May 2
Motiva Port Arthur Refinery
Port Arthur, Texas
8:06 A.M. CDT / 9:06 A.M. EDT
Shane Yerkey had slept in his office, though an impartial observer might have disputed the description. Despite his exhaustion, physical and mental, sleep had proven elusive for reasons entirely unrelated to the comfort level of the faux-leather couch on which it had been pursued.
Mainly, he had thought of Carol Golembiewski. That was logical, if only because Shane knew her face and name; in that aspect, his sense of shamed betrayal was real and immediate.
More theoretical, if somehow also no less real to his conscience, were the faceless and nameless who labored, unaware, at whatever facilities similarly had been compromised with an infection he was now complicit in concealing.
Sitting on a timebomb, all of them, his mind had churned. Bait, staked out so the goddamn hunters could try to catch a tiger. Expendable…
Sometime during the long night, his eyes had finally closed. He had dreamed, though the details of them had evaporated immediately upon waking.
All he could remember was that they had been horrifying.
That, and the soul-wrenching sense of his own guilt.
Shane pushed himself to a sitting position, unconsciously tugged at his rumpled, already loosened necktie.
No. Fuck your goddamn lies; shove your ‘keep-it-secret’ legal forms up your asses.
Go on, fire me. Send me to jail, even.
But … no. Just hell no.
• • •
NBC News
Rockefeller Center
New York City
9:11 A.M. EDT
“Thirty-second promo spot,” Todd Leiberman was saying, “cutting between Denny at the anchor desk and news clips of scenes from D.C. and the crashed helicopter. We’ll intersperse those shots with video-archive cuts of his older stuff—Africa, London, the places he worked back when he was a news correspondent.”
He illustrated, a rapid-fire finger-snapping. “Like a jump-cut collage: bang, bang, bang! Denny here, Denny there, Denny dodging gunfire in Baghdad, Denny with the Contras in—”
The video editor, a longtime veteran at NBC, rolled his eyes.
“I used to edit some of his stuff back then. Littrell has put on thirty pounds and gone silver-haired since those days. How about we chroma the older stuff to black-and-white?” The editor’s face brightened. “And maybe start with a few seconds of action, then capture a freeze-frame and go close in on his face. Turn it into kind of a Ken Burns pan-and-zoom. Then we contrast it with full-color, full-motion video of what he looks like now.”
“I like it,” Todd nodded.
“That way, might feel less like we’re watching Rip Van Winkle doing an on-camera age progression.”
The producer winced. “Good point. Just make him look like a lion, will you?”
“You going to want the original sound on tape too?”
“No. Ellen is finishing up the new show’s musical theme,” Todd said. “Rush job; the network only approved the Sunday debut an hour ago. But it’s a pretty good tune: fast-moving, driving beat. Time the video cuts to the music, right?”
“Piece of cake. But no voice-over, no graphics crap?”
“Fade-out audio on the theme’s crescendo. We’ll dissolve into SOT of Denny at the desk saying ‘From NBC News, this is Dennis Littrell.’ Freeze, superimpose a CG graphic that reads ‘Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern: INSIDE THE STORY WITH DENNIS LITTRELL.’”
“Catchy,” the editor said, failing to fully repress a smile. “Denny come up with it?”
“Marketing department,” Todd shrugged. “Me, I think the name’s a rip-off of Inside Edition. But the suits make the rules.”
“That’s all, then? Fade to black?”
“Not quite. Marketing came up with a tagline too. Real original, but we have to put it in.”
“I’m bracing myself. What is it?”
“‘THE STORIES THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW.’”
The editor grinned wider. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“If I know Denny, often as not ‘they’ is going to be the network,” Todd chuckled.
“Denny, starring as the renegade newsman. The ‘Outlaw Champion Of The People,’ I guess.”
Both men shared a laugh at that, albeit a rueful one.
“Anyway,” Todd said, “jump on it, okay? The spot’s supposed to start airing throughout the day, soon as the guys upstairs sign off on it.”
He paused, pondered for a second.
“What the hell. Add a graphics line at the end. Something like ‘SEND YOUR NEWS TIPS TO INSIDENEWSLITTRELL at NBCNEWS.COM.’ I’ll get it registered right now, so we’ll be good to go.”
“Can’t hurt,” the editor said, turning back to his console. “Hey, who knows? Maybe somebody out there actually does have a story ‘they’ don’t want known.”