Michael Walsh - Early Warning

The voice on the other end of the line crackled with something very like fear. It was Bill Connolly, the head of his cable news division. “We’re on it, Mr. Sinclair.”

Sinclair tossed a glance at one of the video feeds. Huge billows of smoke were ascending into the sky from what had once been Times Square, and farther to the south, another conflagration had started. The only question now was how much worse it was going to get. A lot worse, was his guess. “Status report,” he commanded.

“ Times Square is cut off. Looks like some kind of bomb just sealed the entrance to the Holland Tunnel on the Manhattan side. Jesus Christ, what are they doing, taking out all the-?”

“That’s your job to find out,” snapped Sinclair, “so get to it. Put Principessa on the air-let her anchor. People like to see a pretty girl when the shit hits the fan.”

“Um, sir? Principessa’s just getting back to the city now. She did a hell of a job just getting to within a hundred miles of Manhattan.”

Sinclair’s mind raced. He would have preferred to have that magnificent rack front and center on America ’s TV screens; she wasn’t terribly smart but she was pretty, had a great body and was absolutely unafraid of her own stupidity. In fact, she was stone-cold brave, a quality you didn’t find in many women.

“Okay, then track her. Get another crew with her. If she starts to mix it up in the shit, we need to be there to cover her.” He’d hate to lose Stanley if anything happened to her, if she caught a stray bullet or got clipped in an explosion, but hey, this was war. Ernie Pyle made a great career move when he bought the farm in the Pacific, and as far as Sinclair was concerned, today’s reporters were a bunch of pussies anyway, covering stories from the studio or, in a pinch, from their satellite vans. Good to see the girl on the streets.

“I’ve got another call.” He punched the talk button again. This time it was Ben Bernstein, the editor in chief of the Times. “Give it to me straight, Benny,” he said.

“We’re under attack,” shouted Bernstein-

“Calm down,” he soothed. The man sounded like he was having a heart attack. “It’s happening right in your own backyard. Chance of a lifetime. Who’ve you got on it?”

“Everybody-”

“Good. See that they stay there. Tear the paper up and get ready for a Pulitzer.”

Bernstein was practically sobbing. “But, Jake, it’s…it’s terrible.”

“Of course it’s terrible. It’s news. Forget 9/11-we own this story.” He rang off. Alert now, he punched up Firefox. Almost immediately, the tabs to his principal websites popped up so he could watch what was happening in real time. Under the guise of providing “traffic cams” and “beauty shots” of various cities, Sinclair had been one of the first to install and link a series of private spy cams around the country. Gradually, sub rosa and through discreet bribery, he also managed to install “news feeds” in Europe, the principal Asian cities, and a couple of places in South America, precisely against moments like these. People didn’t trust the news much anymore-not that he could blame them; after all, he didn’t trust it much anymore, and the reporters were mainly employed by him-and they were more likely to believe the evidence of their own senses than some silly blow-dried mouthpiece doing a standup from a safely secured “war zone.” This way, the anchors could perform their voice-overs while the remotely controlled cameras gave the viewers a grunt’s-eye view of what was really going on. Needless to say, the viewers loved it, even if the reporters didn’t, and his network’s ratings soared. Besides, who cared what the reporters thought? He had fired half of them already and looked forward to the day when he could fire them all and use 3-D animated avatars, just like in the movies.

One glance was enough to tell him this was very, very bad-which meant for the news business, it was very, very good. It mattered not if he lost a day, or a week-hell, even a month’s worth of revenue. He would make it up in the numbers of eyeballs delivered to advertisers down the line, and in prestige by his Nielsens. And he would make it up on the back end when he eventually drove his competitors completely out of business, leaving the field entirely to himself. Too big to fail was just fine by Jake Sinclair, and, if anything, he planned to get even bigger.

Which was why he had left New York, and wasn’t that looking like a smart idea? Not like the poor guy who had leased the old World Trade Center a few weeks before the nineteen holy warriors leveled it. Part of his considerable fortune had been based on smart real-estate deals, and the close of the sale of the New York corporate headquarters to some European interests was his smartest deal yet. The building he had purchased quietly in Century City -the retrofitting was almost complete-would be a beacon for all other corporate moguls, and with better weather.

“Oh, my God-have you heard?” That would be Jenny II, coming in the door from the porte cochere. He could hear her rustling around in the kitchen, dropping her Maxfield’s bags and her keys; in a few seconds, she’d be in the room, and then he was going to have to feign shock and horror at what was transpiring three thousand miles away instead of gloating about how he’d just made a fortune, and that his network’s rating were sure to soar. “Yes,” he shouted, hoping his voice had just the right amount of concern. “It’s terrible. I’ve got it on right now.” Sinclair linked his computer’s screens to the huge flat-screen television that dominated one wall of the room.

“I thought the president was supposed to keep us safe,” said Jenny. The look on her face was so real and so sincere that for just a moment Sinclair felt a little embarrassed at his own conflict of interest.

He put his arms around her and held her close. It was at times like these, when she was the vulnerable girl he had first met playing tennis at her father’s house, that day he had come to consummate his business relationship with the father and eventually wound up marrying the daughter, that he actually enjoyed her company again.

“What can I do? What can one man do?” he whispered softly. Like most Hollywood wives, she gladly accepted the often brutal violence of the torture-porn movies his and other studios made, yet in the face of the real thing became completely unglued.

“You can fight him,” said Jenny, softly. “You fight him with everything you’ve got. With everything we’ve got.” She pulled away and gestured around. “I mean, why have you worked so hard to acquire this business, your newspapers, your whole media empire, if not to use it to save our country?”

Sinclair pulled Jenny II close to him. It was at moments like this that he was grateful he didn’t have to remember a new name. Over her tender, soft shoulder, he could see New York burning.

It was surreal, a sight he had seen hundreds of times before in his studio’s movies. Disaster movies were ten cents a dance these days, when filmmakers looked for any excuse to blow up the White House and the Vatican (but never anything Muslim), but that was only because nobody ever expected their cinematic visions to actually happen. Fiction was only fun when it stayed fiction.

There wasn’t much left in Jake Sinclair other than greed and a vague, free-floating animus against various wrongs, both real and imagined, but whatever it was welled up inside him, and he found himself once again making promises that he could not keep. Still, as always, it felt good to make them. “I’ll get them,” he said.

Jenny II pulled back, her face still turned away from the disaster unfolding in New York. He would try to shield her from it as long as possible; holding fast to progressive belief meant denying reality as long as one could. “Will you, Jake?” she asked, her face streaming. “Promise me you will.”