G’day. My name is Andy Delmonte. I’m a journalist at The Advertiser, the only newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia. The only newspaper in a city of over a million people.
There used to be two newspapers, The Advertiser and The News. The bloke who owns the first ran the second out of business. Media ownership and monopoly laws? Piss off, there are none.
Those of us still at The Advertiser wake up every day not knowing if we will have a job by the middle of it. Some end up being ‘let go’ for dinkum reasons, like they are crap at their job, or the area they were writing about has ceased to be important, relevant and ‘newsworthy’. Sometimes some of us lose our pay packets because our faces no longer fit, if they ever did.
And some are just let go because ever since the internet arrived, the need for paper-based news has disappeared and internet sites don’t need the staff they used to, including writing staff.
I know of one London news site that Rupert Murdoch owned and that had 45 journalists working for it, plus a swarm of admin staff. I was one of those journalists, a Content Producer for the Business section. One week a competitor popped up, as competitors often do. Only, this competitor produced the same amount of content as our site but with only six staff.
Six.
In total.
Their IT gurus had written code that hoovered Google and scraped the results onto their own webpages. Two weeks after this competitor popped up, our website closed down and everyone was given their redundancy pay at an all-staff lock-in, while the key IT staff quietly slipped out of the meeting and deleted everybody’s email accounts and wiped their hard drives clean. Just as Murdoch’s lawyers had told them to.
But that’s not why I’m here, talking to you. I’m here because, as the crime reporter for the one remaining paper, I sometimes see stuff that scares even me, or can’t be printed in the paper or online because the people involved would not want their names known or implicated.
So it is with this story. In a minute I’ll introduce you to Stephanie McBride, a consultant to SAPOL, the South Australian Police Force. During the story I provide some help to Stephanie of a confidential, un-reportable nature. And, at the end, I again figuratively stand next to her and text a message to her phone that must never be seen by anyone else and can never be acknowledged that it even existed.
The story you are about to read never happened, as all the best intelligence and police agencies say. But this story is real, the events are real, the characters are real, the places are real. Stephanie and I can just never tell anyone about them, that’s all.
Which, as a journalist, sucks.
The bullet whizzed past her left ear, grazing her sensitive and skin-thin earlobe, causing blood to start dripping. Starting a rivulet of warm blood to slowly seep down the left side of her neck.
‘FUCK!’ she shouted as she dived to the floor.
Stephanie McBride, in her role as a civilian consultant to the South Australian Police Force’s Computer Crime division, had never been exposed to gunfire before. She’d never been away from her desk and computer before. The only guns she’d seen were the pistols carried by the patrol policemen and women that very rarely came for a briefing on who they were going to arrest for her and why. She wasn’t allowed a gun for the very simple reason that she didn’t need one, and as a desk-bound analyst she was glad of that.
This was Adelaide, and Adelaide was gun-free. Like in the UK, the criminals in South Australia knew that the police and judiciary took a hard line on guns being used in public spaces. The criminals knew, even better, that the judiciary took a REALLY hard line on guns used against police office, which baffled Dr John Cline, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Yale School of Medicine in North America and a world-renowned specialist on Fatal Familial Insomnia.
‘Stephanie, this condition is exceedingly serious. Terminal. Stop being so facetious, please.’ Dr Cline had said in their most recent Zoom video conference. ‘I don’t know how you have lived for so long. Or why you are still standing. Because the average life expectancy of someone with FFI is eighteen months, not eighteen or more years. After ten months your brain is supposed to shut down and you enter a coma from which you don’t return. My team and I can’t figure out why you have bypassed the coma stage and are still here.’
A second bullet whizzed past, this time skimming the top of her skull and burning her hair and scalp. She had no weapon with which to return fire or protect herself. And with that knowledge came the burning realisation that this was where her eighteen years of being permanently awake was going to end.
‘You may be breathing fresh air now, but once you get in front of a judge you won’t be breathing fresh air ever again, you bastard!’ Stephanie shouted out, partly as a way of keeping herself as emotionally stable as the circumstances would permit.
Her life flashed before her.
Once she was past the boring bits, she reflected that she was in a warehouse, in a large lock-up storage unit, and foolishly had allowed herself to enter into the unit alone, without a gun, where at the very end of the unit a group of four Chinese men in cheap and ill-fitting black suits were sitting on cheap white plastic chairs around a cheap round white plastic table and seemingly counting hundreds of thousands of dollars, all the while surrounded by bags and bags of white powder.
Because time had slowed down for her, as often happens to men and women who find themselves about to crash badly, Stephanie was surprised to notice the colour of the walls (forest green) and the size of the storage unit (large), the lighting (fluro tubes running down the intersection of the left-hand wall and the ceiling), and how cold the concrete floor was (icy).
‘What the fuck am I doing here? Why did I leave my desk and think I could cope with the real world? Now I’ll never finish the jigsaw puzzle.’
The exit door behind Stephanie has closed shut seconds after she’d entered the lockup. She had heard the click of a large, solid lock. Her acknowledgement of that had caused her stomach to both shrink and enlarge, and a little bit of excrement left her partly-open sphincter and dribbled down her left thigh. Lying face down on a cold concrete floor, shitting herself, weaponless—and facing four men who probably weren’t weaponless, especially the man who had shot at her twice—she counted down the seconds until everything was going to go dark for a final time.
Without any warning, an explosion behind her deafened her, and the locked door flew then silently skidded in slow motion across the floor.