Sheikh's Revenge

“We can’t afford this fight. Circulation’s down twenty-five percent this year alone, and we already lost a suit because of that drunken fistfight our sports reporter started on opening day. The truth is that the Sentinel is tapped out. I’m sorry.”

Her heart started hammering. The old pit-bull mentor of hers was tough, but Harris had always had a soft spot for her. There was no way he was firing her. That wasn’t possible. Couldn’t be. She’d had to work her way up here from a nowhere paper in Northern Virginia. If she lost her job she’d be stuck back there or worse. Considering the state of journalism today, there was a good chance her only option would be blogging from her breakfast nook.

As if that was journalism.

“Are you firing me? You can’t! Not after five years! You know what I bring to this paper—you’ve seen the awards I’ve won for the Sentinel. I mean, are we about truth and justice or are we about avoiding suits?”

“Usually we’re about both,” he said. “And I didn’t say I was firing you, Sinclair. Jesus, jump to less conclusions.”

She frowned, pushing her long blond hair back out of her face. It tended to fall out of her tight buns at the worst times. “Okay, so I have to drop the story. What’s the real catch?”

“Why do you think there’s a catch?”

“Because it’s life and there’s always a catch,” she continued. “So I’m not fired, but what else aren’t you telling me, Donald?”

He sighed and sat down on the corner of his desk. She watched him stamp out the butt of the cigar into his old, yellow-glass ashtray. “Have you ever wanted a long vacation?”

***

“Son of a bitch!” she shouted again. She drained her mojito but wasn’t feeling enough of the rum yet. Intellectually, Amanda understood that Harris had stuck his neck out for her, and that any other editor would have thrown her to the wolves to be fired or sued into oblivion. Still, the alternative wasn’t any better. She was being exiled, and the bitch of all of it was that Senator Jackson was just going to walk. “I can’t believe it.”

Margery frowned back at her, her brown eyes concerned behind the thick rims of her nerd chic glasses. “It’s not that bad.”

“I’m being shipped off to the middle of nowhere. I’m gone, removed from the hustle and bustle of both DC and the Metro.”

“You’re being melodramatic. It’s just six months! Considering you rushed to press before he gave the final go-ahead, you’re really lucky that’s all you got,” Margery continued, sipping at her Long Island iced tea.

“I’m not even talking about being sent to Abu Dhabi. I know that’s at least a bustling tourist destination. I mean they sent me back to Life and Style. I’m going to be covering the opening of a casino, and then? What? Am I going to cover the start of a waterpark in Shanghai? Maybe a new roller coaster in Berlin? This is demeaning. I’m a reporter, not a glorified puff-piece press agent.”

“And you’re still a reporter. You can lay low for a few months.”

She narrowed her eyes at her friend. “Six is not ‘a few.’ Six is half a year.” Amanda heaved a heavy sigh and gestured to the waitress. “Can I get a Sex on the Beach?”

“You might want to pace yourself. You’re going to have to pack quickly if you’re going to be there in time for the Ali Babba Casino unveiling next week,” her friend suggested.

Amanda didn’t care. She almost had that bastard nailed dead to rights. But now? Now she’d be going half a world away to a ridiculously named hotel, just to ask an assistant about the executive chef at its sushi restaurant or the seating capacity in the stage show theater. The fact she’d be doing it in one hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit each day just added insult to injury.

“I think I need another drink. I’ll try and forgive myself tomorrow. I just…you know how important that story was to me. You should have met the families I talked to, the people who have been ruined by the cartels and then fled here. It’s not even just them. The few ex-aides I was able to get to talk by offering protection?”

Margery nodded and leaned in closer. “Yes?”

“They were scared. They were always shaking when I talked to them. This man is beyond dangerous, and people keep saying he’s going to run for president in the next cycle. He needs to be brought to justice. Instead, I’m going to let down all those people who trusted me. They told me their stories so they’d get out, so maybe one day they’d be safe. They didn’t do it so I could ask someone in Abu Dhabi about their blackjack tables.”

Margery patted her hand. “But you sometimes have to live to fight another day. If you reach out to even more contacts while you’re in the Middle East, maybe then you can get a mountain of evidence even Jackson’s lawyers can’t bury.”

“My mom wouldn’t run,” Amanda lamented, gratefully pausing to sip the drink the waitress had brought. It was her third mixed drink in an hour, and she’d be regretting it in the morning, but right now she just needed the oblivion. She needed not to care. “She was never scared of anything.”

Margery swallowed and seemed unsure of what to say next. “You know that…”

“What? My mom put everything she had into her job at the Post. She was one of their most decorated reporters, and she helped find things that got a vice president impeached and imprisoned.”

“She also died under less than normal circumstances,” Margery pointed out. “You’ve said yourself a million times, what happened to her in the garage when you were nine never made any sense.”

“I know,” she said, her throat constricting at how much she missed her mother. Some things didn’t stop hurting even after sixteen years. They said her mom had committed suicide, but she knew for a fact her mom hadn’t been depressed and that people had been following both of them. A strange man had come up to her at the playground twice the week before. “But she did what was right. I know she’d be disappointed if I just nodded my head like a good girl and fled to Arabian wonders.”

“No one talks like that,” Margery said, chuckling. “It’s not retreating or running away. It’s just regrouping. You can get Jackson, but you have to be smarter about it. Look, if Harris didn’t believe in you and didn’t eventually want this scumbag to go down, then you really would be planning out your day tomorrow at the unemployment office. He didn’t do that. You just have to be smart.”

“Are you saying my mom wasn’t?”