’t ditching her workload out of sloth. None of them had a complete overview of the wider situation, and it was slightly more than an hour before the City coughed up whatever they were willing to tell. Lenore Barrett seemed suddenly very remote and unhelpful, ensconced in her office, despite sending half-a-dozen emails inside the last half-hour.

  Serik Iskov walked into the newsroom in that perfectly-timed pause.

  “I thought you might want to know,” he said. “Davenport, Iowa, also has news coming in. Peoria and Bloomington also reporting a spike in shootings and house fires.”

  “Fuck,” Melina gasped.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” Anna said.

  “It’s spreading,” Demien said as if she hadn’t spoken.

  He looked at the others, rapidly losing his composure. Colleagues knew about his mild germaphobia already – but his fear of a pandemic completely panicked him.

  “It’s spreading, guys,” Demien said more hoarsely. “Like a disease.”

  “Calm down, man,” Melina snapped. “We don’t know anything yet.”

  Anna nodded, disrupted by her own fluster.

  “That’s right,” she said and thought about the last glass of water she’d taken.

  “But you need to get in a cab – if you can get one – and get to City Hall, pronto.”

  Melina nodded. “On my way.”

  LENORE ENTERED THE newsroom with tattletale Charlotte as her shadowing. The redhead wore a pleased look. Lenore, not so much so.

  “Hi team,” Lenore said as she walked in, then made little pretense about heading straight for Anna’s space.

  Anna stood.

  “How’s it going?”

  “That was my question for you,” Lenore said and smiled lightly, the look not quite reaching her eyes. “Both Doug and Melina are at City Hall?”

  “Douglas downright refused to come back to for one of the new cameras,”

  Anna said. “Pretty hard to integrate without the technology, right?”

  “And Melina… ?”

  Anna took a balancing breath rather than answer off the cuff. Her eyes lit on Charlotte and she offered the woman an equally fake smile.

  “Charlotte didn’t explain that already?”

  “Well, she said Melina’s taken one of the cameras –”

  “Exactly.”

  Anna turned back to Charlotte and gently touched her on one bare freckled arm.

  “Thanks for helping me liaise with the boss, Charlie,” Anna said.

  She ignored Charlotte’s puzzled reaction and brought her eyes back to Lenore.

  “I’ve been finalizing the last pages,” Lenore said and then made a soft growl, catching herself explaining herself. “EGN’s nearly done, except for the front. We need the print package for Melina’s video piece.”

  “She filed it more than an hour ago,” Anna said. “Demien’s knocking together the full-run video now. Right, Demien?”

  The science reporter remembered he was meant to be working and nodded furiously, moving back to his displays while drawing a disposable hand wipe from the box behind his monitors.

  “OK, that’s all in hand, then,” Lenore said.

  “Can you include a Bit.ly link to the video on a strap or something on page one?”

  “Sure,” the editor said.

  “What are you doing with Douglas’ ‘night of violence’ thing?”

  Lenore slowly batted her eyes at the impudent younger integration expert, Anna asserting herself rather than giving in to whatever the hell was expected of her.

  “Well, it’s old news, like I heard you said earlier… .”

  “It’s still the bones of a good story,” Anna said. “It needs updating – we haven’t written anything about tonight’s press conference yet, that it was even going to happen – but it could carry page three.”

  “We have Charlotte’s social media piece for that,” Lenore said. “It’s excellent – especially with all those added calls.”

  Charlotte beamed.

  “Yeah,” Anna said as she briefly turned to the woman. “That was really cool you chased me down to pitch it, Charlie. Well done.”

  Charlotte now looked even more confused.

  “Charlie?”

  “It’s my new nickname for you,” Anna said brightly and turned it into a shark’s grin she could switch on the moment the newsroom needed combat between its alpha females. “You remind me of my kid sister,” Anna added and winked.

  “OK,” Lenore said, interrupting any comeback and sighing, no enthusiasm in her as she checked her watch. “Let’s not all start scissoring each other just yet. The City conference is in thirty minutes and we have to get the last pages in lockdown.”

  Lenore held Anna’s gaze.

  “I called the printers to see if we could get an extension – to try and squeeze in an actual report from the conference, rather than just write that it happened after deadline – but they’ve had some troubles of their own today, too.”

  “What sort of troubles?”

&nb
sp; “They were on the phone to Gus earlier to warn him, apparently,” Lenore said.

  “A couple of key personnel were down today. Home sick, they think.”

  “Sick?”

  Demien Christopher’s trembling question hung in the air, but Lenore only used it as her segue to leave the room.

  Her deft departure left Anna playing house mom despite Lenore’s quick visit to mark her territory. Checking Charlotte had returned to her station – in fact, she was clearly packing up for the night, her assigned tasks done – Anna moved to the other end of the office and fell into the science reporter’s limited privacy.

  “Just wondering how you’re going finding a science angle on all of this?”

  “Well, like I’ve been saying, this has all the hallmarks of an infectious disease –”

  “OK, how do we know that?”

  Flustered, Demien had no adequate reply.

  “You’ve got the science desk,” Anna said firmly. “You talk to the experts in the field. We don’t just report what we think, right? How about getting a few of them into the studio for a chat. A discussion.”

  “When?”

  “Now?”

  “Now?”

  Anna chuckled.

  “There an echo in here?” she asked softly.

  Demien somehow looked startled and undeterred at the same time.

  “It’s six-thirty,” he said. “I filed my piece for the day.”

  “Yes, we’ll run it next edition, or online.”

  “Online?”

  “Mr Casabian wants his science reports, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Anna dropped a shutter on her open smile and turned her hardened gaze on the young man.

  “Then make some calls,” she told him. “We have to control this conversation the minute that press conference ends.”

  ANNA EMAILED LENORE rather than put her head into the lioness’s mouth right at that moment, politely requesting names and numbers of a few civic experts, any ex-police chiefs, former governors and the like who might be ready to go into the studio at short notice. To Anna’s mild surprise, an Excel file of contacts came back within a minute, along with a short note congratulating her for the idea.