Hard News (Rune 3)

"Sorry, Rune. I'm so sorry." Maisel gave her a grim smile but the disappointment and disgust in his face overwhelmed it. He blew air slowly out through his rounded cheeks. Rune could see he was suffering.

Good, she thought.

Maisel poured his drink down in one swallow. "I don't know what to say to you. I tried to stop it all without hurting you."

Jack said, "Yeah, he's right. We tried to kill Boggs in prison. That would've solved--"

"You tried to ..." Rune looked at Maisel; he wouldn't meet her eyes.

"Paid to have a buddy of mine in Harrison kill Boggs. Then when you got him out I tried to do it myself. But that man just wouldn't die."

"It wasn't Piper? But she did everything she could to stop the story."

"Well, sure," Maisel said. "The story would've been bad for her image--she didn't want the EEOC suits coming to light. She hated having the courts to fight her battles for her. But just because she didn't want the

story to run didn't mean she was going to stop it."

"You encouraged me to keep going with it."

"There'd been rumors that there was more to Hopper's death than just Randy Boggs acting alone. We needed you to find the evidence, witnesses. We knew we could control you."

Rune said to Maisel, "Why did you do it?"

"What does it matter?"

"It fucking matters to me!" she snapped.

"Beirut," Nestor said.

"Shut up!" Maisel snapped.

"The story where those people got killed?"

"Right."

"She doesn't need to know," Maisel muttered.

"Why not?" Nestor said. "You fucked up, Lee. You may as well admit it." To Rune he said, "You know Lee's big scoop a few years back? His big fucking award?"

She remembered his Pulitzer. She nodded.

"Well, it was all fake. He made up the interviews, he made up the names of the locals. Who understands all those raghead names anyway? He said they had machine guns and hand grenades and rockets. He scooped everybody."

"Jack ...," Maisel said angrily.

But Nestor kept right on going. "Only the problem was the U.S. Army believed the story and when they went into this village they were loaded for bear. Some Arab kid shot a round at a dog or rabbit or whatever they got over there and, jittery trigger fingers, the whole platoon opened up. When the smoke cleared there were a bunch of dead ragheads and a couple of our own boys. All friendly fire. All courtesy of Mr. Newsman here."

"You made up the whole story?" she asked.

"It wasn't a big deal," Maisel said bitterly. "I mean, it shouldn't've been. I didn't even think anybody'd pay attention to it. You have to understand--there's so much pressure to get stories. There's so much time to fill and so little hard news. And always the fucking competition breathing down your neck. I started just adding a few quotes and the next thing I knew it got out of hand. I never thought it would have any consequences."

"But it did," Jack Nestor said, laughing cruelly. "And one of 'em was that Lance Hopper was going to investigate what happened."

"So you hired him." Rune nodded toward Nestor.

The killer said, "Mercenaries and journalists hang out a lot together in combat zones. Isn't much difference between them really, you think about it. Lee and me spent some time together over there, looking for the underground bars--fucking ragheads can't even drink--and hanging out. I go off to Sri Lanka and come back to California, where I do some funny stuff that lands me in Obispo for a while, doing easy time. When I get out Lee calls me and flies me into town to talk to him. The rest is history...."

Maisel didn't look good. He was pale and sweating. Beneath his salt-and-pepper beard, you could see his lips pressed together. She wondered what bothered him the most: That he'd nearly been caught violating journalistic ethics or that he'd had several people killed to cover it up.