Natalie turned over Matt’s bombshell information in her head. All this time she’d thought Hal had been sabotaging her because she’d rejected him. But the truth was so much worse.

The whole thing had been rigged? She’d never had a shot? It’d been a setup all along.

“I can’t believe Andrea did this,” she said, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe she didn’t care about putting bad reporting on air.”

“Andrea didn’t know the story was BS. She thought she was hooking you up with a big story and she seems to feel awful,” Matt said. “Not that it helps to hear that.”

Actually it did. It wasn’t Andrea’s fault. It was the system they worked in. Pitting people against each other. Making it seem normal to betray a colleague or traffic in unconfirmed information in order to please the boss.

Which reminded her.

“Hey, what do you know about Jazzmyn?” Natalie asked anxiously. “I tried to reach her, but the email bounced back.”

“Gone,” Matt said and made a loud noise slurping from his almost empty Starbucks. “Like packed up and outta the bureau.”

“Oh god,” Natalie whispered, hit by a wave of guilt. “Do you think they paid her to go away?”

“I hope it was a lot.” Matt nodded vigorously. “For sure they made her sign an NDA.”

Natalie felt the weight of Jazzmyn’s fate in her chest.

Matt surveyed the coffee table in front of Natalie’s couch, littered with notes she’d taken during her reporting frenzy the night before, and held up a paper covered in especially erratic handwriting. “What’s doing with the paper chase?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” She looked at the papers and shrugged. “I went full conspiracy theory, trying to figure out what I missed.”

“And?”

She explained about the pipeline and the oil field. How there was real money at stake and the US was taking sides for no discernable reason. “It could explain what’s really behind the tensions between Venezuela and the Lystras. Though I’m still trying to figure out why the White House is lining up with the Colombians,” she said finally. “We need Venezuela for oil. Why alienate them?”

“Interesting,” Matt said. “Too bad you don’t have a place to report all this.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” she said.

He reached another one of the papers on the coffee table. Natalie had written Karima across the top. “And what’s this?”

“I got a few tips from Karima I was trying to piece together.”

“What, like never eat your calories when you can drink them?”