Hard News (Rune 3)

They were at an outdoor table at a Mexican restaurant near the West Side Highway, the table filled with red cans of Tecate beer and chips and salsa--and a ton of printed material about Lance Hopper and Randy Boggs.

Bradford had wanted to ask her out again, as it happened, but Rune was content to keep the evening mostly professional.

The intern scooted his chair closer to hers and Rune endured a little knee contact while they read through the Hopper files. "Where's Courtney?" Brad asked.

"Let's not go there," Rune said.

"Sure. She's okay?"

Yes, no. Probably not.

"She's fine."

"She's really cute."

Let's not go there, she thought and turned back to the files on Lance Hopper that Bradford had found in the archives.

As they read she began to form a clearer picture of the late head of Network News.

Hopper was a difficult man--demanding that everyone at the Network work as hard as he did and not let their personal lives interfere with the job. He was also greedy and jealous and petty and wildly ambitious and several times, when his contract was up, virtually extorted the parent company for stock options that increased his worth by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet he was also a man with a heart. For instance, spending as much time with the interns as he did, as Bradford had mentioned. He advocated educational programming for youngsters on the Network, even though shows like those produced far less revenue than after-school cartoons and adventure programs.

Hopper regularly appeared in Washington before the FCC and congressional committees, testifying about the importance of unfettered media. He was often vilified by conservative, family-oriented groups, who thought there should be more censorship on TV.

Hopper also took responsibility for the worst black eye in the history of the Network. Three years ago--just before his death--the Network had run an award-winning story as part of the coverage of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. The story was an exclusive about a village outside of Beirut that appeared to be liberal-minded and pro-Western but was in fact a stronghold for fundamentalist militants.

But when a U.N. force made a sweep of the village to look for suspected terrorists they were so prepared to meet resistance that the operation turned into a bloodbath after a solitary sniper fired one shot near the convoy. A chain reaction of shooting followed. There were twenty-eight deaths, all by friendly fire, including some U.S. soldiers. The "sniper" turned out to be a ten-year-old boy shooting at rocks. The militants, it seemed, were long gone. Some blamed the U.N. for relying on a news story for its intelligence but most people thought it was the Network's fault for doing the story in the first place or for not at least following up and reporting that the terrorists were no longer there.

Hopper took responsibility for the incident and personally went to Beirut to attend the funerals of the slain villagers.

Bradford and Rune continued to pore over the files and, though a portrait of Hopper as a complex, ambitious and ruthless man appeared, no evident motive for his death emerged.

From there they turned to the transcripts of interviews Rune had made over the past week as she'd traveled around the East Coast and the South talking to people who knew Randy Boggs.

Yeah, Randy Boggs worked for me for close to two years. He come in and was looking for a job. Good boy. Dependable. He wasn't no killer. He pushed a broom with the best of them. I'm sure it was the sixties. We had the Negro problem then. Course, we still have the Negro problem. 'Bout that, I'd like to say a few words, seeing how you have a camera--

Next ...

Randy Boggs? Yeah, I knew the Boggs family. Boys I don't remember. Father was a mean motherfucker. Man, the--

Next ...

Randy? Yeah. We had this lobster business. But--you got the camera rolling? Okay, let me tell you this story. The wife and I were one time over to Portland and we were driving in the Chevy--we always buy American cars, even if they're a pile of you know what. So we were driving along and there were these three lights in the sky, and we knew they weren't planes because they were so bright. Then one of them--

Next ...

Rune yawned violently.

"You okay?" Bradford asked.

"More or less." She opened another file.

Her life had become an endless circle of long hours by herself, of flying on airplanes and staying in hotels that somebody else paid for, of tense meetings at the Network, of interviews that sometimes careened out of control and sometimes worked, of a lonely houseboat, of a chaotic editing room. (One morning she woke up to find that she'd fallen asleep with the Betacam next to her--which wasn't so scary as the fact that she'd slept with her arm around it all night.) She gave up late-night clubs, she gave up West Village writers' bars. Even gave up seeing Sam Healy much. Piper Sutton would occasionally swoop by Rune's cubicle for a status report, like an eagle grabbing a squirming trout in its talons.

As she and Bradford pored over all this material now, amid the raucous laughter and boasting and flirting of dozens of young lawyers and businesspeople drunk on tequila and the thrill of life in Manhattan, Rune felt both more and more incensed that such a vital and important man as Lance Hopper had been killed and more and more certain that Randy Boggs hadn't done it.

chapter 12