“Forgive me for saying this, but have we not learned anything from the other attacks? As you recall, there had been ample warnings, but each held tight by various government agencies leaving us vulnerable, while bureaucrats protected their precious areas of autonomy. In this latest round of more random, more sporadic but unrelenting attacks, we still have no idea who or for what purpose Americans are losing their lives. Let’s hope the squabbling ends soon so we can catch the people who are doing these horrific deeds. I am being told right now from the control room that my producers are trying to get Dr. William Hiccock on the phone. We’ll try to get him on the air and see if he can provide further insight into this segment, which we’re calling ‘The Quarterback Gets in the Game.’ We’ll be back after this break. Stay tuned, lots of news to come.”
The telephone started to ring.
“Over the objection of the FBI?” Janice said.
“It pays to have enemies in high places.” The telephone kept ringing. “And I am not going to answer that. I am actually under orders not to.”
“Then you’ll have time to do the dishes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nobody steals clothes anymore, right? Carly asked herself as she looked out the diner window at the harsh green tinted fluorescent spill from the laundromat across the street. As her private unmentionables tumbled in the public dryer, she sat sipping hot tea with lemon from her “sick tray” before her. No cross-dressing transvestite or out of work Victoria’s Secret model was going to steal her intimate garments and get away with it. This is ridiculous! She thought, yet she still couldn’t get herself to deposit them in the hotel laundry service bag. Why can’t I ever remember if it’s cold or hot water that gets blood out?
As if she were instantly cast into one of her worst nightmares, she recognized the face of a man she knew, entering the diner. In her particular version of the common nightmare, she would find herself naked in front of a laughing and snickering 6th grade assembly. In the dream she would nearly die of embarrassment, although she always awoke, in a cold sweat, before meeting the grim reaper, naked. Tonight, she was bloated, retaining water. Her hair unceremoniously lobbed on top of her head, she was in the old ripped sweatshirt with, Oh God, old spaghetti sauce stains on her chest. The warm-up pants she wore were a wonderland of lint balls and, on her face, the last remnants of a day’s make-up had, at this point, been reduced to an echo of eyeliner. Her lipstick had long since dissolved away from her normally accented lips.
Although he wasn’t laughing at her yet, her heart stopped when she realized he was someone from the White House, the press corps, somebody from cable. Please don’t let him see me. She buried her face in the cup and mentally tried to be smaller than her 5’10 frame. Although at that moment, she was in the middle of a little real life nightmare, later, upon reflection, she would come to appreciate the evening as the night that changed her life in ways she could never have dreamt possible.
“Hello there; Carly isn’t it?” the voice said.
Shit. “Yes, Carly Simone,” she said. Then waited for him to fill in the blank look she wasn’t trying very hard to conceal. He was on the far side of fifty, and could have been Regis Philbin’s brother. There was a warmth in his eyes, but a perpetual sneer to his mouth. She wondered which one was dominant.
“Wallace Smith, MSNBC. May I join you?” He flashed a winning smile.
Carly was surprised. “Well, actually, I was just leaving.”
“Actually this will only take a few minutes.”
“What will?”
He smiled as he invited himself into the booth sitting across the table from her. “I have an idea. Do you watch MSNBC?”
“Sometimes, not lately. I haven’t had time to watch anything lately.”
“Are you permanent here now?”
“No, I am on assignment.” Why didn’t I comb my goddamn hair?
“Do you like it here in Washington?”
“It’s got a personality all its own… more than any other place in America. The buildings and what they represent are old and stationary, but the people in them are always new and constantly changing. Even New York has natives. Here in D.C. if you find a native, there’s a good chance they are not involved in the only business in this town.”
“Well, I can see you are not opinionated.”
“I do objectivity for a living, I live subjectively.”
Wallace, who 25 years ago started out as a copy boy at the New York Post instead of going to college, recognized the journalism school jargon. “What school did you come out of?”
“Andover, then NYU Journalism for post grad.”
“Well, Carly, I’ll get right to the point. How would you like to work at MSNBC?”
“I wouldn’t know how to write for television.”
“No, Carly, I mean, go on camera, become a reporter.”
“Me? I have always done print. I am used to hundreds of words; you guys deal in hundredths of seconds.”
“Look, we have producers like me who handle all that. TV requires someone who can speak extemporaneously about an issue only when the earpiece falls out of their ears. You know Brian Williams, or Scott Pelley?”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes I am reading the script right into their ear, two words ahead of what they are speaking. It’s called audio prompting. We of course only do it when things are happening so fast that there isn’t enough time to even teleprompt it to them.”
“So, are you saying you will put the words into my mouth?”
“Only if we are live and you couldn’t possibly know everything that’s going on.”
“But if I don’t know, why would I be talking about it?”
He held up his hands in a “no-contest” gesture, “Okay, so that’s a deal breaker right there, Carly. If you are going to spew forth journalistic ethics to me, then maybe you should stay in the virginal, unadulterated, pristine world of magazine writing. So you can be as God intended, one girl, talking to a few readers with nothing between you and them but a pencil and notebook.”
Carly let the “girl” remark go. But she grabbed onto the magazine slam. “So if I remember correctly, the top shows any network actually produces themselves with consistent top ratings are the ones they laughingly call ‘Magazine Shows.’ Tell me, is that just a way of buying credibility, ‘print’ credibility, the credibility won by those reporters who apply pencil to notebook?”
Wallace was amazed at the moxie this girl had. Maybe she didn’t know who he was. “You know as the head of the Washington news operations I would love to debate this all night, but you look like you got other things to do tonight and so do I. I’ll just leave it at this. I would like you to come work for us and cover the science beat. Since we deal in hundredths of a second in my business, I’ll give you a few hundred thousand to decide. Here’s my card. Or you can always find me around the press room.”