Elimination Night (24 page)

Then a voice.

My voice.

“New York, can you hear me?” I asked.

A rush of static over the studio monitors.

“Hello, LA,” came the reply. “This is New York. We can hear you. Thirty seconds.”

A long, fuzzy tone.

Soon, the digitized image of Wayne’s face would be funneled through a heavy-gauge cable to a dish of Kennedy Space Center proportions on the roof, and from there beamed up to an orbiting satellite, before ricocheting back down to Earth—only this time in the direction of Manhattan, where it would be processed and distributed to approximately one and a half billion homes throughout the world.

One and a half billion homes.

Barely a single percentage of this theoretical “maximum reach” audience would be watching, of course—or at least by the definition of the Jefferson Metrics Organization, which doesn’t count viewers outside the US, on account of their being “nonmonetizable.” Still, you could take the largest venue in America—Michigan Stadium, with its 109,901 capacity—build nine identical replicas, put them side by side out in the Nevada desert, and you still wouldn’t have a seat for every person about to watch the first live episode of
Project Icon
’s thirteenth season. And this in spite of its being the least-watched season in the show’s history.

The pressure didn’t seem to affect Wayne. Up there on stage, he was focused, yes, but calm. That’s the thing with Wayne—his unshakable calm. Some take it as niceness. Professionalism, even. These people have got it all wrong.

Wayne is a functioning psychopath.

Watching him from my position in the wings, I marveled at his unbreakable confidence. Over the course of the next hour—not a second more, not a second less—he would conduct the cruel ballet of
Project Icon
with inhuman precision.

Not a bead of sweat. Not a syllable misspoken.

I’ve often wondered if the rise of the show in the early days was really more about Wayne’s ability to make a live broadcast seem edited—while retaining just the right amount of unpredictability—than Nigel Crowther’s “Mr. Horrible” routine. Or perhaps it was the obvious hatred between Wayne and Crowther that gave
Project Icon
its edge: Crowther the archmanipulator, Wayne the unmanipulatable.

A crazy fact: Before the show launched, Wayne
auditioned
for Crowther’s job. He was twenty-two at the time, a warm-up guy for
Guess the Price.
He’d lost a lot of weight since leaving his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, where he’d dropped out of high school. He’d gotten his eyes fixed, too—dispensing with the goldfish-bowl spectacles that had caused him so much grief at school. The audition was his big chance. His moment to break out. But he was a terrible, lifeless judge. He felt
nothing
for anyone—not even contempt—and it showed. So Len tried him out as host and couldn’t believe what he saw. Wayne read from the teleprompter with such control, he could time his sentences to within a sixteenth of a second. He could play the thing like a musical instrument. What’s more: It was impossible to tell when his scripted lines ended and his ad-libs began. And his ad-libs—well, they were something else. Breathtakingly mean, and yet delivered with a bland pseudofriendliness that somehow made them seem okay.
“Hey buddy, come here, gimme a hug. Good job. Now, your mom’s in the hospital, right? Very sick. And do you worry that if you get voted off the show tonight, she might take a turn for the worse? You could actually be singing for her life, right? Tell everyone how you feel about that.”

Like I said:
Functioning psychopath.
In another era, Wayne would have emceed hangings and public disembowelments.
“Hey buddy, come here, gimme a hug. Now, tell me what’s going through your mind as this masked butcher behind me sharpens his knives?”

Another thing about Wayne: He’s always moonlighting. Red-carpet shows. Charity specials. Afternoon drive time on Megahitz FM. Which means he’s on the clock, eighteen hours a day, seven days a
week. He works so hard, he doesn’t even have a chair in his office—if he wants to sit down, he uses an exercise bicycle. I saw him in there once, pedaling away while reading his e-mails and eating with chopsticks from some kind of prepackaged meal. I was struck by the
bareness
of the place. No plants. No photographs. Nothing. Just an enormous poster of Nigel Crowther, on which he had drawn crosshairs in red marker pen…

Another fuzzy tone over the monitors.

“Stand by, New York,” I said.

A few seconds passed. Then a red light above the camera, flashing in sequence.

I began counting down.

“Ten… nine… eight… seven…”

The light was flashing quicker now, like a bomb ready to detonate.

“… six… five… four…”

Wayne’s expression changed. He looked poised and deadly: a killer with cornered prey.

“… three… two…”

“
THEY SAID WE’D NEVER MAKE IT,
” began Wayne, his face still in almost total darkness. “
They said it was… impossible. Well, they say a lot of things, don’t they? And sometimes they’re wrong. Very wrong. Because here we are, back again for our thirteenth year of live broadcasts from Greenlit Studios, right here in Hollywood—with some of the most outstanding talent not just in the history of our show… but in an ENTIRE GENERATION. Mia Pelosi. Jimmy Nugget. Cassie Turner. These are already household names, folks. But who knows if any of them will make it over the weeks and months to come. We are in uncharted territory, my friends—in oh-so-many ways. It’s gonna be quite a ride. Who will survive? Who will face ELIMINATION? And will our new judges be able to handle the pressure of sending home these talented girls and guys when they just don’t make the grade. Well, if you want answers to these questions: Stay tuned—because THIS…”

A pause, lasting precisely two-point-six seconds.

“Is
PROJECT…
”

Blinding whiteness as the lights came on.

“…
ICON!
”

It was nothing short of an act of God that we’d made it onto the air. I mean, Sir Harold had practically announced our cancellation during an interview on the Monster Cash Financial Network just a few days earlier. “The Jefferson numbers stink so bad, I gotta light a bloody match every time I walk in the studio,” he’d raged, with his usual thumping of the table. “Nigel Crowther is absolutely bloody right: A prime-time franchise that can’t give us twenty million eyeballs a week needs to be
put down.
”

A few people at Zero Management—including Stacey, the emotional receptionist—never showed up to work again after that. They just assumed it was all over.

But then… well, some extraordinary luck. Sir Harold became distracted. The entire executive board of Big Corp became distracted, in fact. The problem was Rabbit’s German division. Those “local difficulties” it had been experiencing for the last month or so? They’d suddenly become a lot more urgent.

As I learned from the reports in
ShowBiz,
Rabbit had for years been producing a live Saturday night “bingocast” for one of Germany’s largest broadcasters. But now the show,
Bingo-Bitte!,
had been exposed as a huge scam. Basically, a handful of employees of Rabbit Deutschland had figured out a way to hack into the
Bingo-Bitte!
computer (operated on air by two fulsome-breasted teenagers in Bavarian-maid outfits), which meant they could predict the numbers called with a hundred percent accuracy. This wouldn’t have been of much use, of course, unless the hackers had also been able to make their own bingo cards… or unless, say, the largest printer and distributor of
Bingo-Bitte!
cards happened to be a daily tabloid newspaper,
Schnelle Lesen,
which was yet another subsidiary of…

Yeah: Big Corp.

Having already broken into the
Bingo-Bitte!
computer, it wasn’t much of a leap for these algorithm-savvy Teutons to start meddling
with
Schnelle Lesen’s
presses—and before long, they’d fixed the entire game, allowing them to collect several million euros per week in winnings, via the generously bribed friends and family members who played on their behalf. As a criminal enterprise, it was brilliant. And like all brilliant criminal enterprises, it couldn’t last forever. Eventually, one of the players got nervous and turned himself in, worried that someone else would do it first. One plea bargain later, and the Berlin Fraud Squad knew everything.

At first, they thought the scheme had gone on for a few months, making the “Bingo Betrügers” some ten or twelve million euros each. (The whistle-blower had been one of the last to get involved.) But then more evidence emerged: The
Bingo-Bitte!
hacking had in fact gone on for
years
—which meant the illegal winnings weren’t in the millions at all.
They were in the billions.
Worse: An official at one of Berlin’s most-respected auditing firms appeared to be in on the ruse. As a result, Rabbit’s broadcasting license had been temporarily revoked, and Sir Harold, along with his most senior Big Corp lieutenants, had been called to give evidence to the Bundestag. Suddenly, the company was having to contemplate the possibility of arrests, bail conditions, and extradition demands—not to mention dual investigations by European Union officials and US financial regulators. Sir Harold had made a lot of powerful enemies since using the cash from his father’s gold mine to buy his very first newspaper in Cape Town.

Now it was their payback time.

Given all this, it was hardly surprising that the ratings of a televised singing competition were no longer at the top of Big Corp’s agenda. And thank God for that, because the first live episode of season thirteen was terrible. Not can’t-take-your-eyes-off-the-TV terrible. More like switch-off-the-TV terrible. Something about it just didn’t work. It seemed dull, spent; an exhausted, obsolete franchise. Which meant we had to find the cause of the problem, quickly, and put it right before the Big Corp Gulfstream got back to LAX. A week of interrogation by angry Germans wasn’t exactly going to put Sir Harold in a very patient mood.

Here was the big surprise, though:
Bibi
wasn’t the issue.

In fact, Bibi’s performance during the first show at Greenlit Studios had been the strongest of all three judges. For a start, she’d been allowed (as per the contract that Teddy had negotiated) to stage a “live performance” of her latest single during the halftime break. Or as Len explained it to Ed Rossitto, “live in the sense that she’ll be alive when we fucking prerecord it.” In fairness to Bibi, the song was a good deal more entertaining than the usual lip-synched affair. This was due in large part to the choreography, which involved a break-dancing mariachi band, a troupe of eighteen mostly naked construction workers, six lions, several high-wire aerial stunts, an indoor explosion, and—the masterstroke, in my opinion—a choir of Nepalese lentil-famine refugees. It lasted two and half minutes, at a cost of approximately ten thousand dollars per second.

Bibi paid for it herself.

She had some help in another department, too: her lines. These were mostly the work of the Oscar-winning screenwriter Tad Dunkel, who’d been hired by Teddy to sit through the afternoon rehearsals and compose emotional monologues for Bibi inspired by the contestants’ performances. (Which meant that no matter how much they improved in time for the live broadcast, it made no difference to what Bibi said.) At first, I was surprised Tad had even taken the job. I mean, the man had an
Oscar
on his mantelpiece. But then I discovered that since winning his sole Academy Award nearly two decades ago, Tad had sold only one other screenplay, the infamous animated comedy,
Terrence the Turkey,
released over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1995. It was infamous because it took in a grand total of $64.38 cents at the box office—a record that stands to this day. Tad never completed another full-length feature, although he did find work as a script consultant, becoming known in the business as “The Cry Guy” for his unfailing ability to make test audiences weep. His secret, went the Hollywood joke, was that he simply channeled the pain of
Terrence the Turkey
’s opening weekend.

And now Bibi had him on retainer.

It was, I had to admit, a brilliant move. Every time Bibi opened her mouth, it felt like the third act of a major motion picture. After a contestant’s performance of “Stayin’ Alive,” for example, Bibi embarked upon a lengthy soliloquy about how the lyrics brought to mind her tragic childhood dachshund, Frankie, who had died in her arms when she was just six years old. We learned about Frankie’s playful disposition. We learned about the time Frankie saved the family goldfish from an evil neighborhood cat. We learned about Frankie’s love of meatball sandwiches. And by the time Bibi reached the part about Frankie licking her six-year-old face
one last time
before snuggling up to her chest and drawing his final doggie breath—and how she’d wrapped him in a blanket from her own bed and wrote a note to the angels reminding them to feed him a meatball hero every Sunday—the audience had experienced what amounted to a collective nervous breakdown. People were sobbing so hard, Len had to switch off the studio mics. The Cry Guy had done his job. Bibi had shown her passion, her tears… her
humanity.
As for the contestant: He stood there motionless and somewhat confused, wondering what
precisely
it had been about his rendition of a 1970s Bee Gees classic that had triggered such an epic canine obituary.

(It probably goes without saying, of course, that Frankie was a work of fiction.)

So, anyway: Bibi wasn’t the problem. All of the caution she’d exercised during the audition rounds—her fear of being made to look stupid in the editing room—had vanished. Suddenly, Bibi was in her element. She was an actress, after all. She liked memorizing lines—it was so much easier than having to think of what to say. Which begged the question: If Bibi wasn’t ruining the show…
then who was?

It was Joey.

Something had changed in him since that night at Maison Chelsea. His eyes were bloody hollows. His hair was a rodent’s nest. Even his mouth, with those spectacular, ever-shifting lips, looked somehow less luxurious than usual. He seemed to be… disintegrating. At first, I thought it was the Bonnie situation. But the more I found out about the circumstances of her pregnancy, the more I suspected that
it had nothing whatsoever to do with Joey’s malaise. Bonnie, it transpired, had always wanted a child. And after her husband’s injury, not to mention the slaughter of his twenty-three comrades, the act of creating and nurturing a new human life seemed essential to her, a way of proving that the universe—God, I suppose—was still capable of love. But Staff Sergeant Mike Donovan was of course no longer able to father a child. And unlike many of his fellow soldiers, he hadn’t visited a sperm bank before leaving for Afghanistan: It was the
married
guys who jerked off into test tubes before their tours of duty, not the likes of Mikey, who was still technically a bachelor at the time he was ambushed.