Hard News

head engineer and the producer kept their eyes on his craggy, square face. Everyone else in the huge studio gazed at Sutton and Maisel, as they hurried toward the
Current Events
desks like surgeons answering a code blue.
    “What the fuck happened?” Sutton asked in a shrill whisper.
    “I don’t know.” Rune felt the tears start. She dug her short nails into her palms furiously; with the pain the urge to cry lessened. “Somebody robbed me. They took everything.”
    Maisel looked at the clock above the control booth. “We don’t have
anything?
Nothing at all?”
    “I don’t know what happened. I turned the tape in—”
    Morrie said delicately, “She did. Charlie got it. He programmed it in. Sometime after four it disappeared.”
    “Son of a bitch. How long was that segment?”
    Morrie consulted his clipboard but Rune answered from memory. “Eleven minutes, fourteen.”
    Sutton whispered furiously, “You should always make backups, you should—”
    “I did!
They
were stolen too. Everything. Even the original tapes …”
    “Fuck,” Sutton spat out. Then she turned to Maisel, whose mind must have been in the same place and known what she was thinking. There were three other stories programmed for
Current Events
that evening. But Maisel said they had nothing else finished that could be used as a replacement for “Easy Justice.” He said, “We’ll have to cancel the show.”
    “Can we go with Arabs in Queens?” she asked.
    He said, “We never finished editing. We stopped all postpro for the Boggs story.”
    “What about the former-mayor profile?”
    “Mostly unshot and a lot of unattributed quotes. It’s legally hot.”
    “The Guardian Angels piece?” she snapped.
    “We’ve got footage but there’s no script.”
    “It’s outlined?”
    “Well, in general. But—”
    “I know the story.” She waved her hand. “We’ll do that.”
    “What do you mean?” Maisel asked, frowning. “Do what?”
    “We do the original three stories plus the Guardian Angels.”
    Maisel’s voice rasped, “Piper, we’ll have to cancel. We can slot a rerun.” He turned to Morrie and started to say something. But she said, “Lee, a rerun of a news show? We’ll go with the Angels.”
    “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Piper. We don’t have a script. We don’t have footage of you. We—”
    “We’ll go live,” she said.
    “Live?”
    “Yep.”
    Maisel looked at Morrie. “It’s too late, isn’t it?”
    He answered calmly. “We can’t do half and half. We can shut off the computer and queue up the other stories by hand, using a stopwatch. Like in the old days. You’ll have to be live in all of your on-camera commentary. Hell, we’ll have to manually roll the commercials too and you know how many fifteen-second buys there are during
Current Events?
It’ll be a nightmare.”
    “Then it’ll be a nightmare.” the anchorwoman said.
    “But, Piper,” Maisel said, “we can slot something else.”
    She said evenly, “Lee, every TV guide, cable guide and newspaper in America shows that we’re running a new
Current Events
tonight. You know what kind of questions it’ll raise about the program if we go to a rerun or slip in something from syndication?”
    “We’ll say technical difficulties.”
    “There are no technical difficulties on my show.”
    “Piper—” Rune began.
    But Sutton didn’t even hear her. She and Maisel hurried off and Rune stayed behind, in her cubicle. She curled up in her chair, the way Courtney did sometimes, drawing her legs up. She thought of all the work she’d have to do over again. She felt numbed, stunned, like somebody had died.
    Uh-uh, she thought. Like someone was
about
to die.
    Randy Boggs.
    AT 7:58 P.M. LEE MAISEL WAS SITTING IN THE HUGE CON trol booth overlooking the
Current Events
set. The booth was filled with three times its normal staff (most of whom were from the Jim Eustice crew and had experience with the rare and demanding art of live production).
    Maisel hadn’t done live producing for years and he sat forward, sweating and uneasy, like the captain of a torpedoed ship still doing battle with an enemy destroyer. He was holding an expensive digital stopwatch in his hand, gripping it tightly.
    Maisel and Sutton had managed to write half the Guardian Angels piece and get it, handwritten, into the TelePrompTer, but at 7:56 they’d had to break off. So Sutton had said, “I’ll ad-lib.”
    Maisel called over the loudspeaker, “You got a