Hard News

others.
    They were in black and white, they were in color, they were mute, they were in Dolby stereo sound.
    The pictures …
    They didn’t haunt him, of course. He didn’t have any emotional response. He wasn’t tormented by guilt, he wasn’t moved to lust. They just wouldn’t go away. The pictures came into his head and they wouldn’t let him sleep.
    Tonight Nestor—energized by the city and troubled by its fast food—lay in a too-soft bed and fielded the pictures. Pushed one away. Then he did the same with the one that took its place. Then the next. For an hour, then two. He wanted Celine next to him. He thought about her but the pictures pushed
her
away. He thought about what he was in town to do. That kept the pictures away for a while. But they came back.
    Finally—it was close to three A.M.—he began to think about the French girl, the one with the straight teeth. With the thought of her, and a little bit of effort on his part (elbow grease was the way he thought of it), Jack Nestor finally began to relax.
    IT WAS ENOUGH OF A DATE TO KEEP BRADFORD SIMPSON happy and not enough of one to worry Rune.
    They were at an outdoor table at a Mexican restaurant near the West Side Highway, the table filled with red cans of Tecate beer and chips and salsa—and a ton of printed material about Lance Hopper and Randy Boggs.
    Bradford
had
wanted to ask her out again, as it happened, but Rune was content to keep the evening mostly professional.
    The intern scooted his chair closer to hers and Rune endured a little knee contact while they read through the Hopper files. “Where’s Courtney?” Brad asked.
    “Let’s not go there,” Rune said.
    “Sure. She’s okay?”
    Yes, no. Probably not.
    “She’s fine.”
    “She’s really cute.”
    Let’s not
go
there, she thought and turned back to the files on Lance Hopper that Bradford had found in the archives.
    As they read she began to form a clearer picture of the late head of Network News.
    Hopper was a difficult man—demanding that everyone at the Network work as hard as he did and not let their personal lives interfere with the job. He was also greedy and jealous and petty and wildly ambitious and several times, when his contract was up, virtually extorted the parent company for stock options that increased his worth by hundreds of millions of dollars.
    Yet he was also a man with a heart. For instance, spending as much time with the interns as he did, as Bradford had mentioned. He advocated educational programming for youngsters on the Network, even though shows like those produced far less revenue than after-school cartoons and adventure programs.
    Hopper regularly appeared in Washington before the FCC and congressional committees, testifying about the importance of unfettered media. He was often vilified by conservative, family-oriented groups, who thought there should be more censorship on TV.
    Hopper also took responsibility for the worst black eye in the history of the Network. Three years ago—just before his death—the Network had run an award-winning story as part of the coverage of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. The story was an exclusive about a village outside of Beirut that appeared to be liberal-minded and pro-Western but was in fact a stronghold for fundamentalist militants.
    But when a U.N. force made a sweep of the village to look for suspected terrorists they were so prepared to meet resistance that the operation turned into a bloodbath after a solitary sniper fired one shot near the convoy. A chain reaction of shooting followed. There were twenty-eight deaths, all by friendly fire, including some U.S. soldiers. The “sniper” turned out to be a ten-year-old boy shooting at rocks. The militants, it seemed, were long gone. Some blamed the U.N. for relying on a news story for its intelligence but most people thought it was the Network’s fault for doing the story in the first place or for not at least following up and reporting that the terrorists were no longer there.
    Hopper took responsibility for the incident and personally went to Beirut to attend the funerals of the slain villagers.
    Bradford and Rune continued to pore over the files and, though a portrait of Hopper as a complex, ambitious and ruthless man appeared, no evident motive for his death emerged.
    From there they turned to the transcripts of interviews Rune had made over the past week as she’d traveled around the East Coast and the South talking to people who