Reggie Waite had been a little surprised to get the text from Autumn Belfontaine. Given the situation, he’d granted her pretty much a blank check to use her own judgement in covering the diablovirus pandemic. Which suggested that she’d found something she considered too hot to handle alone.
Which was why he’d told her to come up and talk with him rather than say that she shouldn’t worry about it. Trusting her judgment went both ways. If she said something was bigger than she wanted to handle on her own, it probably was.
So here she was, looking notably uncomfortable. Not nervous like someone being called on the carpet for some shortcoming, but like she had some seriously bad news to report and was trying to figure out whether to break it to him gently or just drop the bomb on him.
Reggie invited her to sit down, offered her coffee, which she politely declined. Now that the courtesies had been satisfied, he could get down to business.
“I understand you have some material you are concerned about releasing.”
Autumn handed him a USB stick, a completely unremarkable black shell of the sort that were cranked out by the million, so cheap they could be used for promotional purposes. “It has a number of video files that the Administration probably would find embarrassing, as well as some data files I believe they are deliberately suppressing.” She paused to consider what to say next. “Given their uncertain provenance, I thought it would be wise to run it past you before I put anything in the public view.”
The careful wording suggested she was protecting a source. Steffi had mentioned that someone had been visiting the dark side of the Internet. She’d been concerned mostly because of the disreputable sorts of porn one could find there, and the high risk that downloads could carry malware.
“I’ll look it over.” Reggie kept one computer specifically for examining questionable materials of this sort. Steffi had set it up specifically to have no connections to any other computer, and with some of the best anti-malware protections that didn’t require a specialist to use. “You might be able to help me sort through the files and identify the most relevant ones.”
It was a little awkward when she leaned over his shoulder to point out some file names, but he reminded himself that genetically she was his niece, the daughter of a clone-brother. Never mind that he and Lucius Belfontaine had never met — Reggie was still flying F-18’s off carriers when Belfontaine had died in the NASA Massacre — the connection was still very real.
Just focus on the material, not the person presenting it.
And Autumn knew those files up, down, sideways and backward. Not surprising for a news reporter. You had to be able to find the right file without a lot of wasted when your got back to the station and needed to file your report. Especially if you were prepping clips to play on air.
By the time Reggie had gone through the relevant material, he was shaken in a way he hadn’t been since the Kitty Hawk Massacre. “This is some pretty hot stuff. I think we’d better talk this over with Betty Margrave before we put any of it on the air. On second thought, let’s also have Dr. Thuc take a look at that epidemiological data.”