Counterfeit Love (11 page)

Lucy glanced at the time before checking the latest on the Straits Times Index. Markets around Asia were all rallying after Friday’s performance on Wall Street, except Malaysia. Their stock market index had nosedived after a mudslide in the south.

‘Where’s that new stuff from Malaysia?’ Han, the director, called into the intercom. The first pictures had already come in: homes flattened, half-buried bodies. Pretty graphic stuff. ‘We’re gonna need that for the top of the hour.’

Lucy glanced at the clock again. It was almost eleven, which meant Han was about to start hassling her. She hurried through the figures from around the region. Nothing from Hong Kong because it was the Ching Ming Festival holiday, Tokyo was covered, now she just needed the latest from Seoul.

‘Lucy, I don’t have the market wrap,’ Han said sharply.

Lucy added the latest figures to her script. ‘You do now,’ she said as she saved the story. Less than a minute later, the anchor was reading the market wrap.

Lucy exhaled deeply. It was always like that in master control – seconds separating success and disaster. The morning news program was a three-hour adrenaline rush, and Lucy often felt like she was hurtling into an oncoming train, yet Han seldom raised his voice.
Nerves of steel
– she assumed that was part of the job description.

‘Lucy, I’ll need a new script for the mudslide. Have a look at what came in. There are a couple of sound bites from survivors. The first one’s in English.’

No!
Lucy thought, checking the time again. She normally just did business stuff, and she had enough on her plate with that. Now she had three minutes to cobble together something new on the mudslide. Lucy pulled up the wire services and confirmed the latest death toll, checked for new developments and added them to the script, found the English sound bite and incorporated that.

‘Have I got the new mudslide script?’ she could hear the anchor asking over the intercom. ‘I think this is the old one.’

‘It’s coming,’ Lucy called, pounding her fingers on the keyboard. She knew she was cutting it fine; the trailer was already playing.

‘Got it,’ she heard the anchor say.

Lucy sighed as the anchor calmly read the headlines, then went onto the latest from Malaysia.
How does she do that?
It was organised chaos in master control, and yet the news anchor always managed to look like she’d been rehearsing the script for hours. She was often seeing it for the first time when it appeared on her autocue.

Lucy wondered how
she
would cope if she were the one sitting in front of the cameras. It was her plan to get there as soon as possible, and she liked to think she’d handle the pressure as well as any of the experienced news anchors. After all, she’d stood up to the stress of writing for the morning program every day of the week, working to ridiculous deadlines, making last-minute changes, filling in for people when there was a crisis. She’d even had to take over a studio camera once when one of the guys fainted!

But being in front of the camera would be entirely different. If she screwed up behind the scenes – missed a deadline, got a fact wrong, or misspelled someone’s name, she knew she’d be in for a roasting, but the audience, for the most part, wouldn’t even know about it. But in front of the camera, there was nowhere to hide. And didn’t the blogosphere light up when an anchor stuffed up!

Mandy Cheung, Lucy’s hero, was still living down the time she’d stumbled while reading a completely innocent story about a minister enjoying a traditional Asian foot spa on a visit to Thailand. She was supposed to say that the fish were engaged in a
toe-sucking frenzy
, but Mandy transposed the first letters of
sucking
and
frenzy
and gave the excursion a very vulgar twist. She’d tried to correct herself, but just repeated the same mistake! All live on air. It became an instant YouTube hit, still attracting new viewers three years later.
Tragic,
Lucy thought,
it was probably Mandy’s only screw-up in her whole career and she’ll be remembered for it.

By the time the morning program ended, Lucy was completely drained. She emerged from master control feeling like a rabbit coming out of its burrow. She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light of the newsroom – and the noise. While master control was organised chaos, the newsroom seemed at times to just be chaos. But for the next few hours the pace of her day would slow slightly, and then it would go crazy again as the deadline for the business shows approached.

Lucy used the brief break from deadlines to check her mobile. Still nothing from Byron. Lucy had stayed up late piecing together everything she could on him and could only confirm that he had studied in California and played a lot of tennis there, if the number of shots of Byron in tennis whites was anything to go by. He had the usual social media profiles – Facebook, Twitter, but nowhere could she find his occupation. There was certainly no evidence of a Mongolian geologist called Byron Lloyd – not that she was expecting to find any, but Byron’s anonymity seemed to confirm that he was involved in something illicit, if not illegal.

Lucy had considered just asking him straight up what he was doing, but he’d stonewalled all her questions so far. She realised she’d have to approach him like any reluctant source and slowly draw the information out of him. If she was going to find out about the key she had to be discreet – act normal, and then slip back into his life gently to find the answers. But first he had to respond to her message. As Lucy stared at the blank screen on her mobile, where a text from Byron should be, she began to wonder if she’d been a bit
too
normal in her last text to him.

Charlotte had offered to compose the message, but there was way too much
Would you like lunar mineral water with your flight to Mars?
about her texts. Lucy didn’t think she had the right tone for the task. It needed a direct approach. Lucy had started off with a very blunt text, telling Byron what a deceitful creep he was, dating her under false pretences and stealing the golf shirt. But even Lucy knew she wasn’t going to get a reply with that kind of message. In the end she had just kept it simple:

Byron. We need to talk. Lucy

But he hadn’t replied. And that was a major problem, because she couldn’t progress with just a key, a golf shirt, a nameless guy in a safari suit and a Miss Chan. Hong Kong was full of Miss Chans. She needed Byron.

And that presented yet another issue, because every time she thought of him, she was thinking about their kiss on the waterfront and how much she wanted to kiss him again. After all he’d done, she was getting misty-eyed over him again! Lucy berated herself for letting her emotions get in the way of the story. If she’d had her wits about her at Vue, she might have had the story out of Byron before they even left the bar. Lucy put her phone away and headed for a seat with the other business reporters.

J.T., one of her colleagues, got up from her desk just as Lucy sat down. ‘See you later.’

‘Something I said?’ Lucy smiled.

J.T. shook her head. ‘I’ve got an interview with Leung.’

Lucy frowned. Leung was the government’s Financial Secretary. How did J.T. manage to wangle an interview with him today?

‘But it’s a holiday,’ Lucy said.

‘We’re filming at his house – he wants to appear a bit more … approachable.’

‘Good luck with that,’ Lucy laughed. ‘You got a cosmetic surgeon with you?’

J.T. smiled ruefully. ‘You’d be surprised how approachable he can be. I’m following him all week.’

J.T. left the office, leaving Lucy slightly bewildered, but still feeling inadequate. She was looking at another day of market wraps unless she could come up with a Ching Ming Festival-related business story. Today was the day that Hong Kong families spent time at the graves of their relatives, sweeping tombstones.
Maybe the heavy demand for brooms has caused a spike in prices?
She knew it was a fairly lame idea, but it was the best she’d come up with. She was just about to share it with another reporter, when Chan, a senior producer, sidled up to her.

‘Lucy, didn’t you promise you could get Yu this week?’

Lucy’s heart raced. She hated letting anyone down. ‘I’ll do my best. I’m pretty close now. Just waiting for a call from his office.’ It wasn’t a complete lie, she was waiting for a call; she just wasn’t expecting one.

‘Heard that before,’ Chan mumbled.

He probably never expected Lucy to pull off an interview with Yu, anyway. But that just made her want to get him even more. Chan sat down next to one of the other reporters. Lucy’s colleague listed three big names that he’d already lined up for that day. And it was a public holiday! Lucy might have been impressed; instead she was jealous. She had to find a way to get something out of Yu.

Lucy thought of Durban. She cursed herself for the thousandth time for turning him down. She might be heading up to his apartment on the Peak to interview Yu right now if she’d gone to the party. But she’d certainly burnt her bridges with Durban – he wouldn’t introduce her to Yu now. Unless she sent a really, really grovelling apology.

Lucy pulled out her phone to start composing one. She needed Charlotte’s help on this one – it definitely needed a
Can I get you Siberian wildberries with your vintage champagne?
feel to it. And then an image of Durban in his champagne bath popped into Lucy’s head again and she put her phone down. She couldn’t do it – she had to find another way to get to Yu.

Lucy put the mobile in her bag just as Henry, the assignment editor, appeared. He only made it to Lucy’s end of the newsroom when a reporter on the business desk had a major problem – either someone had been assigned a story they thought was beneath them, or they’d missed out on a story they thought they
should
be doing. It didn’t happen often, but it got ugly when it did. Lucy had only been in the job for three months and was pleased to have
any
story assigned to her, so she rarely had anything to do with him. But as he strolled towards her, a serious expression on his face, she began to wonder if he was coming to see her. She smiled at him just in case.

‘Where are the sports guys?’ he asked without looking at Lucy. He was staring at the empty desks where the sports staff normally were.

‘I think Wong’s out on a story.’ Lucy had seen him in the newsroom earlier that morning; she was pretty sure he’d left with a cameraman.

‘No, he’s in hospital. A bad batch of painkillers, I think.’

‘Is he all right?’ Lucy had heard of several people lately who’d gone down with serious side effects from counterfeit prescription drugs; they were impossible to tell apart from the real thing. They were usually just a waste of money because they were lacking the active ingredient, but some were filled with toxins that did more harm than good.

‘He’ll survive. How about the others?’

‘Paulo is in Macau and Rolly’s about to go on air.’

‘Not much good to me, then. Who will I get to cover the race?’ he said to himself.

‘The China Sea Race?’ Lucy asked.

Henry looked at Lucy for the first time. She could see the cogs whirring in his mind.

‘What do you know about the race?’

‘Hong Kong to Subic Bay. There are three maxis that are in the running to get line honours.
Impetuous
has an asymmetrical rig, so if they plan it right and catch a northeaster they could come in ahead of the record.’

Lucy went on with the prospects of the other yachts, repeating everything Charlotte had told her on their walk home from Dragon’s Back.

Henry listened with his mouth open. ‘Right. You’re covering the start of the race. I need you down at the yacht club in … ’ He looked at his watch. ‘Right about now. The race starts in two hours, but you’ll be doing a live cross before that. The crew’s already down there setting up.’

Henry rummaged through some papers on Wong’s desk until he found what he was looking for. He handed Lucy a pile of news releases. ‘There you go. Everything you need to know about the Rolex China Sea Race. Good luck.’

He took a few steps away from Lucy and then turned around. ‘Lucy Yang. You covered the last Olympics, didn’t you?’

Lucy swallowed hard, still trying to grasp what was going on. ‘Ah, yes.’

‘Don’t know why I didn’t think of you first for the story. Upstairs have got a bee in their bonnets about boosting our sailing coverage. Someone’s probably getting pressure from advertisers. Just make sure you do a good job.’

Lucy was struggling to breathe by the time Henry walked off.
Talk about being at the right place at the right time, with just the right amount of knowledge on the China Sea Race. Thank you, Charlotte!
she thought to herself. She packed her things and rushed out of the office. This was it – she was finally on her way to the big time!