Somewhere down at City Hall, Jillian Morris let out a breath she'd probably been holding for over a decade.
"I'm sending you a list," she said, and she was already typing; I could hear the keys."Every major outlet with a newsroom in this city.You're going to update your résumé, you're going to put on real pants, and you're going to start making calls."
"You're awfully bossy for someone who isn't my mother."
"Your mother would agree with me and you know it.List's coming tonight.And Jimmy?"
"What?"
"Throw away the noodles."
She hung up.I set the phone on my chest and lay there, listening to the radiator clanking like a ghost was trapped inside it .
The Peabody glinted on its cinder block shelf.My laptop sat on the floor beside the couch, still open to the email from Todd in accounting — twenty-one days old, read more times than I'd admit, memorized against my will.
I turned my head and looked at the apartment.Really looked, the way I'd look at a location I was scouting for a film.The single overhead bulb that buzzed.The kitchenette with its two-burner stove and the cabinet door that wouldn't quite close.The window that didn't lock, letting up the sound of the street — somebody's car alarm, somebody's music, somebody else's life running louder and fuller than mine.
This was what thirteen years of integrity looked like.This was what principles bought you once the checks stopped coming.
I sat up.Swung my feet to the floor.Carried the noodle container to the trash and dropped it in.
Then I opened the laptop, closed the email from Todd, and started a new résumé.
ChapterFour
Nelson
The teleprompter was wrong.
Not catastrophically wrong, the kind of wrong a viewer at home would catch — curled on the couch with a glass of wine and half an eye on their phone.But I caught it.I caught it because catching it was the job, and because the copy readthe senator's office issued a statement this morning refuting the allegationswhen it should have readdenyingthe allegations — because refute and deny are not the same word, and if this network couldn't be bothered to know the difference, I didn't see why we kept pretending to be journalists.
I delivered the line correctly.The audience would never know there'd been a choice to make.But I knew, and the control room knew, and somewhere behind the glass wall that separated my desk from the rest of the operation, my executive producer, Greg Fletcher, was hopefully finding the good sense to be embarrassed.
The red light on Camera Two held steady.I looked directly into it — not through it, not past it, into it — the way I'd trained myself to years ago.The camera wasn't just a machine.There were fourteen million people in their living rooms watching me, and every one of them deserved to feel I was speaking to them alone.That was the job.Not reading copy, not looking good under studio light, though I did both exceptionally well.The job was trust.You either made people trust you or you didn't, and if you didn't, no amount of lighting or wardrobe or hair and makeup would save you.
"Nelson, package on the trade deal in thirty," Greg said in my earpiece.He always sounded nervous.He'd sounded nervous for all four months he'd held the EP chair, and tonight — his last night, though he didn't know it yet — was no exception.
The trade-deal package was forty-five seconds of mediocrity that should have died in the editorial meeting, but Greg had championed it, because Greg championed things that were safe and shapeless and would offend no one — which was precisely the editorial instinct killing this show.
Beacon News Tonight had been the flagship of this network for twenty-two years.Eleven Emmys.Stories that had reshaped elections.Under Greg Fletcher it had become the journalistic equivalent of unseasoned chicken: technically edible, impossible to remember five minutes later.
The package ran.I watched it on the monitor with an expression of composed attention while mentally drafting the memo I'd send Bruce Coleman tonight — after the broadcast wrapped, before Greg reached his car.It would be professional, precise, and devastating.
I'd written two in the past eighteen months.One for Greg's predecessor, David Barr, who lasted six months before developing what he told HR were "stress-related health concerns."One for the EP before him, a woman named Liz Harmon, who simply stopped coming in and mailed her badge back in a padded envelope.
I wasn't proud of that, but I also wasn't sorry.
The package ended.I turned back to Camera Two with seamless precision."The Senate Finance Committee is expected to hold hearings on the deal next week.We'll have full coverage as the story develops."
One beat.Two.
"Still ahead — new questions tonight about the Pentagon's classified spending program.That story, when we come back."
The red light died.A voice called "Clear!"and the enormous room exhaled around me.Crew shifted, adjusted cables, murmured into headsets.I reached for my water — always to the left of the desk, always exactly seven inches from the edge — and took a measured sip.
Marla St.John, my co-anchor, leaned back in her chair to my right and stretched like a woman easing into a recliner on a Sunday afternoon.She was sixty-three, had been on television for thirty-one years, and approached every broadcast with the magnificent ease of someone who'd been told she was exceptional before the age of forty and had simply never updated the software.
"Refute versus deny," she said, not looking at me.She was examining a ring."I caught that."