Courier Page 2

  Paul Smithson was ABN’s Washington bureau chief and – like many other senior press executives in this "company town" – had first worked in politics. He had risen to senior counselor to the Vice-President and then capped it off with a stint as White House Press Secretary before cashing in with a well-paid job with the networks. He didn’t have to do much work, and the network got better access to the administration. It was a good deal for all concerned.

  Usually, he had almost nothing to do with actual news – leaving it to the producers and desk editors – but two weeks ago, he’d ripped into Hadley over a report on questionable campaign contributions. The reporter hadn’t been able to document everything – too many anonymous sources – and, eventually, he’d had to make a painful public apology.

  Investigative reporters were always caught between stories that weren’t big enough to be interesting and stories that – like the money story – weren’t solid enough to stand up to the inevitable attack from those accused of wrongdoing. Hadley knew his days as a network correspondent were numbered if he blew another story.

  It didn’t mean he was grateful for Moten’s careless reminder.

  "Listen, boy. You’re only here because someone decided we had to hire some tokens after ’68. It sure as hell doesn’t give you the right to tell me how to do my–"

  Rick cut the reporter off. "Give it to me, Pete."

  He liked Pete. As a group, network cameramen were nasty to everyone, but they really took their venom out on the one black guy with the audacity to try being a shooter. It took guts to put up with it, and, anyway, Hadley reminded him a little too much of some jumped-up lieutenants he’d had to serve under in the army.

  He took the can, stashed it deep into the bag underneath the heavy film magazine, and grabbed the camera. He unzipped his jacket, tucked the camera on his chest, pulled the zipper back up, and patted the bulge.

  "OK, safe as a baby. Now, can I please get out of here?"

  The reporter swore again and walked stiffly back toward the house. Rick pushed the bike off the stand, jumped on the kick-starter with all his weight, waited an instant, and then smiled as the twin cylinders caught with a rumble. He glanced both ways, waved over his shoulder, and headed off the way he’d come in.

  Concentrating on building up speed, Rick didn’t notice as the black Chevy pulled out and drove at a conservative pace down the street behind him. Passing the crew, now stacking camera cases into the rear of the Jeep, the driver pressed a button on a remote control on the seat next to him, saw the glow of the remote’s green light reflect off the dashboard, and followed the taillight of the motorcycle into the dusk.

  Rick took a different route back to the bureau – crossing Chain Bridge and pushing hard down the long curves of Canal Road. He was caught up once again in the dance, but this time, it wasn’t just speed that occupied his mind. Increasing darkness and a slight mist were making it difficult to tell if the road ahead of him was wet or just shadowed. After months of driving the massive bike at its limits, he’d developed a visceral reaction to the parts of a road with poor traction. They would literally make his stomach hurt.

  Since he was moving against the outward flow of commuter traffic, he still made good time as he cut back over Whitehurst and ripped down K Street. He was certain to beat the deadline with ten minutes to spare – time for the editor to make at least a couple of quick cuts before it was raced down the hall to the projectors. Hadley would have to read into the live microphone in the studio and match the pictures by watching his edited film roll on a monitor in the control room, but it would come together.

  It always did.

  As he picked up speed on the downhill slope of 18th Street – a block from ABN – Rick smiled as he remembered his early days at the bureau. Practical jokes were a constant. The assistant directors in particular had lots of free time and inventive minds. Several times, they’d told him to deliver the film to Joe Telecine – at least until Rick worked out that the room with the "Telecine" sign was just the transfer room where television was made from cinema.

  Suddenly, the part of his mind that never stopped screening traffic demanded all his attention. He had long ago realized that the only way to stay alive on a motorcycle was to make it a rule that any accident would be his fault, because he’d sure as hell pay the penalty. That way he was always ready for drivers who would squeeze him into a line of parked cars without a glance or decide to make a left turn directly in front of him.

  A black car coming along L Street on his left wasn’t slowing as it neared the intersection at 18th. Rick rechecked – the light was still showing him a clear green. His eyes switched back to the car and saw that the driver’s head – outlined in the store lights behind him – was turned so that he stared directly at the big motorcycle.

  The black car blew the red and entered the intersection only yards ahead of Rick.

  Time slowed.

  Rick slammed down on both brakes, and both front and rear wheels began to skid. It felt like the side of the car in front of him was crawling by, stretching out longer and longer to fill all possible avenues of escape.

  As his wheels screamed on the pavement, Rick knew that he was losing steering control and forced his right hand to loosen up on the front brake lever while keeping a full lock on the foot pedal that controlled the rear brake. He was bringing his speed down fast, but that damn black car was still blocking the road in front of him.

  That son of a bitch must have slowed in the intersection!

  He could feel the rear tire begin to skip and knew he was losing precious traction every microsecond that it spent in the air. He needed to get the back wheel down and in solid contact with the road – fast. He slammed his body back and actually came right off the seat to sit on top of the radio, throwing all his weight directly over the rear tire.

  He felt the tire grab the road as the tread caught, and the stuttering of the rubber treads became a steady scream. He was still going too fast to go anywhere but straight ahead and that damn car was simply not moving fast enough to get out of his way, so he tensed for a jump. Getting his body up in the air and flying over the car’s trunk would mean some nasty scrapes on the other side, but it was either that or turn into a red smear on the rear fender.

  He fingered just a bit of tension back into the front brake, and that made the difference. He flashed past the car, and time jerked back to normal. His right leg couldn’t have been more than a half-inch from the wicked-looking steel bar that topped the rear bumper.

  He unlocked the rear wheel and slowly, carefully, pulled over to the curb and stopped. His hands were so clenched that he had to force them to relax finger by finger. After he released his death-grip on the handlebars, he held his gloved hands out in front of him and just watched them shake for a long moment.

  The right hand – the brake hand – felt strained as if it were still grabbing for more stopping power. He looked down the right side of the BMW. The rear brake pedal was bent, almost broken. Calmly, he thought: going, Going to have to stop by the garage and get that fixed.

  He looked back, expecting to see that the Chevy had stopped, and the driver was coming over to see if he was OK. More likely, he’d come over and yell at him for getting in his way.

  The black car was gone.

  As he sat there, he saw the light finally turn red.

  Rick blew out a deep breath and drove the half-block to the bureau – slowly and carefully.

  CHAPTER 3

  The GW Parkway southbound was almost empty, so Ed Farr had the big Jeep way up over eighty miles per hour. He knew that they had to get to the bureau in time for Hadley to write and voice his story, and he was confident that they could fast-talk their way out of a traffic stop. After all, they were legitimate members of the national press corps on an important story, right?

  Hadley was in the backseat, alternately looking off into the middle distance and furiously scribbling in his notebook. Pete Moten was in the front passenger seat. He lit a c
igarette, leaned forward, and turned on the radio before remembering that he’d left it set to a soul station before they picked up Hadley.

  The fast funk of "Whole Lot of BS" filled the car.

  The reporter shouted without looking up, "Turn that crap off!"

  "Cool out, man," Moten responded. "Just relax and feel the beat."

  In the left-side wheel wells, two timers finished their countdowns, and the explosive devices clamped over the tires detonated almost simultaneously. Custom-made, they were essentially the reverse of a claymore mine. The standard US Army claymore was a convex metal plate covered on one side with C-4 explosive and ball bearings – built to spray death outward in a wide swath. These devices were built on a concave steel plate so that the relatively small explosion drove tiny ball bearings inward like a spear, shredding the tires instantly, but leaving little evidence of an explosion on the body of the car. The small metal boxes fell to the side of the road as the blast destroyed the batteries and released the electromagnets that held the devices to the vehicle.

  The heavy Jeep swerved violently to the left, throwing the soundman and the reporter against the doors and wrenching the steering wheel out of the cameraman’s hands. None of them were wearing seatbelts.

  At this point in the parkway, right after the first scenic overlook, the grass median was wide and dropped down to a V-shaped point in the middle.

  After lifting up onto its two right wheels and almost rolling sideways, the Wagoneer smashed back down just as it hit the median’s lowest point, bottoming out the heavyweight springs and sending a spray of mud and frozen grass out to both sides. When the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle hit the opposite slope, it was still moving at over sixty miles per hour and the release of the massively compressed springs and its own momentum launched it into the air as it tore up the slope. It soared over the northbound lane, slowly rolling over to the right in midair and passing directly over a VW bug. It just clipped the low stone wall at the opposite shoulder with the right rear tire and began to roll forward as it disappeared.

  The VW pulled into the parking lot of the scenic overview and jerked to a stop. The driver, a pale and shaken college student, opened his door, threw up, and then just sat and shook. His girlfriend got out of the passenger side and approached the stone wall at the edge of the drop. To her right, she could see the line of smashed trees and torn bushes that marked the path of the Jeep, but she couldn’t see where it had landed. She climbed the stone wall and, clutching the sturdiest branches she could find, leaned out over the precipice.

  At that point, the George Washington Parkway climbed high on the rocky shelf above where the Potomac River, driven by its rush down the six-hundred-foot-high fall line between the Appalachians and the coastal plain, had cut a deep wedge in the land. The Jeep had dropped about a hundred yards and smashed into one of the rocks that emerged from the rushing brown water.

  The Jeep lay upside down, and the girl almost didn’t recognize it as a vehicle. Then she realized that the roof had not only been flattened on the rock but actually driven inward, giving the tall truck-like vehicle the squashed look of a stepped-on cardboard box. As she watched, Pete Moten’s cigarette ignited the fumes from the ruptured gas tank and a fireball erupted – painting orange shadows on the trees on the opposite bank and brushing her face with a gentle rush of warm air even far above where she stood.

  She worked her way back to the parking lot, got in the car, told her boyfriend to pull himself together, start the car, and get her to the closest phone booth – even though it didn’t look as if there could be any survivors. Since the closest phone was several miles away at a gas station on Chain Bridge Road, it was over a half hour before the DC police riverboats fought their way upriver from their base near the Tidal Basin to the crash site.

  The bodies weren’t identified until long after midnight.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rick strode up the short walk to the back door of the news bureau without taking off his battered helmet; radio and gloves clipped to his belt, boots tapping on the concrete, wearing the black T-shirt, worn blue jeans, and leather bomber jacket that made up his everyday wardrobe. His long, unruly hair came out in a spray from under the helmet, and his heavy black-framed glasses – essential for cutting windblast on the bike – gave him a studious look at odds with the tough image most couriers cultivated. To an observer, only the tightness around Rick’s blue eyes – normally calm and somewhat bemused – would have revealed his anger over the close call with the black Chevy.

  He had, of course, already lit up a cigarette. He held it in his left hand as he balanced the massive film magazine upside down over his shoulder with his right. Ridged pink scars webbed the back of the right hand, only a preview of the chaotic moments in battle and the long months of painful recovery that had been written in blood down the right side of his body.

  Pushing through the two doors at the entrance, he started down the main hallway. Even after several months working for the news network, Rick still felt a thrill when he came into the bureau as the approaching deadline for the evening news stirred the place into an organized frenzy. Looking left, the newsroom was a sea of battered metal desks pushed into groups of two or three under harsh fluorescent lights. The room looked chaotic, with a lot of people moving quickly and talking loudly, but Rick knew the underlying choreography that welded them into a team.

  In the far corner, a half-dozen wire machines the size of suburban mailboxes were hammering against long rolls of yellow multicopy paper. Two desk assistants tended the bulky machines, listening through the continuous jangles of single and double bells, which meant updates and new slugs, for the sequence of seven bells that signaled a significant news event. Every few minutes, they would rip the top four layers of paper against the sharp faceplate on the front of a wire machine, leaving the bottom copies to continue falling into serpentine piles in the back. The other copies were rolled, marked, and taped, then quickly brought to the senior producer, both writers, and the anchor.

  The writers, quiet, older men who looked like they came straight out of the cast of The Front Page, scrolled through their rolls of wire copy. One would stop and rip out a particularly interesting story against the edge of the desk, spiking the ragged pieces on a small metal rod. The other – who wore a green plastic eyeshade – would meticulously clip items by holding down the scroll and slicing them off with a metal ruler and then fold them, mark them with a story title, and spread them in neat rows down the side of his desk.

  Either way, by the end of the day, both of their desks would be covered with a slurry of wire stories, newspapers, and notepads. Periodically, they would turn to the solid upright typewriters that sat at a right angle to their desks, insert a thick script pack of ten interleaved colored pages and carbon sheets, and hammer out a few seconds of the anchor’s script.

  Over on the right side, the production assistant was discussing graphics with one of the artists, and as usual, it was escalating into a loud argument. The artist was defending the creative merit of her four-by-six gel, while the PA patiently tried to explain that, while it was indeed beautiful, it simply didn’t have anything to do with the story it was meant to illustrate. In Rick’s experience, graphic artists were eternally unhappy – torn between genuine artistic talent and the demands of producers with all the aesthetic vision of a plundering Visigoth.

  The senior producer and the DC anchor were sitting at side-by-side desks near the front of the room. As usual, they were on the phone, probably talking to New York, their faces tilted down and their eyes glazed – their attention totally devoted to the conversation. The producer, a chunky middle-aged man named Tom Evans who somehow managed to keep a lit Lucky Strike between his lips even while talking, glanced up and saw Rick and raised his eyebrows in a mute question.

  "It’s Hadley’s," Rick called, lifting up the film as he walked past. Evans nodded and gave him a thumbs-up before turning his attention back to the phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. />
  "Jeez, hurry up and get that in the soup," said a voice to his right. Rick had to rotate his whole body to see around the bulky film magazine and find film editor Don Moretti standing in the door of his edit room.

  "I’ve got to cut that for the six and I’ll only have…" Moretti checked the large clock that hung over his edit table just as similar clocks hung in every room in the building. "Twelve minutes as it is."

  "Darn, and here I thought I could take a cigarette break before I brought it in."

  "You would, you son of a bitch." Moretti grinned and spun back to the big Steenbeck flatbed screener where other elements of the story were already loaded through the intricate maze of sprockets and audio heads.

  Rick liked the brash editor. He was always moving, talking, and joking – leaping from subject to subject. Still, he was one of the fastest and most accurate editors in the place, and when it came down to those final minutes before air, Rick had often heard from the reporters that they wanted Moretti working their piece. After all, Moretti was the best damn editor in town. At least, that’s what he would tell anyone who would bother to listen.

  On the other hand, he also claimed that he’d played rhythm guitar and sung backup on Crazy Elephant’s classic bubblegum song "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’", but the song had come out while Rick was in Vietnam and he hadn't heard it enough to be sure it was Moretti’s voice.

  When he didn’t have a run, Rick would spend hours in Moretti’s edit room, absorbing the flow of the newsroom: the desk assistants running the scripts to the technicians, who typed them on to the paper cue rolls that would appear in a mirror in front of the anchor; the intense conversations between reporters and producers as they mapped out a story; directors race-walking down the hall to the control room to polish the final product. He enjoyed the atmosphere of rough camaraderie and black humor combined with serious conversations about oil shortages, election strategies, and distant wars.