"I need some expense money," Scott blurted out at Doug.
"Yeah, so?" Doug sounded exasperated with Scott's constant requests for money. He didn't even look up from his impossibly disorganized desk.
"I'm serious . . .," Scott came back.
"So am I." Doug firmly laid down his pen on his desk and looked at Scott. "What the hell kind of expenses do you need now?" Scott spent more money than several reporters combined, and he never felt bad about it. While a great deal of his work was performed at the office or at home, his phone bills were extraor- dinary as were his expenses.
Scott had developed a reputation as willing to go to almost any lengths to get a story. Like the time he hired and the paper paid for a call girl to entertain Congressman Daley from Wisconsin. She was supposed to confirm, in any way necessary, that LeMal Chemical was buying votes to help bypass certain approval cycles for their new line of drugs. She accidentally confirmed that he was a homosexual, but not before he slipped and the lady of the evening became the much needed confirmation.
As Scott put it, Daley's embarrassed resignation was unavoidable collateral damage in stopping the approval of a drug as poten- tially dangerous as thalidomide.
Or then there was the time that Scott received an anonymous tip that the Oil Companies had suppressed critical temperature-emis- sion ratio calculations, and therefore the extent of the green- house effect was being sorely underestimated. As a result of his research and detective work, and the ability to verify and under- stand the physics involved, Scott's articles forced a re-examina- tion of the dangers. He received a New York Writer's Award for that series.
When Doug had hired Scott, as a thirty-something cub reporter, they both thought that Scott would fit in, nice and neat, and write cute, introspective technical pieces. Neither expected Scott to quickly evolve into a innovative journalist on the offensive who had the embryo of a cult following.
But Scott Mason also performed a lot of the more mundane work that most writer's suffer with until the better stories can justify their full time efforts. New products, whiz bang elec- tronic toys for the kitchen, whiz bangs for the bathroom. New computer this, new software that.
Now, though, he was on the track, due in part he admitted, to
Doug coercing him into writing the computer virus bits. Yes, he
was wrong and Doug was right. The pieces were falling in place.
So, no matter what happened, it was Doug's fault.