Chapter 1: Japanese Roulette
“We aren’t some behemoth corporation! Don’t complain be thankful you aren’t following Margaret’s footsteps and having to cover corporate corruption in Indiana! You will be flying coach, Southwest, to Miami and there will be a boat there, not a yacht, I hope you don’t get seasick too easy. Newspapers aren’t what they used to be, for all I know the company jet was traded to a pawn shop for the money to keep our suite at the Garden, just to kiss the ass of those advertisers who we know will be screwing us more and more on every deal we squeeze out of their wrenched fists.”

“I understand boss, but all that hassle just to save a couple hundred dollars on a plane ticket? I mean I know we aren’t Goldman Sachs, but as a representative of a respectable publication I’ll look a mockery pulling up in a boat that cost less than one of their suits.”

“It’s the Caribbean and they are a bunch of greedy bankers who could give a crap about your method of transportation as long as they aren’t getting screwed on their bottom line! You’re a reporter; you’re here to find the story without making a dent in the budget. Trust me, I respect you, but down there there are no expectations for you, you’re the press, the enemy and the worst possible thing would be to upstage them and challenge their unwavering complexions of superiority.”

“I understand.”

But, did he understand? Did he understand the implications that this line of story was nowhere near the top of the list? The list of priority, what people want to read. People didn’t pay for good journalism anymore and Ralph Felix was a good journalist. The public couldn’t delve that deep into the depths of good or bad, right or wrong, morality in general. No, no, there was no time for that sort of contemplation that sort of thinking required complex perception and an in depth perspective on the world in motion. It was much better if those distant men up at that colossal white building, whichever one it was, remained an idea perched on the outskirts of one’s mind. Assessing information is not a function of society any longer, don’t present the facts, give the opinion. Give the right opinion and let it be known that this is what they should think.

Ralph didn’t divulge upon this line of thinking, he was a member of the old school, though not old in any sense. His last story ripping apart the life of the head of the NSC, no that’s not Nevada State College, or Nickelodeon Summer Camp, no, National Security Council would be the definition of that acronym that would make a point to loom in his mind for the rest of his existence on this planet.

You are supposed to learn from your mistakes well that was one mistake that no one was given a choice whether they would choose to take a nugget of knowledge or a fresh virtue for the future. The NSC doesn’t give choices and as Ralph’s boss would soon learn doesn’t take any shots lightly either. When one of its own, particularly the head of the entire ruthless snake that plunges its teeth into any obstacle that so much as ruffles one of its scales, is exposed for his deep engulfment in an underground prostitution ring, well you get the fangs. The hammer came down hard. First amendment rights, spouted the ignorant lawyer sent from D.C. that’s what we will do. The firm refused to send anyone past a junior associate to handle a newspaper; they were obsolete creatures, going extinct. Unfortunately even the most smooth-talking, well reputed Atticus Finch wouldn’t have been able to stick a thorn in the side of the leviathan known as the United States Intelligence wing. The paper was shut down for six months for ongoing investigations, with classified purpose and classified personnel conducting it, too classified to correspond with the editor or the publisher, or even the media that saw this coming from a mile away. Six months is a long time in the ruthless landscape of the publishing industry. Profit margins were already skidding so far into the red; the spreadsheets were becoming a continuous slaughter fest, more like an image of the Great Leap Forward, than advertising revenues. Ralph’s boss the National News Bureau Chief was canned before he could even grab the keys to his company Ford from the valet, but Ralph stayed aboard it would be a press nightmare if he was cut loose. “The New York Times fires Pulitzer Winning Journalist”. Any trace of journalistic integrity and loyalty to the writers would have been sucked right out of the dry coffers of the waning advertising dollars that would all but disappear after that sort of P.R. catastrophe. No, Ralph would be kept on board, but something would have to change and change was exactly what was happening right now.

The newly minted Bureau Chief continued his rhetoric to Ralph, “Don’t look so downtrodden you are going on a vacation for God’s sake. Investigating in the Cayman Islands is the closest thing to walking in paradise that I know. Enjoy yourself and find a damn good story that exceeds your expectations. You’re the best and that’s why I’m putting you on this, Gulf Stream or not, this story is at the top of our list and we need you to cover it before the Journal comes sliming all over it.”

This story was not at the top of the list and would probably never make it past a spot on some online archive loaded with restaurant reviews and gardening tips. The point of this story was not glory or journalistic success, it was isolation. Isolate Felix from anything that would have the smallest chance of gracing the page of our national section. That is what the editor-in-chief said to Rob Barker, the newly-appointed National Bureau chief, sweating in his globs of cellulite masked by his magisterial suit. The suit was meant for a senator not some hack that was pulled out of the abyss to run the least important department of the least important newspaper in New York City. His lip quivered as the red haired Tilda Swinton look alike editor-in-chief stared daggers into his eyes, no not the cliché description, she honestly had Japanese daggers hanging on her walls that were sharpened on a weekly basis evoking images of slaughter on the usually fearful guests to her office. If you were so lucky as to be invited to her office, it was usually for two occasions an emotionless and hard-faced firing, or a vulgar tirade of abnormal proportions that was inevitably going to lead to a firing. But, the one exception was new employees. If you were new, she met you face-to-face and allowed you to stare directly into what most would imagine as being the depths of hell. After that, she would never utter a word to you unless it was filtered through her secretary or her inclusive wall of modern technology that consists of numerous communication devices that managed to help her maintain her aloof and god-like status at the paper. This status was the key element in her devilish control over the publication.

Barker responded to her orders in meek hesitation, “I’m not sure I should be the one telling him this information. I’m the new guy and he’s just won a Pulitzer. Maybe you could let him know of his new assignment. It would allow me to ease into my job and avoid a rocky start.”

Her eyes locked onto him and the scattered spots of perspiration on his forehead multiplied, until his face reflected the image of Niagara Falls on the desk that displayed Mrs. Drake with her third husband, almost painfully eking out a smile for the flash of a camera. Without ever removing her eyes from his head, which was now beginning to resemble an elementary student’s replica of the planet Mars shaded deep red, without any attention to its natural orange hue, the editor-in-chief gracefully descended from her massive oak capsule toward a particular display of knives on her wall. She slowly and ominously unsheathed a dagger that stretched the length of her forearm and admired its violent beauty. Barker’s eyes were nearly jumping out of his head as the multiple curves in the exquisite blade were slowly revealed from behind its red sheath. Mrs. Drake gripped the blade like an expert samurai and casually brought it back to her desk nearly brushing Barker’s arm giving Barker an unimaginable flood of thoughts concerning the possibility of someone equipped with this type of blade.

Mrs. Drake pulled a cucumber and some yogurt out of her sleek lunch container and began slicing the vegetable directly on the surface of her hearty wooden desk. The knife sliced the cucumber with unusual speed into slices thinner than the crisp collar perched on Barker’s drenched neck as she began into her speech, “Do you have any knowledge of Japanese history? Mr. Barker”

“No”, he replied. “Not more than any person put through the typical American high school history course.”

“Why I am I not surprised”, she remarked “a Midwest transplant like you would lack the sophistication of a fourth grader in my son’s private school, but that’s beside the point. This knife here was recovered from Okinawa, during a minor archeological excavation of the caves several years past World War Two. When the Americans were closing in on the caves commandeered by the Japanese as a sort of covert military headquarters, the generals refused surrender. The idea of surrender was as foreign to them as Indian food in whatever absurd inhabitance you occupied in Sarah Palin land. The generals sent out their last message “Long Live the Empire” to Tokyo and that was it. They took the noble path, the honorable path and slit their throats, leaving behind the evidence of mass suicide. Everyone from the top officers to the soldiers who knew nothing other than peeling potatoes was gone, like it or not there was no other option. A brilliant general, Akane Hayato, slit his throat with this very knife and I keep it in my office as a reminder of the path that exists outside of success. Do you know what path that is”, she questioned in a subtle fury.

“Ummm, failure”, he timidly replied.

“No! It is death because success means money in this world and without money you are dying in a dark alley, a haggard bum worth nothing more than the gum on my shoe”, she replied in apparent anger. “So you are going to do as I tell you or you won’t fail, no there won’t be failure, you’ll just be dead because I will shove your reputation so far down your ass that you won’t even be able to get a job cleaning the s*** out of a McDonald’s toilet in Tijuana!”

He looked on in amazement and fury as the inherently evil woman ranted in his face for the next fifteen minutes and reached her point only when she could tell that he was so broken that he would never even come close to her office again. He would have to take the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor and then take the stairs to the twenty-eighth because the walk from the elevator required him to stride into the line of sight from her office. Her hellish demeanor would be forever engrained in his mind as he confidently concluded he had finally met a person that he could stab in the throat without giving a damn about their family or their well-being. All of her outrageous taunting came to a close when she finally addressed the point that had set her off on this magnificent blaze of glory.

“So”, she muttered in a sudden shift of subtly. “You will never question me again when I give you direction and you are to behave like you are my wearing my Doberman’s shock collar and that at any sign of dissent I will send volt so hard down your throat that you will think you were hooked up to a car battery. You will go to Ralph Felix and you will get him the hell away from anything touching this paper. You will send him f
;.ishing for Atlantis, or anything that gets his pompous journalistic bravado out of my face. The world wants to know about Brad and Angelina, not corrupt bureaucracies and I don’t think Ralph’s eyes have ever graced the page of an US Weekly. So, get rid of him. Got it?”

“Understood”, he replied as he climbed swiftly out of his chair ready to escape the horror of Mrs. Drake’s livid contempt.

“Wait, wait”, she exclaimed. “Don’t be so quick to go, you know that’s rather impolite, especially toward your brand new boss.”

He stared at her in amazement. What could this woman want now?

She smiled at him, relishing the sheer agony experienced by this man and asked, “Would you like some cucumber?”

He thought to himself, “that conniving bit—”

“Mr. Barker?” she interrupted.

“Uh, no thank you mam my appetite is just fine” he replied.

And that was it. They both knew he was hungry it was two o’clock and he had missed his lunch for a meeting with the boss. He knew that she knew too, but he refused to expose himself to the ruthless antagonizing inflicted by the heartless woman any longer and concluded that it was better to escape the continuous verbal onslaught, as opposed to playing her games to get what he imagined to be little more than an ounce of good favor with the boss, for he knew that no good deed went far with a woman of her disposition.

The path was clear in Barker’s mind and it wasn’t a matter of his opinion, but a matter of survival. He would send Felix on a goose hunt. Give him a story with no public appeal, money laundering, and have it appeal to Felix’s obsession of high power corruption, involvement of the billionaire New York Mayor’s funds, and most importantly it had no point of entry, the Cayman banking system a virtually impenetrable fortress that had avoided the constant onslaught of entire countries attacking them as a haven for the big boys’ funds. The world hates corporations, but they could care less if they were laundering billions of dollars in an offshore bank account, all that matters to them is that that money is going towards some extremely successful person’s salary that probably more contributes more to society in one day than they will in a lifetime. This story would take months for Felix to crack and knowing his journalistic zeal, he would make a point to squeeze every detail he could scrap out of the dry well he would be toiling over.

“I’ve just got to muster up some balls and tell it to him straight”, Barker thought to himself. “He is just a Pulitzer winner, not a deity. Be focused and tell it to him straight. Wait no, I can’t tell it to him straight; I’m supposed to be deceiving him. Tell it to him strong. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do face him down eye-to-eye, man-to-man. You aren’t in the mailroom anymore. Be tough Rob, you’re the boss.”

And that was it. Rob Barker walked into his office with the air of U.S. Senator, confident and proud, but any Beltway insider could tell this man was no U.S. Senator; he wasn’t even cut out to be a bureau chief with his twitching eye and overtly flashy cufflinks. He was trying too hard, but what would one expect from a former mailroom manager whose next promotion should have been a tier below delivering coffee. Rob deserved sympathy. He was thrown into a job that he sure as hell wasn’t cut out for, but there was no one there to cry for him. The closest thing to tears he could get were the streams of sweat that soaked through his shirt. So for now, he would command his office as if he were imitating the newspaper chief he has seen in Spiderman and he would get Ralph Felix the hell away from the newspaper that he so greatly admired. The newspaper that put him in the hardest job in New York City and thrown him to the wolves. That’s what you call loyalty and it was definitely blind.