"Yes. The feed's coming in now."
Pepsie lowered her head, eyes squeezing tears of relief that coursed down her makeup-powdered cheeks.
"Thank God," she sobbed.
With an effort she came out of her chair and followed the lemminglike streams of staff heading for the monitor room.
"Satellite feed's coming in now," a technician said, hoarse voiced.
All eyes went to a monitor, one of many banks of monitors in the monitor room. Pepsie's eyes raced along the grid, pausing at the one that monitored CNN, which scooped them with annoying frequency.
"Hurry, hurry," she urged. "CNN doesn't have film yet."
The feed came in.
The angle, everyone saw, was not straight on. The ANC cameraman had been blocked by the broad backs of the Secret Service protective ring. The camera jumped around several times.
Pepsie wrung her hands. "Come on. Come on. Steady it. Steady it, please."
As if in response, the camera caught the opening of the limo door emblazoned with the Presidential seal.
"Here it comes," the technician warned. "Prepare yourselves. It could be gruesome."
"Be gruesome," Pepsie whispered prayerfully. "Please, oh please, be gruesome."
The familiar steely haircut ducked up from the dark interior of the limo back, one hand fumbling for the middle button of the dark suit. Abruptly the top of the victim's head came apart.
"This is better than the Zapruder film," Pepsie screamed. "We've got to go on. We've got to go on right now!"
"Let go. Damn it, let go," the news director was saying, trying to disentangle Pepsie's claws from his collar. "I make the decisions here."
"CNN hasn't broken in yet..." the technician reported.
"No cut-ins from the other networks," an intern called.
Pepsie pleaded, "Greg, you've got to go on the air with this. Let me do it, please."
"This is the anchor's job."
"He's not here. I am. Please, please." She was bouncing on her heels now, pulling the news director by his tie as if trying to ring a church bell.
"It's news. We gotta go with something."
"All right. Do it from your desk. We'll superimpose a newsroom background over it."
"Great. Great. You won't regret this," Pepsie Dobbins said, running in her stockinged feet for her desk.
Flinging herself behind her desk, she primped her short sassy shag as she stood up straight. Her back was to a blue screen that the camera couldn't read. A computer-generated newsroom would be laid in the background. Only the audience would see it. No one would suspect it didn't exist.
The red light came on. The news director threw her the signal, and Pepsie Dobbins moistened her red lips as the announcer intoned, "This is an ANC special report."
"And this is Pepsie Dobbins speaking to you from our newsroom here in Washington."
Out of the corner of her eye, Pepsie saw the director pointing frantically to the monitor. Pepsie allowed her left eye to dart to the screen. She had the faculty of being able to move her eyes independently of each other so that when she turned slightly she appeared to be looking directly at the viewer while surreptitiously watching her surroundings.
To her horror, she saw herself on the in-house monitor-against a dead black background.
"In our Washington bureau, excuse me," she corrected. "This just in from Boston, Massachusetts. The President of the United States was shot by unknown persons as he exited his limousine at precisely-" she glanced at her desk clock and guesstimated a time "-10:47 Eastern Standard Time. ANC News had a crew at the scene, and video is being satellited to us even as I speak. We here at ANC have yet to screen this footage, but in the interest of the public's right to ratings-I mean, to know-and as a public service we are showing it to you raw. We caution viewers that some of the scenes you are about to see may be graphic to the point of gruesomeness and that small children and animals should be shooed away so that they do not see it. Everyone else, pull up your chairs. This is history and you are seeing it almost live."
The news director flashed a signal to the technical crew, and Pepsie's left eye went to the monitor.
The monitor was blank.
"Something's wrong," she hissed.
Technicians in the control room frantically threw switches.
The monitor screen winked, and suddenly there appeared the computer-generated ANC Washington bureau newsroom-without Pepsie Dobbins. No footage rolled.
"Where's the damn footage?" Pepsie screamed.
Over the air millions of Americans watched the static newsroom shot and heard the disembodied voice of Pepsie Dobbins demand that the footage be telecast.
The news director shushed her with a finger to his lips.
"Get that fucking footage on the air before CNN beats us to it!" she hollered, her blue tomcat eyes snapping sparks.
Millions of Americans heard that, too.
Then a technician poked his head out of the control room saying, "The deck ate the tape."
The news director cursed and, without looking back, threw the signal to Pepsie to take back the broadcast.
In TV sets all over America, the empty newsroom was replaced by the sight of Pepsie Dobbins, her head down on her desk, tearing tufts of her short brown-blond mane of hair out with enameled nails, repeating "I'm gonna kill everyone in the control room ...." over and over.
In her earpiece, the news director whispered urgently, "You're still on, Pepsie. Improvise something."
Without lifting her head, Pepsie said in a twisted voice, "On behalf of ANC News, I would like to lead the nation in a moment of silence for our martyred President."
Offstage the news director screamed, "What are you doing? We don't know that he's dead yet."
"Trust me on this one," Pepsie muttered.
Then CNN came on with their version of the footage.
It was merciful. The CNN camera crew, well behind Secret Service rope lines, caught only the shirtfront of an anonymous Secret Service agent as the limousine door opened. In another second the man who emerged from the limo would have stepped into clear sight. But he never did.
A shot rang out, and the agents whirled, forming a tight protective knot around the fallen man, 9 mm MAC-lls and 10 mm Delta Elite handguns coming up at the ready.
After that it was aboil in frantic officials. Someone yelled, "It's Dallas all over again!" and the Presidential motorcade sped away from the rushing cameras, grim-faced agents clinging to bumpers and sideboards.
The camera found a pudding of blood and brains on the pavement and lingered on it for nearly a minute. Then other cameramen saw the stain and they quickly trampled it under their jostling feet.
America was spared the gruesome sight. But nothing spared them the horror. Their imaginations filled in the Technicolor details.
HAROLD W SMITH WAS oblivious to the first bulletin. It was ironic. Harold W Smith should have known about the Presidential assassination as it was breaking. At the very least.
In the best of all possible scenarios, Harold Smith should have seen it coming and been able to intercept the assassin. That, among other responsibilities, was Harold W. Smith's duty, as director of CURE, the supersecret government agency he headed.
As the first reports were breaking, Harold W Smith, incongruously attired in a gray three-piece business suit, was in a concrete vault in one corner of the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover installation that masked CURE operations. Smith was completing repairs to the great bank of IDC mainframes that constituted the nerve center of CURE's information-gathering arm.
CURE had been without its full Intelligence-gathering capability for three months now, ever since the awful morning when a combined IRS-DEA raid on Folcroft had forced Smith to erase the thirty years of data he had painstakingly compiled. And as the lasers were burning the deepest secrets of a fractious nation out of existence, Smith had taken the poison pill that would have erased him, too.