Page 14 of Making It Live!

It was worse than I'd imagined.And also, infuriatingly, better.

The lobby was enormous — marble floors, vaulted ceiling, a wall of monitors cycling live feeds from bureaus around the world.London.Beijing.Nairobi.Jerusalem.The feeds were crisp and immediate, and despite myself the journalist in me leaned toward them the way a moth leans toward light.That was Amal Khoury reporting from Beirut — I'd met her once, at a press-freedom conference in Geneva.She was good.

The newsroom was on the fourth floor, and the elevator let me out into organized chaos.Rows of desks ran toward the far wall, each anchored by at least two monitors.Phones rang.Keyboards clattered.Somebody was arguing about a graphic.Somebody else was eating what smelled like reheated Chinese food.

And there, at the far end of the room, was the studio.I could see it through the glass — the anchor desk, the camera rigs, the lights hung from the ceiling like a constellation of mechanical suns.And to the right of the studio, behind another wall of glass, the control room.

My control room.Starting tomorrow.

I was staring at it, trying to make the words my control room feel real in my mouth, when a hand clamped down on my elbow.

"What are you doing here?"

Bruce Coleman had materialized beside me with the pallor of a man having a cardiac event.His eyes were wide and his hand was already at his tie, straightening it.Different suit than the restaurant, same expression — polished control with something frantic running underneath.

"Jimmy," he said, low and tight, like he was trying to yell at me in a whisper."Your start date is tomorrow.We discussed this."

"I wanted to get the lay of the land."

"The lay of the—" He stopped himself.His hand went to the tie again."If Nelson finds out we hired someone without his input, he will—" He couldn't finish, as if the possible endings were too many and too terrible to choose among."He has burned through three executive producers in eighteen months, Jimmy.Three.One developed stress-related health problems.Another simply stopped showing up.And the last one?Nelson wrote a memo about him so devastating that the man's therapist called HR to request his personnel file.I’ve spent two weeks keeping your hire quiet.Two weeks of avoiding Nelson Mackenzie, which is like avoiding weather.He is everywhere, and he sees everything.And you are standing in the middle of his newsroom on a Monday night looking like—"

He gestured at me.I looked down at myself.Jeans.The new blazer Jillian had bullied me into buying.My freshly cut auburn hair, which I had to admit fell a lot more like a professional's and a lot less like the weather event Dominic had wrestled into submission.

"Like what?"

"Like someone who doesn't work here yet!"

"Bruce."I kept my voice calm, which wasn't hard — I'd spent thirteen years staying calm in places considerably more dangerous than a cable news studio."Relax.I'm not going to introduce myself to Nelson tonight.I just want to see the operation.Get a feel for the show before I'm running it."

His hand went to the tie a third time.The man was a walking tell.If he ever played poker he'd lose his house inside an hour.

Bruce stared at me a long moment, calculating risk, I guessed.Then something shifted in his face.Not relaxation — men like Bruce Coleman didn't relax.More like a man choosing the least catastrophic option from a menu of disasters.

"The control room," he said."You watch from the control room and nowhere else.Nelson never looks in there during a broadcast.Not ever.You sit in the back, you don't talk to anyone, you don't introduce yourself.You are a ghost."

"I've been embedded with military units in active combat zones, Bruce.I think I can manage being inconspicuous in a television studio."

He didn't look reassured.He touched the tie one final time, muttered something that sounded like a prayer, and slunk away.

* * *

The control room was smaller than I'd expected.Darker, too.Banks of monitors lined the walls — feeds from every camera in the studio, graphics queues, live satellite windows, a clock counting down to air.A long desk ran the length of the room, bristling with switches and sliders and headsets, and behind it sat the crew: a technical director, a graphics operator, a couple of production assistants, and an empty chair in the center where the executive producer was supposed to sit.

My chair.Tomorrow.

I slipped into the back corner, against the wall, where a row of extra chairs sat empty.Nobody questioned me.In a control room running on deadline adrenaline, people came and went — network executives, visiting producers, the occasional lost intern.I was just another body in the dark.

The countdown clock hit zero.The theme music kicked in — that four-note brass fanfare I'd heard a thousand times through television speakers, now landing in the room with a physical weight that caught me off guard.On the center monitor, the Beacon News Tonight graphic spun and dissolved, and there he was.

Nelson.

My breath did something involuntary, and I disguised it as a cough.

He looked — God, he looked exactly like himself, and nothing like himself at all.The kid I'd known — the one who grinned too big and shook people's hands with both of his and once cried in an editing bay over a story about a homeless veteran — was gone.In his place was a man carved from marble and lit by professionals.Black hair with the faintest blue cast under the studio lights.Ice-blue eyes locked on the camera with an intensity that made the air in the control room feel thinner.Nelson wore a navy suit — structured, sharp, not a single element out of place — and he sat behind that anchor desk like the desk had been built around him.

He was beautiful.That wasn't new.Nelson had always been beautiful in a way that was almost aggressive — tall, angular, a face that could stop a conversation from twenty feet away.But this was different.This beauty had been weaponized.Cut and polished and aimed straight down a camera lens.It was terrifying.

"Good evening.I'm Nelson Mackenzie, and this is Beacon News Tonight."