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"HANG ON BIANCA!"

was the headline for Day 3. This was somewhat meaningless. Day 3 was a Sunday and not much was going on. And Bianca's
ability to hang on had never really been in question. The fact that
she was still breathing when she was pulled from the Truck of
Death, and when the ambulance crew had taken her to Highlands, where they had been told Let Her Die, meant that the parts of her
brain that controlled breathing and heartbeat still worked. She was,
in other words, stable, albeit in a coma. There was nothing to hang
on to. But it made for a great headline, and it gave the tabloid (and
the television journalists who functioned at the same journalistic level) a bit of breathing room. For a couple of days they had been
accumulating a great mass of basically irrelevant human-interest material: pictures of the big-eyed Bianca, testimonials from family
and playmates, descriptions of her favourite foods and toys. Sunday
gave them a chance to unload all of that stuff on the public. If
nothing else, Sunday was the day that Bianca became an official
public figure, someone who could be referred to by her first name
in a tabloid or on a TV broadcast, like Madonna or Di. As such, she
represented a money factory for the tabloid; for at least the next
couple of weeks, whenever they needed to goose their circulation
figures they just printed any headline containing the name Bianca.

But Sunday was not a day of rest for everyone. A bleary-eyed
Ray del Valle led a caravan of half a dozen journalist-laden vehicles
on a drive across the prairie, headed for the patch of Forest Service grazing land where the Ramirez children had played their last game
of soccer. The reason that Ray was bleary-eyed, even though the caravan departed at the civilized hour often
a.m.,
was that he had
spent the entire night driving from Denver to the site and back. On
his drive out to the site, his car had been full of used toys and house-
wares, which he had purchased for a few dollars at Goodwill. On
his drive back to Denver, the car had been empty.

When the caravan of journalists arrived at the site in mid-
afternoon they were treated to the blindingly photogenic sight of
cattle grazing over the remains of a hastily evacuated migrant settle
ment. Remains of human tragedy were strewn everywhere:
Raggedy Andy dolls, overturned cooking pots, baby clothes, a battered, well-loved Malibu Barbie or two.

None of it had been there the day before; the migrant workers
had had plenty of time to pick up their things before they'd
evacuated the site, and were not so wasteful as to leave perfectly good pots and toys strewn around. But it looked great, especially
when the handsome, pony-tailed Ray del Valle squatted down in
the grass to ponder an abandoned soccer ball as fat cattle
emblazoned with the Lazy Z brand grazed contentedly nearby. So
it was no big surprise when a photograph along those lines took up
most of the front page of the next morning's tabloid, accompanied
by the headline:

"WYATT: 'THROW 'EM OUT!'"

It would be an understatement to say that Sam Wyatt, his very
close friends in Senator Marshall's offices, and most of the Denver
medical establishment were, so far, not amused by the way the
Ramirez situation had been covered in the media. And although Ray del Valle had begun the new week with a crushing sucker
punch, afterward it became the Week of the Backlash. The
"THROW 'EM OUT!" headline had been on the newsstands for
less than six hours when two cars full of INS agents pulled up in
front of the home of Pilar de la Cruz, nee Ramirez, and came to
the door with the intention of arresting Carlos and Anna Ramirez,
who both happened to be illegal aliens. If these agents had been
reading their tabloids, they would not even have stopped; they
would have known that Carlos and Anna were not there by the fact
that the TRUCK OF DEATH was not parked in the driveway.
But they made the mistake of going to the door anyway. Pilar,
alerted to the fact that Immigration was after her sister and brother-
in-law, telephoned Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre, where
they were visiting Bianca, and warned them. They cut their visit short, jumped into the Truck of Death, and vanished from the face
of the earth.

"MOMMY HAS TO GO, BIANCA!"

graced the newsstands the next morning, accompanied by a
photo of the tearful Anna bidding farewell to her daughter, who
was bottled up inside the giant pressurized chamber where she had
been receiving her treatment. A photographer had been present in
the room when Anna and Carlos received the warning from Pilar
and had snapped pictures of them bidding a hasty farewell.

None of which made the Powers That Be look especially good
to the public. Which is why social workers from Health and
Human services started paying very close attention to Bianca at the same time, and a motion was filed in court for the state of Colorado
to become Bianca's legal guardian. The gist of this legal document
was that Carlos and Anna Ramirez, by driving their kids around in
a truck full of lethal gases and killing three of them, had clearly
demonstrated their unfitness as parents and should not be allowed
to take care of Bianca anymore. The district attorney let it be
known that his staff was actually investigating the possibility of
filing charges against the Ramirezes and that, with every fibre of his
being, he was refraining himself from issuing an arrest warrant for Carlos and Anna. It was all well and good to put public service
announcements on TV begging people not to drive their kids
around in the back of pickup trucks, but what would really put a
stop to this sort of thing was punitive legal action against parents who did it. So the headline for Wednesday morning was

"STATE: BIANCA IS OURS!"

But all of this legal squalor was obscuring an interesting medical
story. When Bianca arrived in the hyperbaric chamber she had
been in a deep coma and totally unresponsive. But in the photo
accompanying the "BIANCA IS OURS" story, a state social
worker stood outside the hyperbaric chamber, smiling and waving
through its thick pressure-proof window at the unseen Bianca
inside. And there wasn't much point smiling and waving to a
vegetable. It seemed that Bianca had staged a miraculous recovery.
She was far from being back to normal, but she was awake, alert,
responsive to verbal communication, and mumbling a few words.

This gave Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre's new PR
Director the ammunition he needed to thunder into the media fray.
His predecessor and former boss had been sacked with astonishing
dispatch as soon as "LET HER DIE!" had hit the streets. The new
man had spent the first few days just trying to get on his feet. By the
time Wednesday rolled around, he was ready. He brought in a
select troop of journalists to videotape and photograph Bianca through the window of the chamber; she obliged by smiling and
waving to them. Since she had all but been written off as a
vegetable a few days earlier, this was certainly going to have an
electrifying effect on the public.

There followed a news conference in a hospital meeting room,
where all of Bianca's doctors, nurses, therapists, and court-
appointed guardians stepped up to the microphone to deliver a few bright, upbeat sound bites praising Bianca's plucky nature and
emphasising the incredible nature of her recovery. A few cynical
journalists tried to spoil the day by asking difficult questions, e.g.:
"Does Bianca know that the INS is trying to deport her parents?" But the new PR Director was standing by the mike at all times,
trying to anticipate any line of questioning that might lead to
another headline along the lines of "LET HER DIE!," and when
ever these issues came up he would do something about protecting
the patient's privacy and then point to some other journalist with a less acute critical facility. In general, the PR Director was finding
that bald, middle-aged print journalists with nicotine stains on their
fingers were troublesome, and beautiful twenty-five-year-old TV
journalists who had arrived at the hospital carrying stuffed bunnies
for Bianca were good people to call on. So the headline for
Thursday morning was:

"BIANCA: MIRACLE GIRL!"

accompanied by a picture of her smiling her gap-toothed kid's grin through the window of the chamber, cuddling a bunny to her
chest.

Anyone who bothered to read the complete news story about
Bianca, all the way to the end, could find out that her treatment in
the chamber was essentially complete, and that Arapahoe Highlands
Medical Centre was going to release her the following day, on
Friday.

Which meant that by the time the "MIRACLE GIRL" headline began to circulate on Thursday morning, all of the participants of
the Ramirez affair, from Denver to the Lazy Z Ranch to
Washington, D.C., were gearing up for the end-game.

Most of Friday would be taken up with logistics: getting all the
players to the hospital on time and keeping in touch with everyone
on the phone. So Thursday was the last day for actually making
moves. Ray del Valle kicked off the final round by arranging a press
conference, in a "safe house" somewhere in greater Denver, in
which Carlos and Anna Ramirez stepped before the court of Public
Opinion to defend themselves from charges that they were illegal
aliens and bad parents.

The illegal alien part was difficult, because they were, in fact,
illegal aliens. But in America, no issue was so clear-cut that it could
not be obfuscated beyond recognition by a talented lawyer. The
Ramirezes now had one: a nationally famous hell-raising San Francisco lawyer who liked to do pro-bono work if lots of TV
cameras were present; he insisted that he was going to get these
people green cards real soon.

The part about being bad parents was different. The Ramirezes
were actually known in their community as very good parents. Carlos was a teetotaler who spent every minute of his free time
with his children, and Anna was a domestic saint. Ray had arranged
for character witnesses to show up at the safe house and say as
much.

Eleanor Richmond's part in the endgame was a different matter. She snuck into, and ransacked, the office of her young colleague
Shad Harper. This was easily enough to get her fired and possibly even enough to get her thrown into jail. She understood this clearly
and had already typed up a letter of resignation for Senator
Marshall. She had been working at this job for exactly one month
and had received exactly one pay check.

It was completely insane for her to be doing this. If she had been
looking for snippets of information that she could have kept to
herself and used discreetly, that would have been one thing. But her
entire goal was to dig up some dirt that she could turn around and release to the media. Eleanor Richmond had gone native. She was
out of control.

She had lost it sometime over the weekend. The realisation that Sam Wyatt, her boss' main man, had triggered this whole chain of
events was bad enough by itself. For a day or two she had wavered,
mostly because she was turned off by Ray's tactic of planting toys
in the grass for photographers. When the INS had come around
looking for Carlos and Anna, she had been annoyed. But when the
state had tried to take Bianca away from her parents, Eleanor Richmond had gone nuts. That was no fair. She'd rather be a bag
lady than a conspirator in an affair that involved breaking apart a
family.

So on Thursday, whenever Shad Harper left his office for more
than ten minutes, Eleanor went in and made herself at home. It
would be worth destroying her own career if she could find
anything to bring Shad down along with her. It would have been nice to find something on Sam Wyatt, or on the aide in D.C. who
had made the fateful phone call to the Forest Service, or even on
Senator Marshall himself. But she was willing to settle for Shad
Harper's head on a platter.

Somewhat to her own astonishment, she didn't get caught. Once
or twice, someone poked their head into Shad's office while she
was there, and she explained that she was looking for a stapler that
Shad had borrowed. This explanation worked because Shad was
always borrowing stuff, including money, and not returning it.