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  His name had been Chiun, but out of respect for his years, Cheeta always called him "Grandfather." She had never spoken of him to her husband. There was no need to crush his spirit. Rory had been certain that the oysters and Spanish fly omelette breakfasts he had endured for more than two years had done it.

  For nine months now, Cheeta Ching had basked in the glow of positive press. BCN Weekend Report ratings were soaring, even as Cooder's were sinking. She had been cover-featured by People three times-once each trimester. Vanity Fair had a standing cover-shoot offer, preferably showing mother and child nude. Breast-feeding. In the rarified world of the celebrity anchor, Cheeta Ching was Queen of the Mountain-and determined to grind her stiletto heels into the eyes of the competition. It was only a whisper in the halls, but already they were talking about making a major change when Cooder's contract came up for renewal.

  The Chair was as good as Cheeta Ching's.

  All she had to do was live long enough to plant her lucky behind in it.

  It was almost eleven o'clock now. Cheeta had been locked in her office since she had signed off the 6:30 feed and rushed from the newsroom.

  "It's for your own good," said the producer, as he escorted her to her office. Security guards ringed her with drawn guns. Down the corridor, Don Cooder was incoherent with rage, screaming, and frothing at the mouth.

  The remaining security force was sitting on him.

  "I'm admiral now, right?" Cheeta had asked breathlessly.

  "We'll talk about it later. Okay?" the producer returned.

  "What about the seven o'clock feed?"

  "It's a slow news day. We'll just replay the 6:30."

  "Who's going to do the West Coast update?"

  "Don't worry about that," the producer promised, shoving her into the office and closing the door. "Better lock it to be safe."

  As the producer hurried away to deal with his temperamental anchor, Cheeta banged in the door and asked, "What about my Eyeball to Eyeball edition?"

  "We'll let you know when the coast is clear."

  Cheeta spent the next hour with one ear pressed to her locked office door, listening to the horrible sounds coming from the newsroom as the staff attempted to placate Don Cooder.

  "We'll give you a raise, Don."

  "Don Cooder's very soul has been wounded. It will take more than mere money to bind up his mortal wounds," he announced.

  "We'll increase your operating budget. Add that backup science correspondent you wanted."

  "You insult Don Cooder with a bribe of another color."

  "How about you do a special special tonight?"

  "A special special?"

  "Yeah. On the blackout. You can do it in the Eyeball to Eyeball slot."

  Cheeta tried to choke it down, but the shriek of anguish came out of her too-red mouth as raw sound.

  "You bastard!"

  "I'll do it," said Don Cooder in a suddenly placated tone.

  At eight o'clock, Don Cooder had gone on the air, his hair sprayed into submission, his wild eyes almost calm.

  As she watched on her office TV, Cheeta Ching's greatest hope slowly dwindled to nothingness. Namely that the brass would see the seven-minute blackout as a repetition of the famous seven-minute Don Cooder walkout and can the prima donna once and for all.

  "My time will come," she hissed at the screen, while eating cold jungol soup. Once, the baby kicked. Cheeta slapped her belly and he settled right down.

  When it was over, Cooder was knocking at the door, saying in an imitation Robert DeNiro voice, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

  Cheeta sat very still in her desk and said nothing until the clumsy sound of his boots creaked away.

  Less than an hour later, he was back doing a Jack Nicholson.

  "Heeerre's Donny."

  Cheeta refused to respond. Fortunately, no ax came splintering through the panel. Cooder went away again. From time to time, furtive footsteps returned to her office door. Cheeta ignored them, mentally vowing to outwait him, just as she would outlast her arch-rival in the long haul.

  Hours had passed without any further sign of Cooder. Cheeta called around the studio. No one had seen him. But no one had seen him leave the building either.

  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.

  "How do you check out an anonymous fax?" he retorted.

  "You know," said Dieter Banning, flicking cigar ash onto a carpet that looked as if it had been pulled from a burning tenement, "I'm just going to pretend I never saw this. How's that?"

  "It's your career," Doppler growled.

  Banning smiled broadly. "Only if you have the balls to use it on Nightmare."

  "It's Nightmirror and you know it."

  "I was thinking of your next night's sleep," grinned Dieter Banning, striding from the room.

  Ned Doppler stood watching him go. "Putz," he said softly. It was ten past eleven. He was on live in twenty minutes and he didn't have his lead written.

  He fished into his pocket for his lucky quarter. It would not be the first time he was prepared to risk his career on the outcome of a coin toss . . .

  Eventually, a producer at the fledgling Vox newsroom bit the bullet. He called his counterpart at BCN.

  "Yeah, we got one," said the BCN producer. "Did you?"

  "Yeah. Think it's legit?"

  "Sonny, if you don't know by now, you ain't never gonna know." And the BCN producer slammed down the receiver and raced to his office TV. He turned on Vox, hoping they would break the story. That way, BCN could use it, falling back on the Vox report for credibility. If it went sour, Vox would take the heat. If not, it was a story BCN would dominate. Vox ran their newsroom as if it were a sitcom, complete with studio audience, orchestrated applause, and canned laughter for the human interest stories. They weren't even in BCN's class.

  But Vox didn't break in with a bulletin.

  Unhappily, the BCN producer pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and draped it across the mouthpiece of his office phone. He called his counterpart at MBC.

  "This is your counterpart at another network," he said through the muffling handkerchief.

  "BCN, right?"

  "You can't prove that."

  "Sure I can. I just got off the phone with both ANC and Vox. They got faxes signed Captain Audion, too."

  "Damn. Are you cutting in with it?"

  "Why don't you tune in and find out," said the MBC producer, hanging up.

  For the BCN news producer, it was pressure beyond belief. All of his competition had the story now. It was just a matter of minutes-perhaps seconds-before someone broke in.

  As the seconds crawled past and salty sweat oozed out of his forehead, he decided that the network that was dead last in the ratings could afford to give the one-armed bandit of destiny a hard pull.

  "Is Cooder still in the building?" he snapped into his intercom.

  "No, sir."

  "Then get me Ching. I know she's still here. She's been circling the Chair like a shark, hoping to go into labor live."

  "Miss Ching left fifteen minutes ago."

  "Is there anybody still in the building who can read news?"

  "I'd be happy to give it a shot," said the secretary in a hopeful voice.

  "Forget it."

  The BCN producer settled heavily into his executive chair. He turned on ANC. It was almost time for Nightmirror. That goofball Doppler was sure to run with the story. He had looked silly for years and it never seemed to hurt his career.

  But Nightmirror made no mention of the fax. Neither did MBC or Vox.

  Potentially it was the story of the decade. All four networks were on ground zero-and no one knew what to do with it.

  Chapter 8

  Harold Smith had his tiny portable black-and-white set perched on his Folcroft desk. The reception was snowy and one of the rabbit ears was bent. He was w
atching Nightmirror. Had he been a viewer of TV during the medium's infancy he could be forgiven for mistaking the blurry talking head on the screen for Howdy Doody or a Mad magazine cover.

  The sonorous voice of Ned Doppler came through the static like an audio beacon.

  "And so it remains, seven minutes of television time lost to mankind. That's 420 seconds to you and an estimated 40 million dollars in lost advertising revenue to the networks. Will it matter? Stay tuned. I'll be back in a minute."

  Harold Smith switched off the set, knowing that Doppler always came back only to say, "That's tonight's report. I'm Ned Doppler." Sometimes he did a program update. But never came back with any statement of substance. The tag was simply a device to trick viewers into watching the final block of Nightmirror commercials-usually for a national retail chain that had a hundred-year reputation and was recently found to have engaged in a pattern of racketeering and fraud in their automotive repair and appliance divisions. Smith had personally exposed them after being overcharged seven dollars on a muffler patch job.

  Smith gave the other networks a final scan and switched off the set. It was midnight. None of the networks had floated so much as a hint of the extortionary fax transmissions. Perhaps they had dismissed them as crank faxes. Possibly none of them understood they were not the only recipient. At any rate, the networks were unlikely to break programming with bulletins now, with much of the country asleep or preparing for bed. It was the flip side of the same cynicism that motivates political leaders to schedule their press conferences an hour before the midday or evening news.

  Smith recalled a nonsense adage: If a tree falls where no one can hear it, does it make a sound? Wryly, he wondered was it news if no one reported it?

  Harold Smith knew the faxes were real. He knew this because he had an excellent idea who had originated them. Not in the absolute sense. But all the signs pointed in one direction.

  Clearing his throat, he reached for the dedicated line to Washington.

  "Yes, Dr. Smith?"

  The President's answer was slightly hoarse. He had picked up on the fifth ring. Smith did not apologize for waking him. That was not how CURE worked. Although ultimately answerable to the executive branch, the President could not mandate CURE operations. That would invite possible political abuse. The chief executive could only suggest missions. Or he could issue the ultimate directive-to shut down CURE forever.