May 1
Intersection,
Avenue Of The Americas at West 54th Street
New York City
3:11 P.M. EDT
Life is good, Dennis Littrell told himself, a self-satisfied smile on his face.
Sure, he said, pretending conversation with the back of his driver’s head. Sure, a lot of people are dead who were alive yesterday. A helluva lot. And sure, Washington D.C. is a radioactive wasteland; God knows how many people are still trapped in shelters there, dead or dying.
But, still … it was a helluva broadcast. A helluva story, and all mine to tell.
It was narcissistic, even callous; Denny knew that, and under most other circumstances might have felt, if uncharacteristically, ashamed.
But the newsman’s exclusive—a prime-time special, in which a worldwide audience heard the fruits of his breaking-news reportáge—had been a coup of broadcast journalism at its finest; in addition to capably informing an audience, it had helped prevent what could have been—and, he reminded himself, had been intended to cause—a horrific, civilization-shaking, vengeance-driven attack by the full, awesome military might of the United States…
On the wrong target, he reassured the driver’s head, silently.
Candidly, Denny would have been the first—okay, he shrugged, maybe among the first—to admit that in reality he had been but a bit-player in a far larger drama. He—not to mention, the world—owed far more to a cast of characters-sources whose clandestine efforts were far more central in avoiding a more terrible catastrophe than even the loss of the nation’s capital.
Beck Casey, for certain. If I ever get to tell the story-behind-the-story, he’d have to top the credits. And of course, the FBI kid: Jeffrey Connor. Wouldn’t have even had a story if he hadn’t leaked it to me. And oh, yeah, note to self: I better start thinking about a wedding gift for him and Katie. And send a card to good ol’ Beck. Maybe something like: “Congrats! Your kid is marrying a G-man!” Every CIA spook’s worst nightmare, eh?
Dennis Littrell chuckled aloud. Life was good.
Take, for instance, the car—a limo, really—in which he was now regally installed as a backseat celebrity.
In his former role—a put-out-to-pasture correspondent, kicked upstairs as a relatively minor NBC executive, and that largely to ride out the time until retirement—the network bean-counters might have raised an eyebrow, more likely posed a squint-eyed question or three, about using a limo service rather than hopping in a taxi.
No longer. Certainly not after the meeting this morning.
It had been intended—at least by the executives much higher on the totem pole who had called it, including the head of the network itself—as a postmortem review of what the morning stats had shown was a record-shattering ratings bonanza. NBC’s video feed had been carried around the world. Its revelations—usually with attribution, sometimes without, but everybody knew who reported it first—were quoted in every news account this morning.
Even without a single advertising spot, the one-hour show had garnered benefits that had the marketing department, the programming department, and—most enthusiastically—the advertising department a-swoon.
Moreover, it had turned “DENNIS LITTRELL OF NBC NEWS” into a brand name of its own.
“So what we want to know, Denny,” the network president said, smiling, “is do you want to do more of it?”
The other at the conference room table—Paul … something, Denny’s mind had registered, spoke up. Advertising veep, ambitious guy, wants to be the next chief. I hate his guts; maybe that’s how come I can never remember his last name.
“More to the point,” Paul said, in a tone that reminded Denny why the vice president would always remain partially unidentified, “can you do more of it? You’ve been out of active news gathering a long time, you know.”
Denny smiled, and the two executives smiled in return.
“I do,” he said to the network president, though his next words were meant for his nemesis, “and I can. But it occurs to me that I can-do it at a number of places. Other than here, I mean.”
At that, Denny’s face broadcast the sole smile in the room.
“Meaning?” Paul’s voice was now colder, even grim.
Denny leaned back, tented his fingers.
“Meaning,” he replied, this time directly to Paul, “what’s the offer? Rather, what’s your offer?”
“Denny,” he heard the network president begin, a placating tone overridden by his subordinate’s own tight-voiced response.
“You have a contract. With NBC,” Paul hissed.
“We’d enforce the ‘no-compete’ clause, Denny,” the president warned. “Nothing personal. It’s just business.”
“Yeah. Funny thing about that, guys. You ever actually read that contract?” Denny chuckled lightly. “Don’t think I had, myself. But my friend Irv—you remember Irv? Irv Leavitt? My lawyer, the guy who handled it all back when I traded my notepad for an office here?—well, he read it. Heck, he wrote some of it. Rewrote it, that is.”
His two companions were silent, waiting.
“I moved out of being a newsie, I had this great idea that people might be interested in hearing about all the stuff I had done, the stories I had covered,” Denny said. “Got a book deal, wrote a book.”
Denny shrugged in good-natured resignation.
“You probably didn’t read that either, Paul. Turned out, not many folks did. But back then, we figured that if I did some talk shows, made the rounds to pitch the damn thing—well, to cut to the chase, one of the guys on your legal staff pointed out that, even if it was a management sort of contract, appearing anywhere but on NBC might violate that ‘no-compete’ stuff. So-o-o…”
He drew out the syllable for an extra count, paused.
Inside, anticipating, the legion of his darker angels joined in a raucous, laughing chorus.
Paul broke first.
“So what?”
“So Irv and the nice NBC lawyer worked out an amendment. A tiny little edit—minor, really. Tweaked the boilerplate, so to speak. Tweaked that ‘no-compete’ bullshit right out of it.”
Denny twisted, the gesture cutting Paul from the conversation, to face the network president directly.
“You maybe want to check it yourself,” Denny said. “But I already did. Nothing personal; it’s just business. So … that question about your offer?”
Denny reached inside his suit coat, pulled out a quarter-inch-thick sheaf of formal-looking paper. “Irv and I wrote up a few ideas this morning…”
• • •
The negotiations had concluded surprisingly fast; given the circumstances, and the undeniable ratings potential for NBC’s newest star journalist, the new deal was quickly struck.
And signed.
Denny had made one concession: NBC would retain the right to name his new show.
Upon reflection, even Denny admitted that “DENNIS LITTRELL: ‘MY BEAT IS THE WORLD’” sounded slightly…
… well, overwrought, Denny agreed. A little egotistical, maybe. Irv came up with that name, and it sounded pretty good at 4 a.m. Still, he’ll be a bit disappointed.
Lost in his musing, Denny had not noticed that the car was stopped. He glanced through the smoked glass at the street sign.
“Avenue Of The Americas,” my overwrought butt; hell, only tourists and newcomer yuppies call it anything but Sixth Avenue, even after all these years. But, jeez—we’re only at Fifty-fourth? What the hell?
Around him, other vehicles—a preponderance of them, of course, taxis—were also stopped, with drivers expressing their frustration at the traffic logjam variously, through horn or gesture or furious pejorative.
He tapped on the glass partition, which slid noiselessly into its slot.
“Sir?”
“How long have we been here?” Denny asked, pleasantly enough.
“Going on ten minutes, Mr. Littrell. Haven’t moved ten feet since.”
“Get to the corner, maybe take a right over to Madison, okay? We can head uptown, cut back later to—”
“Wouldn’t be any better, sir. I just called dispatch. They said the backup’s all over Midtown. Heck, they said most of the city’s in gridlock.”
Denny snorted. “Well, guess it figures. With the President flying in to set up government here, I should have guessed that they’d stop everybody from—”
“Not that, Mr. Littrell. Radio says he’s still on Air Force One, out at Newark. Guess he can’t get in either. Nope; it’s the traffic lights. ’Cording to dispatch, the damn things—sorry—the darned lights have gone whacky. Every freakin’ intersection, it seems.”
“No kidding? All over the city?”
“About twenty minutes now. They all go green at the same time, then they all go red. Fender-benders all over the place, they’re saying, just about every intersection. And not enough cops to take over directing the traffic, either.”
Denny saw the driver’s head shake; he guessed it was in disgust.
“Gotta be the computers, y’know? Damned things—sorry, I’m a little frustrated, sir—but, like they say, it takes a computer to screw up something this bad.”
Uselessly, the driver inched up to the bumper of the taxi ahead, itself trapped in the hopeless snarl.
“And computers,” the driver said, a disgusted aside. “Well, freakin’ things control everything these days, am I right?”
Denny nodded, even as he was distracted by a familiar sensation, almost a voice.
He recognized it as a newsman’s intuition, a sixth sense that had served him well in his life.
Even when—as it was this time—what his sixth sense was suggesting chilled him to his core.