Free Fall

Or break it.

Kate’s years of listening to police radios while working on crime desks in newsrooms across the country had given her the ability to pluck a key piece of data from dozens of staccato exchanges all happening at the same time. She knew the alphanumeric code systems. She could pick out a trace of emotion in a dispatcher’s voice, the underlying tension in a transmission. This was a skill Newslead, the global wire service, demanded from every member of its reporting staff, especially here at its world headquarters in Manhattan, where the competition was fierce. But the incessant noise, the confusion and pressure not to miss anything was torturous for some reporters, making a shift on the scanners the most dreaded job in the newsroom.

Another transmission from air traffic control crackled.

“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, we can give you Teterboro or Newark.”

The jet’s response was overtaken by static.

Damn. There’s a jetliner in trouble with injuries aboard and we don’t know where it’s headed.

Kate glared at the empty scanner room.

This is how we miss stories. This is how we get beat.

She made a quick check of the bank of flat-screen TV monitors tilted down from the ceiling over rows of empty desks. The sets were tuned to news channels with the volume turned low. Most newsrooms in New York subscribed to professional scanner-listening services that sent out alerts. Newslead had cut its subscription years ago to save money.

Nothing was breaking on TV, either. Kate picked up more dispatches.

“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, repeat—we can give you Teterboro or Newark.”

“Thank you, New York. We’ve got a visual on the Verrazano Bridge. We’ll keep LaGuardia.”

“Forty-nine Ninety, stand by.”

Kate did another online check. No one was tweeting anything.

This is all happening now.

Resentment bubbled in the pit of her stomach. She’d come in today on her own time to finish a feature about crime on the subways of the world’s largest cities. She was pulling together files from Newslead’s bureaus in Mexico City, Seoul and São Paulo. But she had to stop. The situation on the radios gnawed at her.

No way am I taking the blame for us missing a major breaking story because someone else failed to do their job.

Kate went to the scanner room, looking for the incident log, or at least a note from whoever was on duty. She found nothing. Again, she looked around the newsroom. One person was working in graphics. Other than that, no one was around. A portrait of an industry withering before the internet, she thought. When she’d started, one hundred and forty newspeople had worked here at headquarters.

That number was now seventy-one.

Kate went to the news assistant’s desk, just in time to see a girl barely out of her teens returning while drinking from a thermos.

“Who’re you?” Kate asked.

“Penny. I’m the new assistant. Todd was here but he went home sick.”

“Who’s on the scanners?”

“Sloane. I forget his last name.”

“Parkman. Where is he?”

“He told me he was stepping out to get scones and would be right back. Is everything okay?”

Kate rolled her eyes.

Sloane was the worst person you could put on scanner duty. All that crash-and-burn stuff is a bit too tabloid for me, but they say everybody has to do their time here, she’d overheard him tell a friend on the phone.

He’d joined Newslead a year ago between rounds of layoffs. His family was one of New England’s oldest. He had degrees from Harvard and Columbia, had worked at the Washington Post and Forbes, and had boasted about having political connections in Washington and corporate connections on Wall Street.

He always introduced himself as Sloane F. Parkman and assured you that he knew everyone and everything, right down to the best bars in Manhattan, the best shops and restaurants. He wore Brooks Brothers shirts, had a gleaming, white-toothed grin and never had a hair out of place.

How he’d gotten a job with Newslead in a time of cutbacks was no mystery. Kate knew that he’d been hired at the urging of her editor because of mutual family ties. There were no secrets in a newsroom. Sloane had half the news-reporting experience that Kate had yet he regarded her as he would an untested rookie, and as a latter-day-Dickensian working-class woman to be pitied.

I applaud you for what you’ve achieved in your life, he’d told her one day. It’s nothing short of heroic, putting yourself through that community college in Chicago the way you did—sorry I’d never heard of it. In any event, here you are. And raising a child alone. Bravo, Kate. Bravo.

That was Sloane F. Parkman.

Kate entered the scanner room with Penny in tow as new transmissions came through clearly.

“Forty-nine Ninety, this is LaGuardia tower. Are you declaring an emergency?”

Kate took notes, motioning for Penny to sit in the empty chair and use the computer at the desk.

“Penny, did they teach you how to listen to the scanners?”

“No, not yet.”

“Did Todd show you how to alert the photographers on duty and call freelancers?”

“Yes.”

“Okay—wait—listen!”

More transmissions were coming through. Kate cranked up the volume and took notes.

“Affirmative. We’re declaring an emergency. We have passenger and crew injuries aboard. Approximately thirty, some pretty bad. We’ll need a lot of ambulances.”

“Fatalities?”

“None to report.”

“Forty-nine Ninety, do you have damage to your aircraft?”

Kate was writing as fast as she could, trying to make sure her notes were clear.

“Damage to the cabin, ceiling, galley, storage bins.”

“Are you citing turbulence?”

“Negative. Negative on turbulence. We had a sys—” A burst of static drowned out part of the transmission, but the message ended clearly with “—malfunction.”