by Rachel Brune
The video finished playing. Scott closed the laptop.
“Tomorrow morning I’m going to sit outside his grandmother’s house and wait for him to show up,” said Scott. “Then, I’ll ask him myself.”
“You mean like a stakeout?”
“Yeah, like a stakeout.” Scott stood up. “It’s late, if you want to crash on the couch.”
“No thanks,” said Mark. “I’ll need to change and get some stuff out of my apartment if I’m going to make it on the show in the morning.”
“Then let me call a cab,” said Scott. “You probably shouldn’t take the subway this late at night.”
Mark hesitated. “It’s fine, I bought a Metrocard.”
It clicked. Scott dug in his pocket and handed Mark a twenty. “Take a cab.”
Embarrassment and pride warred with the reporter’s newfound sense of mortality. “Fine.” He took the money, crumpled it, and shoved it in his pocket.
Scott placed the call. He offered to walk Mark down and wait with him. The reporter accepted.
Standing just inside the door, the two men fell back into silence. There was another question Mark dearly wanted to ask. He saw two headlights pulling down the empty street. The taxi had arrived.
Scott held the door open for him. Mark stepped halfway out.
“There’s a question I want to ask,” said Mark.
“Shoot,” said Scott. The taxi pulled up and he nodded at the driver.
“Were you SF?” asked Mark. “I mean, when you were in Iraq?”
“Special Forces?” asked Scott. He burst out laughing, then stifled it. “Nah. I was just a guy with a talent for talking to people.”
There was a pause. The taxi driver honked his horn.
“No, really,” said Mark.
“Get in the car,” said Scott.
Chapter Eighteen
Mark took advantage of the lethally-strong coffee brewed for the morning show. It tasted like garbage, especially since the only creamer available was the non-dairy powdered kind. Mark poured it in and watched the granular whiteness half-settle into the cup. He swirled it around and took a sip.
“Mark! There you are!”
Mark turned around to see the struggling morning show’s producer enter the green room.
“How are you doing?” The woman extending her hand had recently had a collision with some red hair dye. Mark stared, and she self-consciously touched her hands to her coiffure, aware of the disaster.
“I’m fine, Danni,” said Mark. “Just in need of about a gallon of this coffee.”
The woman laughed. “Help yourself, there’s more where that came from.”
“Thanks,” said Mark, completely without irony. “So, when am I on this morning?”
“Oh.” Danni patted her hair again. “Jeff didn’t tell you?”
Mark carefully set his coffee down. “Tell me what?”
“You’re going to be our special guest host. Yeah, I know, I’m not too happy about it either—we haven’t had time to rehearse or anything. We’re all going to be running like mad around the teleprompter.”
“Am I actually interviewing anyone?” asked Mark.
Danni frowned again. “Yes, you were supposed to bring that detective who got himself blown up with you.”
“You mean Detective Mabry who hates the media, hates being interviewed, and actually has a job that he needs to go to?” asked Mark. “That detective?”
“Yes,” said Danni. “The detective who better be here or you’re out of a job. That detective.”
“Sorry,” said Mark. “You’re going to have to call Jeff and tell him to fire me.”
Wordlessly, Danni pulled a cell phone out of her pocket, hit a speed dial, and held it out. Mark took it and gingerly set it at his ear. His boss picked up after one ring.
“Yes, Danni, what can I do for you?” Taggert’s voice grated in Mark’s ear.
“Mr. Taggert, this is Mark Granger.”
“Where are you? You down at the morning show?”
“Yes, but…”
“Is your cop buddy with you?”
“No, but …”
“What do you mean he’s not with you?”
“You didn’t say you wanted me to bring him with me,” said Mark.
“Are you a goddamn journalist?” asked Taggert.
“Uh …”
“Well?” asked Taggert. “Are you a damn journalist or not? Because any reporter I hired would have known to get him on the show.”
“Scott had nothing to do with this.”
“Bullshit. The two of you start investigating some terrorists, he gets blown up, you get a death threat—hey, did he get a death threat?”
“Not that I know of,” said Mark, thinking of Scott and the men in the park.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Taggert. “Then you get your ass kicked. Right in our own building. There’s something going on and the two of you are in it. From now on, I want you on his ass. Where he goes, you go. Where you go, he goes. And so does a camera. Meanwhile, pull your head out of wherever you stuck it and start thinking like a reporter again.”
The line went dead. The phone indicated that the call had been disconnected.
Danni looked at him expectantly. “Well? Are we getting the detective?”
“No,” said Mark. He handed her phone back. “Next time I get blown up or beat up or shot at and have to come on the show and talk about it, I’ll make sure to bring him right along.”
Marcus was back on his bike, wobbling slightly as he rode through the streets. The arm hadn’t been broken, but it was still healing and it made for tricky navigating. His boss called early asking if he was ever going to come back to work. Eddie didn’t seem to have an objection, just gave him a collection of packages to deliver for Alan. Marcus wasn’t really supposed to freelance while he was working for the delivery service, but he had done it before.
It was a cold day and the sun had not even hit over the skyline, but Marcus was warm enough in an old hoodie with the sleeves cut off and bike shorts. His morning rush hour deliveries zigzagged him all over the financial district, but one of those calls had sent him up to midtown.
Breakfast was a hot dog and pretzel from a street vendor. Marcus leaned against the wrought iron that surrounded Rockefeller Plaza, looking down at the sprinkling of fashionably dressed restaurant goers in the shops below. Finishing, he balled the wax paper and flipped it over the side.
Alan’s first package was addressed to the NBC studios in the GE Building across the square. Marcus left his bike locked to a trash can grate and went inside. The entrance yawned over him, and he shivered in reaction to the sudden warmth. Blinking to clear his vision, he approached the front desk.
The security guard was a short, stocky man who stood up so as not to peer up at too sharp an angle at the tall messenger.
“I’ve got a courier delivery for Green,” said Marcus.
“Do you have a first name?” asked the guard. “Or a floor or office number?”
“Sorry,” said Marcus. “It’s just addressed to Green, NBC Studios, Production Department.”
“How about a phone number?”
“No…I didn’t see one.”
The guard seemed apologetic. “Let me see if I can figure out who it’s for. Can I see that?”
Marcus handed him the package. The guard looked at it, then picked up the front desk phone and dialed an extension. He spoke briefly to the person on the other end.
“Yes, that’s right—Green. It’s from Vertical Securities.” He listened. “Are you sure? Maybe it’s for one of the other departments?” He listened again. “All right, thanks.”
Shaking his head, the guard said: “I’m sorry, but they don’t have anyone named Green in the production department.”
“Can you sign for it and hold on to it in case they figure out who it’s supposed to go to?”
“Sorry,” said the guard. “The new security regulations—I can’t sign for packages anymore.”
Marcus shrugged. “All right, man.”
“I’m sorry,” the guard apologized again. “I’m sure that whoever it’s supposed to go to will call about it.”
Marcus was halfway out the cavernous front hall. It was obvious he wasn’t going to get any sort of tip out of this job.
MTV Studios did not have a Mr. Blue in the editing department, and VH1 did not have a Mr. White in the marketing department, although the girl at the front desk was authorized to sign for the package and even tipped Marcus a few dollars. He had to wrangle his bike through the crowd gathered on the sidewalk to watch Good Morning America through the huge glass windows. He wondered why anyone would stand in line to watch a show they couldn’t hear and could barely see. Tourists.
At the front desk, he discovered that there was a Mr. Black, assistant producer, to whom he could deliver a package, but this Mr. Black wasn’t expecting a package from Vertical Securities. Mr. Black grew irate when the package contained no phone number with which to verify that he was the intended recipient. Marcus thought it best to take the package back and leave as quickly as he could. There were two more packages, for a Mr. Red and a Mrs. Olive, but Marcus decided that unless he had another package going to those buildings, Alan could just wait. The only reason to freelance was for the tips, and he sensed a certain trend in that department.
Danni tried her best to mimic the sidewalk audience success of the major networks, but her efforts were hampered by the fact that they had set up shop in a converted office building, and someone on the street could barely catch a glimpse of the show and its hosts. She compensated by installing large screens on the street level that broadcast the show from various angles, but it hadn’t caught on yet.
Marcus rode his bicycle into a trashcan.
What caught his eye, and thus precipitated the collision, was finding his grainy image broadcast over the jumbo screens. Luckily, the image was too shadowy for a casual passerby to make a connection.
His elbows bled where he scraped them from the fall and his arm started throbbing again. He noticed the pain as he bent his cell phone to his ear. The phone rang multiple times. The other screens in the window displayed angles of the audience reaction and a close-up of the host’s concerned face.
The image on the screen ended in static, paused and began playing again. Marcus slowly picked up his bike and sauntered casually around the corner. The ringing stopped and Eddie’s voicemail message began.
Marcus shut the phone and went to put it in his pocket, then stopped. The screen before him displayed Mark sitting on a couch next to the host. He did not look comfortable.
Marcus flipped the phone back open and dialed again. This time, Eddie answered on the second ring.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Hey man, you by the TV?” asked Marcus.
“Yeah.”
“Put on channel ten.”
Eddie changed the channel. He watched himself in the grainy stop-action black and white footage from the security feed. Apparently, there had been more than the one camera in the garage. He cursed, silently.
“Is that from last night?”
Eddie hadn’t heard Alan come up behind him.
“Yeah, man,” said Eddie. “Marcus just called to let me know it’s on.”
Alan watched as the clip ended and faded to an angle on the host and Mark sitting on the couch.
“Too bad there wasn’t any security cameras in the park.” Alan nodded. “This is good. This is what we were looking for.”
When the clip of the attack ended, a slight smattering of applause began hesitantly in the back, then died away. The lights and cameras tightened on Mark’s face.
The host faced the angle with an appropriately solemn demeanor. She was normally the bubbly foil to the stern, older man who usually served as her co-host, but whom Mark now replaced.
“For all those viewers who just tuned in, I’m Merri Greenleaf and that was the footage from the security cameras right in this very building,” she read off the teleprompter. “With me today is guest co-host Mark Granger, one of our news reporters, and the man who was viciously attacked and beaten by three unknown assailants. Mark, what can you tell us about your attack?”
Her question made it seem as if Mark had had some sort of breakdown.
“Well, Merri, I found out I’m no Jean Claude van Damme.” The line got a few laughs, but it wasn’t Mark’s. It had appeared on the teleprompter. Merri laughed along, as if he had just thought it up.
“Well I’m glad to see you weren’t seriously injured,” said Merri. Her vapid name concealed a shrewd mind that was now wondering what Jeff Taggert had been thinking putting this sort of story into the morning show. “So, can you tell us, what was it like?”
Mark suddenly realized what it was truly like to be on the other end of that question, and how completely inadequate a question it was. That question cracked a window that offered a short glimpse into Mabry’s life.
He hadn’t faced that question after the synagogue explosion—there, he had been the reporter. Even his involvement with the story had been no more than a convenient vehicle for him to exploit the story. There, it was Scott who had been the focus of inquisitive attention.
The question now stripped Mark of the façade of journalist that he hid uncomfortably behind. For this short moment in time, he was no longer a member of the media organization. Instead, he was an outsider caught in the headlight lens of the news.
“Mark? Are you with us?” asked Merri. She thought he looked pretty bad, and hoped he wouldn’t pass out on her. There were a lot more lines on the teleprompter.
“Sorry, Merri,” said Mark. “I guess I kind of zoned out there.” A new line appeared on the teleprompter. “The doctor said I might have a slight concussion.”
“Oh no!” said Merri. Inwardly she vowed to find and eviscerate Jefferson Taggert.
Kyle MacAllister watched the rest of the interview on the television set up in the conference room. Personally, he thought he had seen train wrecks less horrific. The show faded to a commercial and he used the remote to click the set off.
On his way back to the office, he stopped for coffee. He overpoured, splashing his hand. Shaking off the scalding drops, a thought occurred to him. The thought concerned Nina’s problem child, and his probable whereabouts in relation to the attack on Mr. Granger. Wiping his hand on a brown paper towel, he stuck his head into the small office where Mabry was supposed to be reviewing analyses.
One of the two occupants of the room was working at the computer.
“Where is Scott?” asked MacAllister.
“Haven’t seen him.” Gina didn’t bother to look up from the screen.
“What?” asked MacAllister. “It’s almost ten thirty and you haven’t seen him at all?”
Gina nodded. She clicked something on the screen and looked up. “Mac, I would try to cover for him, you know me, but I didn’t even realize he hadn’t made it in until you came by.”
“Don’t worry about it. I got it,” said Kyle.
Back in his office, MacAllister reached in the garbage and pulled out a ball of paper. He smoothed out the crumpled e-mail Mark had printed out. He thought about it for a minute, then decided that if there were weight behind the reporter’s insistence on the seriousness of the message, then one of two things were probably true. Either Scott knew about the attack on the reporter, had not reported it, and was consequently headed off the reservation on a hunting trip, or he didn’t know about the attack and was simply late for work.
MacAllister didn’t believe the latter option to be at all likely.
He picked up the phone, hesitated, then dialed a number. Nobody picked up. Mark’s voicemail instructed him to leave a message.
“Mr. Granger, this is Agent MacAllister. I saw you on the morning show so I figure you can’t answer the phone yet. When the show’s over, do me a favor, and get in touch.” He was about to hang up when another thought occurred to him. He added: “And don�
�t tell anyone I called—including Detective Mabry.”
Chapter Nineteen
MacAllister’s message wasn’t the only one on Mark’s voicemail. The first message was a terse call from Mabry leaving a street address and description of the vehicle he was in.
Even with the description, Mark walked past the vehicle three times. On his fourth pass, Scott gave up and rolled down the window.
“Get in the car, man, you look like a lost tourist.” Scott unlocked the doors and Mark got in. The reporter still wore his studio suit and tie.
“Sorry,” said Mark, shutting the door. “I couldn’t figure out which car you were.”
“That’s the point,” said Scott. He nodded at the coffee Mark carried. “You may want to rethink that plan.”
“Oh?” Mark was confused.
“Yeah,” said Scott. “What are you going to do, knock on one of these doors and ask to use the bathroom?”
“Oh,” said Mark.
“Here.” Scott offered him a pack of gum. “These have more caffeine in them than that coffee. They’ll help you stay awake.”
“Thanks,” said Mark.
Post-rush-hour quiet left the street deserted. Rows of neat two-story apartments stood guard over the quiet porches. Once or twice, a car would pull out of or into one of the narrow driveways.
“Which apartment is it?” asked Mark finally.
“That one. With the red door.” Scott nodded toward the building.
“Oh.”
Scott settled back. After a few moments of silence, Mark looked over at him. Scott was wearing sunglasses, and Mark couldn’t be sure if he was awake or not.
“Do you think he’s going to show up?” asked Mark.
“He’s there already,” said Scott, who was apparently awake.
“Aren’t you going to go in and arrest him?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because why?” Mark’s reportorial habits couldn’t stand the one-word answer.
“Because at this moment, all we have is assault and some traffic violations,” said Scott. “What we want to do is follow him a little, talk to his family, see if there are any unusual patterns of behavior that could support our theory that he’s involved with a terrorist cell. That’s why.”