As the rickshaw bumped along the narrow, uneven lanes of Himli, Casia Washi looked down at her phone and smirked. One of the interns had just sent along a relatively clear – if slightly grainy – picture of the elusive Ashwin Kwan, some distant relation to the king of Zaini and presently, her single greatest lead in the SifCo business. Heads turned in her direction as her rickshaw skidded along the ill-maintained streets of the border town, and she suppressed a groan with some effort. One of the downsides of being on TV every day was that one couldn’t go out chasing a lead like one used to – not without running the risk of becoming the news rather than finding it.
Oh well, at least this Lord Kwan could be trusted not to be too bedazzled by her prime time reputation. While her show was popular, she was quite sure it had a long way to go yet before it could claim any kind of international recognition. And from what she had learned of this Kwan so far from her sources, he certainly didn’t sound like the type to watch foreign news programmes for fun.
Saving the photo to her gallery, Casia grinned. The familiar anticipation of finally getting closer to a good story buzzed under her skin, making her heart beat a little faster. She was profoundly grateful for all that she had been given, by fate and her own dogged refusal to let go when she should. And she would not have traded her prime time slot for the world. Yet, Casia did sometimes heartily miss her days as an anonymous young reporter. You got a lot more actual reporting done when people weren’t gawking at you as you passed by.
She supposed it was her own fault for insisting on doing this personally anyway. She could easily have sent one of the junior reporters along for the first contact and allowed them to lure Kwan to Ragah, where their meeting could have been a lot less conspicuous. But if this lead panned out the way she expected it to, this could turn out to be their biggest story in, well, months. Ever since the Parliament attacks, certainly. And an exclusive too!
Besides, if Casia was absolutely honest with herself, she would have to admit that to an extent, she felt rather territorial about this particular story. She had been chasing clues and rumours about Aeriel activity at the SifCo facility for months now, but none of it ever seemed to lead to anything. Every lead she tried to follow turned out to be a dead end, and if she could get a penny for every time Jiniya had told her to drop the chase and concentrate on something else, something that yielded more tangible results, she could retire comfortably to Ibanborah tomorrow. But something in her gut had told her this was important, that this was the real deal and that the isolated incidents and rumours floating around SifCo added up to something more, and Casia had learned early on in her career to trust her instincts when it came to things like these.
Stolen story; please report.
So when rumours of a Zainian noble in Vandram with insider knowledge of the SifCo issue surfaced all over the place and all her sources in the northern parts of the country came alive with whispers and speculations about Aeriel plots and Zainian conspiracies, Casia could not help but feel a certain amount of possessiveness about the story she had spent months trying – albeit without much success – to put together despite all odds.
As the rickshaw came to a lurching halt in front of the garishly decorated façade of the Red Poppy, Casia hopped lightly off the vehicle and handed the driver a hundred dinka note, waving a hand to indicate that he should keep the change. Smiling, he paddled off in the opposite direction, back towards the railway station where he had picked her up.
Casia drew a deep breath and turned to stare intently at the ornate glass doors of the pub. From all the reports she had received so far, she had gathered that her quarry frequented this particular establishment. For all the pictures she had seen of Kwan, in her time researching him for this meeting, she still had no idea what kind of man she was going to face inside the pub, if she managed to find him there at all. There appeared to be surprisingly little about the guy on the internet, and he seemed to disdain social media with an almost missionary zeal, if the lack of even a rudimentary Facebook or Twitter account was anything to go by. It was not so much that she had expected to be inundated with information – Kwan was obviously not high enough on the complicated Zainian hierarchy for that. But she had expected something more than the few grainy photos and the generic three-line bio on the official site of the Zainian establishment that she had actually managed to uncover.
Well, she had never been one to scorn surprises.
For all the uncertainty surrounding the situation she currently found herself in, Casia did know one thing for sure. If anyone was going to break this story, whatever it turned out to be, it would be her. And really, that was all that mattered as she pushed the doors open and strode briskly into the appropriately crimson-lit bowels of the Red Poppy.