Prophecy's Call by Richard Corbett

Author:Richard Corbett [Corbett, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

16

Washington D.C., USA

‘Is North Korea about to strike?’

What? The question caught the president entirely off-guard. Cassandra could only stare at the NBC news reporter in the crowd at this scheduled press conference.

It had been Danny Cray’s idea to call the conference in direct response to a very different domestic issue that had recently arisen: a group of steelworkers at a plant in Pittsburgh had taken it upon themselves to hold two of the plant directors’ hostage, armed with nothing more than screwdrivers and assorted sharp implements – anything that came to hand.

Hostage negotiators had been able to ascertain that the dispute centred around compulsory redundancies and perceived unfair payoffs to the affected workers – presumably the same workers holding the management guys in their own office. After talks went nowhere, and the smoke cleared from the deployment of armed police, all five hostiles had been shot dead – with one of the hostages claiming there had been no need for it at all.

Ben Gretmore declared loud and clear to any and all media outlets that the actions of the police had been not just excessive but murderous, claiming that the disillusioned workers had not even been holding any of the weapons anywhere close to him or his colleague (who remained strangely quiet since the incident).

Half the country was denouncing the actions of the police, the other half was deeply suspicious of Ben’s actions, that he was trying to make himself out to be some kind of hero. The latter sentiment seemed to stem from the revelation that the man’s career had been built upon his being headhunted by successful companies after building a reputation for successful turnarounds of struggling businesses, and now he was attempting to present himself as whiter than white. Another factor feeding into the martyr idea was that at forty-three he was still young and hungry.

And so now it had reached the highest levels of government and was forcing the White House to make a statement to try and bring some kind of satisfactory resolution to the problem. And in typical news reporter fashion, Cassandra had just been thrown a curveball.

From the corner of her eye she could see Danny shifting nervously behind the scenes. ‘Kate, we are not here to ta-’

‘But it IS true that a South Korean national has defected to America, isn’t it?’

How the fuck did they get hold of that? Despite the sudden hotness around her collar and slightly blurred vision, Cassandra responded in a collected and measured tone. ‘We are here to discuss the issue of domestic terrorism which occurred not one week ago. Can we please address that and not get side-tracked by hearsay and rumour?’

But it was too late. The cat was out of the bag and the only subject of interest now was the curious case of Jak Su-Kim.

The next five minutes passed in a dream-like state for the first female POTUS, a tactical dual between the media and herself. Denials, half-truths and white lies were the playbook’s orders in situations such as this.

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