It was crazy what she was doing.
Her palms were sweaty with nerves, it made her grip on the steering wheel slip. When she came to a red light, she checked the map on her phone which told her she’d be arriving at her destination: Dave’s Bar and Grill, in just under ten minutes. She checked her reflection in the pullout mirror above and tried not to psych herself out.
Priscilla Bush was on her way to her first-ever (and hopefully last, God willing—but she supposed that all depended on how things went tonight) Tinder date. She’d never been much of the dating type. She was a married woman. Her and husband had gotten married last winter. She loved him. The marriage was fine. In fact, Robert knew exactly what she was doing right now. He knew where she was going, who she was meeting, and he encouraged it all. She’d kissed him goodbye when she left tonight. And he wished her good luck.
As soon as she’d left the apartment, she couldn’t wait to be back with him later that night, cuddled up on the couch with a glass of the “fancy” boxed cab he’d got the other day. She wasn’t sure if boxed wine could ever be considered fancy—but some were certainly more fancy than others. And this was the most fancy one she’d had. Plus they were in the middle of a really good true-crime miniseries. But mostly it was just him, being with him, that she looked forward to.
He was supportive of her work. And she loved him for that.
And it was important what she was doing. It was good work.
And tonight was the big night. The culmination of weeks of planning and research. Not the fruits of her labors. Not yet. That would come later in the expose. But everything was leading up to tonight. And it was all riding on her execution. It all depended on how the “date” went.
The light turned green and she waited for the car ahead of her to start moving. She noticed the paper sign stapled to a wooden telephone wire pole by the corner of the street. It was the same sign she’d passed by probably a dozen times just on the drive here. Missing and a picture of a young attractive woman, probably around Priscilla’s age. They started popping up only two or three days ago, but she’d seen so many of them already. Maybe a hundred or more.
The car ahead of her finally started moving, and she followed her phone’s directions through the intersection and right at the stop sign on 76th Street. The ETA shrank until it showed: “The destination is on your right.”
As she parked the car and got out, she could smell the scent of the food being cooked inside. The air was carrying that aroma of fried things, and burgers. She hadn’t eaten, but she was so nervous that even thinking about being hungry was out of the question. Of course, she’d order something and force herself to eat. Had to act normal. Or at least attempt to appear normal to Matt Silva, the man she was here to see.
Priscilla’d taken two whole steps towards the building before remembering what she was doing. A sense of intense embarrassment came over her as she turned around and got back into the driver’s seat of her black Ford Focus. She took a couple of deep breaths to regain her composure. Then she took off her wedding ring, and placed it in the center console. And reached into her purse, found the Android phone (she’s an iPhone girl herself, the thing was annoying to use but she’d finally gotten used to it now), and turned the recording on.
She double-checked that it was still connected to the Bluetooth mic in her shirt. Everything was working. But even if the mic failed at some point tonight, the mic on the phone would be sufficient. And the phone was fully charged. She had a portable battery bank too, if she needed to plug it in later. Maybe while Matt was in the bathroom or something.
They could only do so much planning. The rest of this had to be done on the fly. She would have to adapt to the situation. Think on her feet.
It was 4:30 PM, and they were supposed to be meeting at 5:00. Not wanting to be that early (in fact, she thought it would be best that Matt got there first), she decided to kill some time in the car before going in. She got a piece of gum from her purse and triple-checked that the extra phone was recording one more time. The peppermint made her sneeze (always did), and she imagined herself later that night, after some Netflix and chill with Robert, listening to the playback of the audio with headphones on. Imagining spike in the audio from the sneeze piercing into her ears.
And, not for the first time that day, she wondered if what she was doing was right? She couldn’t deny that it was exciting. She felt like a spy or a secret agent or something. But all this lying...was this really the reporting that she’d dreamed of doing?
She’d been doing the hustle of trying to build a serious career in journalism since before graduating from IU. She’d been doing freelance work for ten years now. Building up her online profiles. Doing independent investigative pieces all on her own. She’d had four of her articles published in the Indy Star. Most recently a piece that shined a light on a sex scandal at a high school in Conners Switch Indiana (a town not far from where she’d grown up) involving a teacher who’d been grooming and taking advantage of students for years. It was a bit of a “#metoo” thing. But Priscilla was incredibly proud of that work. It was her reporting that got that creep arrested and help let the girls abused by him and their families start to finally heal.
The scandal made headlines on every local news channel in the state, even making some national headlines too. But it didn’t blow up her social media like she thought it would. It didn’t get her any job interviews at The New York Times or The Washington Post.
But it had gotten the attention of Orlando Cross. Who reached out to her with an offer. A very good offer. Cross was making moves in the investigative journalism scene. He and his group were getting big. And breaking major news more and more lately.
At the time, all that Priscilla knew about him was what the papers had said of him: that he was a “far-right activist,” that his undercover videos were “deceptively edited,” and a good number of other uncharitable smears. Her gut instinct had been to stay away—far away—from him. But the offer was good.
The money was good. Much better than she was making doing her freelance work. Hell, it was more than even Robert was making. (A lot more!) But what was even better: Cross was going to pay her to keep doing what she was doing. He would feed her leads, and they would likely fall into his political leanings, but she was free to only follow up on what she wanted to investigate. So she took the offer.
She knew that she wasn’t going to win any big social points by partnering up with Cross, but it wasn’t about the social points. It was about being able to do the work she wanted to do. And Cross’s politics aside, he and his team were doing some of the best journalism out there right now. They weren’t just in the news cycle every now and then, they made the news cycles. They were the news.
She’d turned down the first few leads that Cross had given her. But this last one caught her attention. Cross had a lead on an ex-programmer. He used to be a higher-up at one of the big social media companies out of Silicon Valley. Cross wanted Priscilla to get the guy admitting to the company’s left-wing bias. Of shadow-banning conservatives, stuff like that. She was going to blow it off at first—confirming left-wing bias was just not her type of reporting—but she looked into the man anyway. She felt bad taking a paycheck from Cross without giving him anything he could use. It’s not like she was doing nothing these last few months. She had been working on a story that was much bigger than “Ben Shapiro gets less likes because of biased algorithms.”
But in the meantime, this was something she could do. It would help buy time at least, while she finished her own piece. It was local, no need to travel to LA or New York or Chicago. And the experience of working undercover would be valuable in her other reporting. Still, part of her felt like she was rationalizing, and like she was selling out.
She still felt bad about the catfishing and all the lying. Making fake Tinder profiles and fake Facebook accounts that made it appear like she was single. But this was paying the bills while she was writing her own piece. And there was some truth to it. If these social media companies allow the political bias of their employees to manipulate their algorithms, all while claiming to be neutral, that was still newsworthy. That was still something to be exposed.
Right?
She looked at the clock. 5:01 PM. It was time. She left the car and walked into the building.
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