Hard News (Rune 3)

Rune stayed where she was for a moment, her heart pounding. She watched as Sutton read a contract as dense as the classified section in the Sunday Times.

"Anything else?" Sutton glanced up.

Rune said, "No. I just want to say I'll do a super job."

"Wonderful," Sutton said without enthusiasm. Then: "What was your name again?"

"Rune."

"Is that a stage name?"

"Sort of."

"Well, Rune, if you're really going to do this story and you don't give up halfway through because it's too much work or too tough or you don't have enough chutzpah--"

"I'm not going to give up. I'm going to get him released."

Sutton barked, "No, you're going to find the truth. Whatever it is, whether it gets him released or proves he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby too."

"Right," Rune said. "The truth."

"If you're really going to do it don't talk to anybody about it except Lee Maisel and me. I want status reports regularly. Verbally. None of this memo bullshit. Got it? No leaks to anyone. That's the most important thing you can do right now."

"The competition isn't going to find out."

Sutton was sighing and shaking her head the same way Rune's algebra teacher had when she'd flunked for the second time. "It's not the competition I'm worried about. I'm worried that you're wrong. That he really is guilty. If we lose a story to another network, well, that happens; it's part of the game. But if there're rumors flying around about a segment we're doing and it turns out to be wrong it's my ass on the line. Comprende, honey?"

Rune nodded and quickly lost the staring contest.

Sutton broke the tension with a question. She sounded amused as she asked, "I'm curious about one thing. "Do you know who Randy Boggs was convicted of killing?"

"I read his name but I don't exactly remember. But what I'll do--"

Sutton cut her off. "His name was Lance Hopper. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Not really."

"It ought to. He was head of Network News here. He was our boss. Now you see why you're playing with fire?"

chapter 4

LEE MAISEL WAS A LARGE, BALDING, BEARDED MAN IN HIS fifties. He wore brown slacks and a tweed jacket over a tie-less button-down dress shirt and a worn burgundy-and-beige argyle sweater. He smoked a meerschaum pipe, yellowed from smoke and age. The pipe was one of a dozen scattered over his desk. He didn't look like a man who made, as executive producer of one of the country's most popular TV newsmagazines, over one million dollars a year.

"I mean, how was I supposed to know who Lance Hopper was?" Rune asked.

"How indeed?"

Maisel and Rune sat in his large office in the Network's portion of the old armory building. Unlike Piper Sutton's office in the parent's high-rise, Maisel's was only thirty feet in the air and overlooked a bowling alley. Rune liked it that he was down here with his troops. Maisel even looked like a general. She could picture him in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, sending tanks after Nazis in North Africa.

Rune sat next to a large Mr. Coffee machine. She looked at it uncertainly--as if the pot contained the nuclear sludge that the coffee resembled. He said, "Turkish." He poured a cup for himself and raised an eyebrow. She shook her head.

"Piper really rides on hyper, doesn't she?" Rune asked. Then it occurred to her that maybe she shouldn't be talking about Sutton this way, at least not to him.

Maisel didn't say anything, though. He asked, "You don't grasp the significance? About Hopper?"

"All I know is Piper said he was head of the Network. Our boss."

Maisel turned and dug through a stack of glossy magazines on his credenza. He found one and handed it to her. It wasn't a magazine, though, but an annual report of the Network's parent company. Maisel leaned forward and opened it to a page near the center, then rested a thick, yellow fingertip on one picture. "That's Lance Hopper."