Big Bang Story (part three)
Click Your Heels Three Times, part three
III.
2012 - 2013
It’s summertime when the headline appears on the front page of the Daily Planet. The story is quickly picked up by other newspapers and major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC. The story is big, made bigger by the time of year it happens, in mid-July, and by the lack of anything else terribly interesting happening that week. Besides, news of this sort would always garner attention.
After all, it’s not everyday that Lex Luthor, presumed dead billionaire, returns from that presumed dead status and is officially announced as being alive and well.
Chloe is at work when she learns of his reappearance. She left her apartment early that morning without watching the news, and she doesn’t have the Daily Planet delivered anymore. Even without Tess at its helm the paper that was once her favorite is no longer the newspaper she loved, no longer the paper on record for kings and future superheroes. The Daily Planet barely ranked above tabloid quality these days in her humble opinion.
Her dream had been to work for the Daily Planet. Instead she works for the Metropolis Journal, a smaller newspaper. Its circulation is less than the Daily Planet’s even with the latter’s decline in reputation. Still, it’s a better paper than the Daily Planet, with editors that emphasis investigative reporting and solid journalism. Nothing flashy and it doesn’t matter that the Metropolis Journal is less successful than the Daily Planet, less well known.
Her mother had worked for the Metropolis Journal in those years before her meteor power consumed her. Moira had wanted to work at the Daily Planet but could never get hired there; that had started Chloe’s obsession with the Daily Planet. But the Daily Planet is no longer what it once was, and she knows her mother wouldn’t be disappointed that Chloe had abandoned the Daily Planet.
She’s working at her desk when Billy comes over. He’s her age, maybe a year older, with pale skin and dark blond hair that needs a cut. His slacks and button-down shirt are always slightly rumpled.
“Did you hear,” he asks. He leans against her desk.
Chloe tilts her head, her fingers stilled over her computer keyboard. “Hear what? The sound of traffic? The sound of planes?”
“Lex Luthor’s return.”
She makes a sound, but it’s not coherent.
“I know,” Billy says. He shakes his head, looking amazed. “Who would have thought?”
“He’s a cat with nine lives. We should have seen this coming,” Chloe says having regained her ability to speak. Her words are just a cover though for her surprise, her shock.
The news is unexpected. Lex Luthor has been presumed dead before, but the circumstances were different. Oliver was sure he had killed him, absolutely sure his revenge had been taken on the son of the father who had taken his parents’ lives.
“Yeah, I guess. Still, it’s out of the blue. One day he’s supposedly dead and the next day he’s alive again.”
“I wonder what will happen to Luthorcorp.”
“I have no clue.”
Chloe nods. “I should get back to work.”
“Right. Me too.”
A week later comes the answer to the question she had pondered out loud. Oliver Queen simply disappears. A police report is filed but there are no leads, no clues. The questions are still being raised when Lex Luthor is announced as the CEO of Luthorcorp, effective immediately. The front page of the Daily Planet praises this news, and barely devotes a sidebar to the unusual disappearance of its former CEO.
Chloe isn’t even surprised. The Daily Planet is miles from what it used to be and she wishes things could be different. Things are what they are, though, at least for now.
The Metropolis Journal publishes more on the subject. At first the paper is cautious, allowing editorials to point out the coincidences. There’s just not enough information yet, no one can spend too many lines fingering Lex Luthor as the culprit. The editor of the Metropolis Journal, Cliff Edwards, is blunt when it comes to what the paper can and can’t print. Being sued for libel isn’t his idea of a good time and he has made that clear. “Tread carefully,” he says, and he has the experience to make his words hit home. Cliff is in his mid-fifties, a veteran of the journalism business. He has some thirty years of accumulated experience and knowledge.
“I think there’s more to the story,” Chloe told him the day the news about Luthorcorp leaked.
Cliff looked at her, a gleam of curiosity in his eyes. “Why,” he asked, not because he didn’t think this himself. A question asked because he wanted to know her reasoning.
“I know Lex Luthor. Nothing is innocent with him.”
Cliff paused and said, “Beware the dangers of wanting revenge.”
Chloe remembered the road Oliver had taken, that dangerous path he had paved and walked. It was a road that ultimately led to his death, she suspected. Revenge was a motivator to doubt, to worry about. It easily led a person astray, leading them into darkness when they wanted to find the light.
“I know, but I feel it in my bones. My spider sense is tingling, as my father would say. There’s more to this story.”
“Find it, then. Find it, bring it to be me, and for the love of god, be careful.”
Approval in place, Chloe sets out to find the story. She finds it amid lies and cover-ups. There’s a body found on the shore of Metropolis Lake by a curious dog taken out by its owner for a nighttime jog. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Chloe thinks when she hears the news. The body is decomposed from weeks spent submerged in the lake, but not lacking enough DNA to conclusively establish identity. Then there’s the method of death, gunshots at close range to the head and the upper back, and a red bandana covering the eyes of the victim. The classic signs of a hit by the Metropolis mob Intergang.
Her sources are a muddled group. There’s the female from the Luthor mansion too young to remember Lex Luthor in his heyday, and either too stupid or too naïve to realize the danger in pissing Lex Luthor off. Chloe makes sure the young woman is long gone before the story goes to print.
Another source is an ex-employee of the assistant to Lex, a man who was allegedly fired for corporate espionage. The man, in his early thirties, claims he was fired because of questioning certain documents, and when he shows her the photocopies he made, she believes him. It does help that one of the photocopied documents details plans to take over Luthorcorp again, with most of the options discarded in the second of the photocopied documents. A final conclusion of the report: ‘The termination of Oliver Queen as CEO of Luthorcorp will likely be difficult without the individual in question being forced out through a hostile takeover or removed in another manner, possibly through an admittedly unlikely death.’ The third photocopied document shows a contract being made with Philip Andree for consulting services. A contract worth over one million dollars delivered to the man seen as a likely runner of Intergang, the man who police suspect is the leader.
All the evidence adds up. It piles on top of each other, each document or source like a piece of a puzzle. Chloe does her best to put the puzzle together.
She remembers a puzzle she could never put together well enough to get it published. A story about Lex Luthor and how he treated those effected by the meteor rocks in Smallville. A story about the murder of several meteor-infected people after another meteor-infected person had identified them. The story never got published and still sits on a flash drive she has kept despite the passage of time. It reminds her of the imperfection of journalism, of how not all stories can be published.
Not all stories can be published. Chloe knows this.
The story about Lex Luthor and the abduction and murder of Oliver Queen does get printed. Legal goes through the story and approves it with some reservations. Cliff leaves the article mostly untouched after he has taken his red editor’s pen to it. It is at the beginning of autumn that the story is published, months after Lex Luthor appeared and months after Oliver Queen was murdered.
Two days later a man, completely unconnected to Luthorcorp and Lex Luthor, confesses to the murder. Liam Wilson has details only a killer could know, the police claim. These details didn’t appear in her final article, withheld because not every detail can be released.
Cliff says to her, “You can’t win them all.”
“Lex Luthor is excellent at playing chess,” Chloe replies.
Cliff nods and offers his apologies. She waves them off because it’s not his fault Lex managed to find someone to pay off.
Less than a week later she is pulled into an alley by a gloved hand. Another gloved hand clamps itself around her mouth. A thousand bad movies that she’s seen come rushing to her mind. The times when she’s been in situations like this also come rushing to the forefront.
Since Clark abandoned her, though, those situations have essentially shrunk to zero. She’s been more careful and there have been fewer reasons to try to kill her as well. Some of the articles she published for The Gazette made her disliked, but no students or professors or the Met U administration tried to kill her.
“Lex Luthor wanted me to say that curiosity killed the cat. Or, in this case, the reporter.”
Chloe manages to bring her heeled foot down on the man’s foot. Then she manages to turn and kick him in the groin, causing him to fall to the ground. Before she can run, though, his gloved hand grabs her ankle, and she falls to the ground. It’s instinct that makes her scream. She isn’t expecting the sudden save by her former best friend.
The air around her and her would-be killer are whipped as Clark materializes into being. She glimpses more than she has in years, more than just that flash of red and blue. For one brief second she sees his face. Then he’s gone and the criminal is trussed up and there are sirens in the distance. Sirens that are growing in volume as they get closer.
She gets to her feet, surprised that Clark heard her and was here so quickly. There’s a familiar pain only she hurts a bit more than usual. He was near, that much is clear, and he heard her scream. He came and saved her and now he’s gone.
“Thank you, Clark,” Chloe murmurs. He may or may not hear it but that’s okay. She doesn’t add that she misses him because, right or wrong, he made his choice.
It’s better this way, she tells herself. It’s better because it means she won’t get attached to him again only to be abandoned once more if something like what happened occurred all those years ago.
It is what it is, she tells herself. It is what it is.
There aren’t any more criminal goons after that. Whether Clark keeps them away or Lex is playing it safe she doesn’t know. She doesn’t think too much about it. Instead she focuses on work. When in doubt, focus on work.
In January she gets an email requesting a meeting with her. The name of the email sender is one she vaguely recognizes. It takes her about a minute to finally place the name as someone who worked at the Daily Planet when she did.
The email tells her to pick the place. Chloe picks a diner on Twenty-ninth Avenue. It’s several blocks from the Metropolis Journal and many blocks from the Daily Planet. The day selected is next Thursday.
Thursday arrives with cold weather and gray skies. When Chloe walks to the diner, named Dawn’s Diner, she carries her umbrella, the sky above her head darkening from the mixed gray hued cloud cover present when she woke to a sheet of dark gray. Rain promised in that darkening of the clouds.
Dawn’s Diner is located at the corner of Twenty-nine Avenue and Pender Street. Next to it is a florist shop. The diner has been there since she was a child, and its décor is from the 1970s. The colors are pale green and pink and the cushions of the table booths have been repaired with duct tape. There is nothing upscale about the diner, although it is clean and the food is decent. It’s not seedy but it’s nothing to write home about. Chloe comes here occasionally and it seemed as good a place as any for this meeting.
She’s early by about fifteen minutes. She takes a booth away from the windows that overlook Twenty-ninth; the booth she picks is close to the washrooms and the kitchen. She sits facing the door, a habit instilled in her by too many journalist movies as a child. Her father still humors her and always sits with his back facing the door.
Ten minutes later two young men enter the diner. The one on the left is on the tall side, six feet or so. The one on the right is shorter, looking like he’s just below average height for men, so maybe about five foot eight, and heftier than his companion. Both are dressed in pressed slacks and polo shirts, standard attire for men in their mid-thirties. The man on the left has pale skin and red hair; the man on the right is Hispanic. Chloe vaguely recognizes them in the way that you recognize someone you’ve known somewhat but can’t place their names. She can place them as having worked for the Daily Planet, barely remembering them as employees on the third or fourth floor. She thinks she might have served as a fact checker for the one on the right.
The men slide into the booth seat across from her. The red-haired man introduces them, saying, “I’m Dan Matheson. This is Joseph Cano.”
“Chloe Sullivan.”
“We know,” Dan says.
“Thank you for meeting with us.”
“I admit that I was hesitant,” Chloe says. “But my curiosity got the better of me and so I’m here.”
Dan and Joseph both smile, seemingly pleased with her response.
“You both worked at the Daily Planet, I remember you from when I worked there. Are you still there?”
Joseph shakes his head. “No. We stayed for a long time, but eventually we just couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the same paper.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she says with a nod.
“It’s gotten worse with Lex Luthor there,” Dan says. “We still have friends working there and all we hear from them is about the censorship going on.”
“I’m not surprised. Lex Luthor isn’t a man who wants articles printed that will do any damage to him or his business associates.”
The waitress comes at this moment, asking if they have any drink or food orders. Chloe asks for a refill of her coffee while Dan and Joseph both order a cup. Dan orders a side of French fries. Neither Chloe nor Joseph order any food. The waitress jots down the coffee orders and the French fries before turning and disappearing.
“We’ve been approached by Franklin Stern. He has a coalition that is willing to perform a hostile takeover of the Daily Planet. Willing and able and wants to do this,” Joseph says. He speaks in a low tone. “They want Lex Luthor out of the journalism business.”
“I don’t blame them,” Chloe says. “But where do I come in?”
Dan answers. “One condition of the coalition is that they want a respected newspaperman, or newspaperwoman, to take over as editor of the Daily Planet. They want Perry White.”
“I thought Perry White had essentially retired from journalism after the Daily Planet went under Luthor control?”
“He did. That’s the problem. He’s in retirement,” Joseph says.
“That’s where you come in,” Dan says.
“Me?”
“You wrote the story exposing Lex Luthor’s murder of Oliver Queen.”
“Someone else confessed, which made my article null and void. Legal gave me a nice lecture on why next time I should make sure something like that won’t happen because it’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen if I make accusations of that sort which turn out to be fake.”
“We all know it wasn’t fake,” Joseph says.
“In the eyes of the law, it is,” she says.
Dan shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. You wrote that story and you got it published. You were willing to go head to head with a Luthor, and that will have impressed White.”
“That doesn’t mean he’ll return because I say pretty-please.”
“It might help,” Joseph says. “Besides, everyone knows how Perry White turned his life around after he visited Smallville. A town you lived in at the time. You interviewed him for your student newspaper.”
“You do your homework.”
Joseph smiles. “We’re good journalists. We check our facts.”
“What do you say?”
“Is he even in Metropolis,” Chloe asks after a minute of letting them wait for her to consider their offer.
She can’t say going to beg Perry White to come on as editor for the Daily Planet is high on her list of things she badly wants to do. The Daily Planet’s reputation has fallen dramatically and she’s not sure Perry White would want to be connected with the paper again, even if the paper was under new ownership. Yet she wants the Daily Planet to regain its former position, to become once again one of the best papers in the country. That in the end is what makes her say yes.
She just hopes that there’s not another assassination attempt on her life. Or that, if there is another attempt on her life, that Clark is around to save her again because she’s rather attached to her life.
“So you’ll talk to White?” Dan says. His voice has an edge of excitement to it, an edge she thinks he’s trying to hide.
“I will,” she says.
When she leaves Dawn’s Diner, the rain has started to fall. Gently now, but the rain will increase later in the day. After work she’ll devise a game plan. The next day she’ll visit Perry White, taking a sick day to do so.
Perry White says yes.
Part Four
III.
2012 - 2013
It’s summertime when the headline appears on the front page of the Daily Planet. The story is quickly picked up by other newspapers and major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC. The story is big, made bigger by the time of year it happens, in mid-July, and by the lack of anything else terribly interesting happening that week. Besides, news of this sort would always garner attention.
After all, it’s not everyday that Lex Luthor, presumed dead billionaire, returns from that presumed dead status and is officially announced as being alive and well.
Chloe is at work when she learns of his reappearance. She left her apartment early that morning without watching the news, and she doesn’t have the Daily Planet delivered anymore. Even without Tess at its helm the paper that was once her favorite is no longer the newspaper she loved, no longer the paper on record for kings and future superheroes. The Daily Planet barely ranked above tabloid quality these days in her humble opinion.
Her dream had been to work for the Daily Planet. Instead she works for the Metropolis Journal, a smaller newspaper. Its circulation is less than the Daily Planet’s even with the latter’s decline in reputation. Still, it’s a better paper than the Daily Planet, with editors that emphasis investigative reporting and solid journalism. Nothing flashy and it doesn’t matter that the Metropolis Journal is less successful than the Daily Planet, less well known.
Her mother had worked for the Metropolis Journal in those years before her meteor power consumed her. Moira had wanted to work at the Daily Planet but could never get hired there; that had started Chloe’s obsession with the Daily Planet. But the Daily Planet is no longer what it once was, and she knows her mother wouldn’t be disappointed that Chloe had abandoned the Daily Planet.
She’s working at her desk when Billy comes over. He’s her age, maybe a year older, with pale skin and dark blond hair that needs a cut. His slacks and button-down shirt are always slightly rumpled.
“Did you hear,” he asks. He leans against her desk.
Chloe tilts her head, her fingers stilled over her computer keyboard. “Hear what? The sound of traffic? The sound of planes?”
“Lex Luthor’s return.”
She makes a sound, but it’s not coherent.
“I know,” Billy says. He shakes his head, looking amazed. “Who would have thought?”
“He’s a cat with nine lives. We should have seen this coming,” Chloe says having regained her ability to speak. Her words are just a cover though for her surprise, her shock.
The news is unexpected. Lex Luthor has been presumed dead before, but the circumstances were different. Oliver was sure he had killed him, absolutely sure his revenge had been taken on the son of the father who had taken his parents’ lives.
“Yeah, I guess. Still, it’s out of the blue. One day he’s supposedly dead and the next day he’s alive again.”
“I wonder what will happen to Luthorcorp.”
“I have no clue.”
Chloe nods. “I should get back to work.”
“Right. Me too.”
A week later comes the answer to the question she had pondered out loud. Oliver Queen simply disappears. A police report is filed but there are no leads, no clues. The questions are still being raised when Lex Luthor is announced as the CEO of Luthorcorp, effective immediately. The front page of the Daily Planet praises this news, and barely devotes a sidebar to the unusual disappearance of its former CEO.
Chloe isn’t even surprised. The Daily Planet is miles from what it used to be and she wishes things could be different. Things are what they are, though, at least for now.
The Metropolis Journal publishes more on the subject. At first the paper is cautious, allowing editorials to point out the coincidences. There’s just not enough information yet, no one can spend too many lines fingering Lex Luthor as the culprit. The editor of the Metropolis Journal, Cliff Edwards, is blunt when it comes to what the paper can and can’t print. Being sued for libel isn’t his idea of a good time and he has made that clear. “Tread carefully,” he says, and he has the experience to make his words hit home. Cliff is in his mid-fifties, a veteran of the journalism business. He has some thirty years of accumulated experience and knowledge.
“I think there’s more to the story,” Chloe told him the day the news about Luthorcorp leaked.
Cliff looked at her, a gleam of curiosity in his eyes. “Why,” he asked, not because he didn’t think this himself. A question asked because he wanted to know her reasoning.
“I know Lex Luthor. Nothing is innocent with him.”
Cliff paused and said, “Beware the dangers of wanting revenge.”
Chloe remembered the road Oliver had taken, that dangerous path he had paved and walked. It was a road that ultimately led to his death, she suspected. Revenge was a motivator to doubt, to worry about. It easily led a person astray, leading them into darkness when they wanted to find the light.
“I know, but I feel it in my bones. My spider sense is tingling, as my father would say. There’s more to this story.”
“Find it, then. Find it, bring it to be me, and for the love of god, be careful.”
Approval in place, Chloe sets out to find the story. She finds it amid lies and cover-ups. There’s a body found on the shore of Metropolis Lake by a curious dog taken out by its owner for a nighttime jog. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Chloe thinks when she hears the news. The body is decomposed from weeks spent submerged in the lake, but not lacking enough DNA to conclusively establish identity. Then there’s the method of death, gunshots at close range to the head and the upper back, and a red bandana covering the eyes of the victim. The classic signs of a hit by the Metropolis mob Intergang.
Her sources are a muddled group. There’s the female from the Luthor mansion too young to remember Lex Luthor in his heyday, and either too stupid or too naïve to realize the danger in pissing Lex Luthor off. Chloe makes sure the young woman is long gone before the story goes to print.
Another source is an ex-employee of the assistant to Lex, a man who was allegedly fired for corporate espionage. The man, in his early thirties, claims he was fired because of questioning certain documents, and when he shows her the photocopies he made, she believes him. It does help that one of the photocopied documents details plans to take over Luthorcorp again, with most of the options discarded in the second of the photocopied documents. A final conclusion of the report: ‘The termination of Oliver Queen as CEO of Luthorcorp will likely be difficult without the individual in question being forced out through a hostile takeover or removed in another manner, possibly through an admittedly unlikely death.’ The third photocopied document shows a contract being made with Philip Andree for consulting services. A contract worth over one million dollars delivered to the man seen as a likely runner of Intergang, the man who police suspect is the leader.
All the evidence adds up. It piles on top of each other, each document or source like a piece of a puzzle. Chloe does her best to put the puzzle together.
She remembers a puzzle she could never put together well enough to get it published. A story about Lex Luthor and how he treated those effected by the meteor rocks in Smallville. A story about the murder of several meteor-infected people after another meteor-infected person had identified them. The story never got published and still sits on a flash drive she has kept despite the passage of time. It reminds her of the imperfection of journalism, of how not all stories can be published.
Not all stories can be published. Chloe knows this.
The story about Lex Luthor and the abduction and murder of Oliver Queen does get printed. Legal goes through the story and approves it with some reservations. Cliff leaves the article mostly untouched after he has taken his red editor’s pen to it. It is at the beginning of autumn that the story is published, months after Lex Luthor appeared and months after Oliver Queen was murdered.
Two days later a man, completely unconnected to Luthorcorp and Lex Luthor, confesses to the murder. Liam Wilson has details only a killer could know, the police claim. These details didn’t appear in her final article, withheld because not every detail can be released.
Cliff says to her, “You can’t win them all.”
“Lex Luthor is excellent at playing chess,” Chloe replies.
Cliff nods and offers his apologies. She waves them off because it’s not his fault Lex managed to find someone to pay off.
Less than a week later she is pulled into an alley by a gloved hand. Another gloved hand clamps itself around her mouth. A thousand bad movies that she’s seen come rushing to her mind. The times when she’s been in situations like this also come rushing to the forefront.
Since Clark abandoned her, though, those situations have essentially shrunk to zero. She’s been more careful and there have been fewer reasons to try to kill her as well. Some of the articles she published for The Gazette made her disliked, but no students or professors or the Met U administration tried to kill her.
“Lex Luthor wanted me to say that curiosity killed the cat. Or, in this case, the reporter.”
Chloe manages to bring her heeled foot down on the man’s foot. Then she manages to turn and kick him in the groin, causing him to fall to the ground. Before she can run, though, his gloved hand grabs her ankle, and she falls to the ground. It’s instinct that makes her scream. She isn’t expecting the sudden save by her former best friend.
The air around her and her would-be killer are whipped as Clark materializes into being. She glimpses more than she has in years, more than just that flash of red and blue. For one brief second she sees his face. Then he’s gone and the criminal is trussed up and there are sirens in the distance. Sirens that are growing in volume as they get closer.
She gets to her feet, surprised that Clark heard her and was here so quickly. There’s a familiar pain only she hurts a bit more than usual. He was near, that much is clear, and he heard her scream. He came and saved her and now he’s gone.
“Thank you, Clark,” Chloe murmurs. He may or may not hear it but that’s okay. She doesn’t add that she misses him because, right or wrong, he made his choice.
It’s better this way, she tells herself. It’s better because it means she won’t get attached to him again only to be abandoned once more if something like what happened occurred all those years ago.
It is what it is, she tells herself. It is what it is.
There aren’t any more criminal goons after that. Whether Clark keeps them away or Lex is playing it safe she doesn’t know. She doesn’t think too much about it. Instead she focuses on work. When in doubt, focus on work.
In January she gets an email requesting a meeting with her. The name of the email sender is one she vaguely recognizes. It takes her about a minute to finally place the name as someone who worked at the Daily Planet when she did.
The email tells her to pick the place. Chloe picks a diner on Twenty-ninth Avenue. It’s several blocks from the Metropolis Journal and many blocks from the Daily Planet. The day selected is next Thursday.
Thursday arrives with cold weather and gray skies. When Chloe walks to the diner, named Dawn’s Diner, she carries her umbrella, the sky above her head darkening from the mixed gray hued cloud cover present when she woke to a sheet of dark gray. Rain promised in that darkening of the clouds.
Dawn’s Diner is located at the corner of Twenty-nine Avenue and Pender Street. Next to it is a florist shop. The diner has been there since she was a child, and its décor is from the 1970s. The colors are pale green and pink and the cushions of the table booths have been repaired with duct tape. There is nothing upscale about the diner, although it is clean and the food is decent. It’s not seedy but it’s nothing to write home about. Chloe comes here occasionally and it seemed as good a place as any for this meeting.
She’s early by about fifteen minutes. She takes a booth away from the windows that overlook Twenty-ninth; the booth she picks is close to the washrooms and the kitchen. She sits facing the door, a habit instilled in her by too many journalist movies as a child. Her father still humors her and always sits with his back facing the door.
Ten minutes later two young men enter the diner. The one on the left is on the tall side, six feet or so. The one on the right is shorter, looking like he’s just below average height for men, so maybe about five foot eight, and heftier than his companion. Both are dressed in pressed slacks and polo shirts, standard attire for men in their mid-thirties. The man on the left has pale skin and red hair; the man on the right is Hispanic. Chloe vaguely recognizes them in the way that you recognize someone you’ve known somewhat but can’t place their names. She can place them as having worked for the Daily Planet, barely remembering them as employees on the third or fourth floor. She thinks she might have served as a fact checker for the one on the right.
The men slide into the booth seat across from her. The red-haired man introduces them, saying, “I’m Dan Matheson. This is Joseph Cano.”
“Chloe Sullivan.”
“We know,” Dan says.
“Thank you for meeting with us.”
“I admit that I was hesitant,” Chloe says. “But my curiosity got the better of me and so I’m here.”
Dan and Joseph both smile, seemingly pleased with her response.
“You both worked at the Daily Planet, I remember you from when I worked there. Are you still there?”
Joseph shakes his head. “No. We stayed for a long time, but eventually we just couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the same paper.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she says with a nod.
“It’s gotten worse with Lex Luthor there,” Dan says. “We still have friends working there and all we hear from them is about the censorship going on.”
“I’m not surprised. Lex Luthor isn’t a man who wants articles printed that will do any damage to him or his business associates.”
The waitress comes at this moment, asking if they have any drink or food orders. Chloe asks for a refill of her coffee while Dan and Joseph both order a cup. Dan orders a side of French fries. Neither Chloe nor Joseph order any food. The waitress jots down the coffee orders and the French fries before turning and disappearing.
“We’ve been approached by Franklin Stern. He has a coalition that is willing to perform a hostile takeover of the Daily Planet. Willing and able and wants to do this,” Joseph says. He speaks in a low tone. “They want Lex Luthor out of the journalism business.”
“I don’t blame them,” Chloe says. “But where do I come in?”
Dan answers. “One condition of the coalition is that they want a respected newspaperman, or newspaperwoman, to take over as editor of the Daily Planet. They want Perry White.”
“I thought Perry White had essentially retired from journalism after the Daily Planet went under Luthor control?”
“He did. That’s the problem. He’s in retirement,” Joseph says.
“That’s where you come in,” Dan says.
“Me?”
“You wrote the story exposing Lex Luthor’s murder of Oliver Queen.”
“Someone else confessed, which made my article null and void. Legal gave me a nice lecture on why next time I should make sure something like that won’t happen because it’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen if I make accusations of that sort which turn out to be fake.”
“We all know it wasn’t fake,” Joseph says.
“In the eyes of the law, it is,” she says.
Dan shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. You wrote that story and you got it published. You were willing to go head to head with a Luthor, and that will have impressed White.”
“That doesn’t mean he’ll return because I say pretty-please.”
“It might help,” Joseph says. “Besides, everyone knows how Perry White turned his life around after he visited Smallville. A town you lived in at the time. You interviewed him for your student newspaper.”
“You do your homework.”
Joseph smiles. “We’re good journalists. We check our facts.”
“What do you say?”
“Is he even in Metropolis,” Chloe asks after a minute of letting them wait for her to consider their offer.
She can’t say going to beg Perry White to come on as editor for the Daily Planet is high on her list of things she badly wants to do. The Daily Planet’s reputation has fallen dramatically and she’s not sure Perry White would want to be connected with the paper again, even if the paper was under new ownership. Yet she wants the Daily Planet to regain its former position, to become once again one of the best papers in the country. That in the end is what makes her say yes.
She just hopes that there’s not another assassination attempt on her life. Or that, if there is another attempt on her life, that Clark is around to save her again because she’s rather attached to her life.
“So you’ll talk to White?” Dan says. His voice has an edge of excitement to it, an edge she thinks he’s trying to hide.
“I will,” she says.
When she leaves Dawn’s Diner, the rain has started to fall. Gently now, but the rain will increase later in the day. After work she’ll devise a game plan. The next day she’ll visit Perry White, taking a sick day to do so.
Perry White says yes.
Part Four