Hard News (Rune 3)

Morrie said delicately, "She did. Charlie got it. He programmed it in. Sometime after four it disappeared."

"Son of a bitch. How long was that segment?"

Morrie consulted his clipboard but Rune answered from memory. "Eleven minutes, fourteen."

Sutton whispered furiously, "You should always make backups, you should--"

"I did! They were stolen too. Everything. Even the original tapes ..."

"Fuck," Sutton spat out. Then she turned to Maisel, whose mind must have been in the same place and known what she was thinking. There were three other stories programmed for Current Events that evening. But Maisel said they had nothing else finished that could be used as a replacement for "Easy Justice." He said, "We'll have to cancel the show."

"Can we go with Arabs in Queens?" she asked.

He said, "We never finished editing. We stopped all postpro for the Boggs story."

"What about the former-mayor profile?"

"Mostly unshot and a lot of unattributed quotes. It's legally hot."

"The Guardian Angels piece?" she snapped.

"We've got footage but there's no script."

"It's outlined?"

"Well, in general. But--"

"I know the story." She waved her hand. "We'll do that."

"What do you mean?" Maisel asked, frowning. "Do what?"

"We do the original three stories plus the Guardian Angels."

Maisel's voice rasped, "Piper, we'll have to cancel. We can slot a rerun." He turned to Morrie and started to say something. But she said, "Lee, a rerun of a news show? We'll go with the Angels."

"I don't understand what you're saying, Piper. We don't have a script. We don't have footage of you. We--"

"We'll go live," she said.

"Live?"

"Yep."

Maisel looked at Morrie. "It's too late, isn't it?"

He answered calmly. "We can't do half and half. We can shut off the computer and queue up the other stories by hand, using a stopwatch. Like in the old days. You'll have to be live in all of your on-camera commentary. Hell, we'll have to manually roll the commercials too and you know how many fifteen-second buys there are during Current Events? It'll be a nightmare."

"Then it'll be a nightmare." the anchorwoman said.

"But, Piper," Maisel said, "we can slot something else."

She said evenly, "Lee, every TV guide, cable guide and newspaper in America shows that we're running a new Current Events tonight. You know what kind of questions it'll raise about the program if we go to a rerun or slip in something from syndication?"

"We'll say technical difficulties."

"There are no technical difficulties on my show."

"Piper--" Rune began.