Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [35]
But the pictures … Man. Every detail perfect.
A Philippine revolutionary he picked off at three hundred yards using an M16 with metal sights, the man just dropping like a sack …
A black South African who thought he was safely across the border in Botswana …
A coat hanger binding the hands of a Salvadorian, Nestor thinking, Why bother to tie him up? He’ll have a bullet in his head in sixty seconds anyway….
Hundreds of 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