He went back to his private office to ensure that Jill Tzu never filed her interview with Takahiro Ohnishi.
Jill raked her fingers through her thick hair in utter frustration. She pursed her full lips, forming a seductive kiss, then blew a loud raspberry. Her feet were up on the control console of the studio’s editing room, her long legs stretched almost to the bank of monitors. She swung them down, ignoring the fact that her culotte shorts had just given her technician a view he’d brag about for a week.
“This isn’t working, Ken,” she muttered darkly.
“Give me a break will ya, Jill? We’ve been at this for six hours. It’s not like you’re going to get a Pulitzer for this,” the scraggly-bearded techie said in his defense.
“Yeah, but just maybe it’ll be my ticket to the network. Just think about it, Ken. If I leave, you won’t have anyone bitching at you at all hours of the day or night.”
“Keep wearing those shorts and you can piss and moan all you want,” Ken teased.
“Watch it, I know a good sexual harassment lawyer.” Jill smiled for the first time in an hour. “All right, let’s go through this one more time.”
This day in the editing room was the culmination of three months’ work on Takahiro Ohnishi. Jill had begun hunting down her story shortly after the reclusive billionaire had moved to Hawaii and Referendum 324 had first been proposed. At thirty-two, she was already too cynical to believe in coincidences and she’d begun looking for a connection between Ohnishi and Honolulu’s controversial mayor, David Takamora, and his even more polemic actions.
She’d found, just through her own television station’s financial and scheduling records, that Takamora had purchased more advertising space during his campaign than his public files showed he’d had the money for. At just her station, there was a discrepancy of nearly one hundred thousand dollars, and she knew he’d campaigned just as heavily on the other channels. Where had the secret funds come from?
Jill lacked any concrete evidence that Ohnishi had privately funded the majority of Takamora’s campaign, but she was damned sure that was what had happened. Ohnishi, with his billions, had bought himself a city.
A journalism professor had once told her that only prosecutors in courtrooms needed proof. A reporter never needed to prove anything, all she had to do was implicate and wait for the self-incriminating defense. A few years later an aging editor said at his drunken retirement party that news never happened, it was created.
Jill’s piece on Ohnishi was nearly ready. In fact this morning’s interview had really been unnecessary; she’d just wanted to meet the man, to get a better sense of what made him tick.
She and Ken watched in silence as the first half of the piece ran. Stock footage of Ohnishi, David Takamora, and the violent street gangs currently preying on white tourists in the city were interspersed with close-up shots of Jill doing commentary in front of city hall. As the scenes began focusing more on the gangs, especially one violent image of four Asian youths beating an elderly white woman, Jill reached for the goose-necked microphone and began laying in a new voice-over, one not from the contrived script she had written, but one from her heart.
“Hawaii is the Aloha State. The word means love as well as good-bye in the native tongue, and in these times it means both simultaneously. Good-bye to love. Good-bye to everything that our island paradise has stood for since Captain Cook first came here two hundred years ago, and good-bye to the traditions that reigned on the islands since the first inhabitants 1,500 years before that.
“Where once we melded and blended into one people, neither all caucasian nor all Polynesian nor all Asian, today we stand divided from our neighbors and friends. Now all it takes is having eyes a little too round or skin a little too light and anyone on the street can become a target. Racial hatred has grown here like some cancer, some dread disease without cause whose cure seems equally elusive. Fostered by men like Takahiro Ohnishi, with his well-publicized views of racial purity, and van-guarded by youth gangs bent on violent expression, the state has been galvanized into two intractable camps: those who want Referendum 324 and those who fear it as many have feared tyranny before.
“Last night, the vice president called Referendum 324 the beginning of a secessionist movement, and perhaps he’s right. The last time America faced a crisis like this, the Southern states withdrew from the Union because they believed in their way of life, one built on the conviction that people of other races are inferior. Today a segment of Hawaii’s population believes they have a mandate to control everyone’s lives because there is a little more Japanese flowing in their veins. They say that their Samurai ways are superior, that they can calm the streets once again if we agree to live under a system that stifles freedom of expression and the belief that every one is created equal. In this reporter’s opinion, that sounds an awful lot like extortion.
“As the ronin scour the streets for white faces to victimize, their emperor sits inside his glass and steel home, safe behind a wall of hatred and bigotry. Since his arrival a darkness has descended, a black veil that no one seems able or willing to lift. Today, the hotels along the beaches, the condos near Diamond Head, and the cruise liners are all empty. People are afraid to come to Hawaii. I spoke with one hotel manager yesterday who told me that tourists are already canceling reservations for next year.
“A self-generating downward spiral has been created by the actions of those who now seem to control our streets. As more tourists are frightened away, more people will lose their jobs and seek the security and fraternity represented by the gangs, thus increasing their ability to terrorize. Only this morning the President placed the troops stationed at Pearl Harbor on full alert in order to protect the federal government’s interests on the islands.
“Who is going to protect our interests?
“Mayor Takamora’s police force does not act to control the gangs. Will he ever ask for the National Guard to step in and take control of a situation he can no longer handle? For surely we face a crisis as dire as any these islands have faced since the first time a Japanese force descended in 1941.”
Jill angrily pushed the microphone aside as she watched a monitor displaying David Takamora’s announcement four weeks earlier that he wanted to run in the gubernatorial elections in the fall.
Ken was too stunned to speak for an instant, and when he caught his voice, he stammered, “Jesus, Jill, you can’t run that.”
“Of course I can’t. It’s the truth, and right now we’re not allowed to report the truth,” she said bitterly.
The in-house phone rang. The unit was built into the console next to where Jill’s feet were propped back up against the complicated machine. She snatched it up, tucking her hair behind her right ear as she swung the receiver to her head.
“I know, I know, forty-five minutes to air.” Only her producer would disturb her in the editing room.
“You’ve got five.”
“What in the hell are you talking about, Hank? We don’t air for an hour.”
“You know the rules, Jill. Every piece that chronicles the violence must be cleared by Hiroshi.” Hiroshi Kyato was the station’s news director.
“That’s bullshit and you know it. You can shove your five-minute deadline. I’m not some second-class citizen.”
“Wait, I didn’t mean anything by it, I mean I don’t mean any disrespect for who you are. It’s just, well, you know…” His voice trailed off.
The producer backpedaled so fast that it truly stunned Jill. Race was polarizing the station, too. Jill was half-Japanese, and Hank was a caucasian from New Jersey, and he was now deadly afraid that he’d offended her.
“Hold on, Hank,” Jill said quickly. “What I mean to say is that I’m not a cub reporter on her first assignment. I know what the boundaries are. I don’t need Hiro and his thought police telling me what to say on the air.”