The Newsmakers (21 page)

“Will you marry me?” Erica says.

“Let me check with my husband.”

“One more thing, Nancy. I'd like you to design a dress for me to wear to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.”

Nancy stops cold for a moment. “Seriously?”

Erica nods.

“I'd be delighted and honored. Are you going with Greg?”

“Nylan.”

“Oh.” Nancy's eyebrows go up, something shifts in her face.

Erica steps into the closet and gestures for Nancy to join her. She lowers her voice, “What is it?”

Nancy also lowers her voice. “Nothing.”

“Nancy, I saw that look.”

“Discretion is the better part of holding on to my job.”

“You have my word nothing you say will leave this room.”

Nancy moves around a few pieces, generally fusses with the clothes in a make-work way, and asks with feigned nonchalance, “Have you seen the women Nylan dates?”

“I know they're young and beautiful.”

Nancy pulls a dress and hands it to Erica. “Hold this up.” Erica does and Nancy steps back in scrutiny. “Some of them are in our business. And others rent by the hour.” Nancy shakes her head at the dress, takes it from Erica, and tosses it onto the ottoman. “I think we can winnow that one.” She pulls a pair of shoes with clear Lucite high heels. “Tack-y. These shoes are positively”—she looks Erica in the eye—“
predatory
.” She tosses them on top of the dress and pulls a teal cardigan. “I actually bought this for Sue Williams.”

“Sue Williams?”

Nancy holds the cardigan up in front of Erica, saying breezily, “She was the top-rated anchor at the Phoenix CBS affiliate. One of Nylan's first hires before GNN went on the air. Then they went to Davos together. Sue never came back to the network . . . Some men don't take rejection well. All wrong for your skin tone,” she announces, tossing the sweater on the reject pile.

“All wrong.”

“A woman in your position has to be so careful about what she wears,” Nancy says.

“I don't want to end up on the ‘What Was She Thinking?' list.”

CHAPTER 48

GREG LIVES IN A GRACEFUL
prewar building on the corner of Eighty-Second and Riverside Drive. Erica is curious to see what his apartment is like, how it's furnished, what it says about him. When she enters the ornate lobby, the doorman smiles in recognition and says, “Mr. Underwood is in 1014.”

Greg answers the door wearing cargo pants, a black pullover, and beat-up sneakers. His green eyes light up in a welcoming smile and Erica feels this
pull
toward him.

“Welcome to my thank-you-Nylan-Hastings abode.”

He ushers her into the foyer, and she hands him a dozen irises.

“Twenty-first-century gender roles are pretty confusing, but if they include men getting flowers, I'm all for it. Let me grab a vase.”

Greg disappears into the galley kitchen and Erica walks into the living room. The room has great bones—a box ceiling and a fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves—and is filled with comfortable furniture, framed prints, and photos. Windows face a small balcony and the river below.

“I picked up some awesome Italian grapefruit soda. Can I interest you in a glass?” Greg calls from the kitchen.

“Sure. And did you just use the word
awesome
?”

“Tragic, huh?” he says, walking in and handing Erica the drink.

“This is delicious.”

He picks a tray up off a side table. “Tuna tartare?”

She takes one. “Wow, a lot of horseradish.”

“You like?”

“Delicious. Please tell me you didn't make this.”

“I love to cook.”

He loves to cook.

They sit on sofas on either side of the coffee table.

“So, you had an exciting day,” Greg says. “You're getting the coveted nine p.m. slot. And I heard some numbers. Welcome to the one percent.”

“I'll believe it when I spend it.” Erica puts down her drink. “Greg, Nylan wants me behind a desk pretty much all the time. That's not where I want to be.”

“I know it isn't. My advice: Let's get your show up and running. If the ratings are as good as we hope they're going to be, you can . . . well,
demand
may be too strong a word . . . but you can
suggest
that you cover certain stories personally, out in the field. I'll back you up. At that point it will be very difficult for Nylan to say no.”

What would she do without Greg's savvy? “You're right, of course. I think I was anticipating problems. Not a great attitude.” She wants to discuss some of her qualms about Nylan himself—his grandiosity, his cold eyes, his suggestive looks, his rabid fervor, the nagging fear he generates in her, the sick little stunt with the flowers—but wonders if it would be indiscreet. After all, Nylan signs Greg's checks. She focuses on what matters most to her. “I want to stay front and center on the Barrish murder, even if that means spending more time in LA.”

“Have there been any new developments?”

“I'm waiting for the results of the forensics on the car. I think this was clearly a murder for hire. And the people doing the hiring have to be pretty far up the food chain.”

“Meaning?”

“Yanez was obviously the last link. A pawn who sold his life for 10K. There are layers between him and whoever ordered the murder. It could be a terrorist organization with sophisticated operations in this country. Or a political rival who is
really
ruthless. Or a foreign leader. I wouldn't put it past Putin. I suppose it could be some homegrown American crazy like Timothy McVeigh or Cliven Bundy, but those guys are pretty basic at the end of the day. They have the motive—hatred of the government—but not the smarts or the means to pull off something like this.”

Greg is looking at her but he's only half listening. Erica knows that look. She's been getting it—and ignoring it—pretty much since she hit puberty. When he sees her note it, he rubs his hands together to cover his raw desire. “You do know that the crime may never get solved.”

“Not from want of trying,” Erica says.

“Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes. I made chicken Provençal.”

“Sounds yummy.”

There's a loaded pause, and that look comes back into his eyes. “Would you like to see the view?”

“Yes, I would . . .”

They go out to the balcony. It's a beautiful spring night with a silver moon cresting the endless sky—and down below, the river glows like phosphorescence and the city glitters like a billion jewels. And Erica is above it all and, yes, her dreams are coming true. Is she dreaming now?

Greg stands behind her, wraps his arms around her, and kisses the back of her neck, and his lips are warm and soft and rough and tender and insistent. His hands run down her arms and waist and hips, and he gently turns her body and his eyes are pools of kindness and promise, and then they kiss and her chest is rising and falling with each breath, rising and falling into his arms, his lips, and she runs her hand down his cheek and she wants him, she wants this . . . and there's nothing but their kisses and the night . . .

He takes her hand to lead her inside and she whispers, “Greg, I'm . . . I'm not ready . . . not yet.”

And he looks at her and smiles away his disappointment. He tenderly brushes her hair off her forehead, then leans down and kisses her one more time. “Speaking of ready, it's time to eat.”

“I'm so hungry,” Erica says, although food is the furthest thing from her mind.

CHAPTER 49

ERICA IS SOMEWHERE IN DEEPEST
Queens, sweating and straining, huffing and puffing—and it feels so good.

“Run the pattern one more time,” Grandmaster Nam Soo Kyong tells the class, which obediently runs through the Tae Kwon Do series of stretches, kicks, and lunges yet again.

The dojang is crowded; about half the practitioners are Asian, the rest are the usual New York mosaic of colors, shapes, and ages. Erica found the place online, where it earned rave reviews. Then she dressed down, stuck a cap on her head, and took the subway out to Flushing. She walked down from the elevated station to find a thriving neighborhood of fruit-and-vegetable stands selling exotic produce she'd never seen before, restaurants, clothing stores, fish markets spilling onto the sidewalks thick with shoppers. Every sign is in Korean, incomprehensible chatter fills Erica's ears, the air is aromatic with exotic spices, car exhaust, and fresh fish—immigrants bring such entrepreneurial energy to this city, to this country, she thinks. These are people hungry for the American dream, and she hates the way they've been demonized by xenophobic ideologues.

Nobody in the dojang seems to recognize Erica, which is both disappointing and liberating. After the warm-up, the class breaks into partners and the sparring starts. Erica finds herself facing off against a teenage Korean girl—who is fierce. She and the girl exchange head-height kicks and blocks, jumping and spinning—the whole body focused on the foot, concentration fierce. And then, between kicks, total relaxation, which conserves and marshals the energy. All of it performed with breath control—exhale on the kick.

Tae Kwon Do was developed in Korea in the 1940s, a hybrid of Japanese karate, Chinese martial arts, and ancient Korean self-defense and combat exercises. It goes beyond the actions and moves—stressing courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-discipline, and invincibility.

Erica took her first class when she was a freshman at Yale. She had two motives. One was to make sure that her father was the last man who ever hit her. The other was that Yale's urban campus was foreign territory to a girl who'd grown up in all-white rural Maine. The uncomfortable truth was that it took her some months to get comfortable with all the diversity. Once she did, she fell in love with the melting pot. And with Tae Kwon Do.

Erica came to think of her classes in New Haven as lessons in adulthood. Early on, she was tempted to go home and test what she'd learned on her father. But that rage for revenge faded as her practice strengthened. Why sink to her parents' level?

The fact is Erica has never been back home since that late-August day when she left for Yale. Her mother drove her to the bus station. When they arrived, there was a moment of silence. They sat there, the engine running, daughter off to forge a life out of the trauma and chaos of her childhood, mother back to the leaky prefab, her pot pipe, and her black-market painkillers. Sitting in the rickety Chevy, there was so much to say. And nothing to say. Her mother lit a Kool. Erica got out of the car, got her one suitcase out of the backseat, and turned toward the tiny bus depot.

“Erica,” her mother called.

Erica turned back. Her mother was leaning across the front seat toward the open passenger window.

“Listen, you're off to that fancy school now. No one in this family has ever had that kind of chance. Then again, no one's ever had your brains.”

Erica was buoyed—her mother was going to send her off with words of encouragement.

“But just remember, you can change a lot of things in your life, but you can't ever,
ever
change where you come from. And deep down, you'll never be better than any of us.” She snickered, took a drag of her cigarette, and drove off.

With each Tae Kwon Do move, Erica feels herself growing more centered and engaged in the moment. She tries to stare down the fear that has been festering inside her since she found those glasses in front of her computer, that ratcheted up after the elevator jerked to a sudden, terrifying stop, that was further fueled by the water bugs crawling out of the red roses. But no matter how deeply she breathes or how graceful her moves, she can't shake the sense that she's in danger.

The class ends. Erica thanks her sparring partner and the grandmaster. She is so glad she came. Not only because her practice feels tuned up and sharpened, but because she renewed her connection to a discipline that has been important to her, that helped her survive at Yale. And that may help her survive in the days ahead.

As she walks out into the New York evening, she turns on her cell phone and sees there's been a call from Moira. She calls her back on her prepaid.

“Hey, Erica, we just heard from a source in the LAPD that there's been a break in the Barrish case. No word on what it is.”

“Thanks for the heads-up. I'll call Detective Takahashi.”

“And, Erica, I did some serious digging on Fred Wilmot.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“I'd call it disturbing. Wilmot and Nylan Hastings have been best friends since grade school. They grew up together in Winnetka, a rich
suburb of Chicago. Hastings went off to Stanford, Wilmot to Brown. He was the first person Hastings brought on board when he founded Universe. When he was at Brown, Wilmot was accused of selling cocaine to his classmates. It was never proved and the school handled it internally.”

“Not exactly the best character reference, but we all make mistakes at that age.”

“It's the mistake he made when he was ten that disturbs me. With his best friend Nylan watching, he doused a neighbor's golden retriever with lighter fluid and set it on fire.”

Erica stops dead on the sidewalk. “Oh no.”

“Then they stood there and watched it burn.”

“I feel sick, Moy.”

“Erica, you're working for men who have ambitions beyond our imagining. Cold, ruthless, predatory men, men who light dogs on fire. Be careful.”

Should she tell Moira about the glasses, the elevator, the water bugs? She doesn't want to alarm her friend even more. And she doesn't want to jeopardize her career by leaping to any unproven conclusions. Those glasses were probably a cheap stunt by Claire Wilcox. She has no proof the elevator incident was intentional. The water bugs were pretty juvenile in the end. Erica has an awful lot at stake—her future with Jenny, her show, her power, her salary. She can't let overblown fears derail her. She's got an investigation to pursue.