Courier (10 page)

Jamie Mayweather, the lead White House correspondent, was on the phone and thrust his forefinger up in an urgent signal for Rick to shut up and wait.

"Answer me this," Mayweather roared into the phone. "If you don't know what's going on, who the hell does?" After listening for a second, he broke in. "Don't just tell me 1701! For Christ's sake, are you guys running the White House or are they? OK,
whom
at 1701 should I talk to? Oh, never mind, just forget it. I'll find out on my own." Mayweather then slammed down the phone and spun around to face the courier.

"What the hell do you want?"

"I don't want anything. You wanted a courier pickup."

The reporter glared at him for a second and then became distracted by something in the
New York Times
spread out on the counter to his right. "Well, just wait a damn second," he yelled over his shoulder as he began to read an article.

"What is ‘1701'?" Rick asked.

Mayweather acted as if no one had spoken, but the other reporter – a genial and slightly rumpled man named Ken Garrison, who seemed to have accepted the fact that he would always stand outside the spotlight that Mayweather seemed to carry around with him – said, "1701 Pennsylvania Avenue. The headquarters of CREEP. You know, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President that's already re-elected the President but doesn't seem to know when to go away."

"Ah," Rick said. "Less interesting than I thought. What else is going on?"

"Well, let's see. We've lost two more B-52s over Hanoi and there's a new boss over at the FBI, but the real lead story is that even the President can't get the NFL to lift the blackout on the Redskins playoff game."

Rick smiled. "Now we know where the center of power in this country really is."

"Did you ever doubt it?"

Mayweather shot up out of his chair, roaring, "Can't you people be quiet for two seconds?" He shoved a red-taped can of exposed film in Rick's general direction. "Here, take this back to the bureau. I won't use it tonight, but it will get you the hell out of here."

The phone rang, and Mayweather grabbed it and yelled, "What the hell do you people want? I can't get anything done if you keep calling me with your stupid questions!"

Rick looked quizzically at Garrison, who grinned and mouthed, "New York."

Rick headed back to his bike with the sound of Mayweather's shouting fading away behind him.

 

Rick searched but couldn't find anything to read at the courier desk except an old copy of
Sports Illustrated
he'd already flipped through twice. Technically, there was another magazine there, but it was one of the other couriers' copy of
Easyriders
, which, in Rick's opinion, was the only publication actually written by functional illiterates. He could only guess that the editors dictated it to some poor secretary or perhaps to one of the many girlfriends who were photographed wearing skimpy underwear and caressing their boyfriends' bikes. They always looked a bit uncomfortable, and Rick suspected that the heavy-handed symbolism was a bit much even for them.

"I found it, I found it!"

Shelley bounced out of the affiliate newsroom with a smile on her face, then suddenly stopped and burst into tears. Rick stood up, and she buried her face in his chest. He thought that he probably should give her a hug, but she was wearing the same sort of sheer nylon shirt as yesterday and, clearly, nothing underneath.

He was reduced to awkwardly patting her shoulder.

"Oh God, can you believe it? Joe, Ed, and Pete? They're dead. They're all dead. How can that happen?"

Rick was far too familiar with how death happened and didn't want to dwell on it, so he tried to change the subject. "You said you found something. What was it?"

She held up a red plastic film can. "Oh, I found Joe's film. Not that it matters anymore, I guess. But Ed, the operations producer, told me to find it no matter what it took, so I stayed here all night and looked and looked and couldn't find it, and then I started rolling every piece of film in the bureau through the Moviescope just to be sure."

Rick thought only a young kid trying to prove herself would work that hard. Of course, it was hard for any woman to prove herself in this business. There was only one female producer in the entire bureau, and the sole female correspondent was only ever sent to cover news events like the First Lady's teas.

"Where was it?" he asked.

"That's the weird thing. It was in a can marked as a Senate committee hearing from last week, and the head and tail of the film were labeled the same. I mean, the lab techs never make that kind of mistake, but I guess they did this time. I went through it all, and I could see Joe in the suit he had on yesterday and Pete moving around in the background of one setup shot, so I know it's right."

"Did you listen to it?" Rick asked. "Joe said it was a good story."

"I couldn't." She looked a bit guilty. "I'm not really supposed to use the Moviescope much less the Steenbeck, and you can't hear anything on the edit table. There were just some reverse shots of Joe, and "B-roll" roll' of the guy and the outside of his house, and then this long interview."

She spun around and headed off down the hall at a trot. "I'm going to tell Smithson. Maybe we can still do Joe's last story."

Rick called after her. "Wait a minute. There was ‘B-Roll' on Farr's film?"

"Yup. They shot it before the interview."

Rick stood there and watched her go. Then he sat down, opened the drawer of the desk, pulled out the Bolex camera, and stared at it. If the crew had already shot cutaways and reverse shots with the primary camera, what was in the film Moten had given him?

After some thought, he stood up and yanked the heavy desk away from the wall. Reaching over, he carefully slid the small camera down so it stopped against the baseboard, making sure it couldn't be seen from the floor, and then gently pushed the desk back into place. He shoved a random pile of newspapers and net bags over the gap, and then lit a cigarette, sat back down, and stared into space.

CHAPTER 12

 

"So, the dispatcher can't figure out why the Dulles cops are laughing when they're telling him that one of his guys crashed." Sam Watkins was holding forth. "So, he gets the van and goes out to pick him up. And he goes into the police station and he finds his guy sitting there with a blanket around him."

A heavyset black man with patches of lighter-colored skin spotting his face, Sam held up a finger for emphasis. "Only a blanket."

He coughed, lit a cigarette, and continued. "What happened, you see, is that he'd gone under this bridge by the Pan Am freight terminal where the wind is always blasting straight in from the side. When he came out from under the overpass, it caught that damn metal fairing bolted to the front forks, and that bike was gone. He was scooting right along, and when he went down, he popped off the bike to keep his leg from being chewed off, but then he went skidding and rolling along for damn near a hundred yards."

Sam pursed his lips and popped his eyes for comic effect. "He was one hundred percent naked. He'd scraped every scrap of clothes he had on right off. Boots, jeans, jacket, everything. He wasn't really hurt, just scraped up, but the cops just fell out when they found him."

Rick laughed. Sam had been an ABN courier since 1963. According to him, he'd been hired the day before Kennedy was assassinated and ended up sleeping on top of desks in the bureau for two weeks before he got home again. Sometimes, Rick thought he'd learned more from listening to Sam's rambling stories than in four years of college.

He pulled out a Winston, offered one to Sam, did his up-down trick with the Zippo, and lit both cigarettes.

"Hey, move over and make some room," said a voice over his shoulder. It was Kyle Matthews, the third courier currently assigned to ABN. Kyle was a skinny kid with a tattoo of a shamrock on his left arm and a sort of "twitchy" look – as if he were always playing an angle. He was just out of junior college or, Rick suspected, just flunked out of junior college. Kyle was OK to hang out with, but not someone you wanted to depend on.

"And exactly where do you expect us to make this room?" asked Sam in an arch tone. "I suppose you could sit in the ashtray. Or in one of the desk drawers."

"Well, you could start by taking all this crap," Kyle said, grabbing the pile of raingear and heavy coats that were sitting on the remaining chair, "and putting it carefully in the proper location." He dumped the wet mass into the middle of the hall, threw his own gear on the top of the pile, and sat down. "Now there's plenty of room."

He opened a bag of Cheez Doodles and began to eat.

"How is it out there?" Rick asked.

"Completely shitty with a fifty percent chance of incredibly shitty," Kyle responded. "It's stopped raining at the moment, but it's right at the freezing point and the roads are slick as hell. I almost lost it just making the turn into the side entrance off Connecticut Avenue."

Sam intoned, "Another beautiful day in Paradise."

The courier phone rang.

"You, sir, are up." Sam gleefully pointed at Rick. "And with any luck, I won't get another run before I can get out of here. For once, I might actually get home with my toes unfrozen."

Rick picked up the phone. "All-Night Couriers, We Go In Snow."

"I damn well hope so," said Casey Ross, "because you get to slalom your way out to Suitland for the weather film."

"Casey, don't we have a car I can drive? I figure I've got about a fifty-fifty chance of making it back alive in this temperature."

"I already checked. We don't. Just take it easy. It's not like it's worth your life." Ross laughed. "Of course, you have to make the local feed, so I guess you do need to take a reasonable amount of prudent chances. On the other hand, if you lose your life, we'll miss the feed, so–"

"This must be the way you used to talk to guys you were sending out to hot zones in Vietnam. Glad you care so deeply."

"Empathy, my friend, is what has made me the award-winning journalist I am today. Bring the film right up when you get back." The phone line clicked off.

Rick hung up and began the long process of suiting up. In reality, the run wasn't going to be that bad – a little cold, but there wasn't any snow or ice… yet. If he had really thought he might die on the way, the weather film could sit in Suitland forever.

He mused, "Does anyone know if they feed that stuff down to the Weather Service, or do they drop the film from the satellite?"

Sam cocked his head and pretended to think for a moment. "I haven't the slightest clue, old man. I just know that the entire nation is depending on you to bring them those pictures of fluffy clouds in time for the 5 o'clock news."

Kyle slid into the seat Rick had just vacated and picked up the paper. "Hey, look at this. This place in Virginia just blew apart. Cool."

Rick glanced at the paper. He recognized the trees behind the pile of rubble that his perfect memory told him had once been a brick Colonial. "Was the owner inside?"

"Ummm. Yeah." Kyle read a bit more. "Or at least they think so. Everything was pretty much vaporized, according to this. They say it was a gas leak."

Rick turned and headed for his bike, but his mind was on the events of the day before. Hadley and the crew had an accident, and now the guy they'd interviewed was a mist in the wind.
And
the film had gone missing. Had the can been incorrectly labeled on purpose? He felt a chill and imagined he heard the rustle of someone moving closer in the tall grass.

 

As he began to light his cigarette, Paul Smithson realized that he had two already burning – one in the ashtray on his desk and one in the ashtray on the credenza behind him. He looked at the one in his hand a moment and then went ahead and lit it, shaking out the match with a snap of irritation, and sat back in his deep leather chair, rubbing his forehead and sighing deeply.

He sure as hell hadn't signed up for this.

He regarded the red plastic film can on his desk with a mixture of fear and hatred. Why couldn't that goddamn film just stay lost
?
he thought.

After all, film that people actually wanted to find disappeared every day into the river of pictures that passed through the ABN bureau, so why did the one goddamn reel he never wanted to see again keep popping up?

It reminded him of his ex-wife.

That little hippie bitch was the real problem. Why couldn't she have just given up like a rational person?

Everything had been simple, deniable, and easily explained even if it became known. The film was hidden in plain sight. He'd just gone down and taken it from where it sat in the crew room before the editor came to pick it up. Not that it mattered – the bureau chief could go anywhere – but no one had even seen him.

It had only taken a moment to step into the office across the hall and replace the markings on the head and tail ends, slap on the new label he'd prepared, and then go back into the crew room to put it in with the other old film cans that no one had ever picked up. God knows no one would ever have willingly screened through that boring damn hearing.

Now there it was, sitting on his desk like a fucking rattlesnake. And even worse, that dumb blonde had screened it, so he couldn't just make it disappear again.

Damn her, I'd be doing her a favor by firing her. She should be out having babies or getting laid or something. Not working overtime. Women just aren't right for this kind of work.

He swung around to look out the window at the dreary winter street. It had all seemed so easy: a cushy job as a respectable member of the press after all those years of political warfare. His stomach no longer required a daily dosing of Pepto, and he'd kick the cigarettes anytime now, and, God, the money was so sweet. At this rate, it would only take a couple more years to pay off that little place near Key Biscayne – a proper reward after all those years of public service.