Courier (3 page)

He looked back, expecting to see that the Chevy had stopped, and the driver was coming over to see if he was OK. More likely, he'd come over and yell at him for getting in his way.

The black car was gone.

As he sat there, he saw the light finally turn red.

Rick blew out a deep breath and drove the half-block to the bureau – slowly and carefully.

CHAPTER 3

 

The GW Parkway southbound was almost empty, so Ed Farr had the big Jeep way up over eighty miles per hour. He knew that they had to get to the bureau in time for Hadley to write and voice his story, and he was confident that they could fast-talk their way out of a traffic stop. After all, they were legitimate members of the national press corps on an important story, right?

Hadley was in the backseat, alternately looking off into the middle distance and furiously scribbling in his notebook. Pete Moten was in the front passenger seat. He lit a cigarette, leaned forward, and turned on the radio before remembering that he'd left it set to a soul station before they picked up Hadley.

The fast funk of "Whole Lot of BS" filled the car.

The reporter shouted without looking up, "Turn that crap off!"

"Cool out, man," Moten responded. "Just relax and feel the beat."

 

In the left-side wheel wells, two timers finished their countdowns, and the explosive devices clamped over the tires detonated almost simultaneously. Custom-made, they were essentially the reverse of a claymore mine. The standard US Army claymore was a convex metal plate covered on one side with C-4 explosive and ball bearings – built to spray death outward in a wide swath. These devices were built on a concave steel plate so that the relatively small explosion drove tiny ball bearings inward like a spear, shredding the tires instantly, but leaving little evidence of an explosion on the body of the car. The small metal boxes fell to the side of the road as the blast destroyed the batteries and released the electromagnets that held the devices to the vehicle.

The heavy Jeep swerved violently to the left, throwing the soundman and the reporter against the doors and wrenching the steering wheel out of the cameraman's hands. None of them were wearing seatbelts.

At this point in the parkway, right after the first scenic overlook, the grass median was wide and dropped down to a V-shaped point in the middle.

After lifting up onto its two right wheels and almost rolling sideways, the Wagoneer smashed back down just as it hit the median's lowest point, bottoming out the heavyweight springs and sending a spray of mud and frozen grass out to both sides. When the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle hit the opposite slope, it was still moving at over sixty miles per hour and the release of the massively compressed springs and its own momentum launched it into the air as it tore up the slope. It soared over the northbound lane, slowly rolling over to the right in midair and passing directly over a VW bug. It just clipped the low stone wall at the opposite shoulder with the right rear tire and began to roll forward as it disappeared.

The VW pulled into the parking lot of the scenic overview and jerked to a stop. The driver, a pale and shaken college student, opened his door, threw up, and then just sat and shook. His girlfriend got out of the passenger side and approached the stone wall at the edge of the drop. To her right, she could see the line of smashed trees and torn bushes that marked the path of the Jeep, but she couldn't see where it had landed. She climbed the stone wall and, clutching the sturdiest branches she could find, leaned out over the precipice.

At that point, the George Washington Parkway climbed high on the rocky shelf above where the Potomac River, driven by its rush down the six-hundred-foot-high fall line between the Appalachians and the coastal plain, had cut a deep wedge in the land. The Jeep had dropped about a hundred yards and smashed into one of the rocks that emerged from the rushing brown water.

The Jeep lay upside down, and the girl almost didn't recognize it as a vehicle. Then she realized that the roof had not only been flattened on the rock but actually driven inward, giving the tall truck-like vehicle the squashed look of a stepped-on cardboard box. As she watched, Pete Moten's cigarette ignited the fumes from the ruptured gas tank and a fireball erupted – painting orange shadows on the trees on the opposite bank and brushing her face with a gentle rush of warm air even far above where she stood.

She worked her way back to the parking lot, got in the car, told her boyfriend to pull himself together, start the car, and get her to the closest phone booth – even though it didn't look as if there could be any survivors. Since the closest phone was several miles away at a gas station on Chain Bridge Road, it was over a half hour before the DC police riverboats fought their way upriver from their base near the Tidal Basin to the crash site.

The bodies weren't identified until long after midnight.

CHAPTER 4

 

Rick strode up the short walk to the back door of the news bureau without taking off his battered helmet; radio and gloves clipped to his belt, boots tapping on the concrete, wearing the black T-shirt, worn blue jeans, and leather bomber jacket that made up his everyday wardrobe. His long, unruly hair came out in a spray from under the helmet, and his heavy black-framed glasses – essential for cutting windblast on the bike – gave him a studious look at odds with the tough image most couriers cultivated. To an observer, only the tightness around Rick's blue eyes – normally calm and somewhat bemused – would have revealed his anger over the close call with the black Chevy.

He had, of course, already lit up a cigarette. He held it in his left hand as he balanced the massive film magazine upside down over his shoulder with his right. Ridged pink scars webbed the back of the right hand, only a preview of the chaotic moments in battle and the long months of painful recovery that had been written in blood down the right side of his body.

Pushing through the two doors at the entrance, he started down the main hallway. Even after several months working for the news network, Rick still felt a thrill when he came into the bureau as the approaching deadline for the evening news stirred the place into an organized frenzy. Looking left, the newsroom was a sea of battered metal desks pushed into groups of two or three under harsh fluorescent lights. The room looked chaotic, with a lot of people moving quickly and talking loudly, but Rick knew the underlying choreography that welded them into a team.

In the far corner, a half-dozen wire machines the size of suburban mailboxes were hammering against long rolls of yellow multicopy paper. Two desk assistants tended the bulky machines, listening through the continuous jangles of single and double bells, which meant updates and new slugs, for the sequence of seven bells that signaled a significant news event. Every few minutes, they would rip the top four layers of paper against the sharp faceplate on the front of a wire machine, leaving the bottom copies to continue falling into serpentine piles in the back. The other copies were rolled, marked, and taped, then quickly brought to the senior producer, both writers, and the anchor.

The writers, quiet, older men who looked like they came straight out of the cast of
The Front Page
, scrolled through their rolls of wire copy. One would stop and rip out a particularly interesting story against the edge of the desk, spiking the ragged pieces on a small metal rod. The other – who wore a green plastic eyeshade – would meticulously clip items by holding down the scroll and slicing them off with a metal ruler and then fold them, mark them with a story title, and spread them in neat rows down the side of his desk.

Either way, by the end of the day, both of their desks would be covered with a slurry of wire stories, newspapers, and notepads. Periodically, they would turn to the solid upright typewriters that sat at a right angle to their desks, insert a thick script pack of ten interleaved colored pages and carbon sheets, and hammer out a few seconds of the anchor's script.

Over on the right side, the production assistant was discussing graphics with one of the artists, and as usual, it was escalating into a loud argument. The artist was defending the creative merit of her four-by-six gel, while the PA patiently tried to explain that, while it was indeed beautiful, it simply didn't have anything to do with the story it was meant to illustrate. In Rick's experience, graphic artists were eternally unhappy – torn between genuine artistic talent and the demands of producers with all the aesthetic vision of a plundering Visigoth.

The senior producer and the DC anchor were sitting at side-by-side desks near the front of the room. As usual, they were on the phone, probably talking to New York, their faces tilted down and their eyes glazed – their attention totally devoted to the conversation. The producer, a chunky middle-aged man named Tom Evans who somehow managed to keep a lit Lucky Strike between his lips even while talking, glanced up and saw Rick and raised his eyebrows in a mute question.

"It's Hadley's," Rick called, lifting up the film as he walked past. Evans nodded and gave him a thumbs-up before turning his attention back to the phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear.

"Jeez, hurry up and get that in the soup," said a voice to his right. Rick had to rotate his whole body to see around the bulky film magazine and find film editor Don Moretti standing in the door of his edit room.

"I've got to cut that for the six and I'll only have…" Moretti checked the large clock that hung over his edit table just as similar clocks hung in every room in the building. "Twelve minutes as it is."

"Darn, and here I thought I could take a cigarette break before I brought it in."

"You would, you son of a bitch." Moretti grinned and spun back to the big Steenbeck flatbed screener where other elements of the story were already loaded through the intricate maze of sprockets and audio heads.

Rick liked the brash editor. He was always moving, talking, and joking – leaping from subject to subject. Still, he was one of the fastest and most accurate editors in the place, and when it came down to those final minutes before air, Rick had often heard from the reporters that they wanted Moretti working their piece. After all, Moretti was the best damn editor in town. At least, that's what he would tell anyone who would bother to listen.

On the other hand, he also claimed that he'd played rhythm guitar and sung backup on Crazy Elephant's classic bubblegum song "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'", but the song had come out while Rick was in Vietnam and he hadn't heard it enough to be sure it was Moretti's voice.

When he didn't have a run, Rick would spend hours in Moretti's edit room, absorbing the flow of the newsroom: the desk assistants running the scripts to the technicians, who typed them on to the paper cue rolls that would appear in a mirror in front of the anchor; the intense conversations between reporters and producers as they mapped out a story; directors race-walking down the hall to the control room to polish the final product. He enjoyed the atmosphere of rough camaraderie and black humor combined with serious conversations about oil shortages, election strategies, and distant wars.

Then there were the editors in their white cotton gloves, furiously spinning the film reels on either side of their edit bench. They would grab shots they had chosen earlier from where they were hanging above a cloth-lined cart – held by pins through their sprocket holes – whip them down onto the sync block to match them up with the rest of the edits, and then pull them off and onto the splicer. Two flashing cuts with the splicer's diagonal blades, a strip of tape to hold the ends together, and a final double slam of the side blades to trim the clear editing tape so that it was just slightly bowed in and wouldn't jam when it went through the projector. Don had told him that real film editors only used tape splices on a working copy and sent the original film out for professional processing for a smooth final cut.There was no time for that in a newsroom.

Rick continued down the narrow hall, past the audio booth where the recording engineer sat studying for his law degree – a clear indication that the reporters weren't ready to lay down a track yet – and then made a right turn into the back hall. On the left were the double doors with the sign that labeled them as belonging to the office of the mythical Joe Telecine. Through the small window on each door, Rick caught a glimpse of the "two-inch" videotape machines in the back – the engineers who operated them bellied up as if they were playing six-foot-tall pinball machines. That was unfamiliar territory: union engineers had no time for scruffy couriers.

Straight ahead was the film crew's ready room, with battered lockers, equipment cages made of chain-link fencing, and at the end, his destination – film processing.

As usual, the place amazed him. A catwalk across the entire rear of the room held enormous white plastic tanks of chemicals. Alternating stacks of silvered aluminum and bright red plastic film cans covered the walls on either side, and on top were piles of shipping bags made out of a rough twine netting stamped with "Urgent Shipment Newsfilm" and the bright blue ABN logo.

Power lines and plastic pipes of all sizes ran in racks overhead and converged in the center of the room at two large machines. These were the automatic processors, which never stopped grinding away. When there was no new film to develop, yards and yards of clear junk film would be running up and down between spindles and in and out of chemical baths – the first baths covered with lightproof seals, and the later ones open.

The smaller unit to the left was for when the film needed to be darkened or lightened or have the color balance adjusted. The massive main unit on the right took up most of the room, churning out thousands of feet of sixteen-millimeter color-positive film a day. Rick could see the flickering images of developed film rolling toward the final take-up reels. The rest was clear. He knew that this meant Hadley's story wouldn't have to wait for another story to finish.