Killer Ratings Read online

  BY WARREN MURPHY AND JAMES MULLANEY

  The New Destroyer: Guardian Angel

  The New Destroyer: Choke Hold

  The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning

  The New Destroyer: Killer Ratings

  Warren Murphy and James Mullaney

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

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  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the authors nor the publisher have received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE NEW DESTROYER: KILLER RATINGS

  Copyright © 2008 by Warren Murphy

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-6021-2

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-6021-7

  First Edition: August 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mrs. Boegemann, wherever you are.

  For the rest of the Foursome from Hell—Bill Chambers,

  Neil Bagozzi, and Mark Coles.

  For www.warrenmurphy.com, where one of us can be

  reached; for www.jamesmullaney.com, where

  the other one can.

  And for the Glorious House of Sinanju, e-mail:

  [email protected]

  1

  Everyone wanted her dead.

  The jackals were circling her body and had been for so long now, she had forgotten what her world was like without them. She was not yet dead, not even cold, but the snarling, salivating pack was sniffing around as if it had found a fresh antelope carcass deep in the tall grass.

  It had not always been so. She seemed healthy way back at the very beginning although it was so long ago she could scarcely remember now. But even then things were not as rosy as they had seemed. After only one day the bleeding had started. In a week the floor was stained red and the animals that fed off carrion were sneaking in, tearing off pieces of her flesh. Nibbling, nibbling away at a body still standing but wobbling on unsteady high heels.

  KITTY COUGHLIN RATINGS DISASTER!

  IS BCN ALREADY GROOMING KITTY’S REPLACEMENT?

  OUR TOP STORY: KITTY #3 AND FALLING

  COUGHLIN’S RATINGS BLEED CONTINUES

  Those headlines came at the end of just her first week as the first woman to solo anchor a network evening newscast. The press got worse in her second week. In the third week she stopped reading the reviews and threatened to fire anyone who brought to work any newspaper that dared to devote so much as an inch of column space to the growing ratings disaster. This edict, among many others, further damaged the swelling tide of negative opinion about her among the staff at the Broadcast Corporation of North America world news headquarters in New York.

  Naturally, the talk of dissent in the ranks made all the trade papers. It was no secret that the regular news staff hated her. One famous old-timer at the network, an octogenarian who had temporarily held the evening news anchor post until Kitty was wooed to the center chair from a rival network, now regularly fed stories of behind-the-scenes disaster to a hungry print media. A well-known female journalist on a BCN weekly news magazine program, a woman Kitty knew socially and who had been friendly before Kitty became the most famous female news face at the network, would no longer speak when they passed in the hallways. These days it was all icy glares and vile dinner party gossip.

  Everyone was waiting for her to fail, longing for the day when the network finally came to its senses and pulled the plug on the ratings bleed over which Kitty had presided.

  If the bigwigs concluded that it was better for their bottom line, she knew that even her multimillion-dollar contract would not save her from the unemployment line. At fifty-three she’d be a jobless pariah, damaged goods forced to move out of her tony Park Avenue apartment and into some cold-water skid-row tenement. She made a mental note to wear a more sensible pair of Prada shoes her first day in the soup line.

  “Ow. Dammit,” Kitty Coughlin muttered as she strode through the gleaming automatic doors at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Leaning against the doorframe, she stuck a finger down inside the tight back of her left shoe.

  “Is something wrong, Ms. Coughlin?” asked the nervous young man who accompanied her.

  “No, I always stick my hands in my shoes and hop to the plane for good luck, you moron.”

  She had stopped dead to adjust the shoe and was blocking the entrance so that a husband and wife with two children and an armload of luggage were bunched up behind her.

  “There’s another door right there, Gomer,” Kitty snarled at the man, who until now had been offering a friendly smile. “Go around. Jesus. Idiot tourists.”

  The man’s smile faded and he ushered his wife and kids around a railing to an adjacent door. “So, you still getting hammered in Boston by Malcolm in the Middle?” the man queried as he and his family passed Kitty into the building. His wife shushed him but Kitty noted that he was smiling once more as he hurried his family across the busy terminal.

  “Does every nitwit in the world know my goddamn ratings?” she growled, tugging her finger angrily out of her shoe.

  Her once charmed life was a thing lost in the distant mists of hazy memory. A darling only child, the apple of her parents’ eyes; a sorority sister at her exclusive college; an internship at a Washington TV station thanks to her school ties; and up, up, up until she had reached what at the time was the pinnacle of her profession for a woman long on legs and short on talent, cohost of a network morning news and entertainment show. Life had been so easy for so long that her brain could not comprehend adversity, which was why she had taken the job as solo anchor for the BCN Evening News. If she had only had some clue that things might get sticky, that the print press would turn on her, that her coworkers would despise her, that the viewing public could fall out of love with her, she might never have taken the job.

  But she vowed that she would not let it get to her. Her therapist had told her she should visit her happy place in times of stress. But the idyllic, sunny field in her mind was filled these days with snakes and on the lake front of her imagination sharks with legs had started scuttling up out of the shallow water. She had spent so much meditation time lately stomping on snakes and kicking sharks in their snub noses that she had given up hope of finding a happy place even in her mind.

  Yet all the hatred, the backstabbing, the resentment would not get to her. No way. She would not allow it. She was rock. Unmovable, unassailable. Let them give her their worst, she would not be shaken.

  “If only these goddamn shoes fit right, everything would be fine,” she snarled at no one and everyone.

  Walking was murder in these things but no matter how tight the
y pinched she would not stumble, especially in a public place like an airport.

  In the darkest crevices of her worried mind she might be wobbling, but only in her mind. In real life Kitty could not afford to give even the appearance of physical unsteadiness. Her ratings were miserable, but if she wobbled, stumbled or fell and—God forbid—someone got the image on a cell phone and disseminated it to her enemies, it would be seen as a sign; a physical manifestation of the precarious position she was in at her job. Another headline.

  KITTY COUGHLIN TRIPS AS RATINGS DIP!

  In this age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, where anchors not only reported the news but were themselves the topic of discussion on countless panel shows, Kitty would not willingly give the piranhas something to feed on. The pundits would claim even her unconscious knew she was ready to topple. At that point a nudge, perhaps in the form of some supermarket tabloid exposé, and the jackals would have the feeding frenzy they had been hungering after for over a year.

  As she walked through the terminal, the prospects of a new round of bad press made her lightheaded.

  No. There would be no wobbling, no stumbling. Certainly she would not fall. She would absolutely not give the jackals, the hyenas, the vultures the satisfaction. If she had been a dedicated leftist, she might even have recalled the lyrics to the old labor union song, “We are fighting for our future; we shall not be moved.” But in truth, she was not a leftist. She did not really understand political left and political right and such nuances but instead took her political cues from nineteen-year-old bimbo actresses, rock singers with tattooed genitals, and rap artistes whom she liked to interview whenever they were out on bail. Beautiful people all. With beautiful identical ideas of love and peace and brotherhood, which Kitty Coughlin rarely understood but always loudly supported. Beautiful people. And Kitty Coughlin was proud to be one of them and she would hold her head up high and the world be damned before she would show any weakness, especially to the slimy peasants who seemed to infest today’s world.

  Her high heels clicked with renewed ferocious purpose as she went to check in.

  “Washington bureau has a limo all arranged,” said the nervous young BCN Evening News assistant who dogged her steps. His short legs had a difficult time keeping pace with her long, certain strides. “It’ll be at the airport when you land,” he said, panting as he tried to keep up. “They’ve found someone new for sound just like you asked.”

  “They better have,” Kitty Coughlin snarled. “Last moron those bozos stuck me with made me sound like Daffy Duck.”

  Since she was a VIP, Kitty was allowed to skip the line. Ordinarily she was in first class long before the deadweight in the back boarded, but today she noticed that the proles seemed to be moving along faster than usual. For some reason there were not the usual security delays. She only noticed two security officers on duty and they appeared to be arguing with one another, oblivious to the passengers filing through the scanners single file. She saw her own camera crew pass through without having to open their bags of equipment for inspection. At the rate they were moving, the nobodies would all be aboard before her.

  “Your FEMA interview is all set for three this afternoon,” her assistant said, oblivious to the rapidly moving line at his back. He pulled some 3 × 5 cards from his pocket. “Here’s the questions. Mr. Maddox has gone over them and given his okay.”

  Kitty snorted. “Ah, yes, Uriah Maddox. The great savior of the BCN Evening News with Kitty Coughlin.”

  “Um . . . yes,” said the young man. “Anyway, Washington production staff already has copies. Mr. Maddox had me pass them along. They’ll add if they have others.”

  “Yeah, I know the drill.” She snapped her fingers. “Give me those. I don’t have all day.”

  Her assistant handed over the cards as well as her small overnight bag which he had carried from the car. She detected a hint of relief in his shoulders as he turned to leave. He was looking at a whole day in New York without Kitty Coughlin. The rest of the Evening News staff back in Manhattan was probably popping champagne corks already.

  She wished her Botox-saturated face would permit her to scowl as she hustled through the nonexistent VIP security, through the connecting air tunnel and onto the waiting 747.

  Flying commercial was just the latest indignity she was being forced to endure. When BCN was wooing her away from a rival network where she had cohosted the morning entertainment-news program for nearly two decades, Kitty had been feted like a queen on private BCN jets. But these days corporate never missed an opportunity to remind the news division that they were keeping careful watch on the wounded and bleeding bottom line.

  Kitty found her seat at the middle of the first class section of Flight 980, stashed her bag in the overhead compartment and slumped angrily into her seat. She kicked off her uncomfortable shoes and massaged the fresh blister on her left heel.

  She ignored the pilot’s voice on the intercom. When the stewardess began offering unintelligible advice on the scratchy public address system, Kitty was studying her notes. She was still going through the 3 × 5 cards as the plane taxied, gained speed and then tore off down the long runway.

  Uriah Maddox, the executive producer of the evening news and Kitty’s nominal boss, had added two handwritten questions about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and why the federal emergency management gang had assisted the hurricane in destroying the city.

  “Way to stay topical, Uriah,” Kitty grunted as the 747 rose into the clear blue spring sky. “Maybe while I’m at it, I’ll ask them about FEMA’s response to the sinking of the Titanic.”

  The most important questions related to FEMA’s preparedness for the global warming crisis. There were seventeen individual global warming questions. There was a question about FEMA and global warming and tornados in Kansas. There was a question about FEMA and global warming and blizzards in the Northeast. Kitty placed on top the card that asked what FEMA’s plan was if half of the Antarctic ice sheet broke away thanks to global warming, floated north and lodged in the Gulf of Mexico.

  She was tapping the cards back into a neat little pile and wondering if this would be her last interview before the suits came to her office and told her she was finished, when she suddenly became aware of a commotion behind her.

  Several people gasped in unison. A woman screamed.

  “Stay in your seats!” a voice commanded.

  Seat belts unbuckled as people up front craned to see what was going on in back. Kitty fumbled her belt loose but did not have time to peer over the seat.

  Several things happened seemingly at once.

  First there was hustling in the aisle. A frantic stewardess ran past Kitty’s seat toward the cockpit.

  “My God, oh my God!” the woman cried.

  This was followed by a loud pop and the stewardess was suddenly sprawling forward, a red splotch staining the center of her otherwise spotless white blouse.

  More screams. Panic exploded throughout the first class section as three men raced up the aisle, guns clutched in their gloved hands. Each man wore a large backpack. The lower half of their faces up to the eyes was covered with a black mask. Blue baseball caps were pulled down low, leaving only a narrow gap for their nervous eyes to dart around the cabin.

  Two of the masked men paused to shove someone into the empty seat next to Kitty. It was her cameraman. His skin had gone pale under his three-day growth of beard. The anxious young man had been collected from the coach section and was now fumbling his camera to his shoulder. He aimed it at the two men who loomed over BCN’s star anchorwoman.

  “It’s her,” one hissed to another. He was short and at least one hundred pounds overweight. A moist circle of sweaty drool stained his mask over his mouth.

  The second one was much thinner than the first. There were acne boils on the visible skin around his eyes. He shoved a pen and a glossy photograph into Kitty’s hands.

  “Could you do me a favor?” asked the man with the gun politely.
/>
  It was such an incongruous thing given the circumstances that Kitty autographed the photograph out of habit. When she was finished, the skinny man muttered something about auctioning off the signed publicity photo as he snatched it back and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking off up the aisle.

  “Keep filming,” the fat man ordered the cameraman.

  The two men hustled forward, climbing over the body of the dead stewardess on their way to the closed cockpit door where their comrade was waiting.

  Kitty could not believe what was happening. It was a hijacking. An honest-to-God hijacking and she was in the middle of it. This was the sort of thing trained newspeople waited a lifetime for. Unfortunately news reporting in the trenches was not Kitty’s area of expertise and the fact that one of the hijackers had asked for her autograph in the middle of it had thrown her completely off stride.

  “What should I do?” the cameraman asked.

  Kitty pulled out her prepared note cards. “Uh . . . uh . . .” She fumbled through the cards and pulled out the only one that even came close to planes. It was a question for the FEMA director asking what his agency planned to do to respond to the crisis of a diminishing worldwide bee population, a direct result of global warming. She gave up on the cards. “How the hell should I know?” she snapped. “Just point that thing at them and keep shooting.”

  There was at least one more hijacker in back. Kitty could hear a man over her shoulder barking orders. The men in front were arguing before the locked cockpit door.

  “You just blew her away, man,” the fat one said. He glanced back at the dead stewardess. His dark mask was stained darker with heavy sweat.

  “Shut up,” said the hijacker who had asked for Kitty’s autograph. “I had a perfect 100 feedback and he blew it. I explained to him that ‘near mint’ means an album dust jacket might have some corner wear but he’s relentless. We do this and he promised to delete it.”