The Artifact (11 page)

“Another strong possible is an apparent high number of casualties in Bravo Company. If we can nail those down to a squad or two in Mitchell’s Second Platoon, the KIA’s were probably sustained in the Bedouin firefight, and/or the thieves got themselves listed as deceased to avoid detection.”

“Duncan! Hang tight, Toilet, because I’ll square this away pronto.” She pushed up from her chair and T.P. stood with her, holding his hand up. “Sit down, Andy, you can’t win this.”

“He can force me to cover the Preacher, but I will not play girl reporter feeding my copy to

Frank.”

“Why do you always create problems?”

“Randy ‘Boy’ Duncan’s got the problem, Toilet. Brushing my artifact research aside for background on a certifiably crazy religious fanatic.”

Andrea stared poison darts at Viola for several seconds. “If you’re going to shackle me to this loser Preacher, I’m going to own it.” She grabbed her cane and bolted through the door, stumbling at the threshold when her left leg almost gave way beneath her weight.

“Andy,” he called after her. “Andy!”

Andrea limped down the corridor to the elevators, jabbed the ‘UP’ button half a dozen times, glanced at the floor indicator, then toward the stairwell. She massaged her left thigh wondering again what was wrong with it. Once on the executive floor above, she marched past the receptionist, ignoring her call to stop, rounded a corner leaving a half-dozen secretaries with their eyes popping, flung open the door of Rand Duncan’s office and burst inside it with his administrative assistant sputtering behind her.

“Why did you give Frank Morrissey my Preacher interview without even the courtesy of telling me?”

Rand Duncan occupied the head of a conference table reflecting the overhead lights off polished nara wood, with several VPs and department heads gathered around him.

“Come back later, Madigan,” he said, clenching his fists on the gleaming surface. “I am quite busy at the moment, as you can see.”

“I don’t care if you’re signing the Mid-East Peace Treaty, friend, we are going to have this out now!”

Duncan’s boyish face was turning red, but he managed to keep his voice calm. “Please see

my assistant on your way out, and he will try to squeeze you in for a few minutes tomorrow

morning.”

She addressed the dumbfounded men and women around the table staring at her with slack jaws. “You can stay where you are and get subpoenaed by my attorney in my contract dispute, or pack up and get out of here pronto!”

Every head in the room turned to Duncan.

“OK, take a break,” he told them. Andy envisioned spirals of smoke coming out of his ears.

The room was cleared in seconds, and the assistant shut the door behind him. Duncan rose from his chair and leveled an outstretched finger at Andrea. “If you ever, ever,
ever
, pull a rude, unprofessional stunt like that again I will fire you on the spot.”

“Why did you assign Frank to present my Preacher interview?”

“He is our primary anchor and it is my prerogative to do so.”

Andrea took a couple of steps in his direction and stopped with her hand on the back of one of the chairs that had just been vacated. “On a whim, Randy?”

Andrea shook a cigarette out of her pack, lit up, and replaced the crumpled red package in her belly purse. “First you pull me off my best story, then assign me some bogus religious nut, and now give my exclusive interview to some white-haired talking head that never leaves the building.”

“Do not smoke in my office.” Andrea blew a lungful of smoke in his direction and Duncan’s eyes narrowed. “Neither one is your story, Miz Madigan. They are NNC’s stories, the television news corporation that employs you and compensates your efforts with a rather inflated

salary.”

“Lay it out, Randy, what’s going on in that nasty little mind?”

“Yes, Miz Madigan, you might as well know how I intend to run our news items and this organization of which I am president and chief executive officer.”

“Please!”

“From now on, Patricia Zonfirelli will be in complete charge of the so-called Iraq antiquities theft. She will coordinate all related assignments with T.P. Viola, and act as our pool contact.”

“You will continue covering the Preacher Lady, which in my estimation is far more newsworthy than the elusive artifact. Hand all your notes, files and sources on the latter over to Patty, Miz Zonfirelli. Brief her on the totality of your investigation to date.”

Andrea had been listening calmly to Duncan’s pronouncements, standing with arms folded under her breasts heaving beneath the cotton jersey. “Like hell I will!” she exploded. “I didn’t break the artifact story by waiting for Shep Smith to tell me which sand dune to dig in!”

She strode past him, pressed the speaker button on his desk console and dialed a long distance number from memory. “I want you to hear this, Randy.”

“Oh, Miz Madigan! I’m sure he would take your call immediately, but he’s participating in a major client presentation and he left specific instructions not to interrupt.”

“Well, I can tell you have the authority to make critical judgments for Dick, Miz Rogers, so I’m going to ask you to decide if you should give him this message: ‘pick up the phone in three minutes and you’ll get a chance to bid on everything I’ve turned up on the Arab antiquities theft during the past eighteen months. If he doesn’t, I’m going to hang up and make the same offer to CBS.”

“Hold on, Miz Madigan, I’ll....”

“OK! OK!” Duncan shouted, waving his arms. “You win this round.”

Andrea made a quick apology to Nuzzo’s secretary and said she would call Dick back later to explain. She still wanted to talk to him, but the urgency had just been removed.

She broke the connection and started moving toward Duncan. “Don’t you ever try to push me against a wall again, you little twerp.” The network division president took an involuntary step back. “Because next time, I will make that call from my own office, and you won’t know shit from Shinola until the entire legal department of my new employer ties you and NNC up with more injunctions than a monkey’s got bananas.” She stopped two feet from where he was standing. “Do you catch my drift, Randy?”

by an employee.”

“I’ll guarantee that a couple of news orgs will try to grab the limelight by offering a reward for information leading to the antiquities thieves or the artifact itself.”

Duncan’s eyes grew wide as he grasped an idea that would assume an aggressive investigative news posture for the station, and cost nothing unless the artifact became a reality. “So we offer one first!”

“Randy, my boy, if you just leave me alone to do my job, you’ll have no trouble with me. All I want is to crack this artifact trunk wide open, and put me, NNC, and even you, my chicken-livered child, right up there on top of the news heap for our fifteen minutes of fame and glory.”

“I’m not a bad guy to work with.” Duncan stuck out a hand, which Andrea ignored. “I think, $5, $10,000 will be adequate.”

“People offer a grand to find a missing cat! A disgruntled thief is not going to walk away from millions for a couple of thousand bucks.”

“We don’t have a huge amount of money to throw away on wishful thinking.”

Andrea shook her head in obvious disgust, retrieved her cane and started her lopsided gait out of the room, favoring her left leg that felt like it was dead from the knee down. “Talk to your boss, Rand, the big bean counters. Consult T.P. Let me know before I go on the air.”

On the way back to her office Andrea could sense the looks of awe from fellow employees

as she greeted people she knew and concentrated on minimizing the painful limp from what felt like

the hourly deterioration of her leg. The NNC grapevine worked at light speed, and she realized that the entire company probably knew every word she and Duncan had uttered in his office before she stepped out of the elevator.

Andrea had earned the reputation of an imminently proficient investigative reporter throughout the broadcast news business even before she had joined NNC, yet was also regarded as a profligate iconoclast who was hard to manage. Within the organization, she had become respected and often reviled for the absolute confidentiality with which she protected the sacrosanct origins of her stories and inviolable copy. In recent years, her arguments with T.P. had become legend, but the savvy news director was quick to realize that Andrea Madigan was probably the most committed, smartest, intuitive news professional he had ever worked with. A practical man bereft of ego, it did not take Viola long to decide that he would rather deal with the vicissitudes of a crack investigative reporter who was contentious and aggravating, than some follow-the-leader drone he could handle.

On her side, Andrea’s occasional disagreements with T.P. were offset by the respect she afforded him on a personal level, her deference to him in the presence of others and the genuine esteem in which she held him. That working relationship might have continued indefinitely if NNC corporate had not installed thirtyish Rand Duncan President and CEO of their broadcast news division two years ago. Duncan had matriculated from Harvard Business School, had virtually no experience in the TV industry, none at an all-news station, and a proclivity for dictatorial management. Despite T.P.’s efforts to mitigate their instant dislike of one another, Andrea Madigan and Rand Duncan had remained at cross-purposes from the moment they had been introduced.

The international jewel thief code-named Boer had exhausted his inquiries by telephone, e-mail and

personal visits within his primary geographic area of activity. He rose from the wide slab of teak

that served as his desk in a large room lit by bright sunshine, whose walls boasted the heads of several wild game animals and a rack of the rifles that had brought them down. He walked through the open floor-to-ceiling doors of bulletproof glass installed by a previous owner during the Bantu

uprisings before the Whites had finally accepted the end of Apartheid.

Boer stood at the rough wood railing surrounding his broad veranda, gin and tonic in hand, ignoring the lingering heat of day as he stared out across the wide swath of dense scrub and cut elephant grass that grew to full height before relinquishing ground to the jungle beyond.

The universal claim of ignorance regarding the purloined Iraqi artifacts among his contacts within his tightly knit spheres of shady art and gem consorts brought him to two possible conclusions, both of which he was powerless to pursue. First, the entire matter was a hoax, as initially feared by Yank, perpetrated by insurgents posing as Bedouins, or Saddam Hussein himself, wherever he was. Second, the soldier perpetrators had gone to ground with their loot and might not surface for years.

He was ready to go back inside to telephone his beliefs to Brit Jameson when a jaguar flushed a covey of pheasant from the bush in the near distance, their frightened squawks and frantic flapping of wings calling his attention to the swift, silent rush of the stalker and its noisy prey. The sleek quadruped leaped into the air to snag a bird in mid flight, dragging it back into the deep grass. Boer stood watching the escaping pheasants beating their wings in frantic retreat over the treetops as the tall stalks jerked above their luckless sister he assumed was struggling in resistance to the sharp teeth of the rapacious carnivore. Suddenly the bird broke free of the grass, taking flight on an injured wing as the jaguar leaped after it, falling back to ground and slinking off into the brush, probably with one eye pecked from its socket. Never assume in the jungle, Boer mused, freezing

in mid-turn as he did so. Nor in the real world, for that matter.