Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

He laughed and slapped his chest. "Hey, Ididn't get him off. He's not happy and he and his friends are killers. What I'm saying is, Boggs's in danger, I'm in danger. Think about it. You're in danger too. You 're the one saying the cops, the prosecutor and your own Network're a bunch of dickheads. Life is dangerous. What can I say?"

Megler looked at his watch. "Time to do my bit to beautify America and get some more garbage off the street."

"I've got an offer," Rune said.

The lawyer looked over his shoulder. "Make it fast. You don't keep drug lords waiting."

She said, "You know how many people watchCurrent Events?

"No and I don't know the average annual rainfall in the Amazon either. Do I care?" He started up the stairs.

"Depends on whether or not you want ten million people to see your name and face and hear what kind of incredible work you do."

Fred Megler stopped.

Rune repeated, "Ten million."

Megler glanced at the courthouse door. He muttered something to himself and walked back down the steps.

"Me, okay. I was born in Atlanta, and we lived there for ten years before our daddy decided he was going to the land of greater opportunity, which was the way he put it, and I can still remember him saying that…"

From inside a thirteen-inch Japanese television monitor, the color unbalanced, too heavy in red, Randy Boggs was telling his life story.

"Greater opportunity. I was scared because I thought we were going to die because I got 'greater opportunity ' confused with -'Promised Land,' which I remembered from Day of the Ascension Baptist Church meant heaven. At the time I was close to eleven and religious. Okay, I got myself into some pretty fair scrapes at school. Somebody, some older kid'd cuss, 'Jesus Christ,' and I'd get madder 'n a damp cat and make him say he was sorry and what happened was I got the hell beat out of me more times 'n I can recall or care to."

Editing videotape was a hundred times easier than film. It was an electronic, not mechanical, process and Rune thought that this represented some incredible advancement in civilization – going from things that you could see how they worked to things that you couldn't see what made them tick. Rune liked this because it was similar to magic, which she believed in, the only difference being that with magic you didn't need batteries. The ease of editing, though, didn't solve her problem: that she had so much good tape. Thousands and thousands of feet. This particular footage was from the first time she'd interviewed Boggs and it was all so pithy that she had no idea what to cut.

"… Anyway, it wasn't heaven we ended up in but Miami and some opportunity thatturned out to be… Man, that was just like Daddy. This was right after Batista and the place was lousy with Cubans.

For years I didn't like, you know, Spanish people. But that was stupid 'cause a few years ago I went down to Central America – the only time I was ever out of the country – and I loved it. Anyway, I was talking about before, when I was a kid, and I saw these wealthy Cubans who were no longer wealthy, and that's the saddest kind of man there is. You can see that loss in his walk, and the way he looks at the car he's driving now, which isn 't nearly so nice as the kind he used to have. But what happened was they begun sucking up the jobs us white folks oughta 've been having. Not that I mean it in a racial way. But these Cubans worked for next to nothing. They had to, just to get work and feed their families. Which were huge. I've never seen so many little shifters in one family. I thought my daddy was bad. He'd practically roll over on Momma and bang, she was carrying. Home, I had six sisters and two brothers and I lost a brother in Nam, and a sister to ovarian cancer…

"Daddy had a head for mechanics but he never applied himself. I'm just the opposite. You pay me and I'll sweat for you. I like the feel of working. My muscles get all nervous when I don't work. But I have problems with calculating. My daddy was out of work many days running. My eldest brother signed up, Marines, and I was coming up on sixteen so naturally I considered doing the same but started working instead."

The careers of Randy Boggs: warehouse picker, then carny hawker, then ride operator, then sweeper at a Piggly Wiggly, then selling hot dogs on the highway near Cape Kennedy (where he saw the Apollo moon launching and thought he might like to be a pilot), then a stock boy, then fisherman, then janitor, then cook.

Then thief.

"Iwas to Clearwater once with Boonie, that was my brother, what I called him and a friend from the service. And we went to this drive-in and they were talking about the money they were making and how Boonie was going to buy himself a Bulltaco motorcycle, the kind with the low handlebars, and here I was – oh, heavens – I was nineteen and my brother had to pay my way into the theater? I was pretty embarrassed by that. So that night they went to a, well, you know, whorehouse – which wasn 't all that easy to find in Clearwater – and they let me keep the car for a couple hours. What I did, I was feeling so bad about being busted flat, I drove back to the drive-in, which was just closing up, and I did this distraction – set fire to some brush near the screen – and when everybody ran out to see what was going on I ran into the booth and was going to grab the money. Only what happened was there was no money. It'd been packed up and taken somewhere already, probably the night deposit at the bank. I run out, right into one of the owners. I'm a thin man now and I was a thin boy then and he saw what was happening and laid me right out.

"… You know what they got me for? I have to laugh now. They couldn 't arrest me for stealing and they couldn't arrest me for burglary. They arrested me for arson. For burning a plant that wasn't more 'n a weed. You believe that?"

The tapes went on and on and on, endlessly.

The format of theCurrent Events stories made Rune's job tough. Piper Sutton insisted that she herself be on camera for a good portion of each segment. Most of the story would be the interviews Rune was now editing. But every three minutes or so would be a cut back to Sutton, who would continue with the story, reading off a TelePrompter. Then, back to more tapes – the crime scene, atmosphere footage, interviews. The Bennett Frost revelation. Coordinating everything – the voice-over and the dialogue on the tape segments, and Piper Sutton's script – was overwhelming.

("And," Lee Maisel had warned her, "if you put a mixed metaphor or string of sibilants into her mouth, not even God can help you.")

But so what if it was tough? Rune was ecstatic. Here she was – three in the morning, Courtney (and a stuffed bear) dozing near her feet – editing tape into what was going to be a sensational news. story on the number-one-rated prime-time newsmagazine on network television. Best of all, the story would get seen by ten million people, who unless they made a snack or John run immediately after the Fade Out would also see her name.

And, she considered for a moment, the best part of all: She'd be responsible for getting an innocent man released from prison – a man whose muscles got nervous when he couldn't move.

Prometheus, about to be unbound.

The conference room. The legendary conference room on the fortieth floor of the Network's skyscraper.

It was here that the executives and senior newsmen planned the special coverage for Martin Luther King's assassination and Bobby Kennedy's and Nixon's resignation and the taking of the hostages in Iran and theChallenger explosion. It didn't look very impressive -yellow-painted walls, a chipped and stained oval table and ten swivel chairs whose upholstery had faded to baby-blue from the parent company cerulean. But the shabbiness didn't detract from the fact that history had been chronicled – and sometimes even made -in this room.