"Then why send it?"
"I tracked the courier down and asked that very question, as a matter of fact. Got the answer, too—for a price." He grimaced. "Cost me the next best thing to five months' street money, too, and I hope like hell my editor's going to decide it was worth it instead of sticking my personal account for the charges. And to be honest, I don't think I'd've gotten it even then if the man hadn't been so unhappy with his bosses' instructions."
"And why was he so unhappy?" Her tone was skeptical.
"Because the person he's supposed to deliver it to is over at the Office of Naval Intelligence, but his immediate boss—somebody in the New Tuscan government; I couldn't get him to tell me who, but I figure it's got to be somebody from their security services—doesn't want the Navy to go public with it," Juppй said. "They want it in official hands, because it doesn't track with the Manties' version of the story, but they're asking the Navy to keep things quiet until Frontier Fleet can get reinforcements deployed to protect them from the Manties."
"According to the Manties, they don't have any bigquarrel with New Tuscany ," O'Hanrahan pointed out. "They've never accused the New Tuscans of firing on their ships."
"I know. But, like I say, this stuff doesn't match what Manticore's been saying. In fact, the courier let me copy what's supposed to be the New Tuscan Navy's raw sensor records of the initial incident. And according to those records, the Manty ships were not only light cruisers, instead of destroyers, but they fired first, before Admiral Byng opened fire on them."
"What?"
O'Hanrahan stared at Juppй, and the financial reporter looked back at her as she frowned in concentration.
"That's ridiculous," she said finally. "The Manties wouldn't be that stupid. Besides, what would be the point? Is this mysterious 'courier' claiming the Manties are crazy enough to deliberately provoke an incident with the Solarian Navy? "
"As far as I know, he's not claiming anything, one way or the other," Juppй replied. "He's just delivering the dispatch and the scan records, and as I understand it, they're certified copies of the official data." He grimaced. "Hell, maybe the Manties've known all along that it was their man who screwed up, and they've been working on 'proving' it was the League because they figure the only way to avoid getting hammered is to put the blame on the other side."
"Oh, sure ." O'Hanrahan's irony was withering. "I can just see someone in the Manty government being stupid enough to think they'd get away with something like that! "
"I was just offering one possible theory," he pointed out. "Still, I have to say that if there's any truth to Mesa's allegations about Zilwicki and Green Pines, the Manties don't seem to be playing with a full deck these days. In fact, I think 'out of control' might not be a bad way to describe them. And, for that matter, weren't you one of the people who pointed out just how stupid what's-his-name—Highbridge?—was in the lead up to this fresh war of theirs?"
"That was High Ridge ," she corrected, but her tone was almost absent. She frowned again, clearly thinking hard, and then her eyes focused again, boring into his once more.
"I'm not about to jump at the first set of counter allegations to come along, especially when they're coming from—through , at least—someplace like Mesa. So why bring this red hot scoop to me?"
Her suspicion clearly hadn't abated in the least, and he shrugged yet again.
"Because I trust you," he said, and she blinked.
"Come again?"
"Look," he said. "You know me, and you know how it works. If this is an accurate report, if it's true , the Manties' position is going to go belly-up as soon as it's verified, especially given what Mesa's already saying about Green Pines. And if that happens, the markets are going to go crazy—or maybe I should say crazier— as soon as the implications for the Star Empire and its domination of the wormhole net sink in. I mean, let's face it. If the Manties did fake the sensor data they sent with their diplomatic note—if this is another instance of what the Havenites say they were doing all along under what's-his-name—and they've killed the entire crew of a Solarian battlecruiser when they know the original 'incident' was their own fault, all hell's going to be out for noon, and Green Pines is only going to squirt more hydrogen into the fire. The SLN's going to pound their miserable little star nation into wreckage, and that's going to have enormous consequences where the wormholes are concerned. There'll be fortunes—large fortunes—to be made if something like that happens."
"And?" she encouraged when he paused.
"And I'm an analyst, not just a reporter. If I peg this one right, if I'm the first one—or one of the first two or three—on the Net to advise investors to dump Manty-backed securities and stock issues, to reevaluate their positions in shipping, I'll make a killing. I'll admit it; that's what I'm thinking about. Well, that and the fact that it won't hurt my stature as a reporter one bit if people remember I'm the one who broke the story on the financial side."
"And?" she demanded again.
"And I'm not equipped to evaluate it!" he admitted, displaying frustration of his own at last. "Especially not given the fact that this one's got a strictly limited shelf life. Frontier Fleet's going to want to run its own evaluations and check it against what it got from the Manties, we both know that. And then, if it holds up, the guys at the top are going to need to get together, decide whether or not they want to release it right away or confront the Manties with it privately. I guess they could go either way, but I'm willing to bet that as soon as they're confident the data's accurate, they'll go public, whatever the New Tuscans want. That doesn't give me a very wide window if I want to break it first.
"But in the meantime, I don't know whether or not to trust the info, either, and if I do, and I'm wrong , I'll be finished. You've got the background and the contacts to verify this one hell of a lot better than I can, and you've worked with most of them long enough that they'll keep their mouths shut until you break the story if they know you're working on it. So what I'm offering here is a quid pro quo . I've got my copy of the original message, and of the sensor data. I'm prepared to hand it over to you—to share it with you—and to share credit for breaking the story if it turns out there's something to it. What do you say?"
Audrey O'Hanrahan regarded him intently for several endless seconds, and it was obvious what she was thinking behind her frown. As he himself had said, it wasn't as if either of them didn't know how the game was played. The old saw about scratching one another's backs was well known among journalists, and Juppй's offer actually made a lot of sense. As he said, he didn't begin to have the sources she did when it came to verifying something like this . . . .
"All right," she said finally. "I'm not going to make any commitments before I've actually seen the stuff. Send it over, and I'll take a look, and if it looks to me like there might be something to it, I'll run it by some people I know and get back to you."
"Get back to me before you go public with it you mean, right?"
"You've got my word I won't break the story—assuming there is a story—without talking to you first. And," she added in a more grudging tone, "I'll coordinate with you. Do you want a shared byline, or just simultaneous reports?"
"Actually," he smiled crookedly, "I think I'd prefer simultaneous reports instead of looking like either of us is riding on the other's coattails. After all, how often does a columns-of-numbers guy like me get to something this big independently as quickly as someone like you?"