Title: Reporters

Date: 26-01-2010
Number: 12

The office floor was bustling with activity, as men and women ran around desks,
dodging those sitting behind their desks. Fingers tapped on keyboards as more then
two dozen reporters were busily working on their articles, trying to make the
morning deadline. In one of the offices against the wall a small group of specialists
were working on the main story that had to break soon. The walls closing them off
from the rest of the office mainly consisted of large glass panels, but the blinds
were closed. Not that anyone on the floor had time to spy in.

The large meeting table in the center of the room was cluttered with paperwork.
Documents lay buried under files while three maps took up most of the remaining
area. The chairs usually tucked neatly under the table had been piled in a corner.
Only one chair was left in place, an older woman frantically writing in a notepad.
With the tip of her tongue sticking out her mouth as she concentrated her pen flew
over the paper, creating a story the group had been working on for months.

“Alright, so let’s go over the details again.” said Mark, the editor, as he chewed on
the stump of his cigar. It had died almost fifteen minutes ago but everyone was too
busy to notice, especially Mark himself. Chewing on a cigar had become his
trademark since he had been promoted to editor, and it was disturbing for those
that worked for him to see Mark without one.

“We get a call from the Tyian Company, some anonymous worker drone telling us
there’s something fishy going on with the hardware the company was producing.”
His voice was low and rumbling, a result of his heavy drinking and constant smoking
doing a number on his throat. The others had stopped working and focused their
attention on him. “We don’t get anything more from him as he hangs up and isn’t
heard from again.”

The others in the group nodded except for Stacy who was furiously writing down
what was said. A strand of her dark hair defiantly kept falling from behind her ear,
hanging over the paper before she swept it away again. Lindsey was standing next
to her at the head of the table, arms crossed in front of her chest as usual. People
meeting her for the first time felt disconcerted by her posture, suggesting she was
impatiently waiting for them to finish. It was not until later that they learnt it was
her preferred posture for everything. Mark had hired her, so he took no notice of her
seeming attempt to make him hurry up.

On the left side of the table, from Mark’s point of view, Larry and David were
listening as well. Larry was tall but heavy built, his broad arms not giving away the
fact that he was a long serving reporter. He had worked for this newspaper longer
then Mark but never made any attempts in getting higher up. Not that anyone
would have wanted him to, he had an instinct more suited out on the streets
hunting for stories. He knew about half the city on a first name basis, and the entire
city knew him. David was short and overweight, but kept the bravura of his younger
days. He had a big mouth and always kept a story ready, overwhelming officials and
the common man daily searching for a good story.

Finally, on the right side of the table, there was Bolton. Bolton wasn’t his first name,
but no one used that anyway. Mark wasn’t even sure anyone but him knew Bolton’s
first name. He was the youngest in the group except for Stacy, but had already
made a name for himself. Several of his earliest articles had rattled the cages in city
hall, but it had been the responses he had been after all along. When several of the
city officials responded to allegations he had made, he pounced on them. When the
dust settled, four had been fired and seven had taken it upon themselves to quit in
what had became known as the biggest corruption scandal in the city’s history.
After that, Bolton was the undisputed master of the mind games.

“So, we put David on it.” Mark raised his hand at the man he was referring to, as if
no one else knew him yet, and nodded slightly. “He looked into the Tyian Company
products line and found out there was something strange with the integrated
webcams of their laptops.” Mark nodded at David again, this time to indicate he
could take over. “Yes.” David coughed softly in his fist, clearing his throat as his
eyes slid over the rest of the group. “When I first looked at the laptops they didn’t
seem that different from all the other models out there today. They’re a little
cheaper then the most popular models and they have some cheaper components to
justify that.”

He looked at the table in front of him and moved some of the paperwork around
until he found what he was looking for. It was a data sheet. “It wasn’t until I sent
one of the laptops to a friend of mine at a small computer support company that I
found something interesting. It turned out the device seemed to send out some kind
of signal we couldn’t place. Very low frequency, almost no power use and
indecipherable.” David tapped on the paper he had just found. “It looked almost like
a radio wave from the way we were looking at it.”

He looked over at Lindsey. “It was at this point that I decided I needed some help
and I enlisted Lindsey. She took a look at the company’s finances as we thought
maybe their component suppliers could answer this riddle.” He stood back up
straight and stopped talking, as Lindsey seamlessly took over the summary. “It took
a while to get access to the paperwork, and when we did we got buried in it. We got
everything they had from the last three years, about half an office worth of
documentation. They even provided us with the invoices of their toilet paper.” The
others in the room grinned, except for Stacy who was still writing.

It was a classic mistake companies that had something to hide made. It was meant
to work discouraging, but all it did was convince the reporters that something was
going on. “It took us a while but eventually we found out what they were trying to
hide. They received one component from a ghost company, a front for the military.
Larry came in on the story at this point because he knew several people working in
the higher parts of the organization.” Larry didn’t respond as his name was called,
but merely continued listening.

“The component was very odd. It worked exactly as a graphic video card but it
consumed a bit more energy and definitely was the source of the signal. Larry’s
contacts didn’t have any knowledge of the connection between the military and the
Tyian Company, but they did tell us there had been severe budget cuts in some of
the divisions. We asked Bolton to join us at this point.” Bolton didn’t respond, just
like Larry. “We asked him and Larry to dig into the military side of things. They
would find out what divisions had to struggle for money and who made the contract
with the company. In the meantime, David and me would look at the component
more closely.”

“Larry, could you fill us in on your part?” Mark said, as Lindsey paused to take a
drink of water. The journalist looked up at the editor and nodded. “Err yeah sure.
Well me and Bolton knew that there was something going on in the military, and we
suspected right from the start one of the divisions had devised a way of making
some extra money by selling military hardware to a private company. It wouldn’t
have been anything important like weapons, but skimming some video cards from
the top seemed likely.”

“We dug up some reports about unscheduled transports out of the nearest base,
once a week on Thursday at the ungodly hour of four in the morning.” Bolton
continued seamlessly. His voice was higher and friendlier then his appearance or
reputation would make you believe. “So we staked the place the next Thursday only
to find five trucks leaving the base from the back exit. There were no official
documents and the guard on duty just happened to take a stroll those five minutes.
We haven’t been able to trace their destination yet, but we’re going back
tomorrow.”

Mark nodded as he listened, glancing over to the other people in his team one after
another. These were the most experienced reporters he had, and they all sensed
something was going on. “Very well. Hopefully that will lead us to something more
tangible. If you can get your hands on one of these components as they come from
the truck that could maybe help us get to the bottom of this.” He turned his
attention back to Lindsey. “Okay so what did you and David find?”