Star Time (59 page)

Ken dropped heavily into the chair opposite her. "He swore to me that wasn't true, that you're about to slander him and really make us look bad around the world. The Russians will have a field day dragging us over the coals."

"And you believed him."

"He and I go back twenty years. He wouldn't lie to me, Chris."

"We have evidence, Ken.
Testimony."

"By someone you're sure you can trust?
Or a liar with his own ax to grind?"

"By someone I think I can trust."

"But you're not sure."

"Sure enough.
There's one last piece of evidence I'm trying to get, Grant's secret memo ordering the base to be built."

"There is
no
base. He would have had to inform the Armed Services Committee if he was building a base, and I sit on that Committee."

"He's a dangerous man."

"Then you won't kill the story."

"Those bases endanger us all."

"Oh, God!
I was hoping not to have to do this."

He looked down at his hands as if they held a weapon. They slowly clenched into fists. When he looked up at her, his face was twisted by inner pain.

"He told me that you're having an affair with Greg
Lyall
. He has photos showing the two of you making love in
Hedy
Anderson's apartment. He'll leak them to the press unless you drop the story."

The disclosure struck Chris like a mortar shell. She was dazed by it and devastated.

"You say he has photos," she repeated.

"I saw them!" Ken cried out in anguish. "He got them over a goddamn fax machine. Who the hell knows who else there saw them?"

Chris buried her face in her hands. The love affair that had been a miracle revived had been made to appear squalid and lewd.

"How could you do this to me?" Ken cried out. "People fall out of love, I understand that.
But to sleep around behind my back, to let
Lyall
act like my friend while you were having sex with him."

When she raised her head, tears filled her eyes. "It wasn't done to hurt you or anyone."

"You'll drop that story now. I don't care if the Defense Department is building a weapon that would destroy the world. You owe it to me and to
Lyall's
wife not to drag us through the mud. If those pictures get out, my political career is ruined."

Chris ran from the room. She needed a phone. She had to get hold of Greg. She looked up his home number and
called  him
.

"Mr.
Lyall
, please," she told the maid who answered, and gave her name.

A moment later Greg came on.

"We have to meet right away," she told him. "There are photos of us."

"In my office.
In twenty minutes."

Greg arrived at his office a few minutes before Chris. Brooding about the photos had strengthened his decision to resign and thereby save her, Ken, and Diane from the anguish of public ridicule. He would separate from Diane and try to start over again in a new job. He and Chris would divulge their relationship only after enough time passed for blame not to descend on her for causing the separation.

However, Chris's phone call had thrown his thinking into confusion. Who had told her about the photos?
Ev
, for sure.
The guy was evil enough to gain a perverted pleasure out of displaying the photos to her and observing her humiliation.

Greg stood up as Chris entered his office. The emotions she had held back finally broke through. She rushed into his arms.

He guided her to the sofa. Gradually, she regained her composure enough to relate her conversation with Ken and his meeting with the secretary of Defense.

"The secretary of Defense?"
Greg was astounded. Why would
Ev
give the photos to Phil Grant?

"He told Ken the missile-base story isn't true, that I interviewed people who lied to me."

"Do you believe that?"

"I'm not sure anymore."

"You were sure yesterday, when we all reviewed the material. You were confident we had one of the biggest stories of the decade. Nothing about the story has changed."

"Maybe I was pushing my evidence too hard. That interview could have been a setup by those brothers."

"There were other things on the video," Greg reminded her, "supply trucks entering a lonely access road, a guarded entrance you saw in an area that should only have been forest, the military helicopter."

"That still doesn't signify that the base is for nuclear missiles."

A perplexed expression suddenly invaded Greg's features. "Something's wrong. Grant is trying too hard to stop us. If there's no base there, why doesn't he just let the story come out and let us be embarrassed by the truth? Instead he's trying to blackmail a major television network. That's big artillery, Chris. Why would he do that if the story isn't true?"

"Even if it is, let's leave it to someone else to discover."

"And if they don't?"

"I'll leak it to one of the other networks."

"Then we'll be safe until he makes some other 'request' of us."

She glanced sharply at Greg. "He said he'd give back the photos."

"Why should he? How will we be sure we have all the copies? Do you really believe that a man who may have broken an international treaty, who lied to Congress about what he's doing, and maybe even to the President, can be trusted?"

"I suppose not," she replied in a subdued voice.

He took her hands in his. "When
Ev
Carver showed me the photos today, my first inclination was like yours, to do whatever was necessary to save everyone's reputation."

"We have to, Greg. If those photos come out, your career is finished,
so's
mine, and
so's
Ken's. That's what bothers me most: Ken's only mistake was to love me. That could ruin him now. How can I do that to him?"

"I wish it were that easy to make this whole thing disappear. At least running the story will end the blackmail."

"My God!
What's going to happen to my life, my career? Those photos will put us on every news program and every shabby gossip show and website. There'll be a dozen places you can find it on YouTube. We'll be a dirty joke."

"There's enough journalist left in me to understand that what we're being asked to do is wrong.
And for this country, very dangerous.
Do you want that on your conscience?"

She pulled her hands back. "Just about all the load is piled on my conscience that it can take."

"Yielding to the blackmail won't end it. And even if Grant sticks to his bargain, the stakes are too big to kill the story.

"No matter whom it hurts?"

"We have to go with it."

She gazed into the light-sprinkled darkness beyond the office's floor-to-ceiling outer wall. All their escape routes were closed off and their course of action virtually unavoidable. Ironically, this was just the sort of gigantic government cover-up she and every reporter dreamed of exposing, that won Pulitzers and
Peabodies
and Emmys and Columbia-
DuPonts
.
How easy crusading seemed when nothing was at risk.

"Do you love me, Greg?" she asked, not shifting her eyes to look at him. "Will you love me no matter how this turns out?"

"Yes."

"All right," she finally said, turning back to him, understanding that bravery sometimes consisted of having no other choice. "I agree. We lead with the story tomorrow night. God help us."

Before meeting with Chris, a grief akin to that over death had weighed on Greg. Afterward, though, he felt light and nimble, uncertain whether that was because he had acted virtuously or because he had nothing left to lose. He began planning how to meet the crisis.

Chris did not return home, but slept in her office. Early the next morning, a Friday, she began to write the piece. When Hugo arrived, she looked up only long enough to ask him for a "drop line" for the Defense secretary.

"Secretary of Defense Phillip Grant . . ." she began.

"How about," he suggested, "'considered the administration's most vehement hawk.' "

"Thanks," she answered, and typed it in.

When the editor she wanted for the story came in, she joined him in an editing room to begin cutting the piece.

At ten o'clock the customary conference call among Hugo, Chris, all the bureau chiefs around the country, and the senior editors in New York began the daily process of choosing the night's rundown of news stories. Hugo asked whether any of the bureau chiefs had heard rumors about a nuclear-missile base being secretly constructed in his or her region. None had.

Chris worked the phones for an hour, futilely trying to unearth some additional evidence to bolster her story. All the while, though, an upsetting thought intruded on her concentration.

In the early afternoon,
Hedy
Anderson arrived to find a note that Chris wanted to see her. As soon as the door closed to give them privacy, Chris turned on her.

"I knew you were ambitious,
Hedy
, and had done things to get ahead you weren't particularly proud of. But I believed you were my friend and wouldn't deliberately hurt me to get ahead."

"Of course I wouldn't. What are you talking about?"

"The photos.
Of Greg and me in what used to be your bed.
Ev
Carver is blackmailing us with them."

"Oh, no!"

"Don't act as if you didn't know about them. You had to know."

Hedy
sank down onto the arm of a chair. The situation was too far gone to keep her private shames concealed. "
Ev
was trying to get something on
me,
not on
you.
Sleeping with him was what got me to New York. He became furious when I refused to see him anymore. He thought I still lived in the apartment."

"I can't buy that. That lock is pickproof. Somebody had to have your key to plant a camera. They sure didn't have mine. I always keep that key hidden. So does Greg."

"I swear I knew nothing about it."

"I've been thinking back. A few times there were embarrassing leaks from the newsroom we couldn't trace. You were always there, but no one suspected you."

Hedy
reddened. She had been feeding
Ev
bits of information back then, but that had stopped. How could one explain gradations of guilt, that time had changed her behavior? "I swear to you I didn't know he had a camera hidden in the apartment. I don't even know how he got in."

"Someone once told me that when women tasted a little bit of opportunity, they'd become as unprincipled as men in trying to get ahead. Congratulations,
your
double-crossing paid off. This network may soon be looking around for a new anchor. Thanks partly to
me,
you're right up there in line for the job."

Chris opened the door. The conversation and the friendship were at an end.

Late that afternoon, Greg flew to the country house by helicopter, joining Diane and Barnett there.

Diane wanted to begin dinner at seven, but Greg insisted on watching the news.

"This is important," he solemnly told the others as the news program's logo appeared on the television screen.

Chris's piece led. She carefully laid out her case for the missile base's existence, claiming no more than she could prove. Rather than relying totally on comments by experts—the so-called "rent-a-bites," "usual suspects," "talking heads"—after the tape ended, Chris herself explained the possible implications.

"If a nuclear-missile base has indeed been built there, that would violate the terms of our disarmament treaties with Russia and raise troubling questions: Who authorized it? Was it the secretary of Defense acting alone or did he act with the President's knowledge? Or did someone farther down the chain of command create and implement the plan without the knowledge of either man? Why has Congress not been informed about it? And most important, what is its purpose?"

As Chris turned to another camera to introduce the next story, Barnett punched the remote-control unit to mute the sound. His face was tightened into ultimate condemnation, like the magistrate of a last, apocalyptic
judgement
.

"Those are scandalous charges.
Flimsy and unnecessary.
Pure gossip.
A total misuse of our news service.
The Defense secretary is a
patriot and a friend. That woman made him sound like some sort of melodrama villain. The administration has every right to be furious and to retaliate."