With any luck, Cheeta hoped, he had gone to the john to have his long-overdue nervous breakdown. If only someone would tell her for sure. The cold spicy soup was repeating on her. Either that or she was having the weirdest contractions.
Cheeta was steeling her nerve for a tentative hallway reconnoiter when her office fax tweedled and began emitting annoying noises.
She turned in her seat and watched the sheet slide from the slot. She ripped it free and read it.
It was short:
BROADCAST CORPORATION OF NORTH AMERICA:
UNLESS TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS IS DEPOSITED IN SWISS BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER 33455-4581953 BY NOON TOMORROW, THE NEXT BLACKOUT WILL BE SEVEN HOURS, NOT SEVEN MINUTES. THINK OF WHAT THAT WILL DO TO YOUR RATINGS.
CAPTAIN AUDION
"Audion?" Frowning. Cheeta went to her wordprocessor. Her chief asset as a news reporter had been her aggressive take-no-prisoners style and her flat-but-photogenic features.
As weekend anchor, it had been her attention-getting voice and her mane of raven black hair.
Writing had nothing to do with any of it. She was paid over two million dollars a year to be a corporate logo that talked. The truth was, Cheeta Ching could barely spell. So she input the word "Audion" and waited for her electronic on-line dictionary to help her out with the unfamiliar term.
The database responded instantly.
AUDACIOUS: Brash, outrageous or unconventional.
"That's not what I asked for," Cheeta complained. Then she noticed she had misspelled the word and the database had given her the nearest equivalent. She retyped the word again, this tune using both typing fingers.
AUDION: A triode or vacuum tube used in early television development.
"Hmmmm," said Cheeta, swiveling back to her faxphone. As a journalist, she had received her share of anonymous death threats-most, she was convinced, came from Don Cooder. As a precaution, Cheeta had an AT D device attached to her phone that gave a digital readout of the last number that had called. She pressed the memory button.
A ten-digit number marched along the readout screen and froze. Picking up the phone, she dialed it. The phone rang six times, and there came the click of a second line cutting in.
A crisp woman's voice at the other end said, "Burner Broadcasting."
Cheeta hung up an instant ahead of her own gasp.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she told her nest of inanimate electronics. "You have just given me the greatest story of my career."
"Story?" A low voice called through the door. "What story?"
Cheeta froze. Forcing a lilt into her barn owl voice, she called, "Fooled you, Don. Just testing to see if you're still there."
"I'm not Don Cooder," said the unmistakable voice of Don Cooder.
"And I'm sleeping on the office couch tonight," returned Cheeta Ching, getting up to turn off the lights.
After waiting a full minute, she got down on her hands and knees and peered under the door.
An unblinking bloodshot blue orb was staring back at her.
"Comfy?" she asked the eye.
The eye refused to answer. Neither did it blink. It was pretending it wasn't there. Or something.
Noticing some dust along the carpet edge, Cheeta puffed at it hard.
"Arggh," said the eye, going away. Ostrich-skin boots hopped and danced out in the well-lit corridor.
"Something in your eye?" Cheeta taunted.
"You'll never read news in this town again," Cooder warned, stomping off.
"Pleasant dreams," she returned, struggling to her feet. She threw herself on the divan and moved her bloated body so the springs creaked noticeably. The stomping stopped. But in the quiet that followed, Cheeta could hear labored breathing. Cooder had obviously tried the old trick of walking in place to give the impression he had gone away.
After a while, heavy footsteps did pound away, sounding disappointed.
Cheeta went to her window, which overlooked the studio's Forty-third Street entrance. A dark figure in a Borsalino hat and holding a hand up to one eye flung itself into a waiting taxi, which roared away like a fat yellow jacket.
Cheeta eased the door open a crack. Seeing the coast was clear, she slipped out the back door and hailed a taxi with a two-fingered whistle.
"La Guardia," she told the driver.
"Ain't you Cheeta Ching, the anchor lady?"
"No, I'm Cheeta Ching the superanchor," Cheeta spat back. "And after tonight, no one will doubt it."
"Fine. Just don't have your brat in my back seat, okay?"
"You should be so lucky," Cheeta snapped back. "My baby is going to be bigger than Murphy Brown's." She reached into her purse, fished around, and her tightly knit eyebrows separated in dull surprise.
Noticing her expression in his rearview mirror, the cabby asked, "Forget your wallet?"
"Worse. My pills."
"Should I turn around?"
"No," Cheeta said firmly. "The story always comes first. Besides, I'm only going to be away a few hours."
Chapter 7
The biggest flap ever to hit television had turned into the story of the decade with the transmission of a handful of extortionary faxes to the four broadcast networks-and no one knew what to do with it.
At MBC, Senior Anchor Tim Macaw ran his hand through his boyish salt-and-pepper hair as he read the fax over and over with innocent-looking, uncomprehending eyes. In an age where maturity of face and voice lifted ratings, he was rarity-a youthful anchor. Critics dismissed him as Tom Sawyer with a sixty-dollar haircut and dressed up in a Pierre Cardin suit. But he appealed to blue-haired elderly women, and while it was not much of a demographic niche, he sold of lot of Efferdent and Tylenol.
"Captain Audion? Is this on the level?" he asked his producer.
"No one knows."
"But it could be for real?"
"There's no telling."
"Should we break in with a bulletin?"
"If we do, it could be the worst gaff since KNNN almost aired that hoax report that the last president had died."
Tim Macaw frowned, his youthful features gathering like a Kleenex dropped into water.
"I'm not taking responsibility for this," he said petulantly.
"Good. I'll kick it upstairs. It sounds like something for legal anyway."
"Yeah, this is legal's turf."
And two of the most powerful men in broadcasting went their separate ways, relived that they had avoided a potentially career-wrecking bear trap.
At ANC, Dieter Banning had just drawn on his trademark trenchcoat and was about to leave for the night when Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler rushed in, clutching a shiny but smudged fax.
"Dieter-this just came off the newsroom fax."
Dieter Banning was widely considered to be the smoothest, most cosmopolitan anchor in modern television. His round Canadian consonants were invariably delivered in impeccable style. He projected the image of a man of the world-cool, unflappable, and one of the few anchors on TV whose hair looked like his own.
"What kind of bullshit is this?" he yelled, cigar ashes falling on the fax signed "Captain Audion."
Ned Doppler snatched the fax away, his protruding ears red.
"Don't burn it, your moron!" he snapped. "It may be news! I'm giving you the option of going live with it.
Banning wrinkled his pointed nose at the fax. "Is it for real?" he muttered, feeling for something lodged in his left nostril with a thumb.
Doppler shrugged. Banning frowned. The two men stood, toe to toe, sizing one another up like gladiators in some electronic arena.
Both were thinking the same thought.
If I go on the air with this, it could be a career maker. If I don't, it could break me. On the other hand, if it's a hoax I'll never live it down.
"Has it been checked out?" Banning pressed, wiping his thumb clean on the inside of his lapel.
Doppler fixed Dieter Banning with his frank, expressive eyes, like twin marbles sunk into Silly Putty. In spite of his protuberant ears and overfreckled cheeks, and despite his resemblance to a boozy Howdy Doody, Ned Doppler was considered by many to be the most trusted man in TV news since Walter Cronkite.