Rick Mofina - The Panic Zone

A fireball rolled skyward.

New York City

The World Press Alliance headquarters is at midtown Manhattan’s western edge.

Jack Gannon hurried back to it, walking by the Long Island Railroad maintenance yards, where Thirty-third Street slopes into a bleak wasteland near the Hudson River. From here, he could see the helicopters lifting off and landing at the West Thirtieth Street Heliport.

Beyond that: New Jersey.

His cell phone vibrated again. Another text message: Where are you?

Be there in ten, he responded.

Nearly trotting now, he passed the graffiti-covered wall of a shipping depot where shopping-cart pushers sorted their morning bounty of cans. One man in dreadlocks and a faded Obama T-shirt was dismantling a TV for recycling.

“Can you help your brother? I need food.”

Gannon reached into his pocket where he still had the change from his hot-dog lunch and fished out a crumpled five.

“Bless you. Have a long, happy life.”

Gannon was still new to the city, and his heart had not hardened toward the hard-luck cases he saw every day.

Since he’d left Buffalo for his new job at the WPA, he’d taken to walking New York’s streets whenever he could. He was on desk duty today and had come to this isolated tract on his lunch break to be alone.

To think.

He was five months into his dream of working at one of the world’s largest news organizations and he still had not landed a good story.

So far he’d reported on a homicide, and helped with the coverage of a school shooting in California and a charter bus crash near the Grand Canyon. He’d inserted national paragraphs into stories from WPA’s foreign bureaus. He had also been assigned to night shifts helping edit copy on the national and world desks. Soon, he realized that not everyone at WPA wanted him there, something made clear the night he’d overheard two copy editors kibitzing by the features desk.

“What do you make of Jack Gannon?”

“I haven’t seen any pizzazz. He’s out of his league.”

“Didn’t the Buffalo Sentinel fire him, or something? I missed all that.”

“He’s one of Melody Lyon’s projects. She hired him after he broke that story on the Buffalo detective and the missing women.”

“That one wasn’t bad.”

“Gannon’s got more luck than talent, if you ask me. What’s he done since?”

“Not much.”

“That’s my point. And you’re right, he was fired by the Sentinel, so was his managing editor. It was a stinking mess. I heard that O’Neill and Stone were against Gannon’s hire but that Melody wanted it done. I hear he’s disappointed people and there’s talk they might let him go.”

“Really?”

“It’s a rumor. I think he should be punted back to Buffalo.”

“Didn’t his bio say that he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer way back for the story on the jetliner and the whacked-out Russian pilot?”

“A Russian-speaking guy in the Sentinel’s pressroom did all the talking to sources overseas, Gannon just took dictation.”

That was a load of bull!

Gannon had bristled on the other side of the file cabinets, out of sight.

They were wrong about him.

Dead wrong, he repeated to himself now, as he jogged to a crosswalk to make the light. He’d earned his shot with the WPA, crawled through hell to get to New York. He belonged here and he’d prove it.

Gannon entered the twenty-story WPA building, swiped his ID badge at the security turnstile and stepped into the elevator.

He checked his phone. Nineteen minutes since Melody Lyon, the deputy executive-the WPA’s number two editor after Beland Stone-had summoned him with her first text.

We need to see you now.

He got off the elevator on the sixteenth floor with a measure of honor as he strode by the reception wall displaying WPA news photos of history’s most compelling moments from the past hundred years.

The World Press Alliance was one of the world’s largest news wire services, operating a bureau in every major U.S. city, and two hundred bureaus in seventy-five countries, providing a nonstop flow of information to thousands of newspapers, radio, TV, corporate and online subscribers.

The WPA’s demand for excellence had earned it twenty-two Pulitzer prizes and the respect of its rivals, chiefly the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bloomberg, China’s Xinhua News Agency and Russia’s fast-rising Interfax News Agency.

Gannon entered the newsroom with a sense of foreboding.

Something was breaking on the flat-screen monitors that streamed video and data from around the world. Whatever it was, it had hit the WPA. Some reporters looked shaken. A few were standing, hugging each other.

“Did you know Gabriela? Poor John.”

A few editors quietly cursed at their keyboards.

Gannon was headed toward Melody Lyon’s office when a news assistant caught up to him.

“Jack, they’re all in the conference room. Go there now.”

A teleconference was in progress, and solemn-faced senior editors sat around the polished table. Concentrating over her bifocals on the call, Melody Lyon, who was running the meeting, pointed at an empty chair beside her. As Gannon took it, an assistant passed him a folder.

“Sign this.” Her pen tapped a signature line on the documents. Gannon glimpsed the words Consulado-Geral do Brasil em Nova York-Visa Application form and a note affixed: “Request for Urgency.”

George Wilson, the third most powerful editor after Lyon, was in charge of WPA’s foreign bureaus. He eyed Gannon, checked his BlackBerry then said to the caller, keeping his voice loud: “Everyone, Reuters just moved an item claiming two journalists are among the victims. No other details. Frank, let’s run through that again.”

Frank Archer, WPA’s Sao Paulo bureau chief, who was on the speaker phone, kept his emotions under control. He had landed in Rio de Janeiro and was at the scene. Sirens could be heard in the background.

“John Esper was returning to Rio from Sao Paulo where he was helping with coverage of the U.S. vice president’s upcoming visit,” Archer said. “John landed in Rio about four hours ago and learned the news about the Cafe Amaldo bombing. At that time he picked up Gabriela’s message saying she was headed to the cafe with Marcelo Verde-”

Gannon read the note Lyon had passed to him:

“John Esper is WPA’s Rio de Janeiro bureau chief. Bureau reporter Gabriela Rosa is his wife. Marcelo Verde is WPA’s Rio photog.”

Archer continued, “John first thought Gabriela and Marcelo were en route to cover the bombing but when he couldn’t reach them, he rechecked her message about meeting a source at the cafe. That’s when it hit him-they were there when the bomb exploded at the cafe. It was the last thing John said to me before I rushed to the airport. I can’t reach him now.”

“Frank, it’s George,” Wilson spoke up. “John texted us saying that he’d gone to the hospital where they took most of the victims.”

“Wait!” Archer said. “A friend at Globo just told me that police have found Marcelo Verde’s wallet and Gabriela Rosa’s bag among the dead and debris.”

“Oh, my lord.” Melody Lyon cupped her hands to her face. “It’s true.”

Gannon’s stomach tightened.

“The toll,” Archer struggled, “is now seven dead and several critically injured, so it will rise. George, we need help down here.” Archer was fighting emotion. “Our Rio bureau’s been-George, we need help.”

“We’re on it, Frank. I’ve sent in our people from Buenos Aires and Caracas. We’re also sending help from New York.”

Wilson looked at Gannon.

“Melody here, Frank. Any claims of responsibility? Any thoughts on who’s behind the attack?”