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  Natalie hadn’t noticed Ryan before the briefing, which meant he’d crashed—both the briefing and her moment in the spotlight. The feeling of getting wantonly screwed intensified and not in a controllable way.

  When Adam Majors closed his binder and exited the room, Matt turned to her. “You really went off leash there with your question. I’m impressed Bibb Connaught sanctioned that.”

  Natalie tried to keep her face blank. “I write my own questions.”

  “Oh please, Hot Nerd, don’t get defensive. I’m just saying you’ve got moxie. For a TV reporter.” He turned to the back of the room where the blond man-boy was yukking it up with fellow twentysomething reporters. “What’s he called again?”

  “Pendejo?” Natalie suggested, then added, “I thought you knew everyone.” It must have come out a little meaner than she’d intended because Matt stiffened slightly. “Ryan McGreavy,” she added, relenting.

  “Ah, the governor’s kid.” He gave her a knowing smile. “If you ask me, that pendejo is going to be stiff competition. Looks like he’s destined to become a crowd favorite.”

  Matt stood and began to move off. “I think I’ll go introduce myself.”

  What is the plural of pendejo? Natalie wondered, watching him leave. Then she moved her gaze to the vibrating phone in her hand and found that Bibb had sent her an email.

  To: Natalie Savage

  From: Bibb Connaught, DC Bureau Chief, ATN

  Subject: Your Future

  I was not happy with that performance. And what is wrong with your hair? I expect better at the White House. We need to talk. Come to my office. Now, please.

  2

  Hair and Loathing in the DC Bureau

  When Natalie walked onto the seventh-floor newsroom at ATN’s DC bureau, the only sounds were coming from the dozen TV monitors ringing the assignment desk, flashing local news, cable news, and multiple iterations of article-plus-meaningless-noun shows:

  The View, The Chew, The Real, The Buzz. Too bad there wasn’t a show called The Condemned, she could have been its poster child.

  At first she’d been puzzled by what she’d done that warranted being summoned by the bureau chief. Her question wasn’t the classiest but it had elicited a new piece of information, which was her job, wasn’t it? In the taxi on the way to the meeting, she’d looked to Twitter for clues and found only that #NoEstaNoche was trending and Ryan McGreavy’s followers seemed to be climbing by the minute.

  She threaded her way through the mazes of desks where colleagues were staring at massive computer screens, monitoring incoming digital news like air force controllers on high alert for a bogie. Eyes unblinking, they were refreshing Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Drudge, the Daily Mail gossip page, the New York Times, the Washington Post, POLITICO, Axios, BuzzFeed, TVBuzzster, The EarlyBird, and various social media mining apps, making sure that no vital item—“Shocking Video of First Lady’s Indigenous Cousins Performing Ancient Voodoo Ritual”—got overlooked and became The Story We Should Have Had!

  Lucky for her, the news cycle was churning so rapidly that her colleagues were too busy keeping up with the latest White House leaks to note her presence. At least none of them scooted away as she passed them.

  “Natalie Savage. Great! You got a question today!” a voice boomed in front of her.

  Natalie stopped, just managing not to run into the large, fortysomething man who had spoken. Hal Thomas, the deputy bureau chief, was giving her a broad nicotine-stained smile. As the number two boss right under Bibb, Hal had a reputation as a petty tyrant who punished reporters who had the audacity to question their assignments or the bureau’s management. Natalie had heard him referred to even by women outside the bureau as Handsy Hal. Now, as he gripped her arm while standing a little too close and squeezing a little too long, she could see why.

  Natalie gave him a bright smile and disengaged her arm. “Thanks, Hal,” she said in her friendliest voice and, trying to project urgency, continued toward the news desk.

  Hal walked with her. “You looked really great on camera today. Really great,” he said, at her elbow. “But have you considered pulling your hair back? You’ve got great eyes. We could see them more if you’d just pull it back like—” Natalie, too stunned to move, watched as Hal leaned in to pull strands of her hair up and away from her face. Her stomach was mid-somersault when, mercifully, they were interrupted.

  “Natalie!” It was the voice of an angry mom.

  She turned to see a figure rushing toward her in a blur of khaki, diamonds, and white blond hair. Bibb Connaught, her bureau chief.

  “We need to talk,” Bibb snapped.

  Before Natalie could reply, Hal said to Bibb, “They want you—”

  “I know, I know.” Bibb waved him off, then impatiently looked at Natalie. “I need to handle something. Come with me, then we’re going up to my office to have a talk.” She hurried past and disappeared down a second hallway, leaving the scent of Chanel No. 5 and fear in her wake.

  This is not good. Natalie felt as though her stomach was trying to crawl out of her body.

  Jogging to keep up, Natalie had a chance to take in Bibb’s outfit. She was dressed like the Georgetown version of Isak Dinesen wearing a yellow linen shirt with a high popped collar, khaki pants, a cloth belt, and knee-high riding boots. There was a hint of jodhpur in the cut of the pants, not enough to make them look like she’d just bounced over from the riding stables but enough to give the impression that at any moment she might throw a machete over her shoulder and lop off some heads.

  Bibb didn’t lead her to a conference room for a quiet execution. Instead, Natalie found herself pressed against the back wall of the DC control room, where producers were directing the network’s live coverage in a state of mayhem unusual even for live news. Three people were simultaneously screaming.

  “How about Developing Story? Do we have Developing Story?”

  “Can we reboot?”

  “Graphics, that name is BRIT not TIT. Fix it now!”

  Their voices layering over each other.

  In the otherwise pitch-black room, the thirty monitors up front were filled with images of older men in bad suits aimlessly milling around a stage. The sound was muted but Natalie deduced the network was covering the group photo for the PanAmerican Summit now underway at the DC Convention Center. Cleary the sedate scene on air had nothing to do with the panic in the room.

  Bibb, who had raced to the front of the room, was red faced. “We lose ten percent of our tune in for every five minutes the Breaking News banner isn’t up,” she snapped at a haggard producer who was in turn barking into a tiny microphone attached to a headset. Natalie noticed that even in a state of clear agitation, Bibb’s forehead maintained the smooth satin glow of Botox. “The earnings call is around the corner. We can’t afford this right now!” As Bibb barked, the producer twisted around to look up at her, making the headset cord look like a noose around his neck.

  “What’s going on?” Natalie whispered to a young African American man, probably an associate producer, seated at a desk to her right.

  “The Breaking News banner crashed.” He shrugged, laconically. “So they’re freaking out.”

  Natalie’s eyes got big as she registered the full weight of the situation. “You mean we’re live on air without the words Breaking News on the screen?”

  The producer met her gaze with a nod of mock horror. In a deadpan, he said, “Indeed. No news can be broken without a Breaking News banner.”

  She swallowed back a laugh. It would have been funny if the mood among the terrorized producers didn’t give the impression that someone’s head was likely to roll. Clearly one of these people was going to pay for a computer bug taking out the network’s guaranteed ratings generator.

  Natalie watched Bibb, the EP, and a tech guy huddled over a master computer trying to get the machine to
summon the magic words. A flash of color drew Natalie’s attention back to the monitors. She watched the silent show as BamBam made a dramatic late entrance to the summit stage with Rigo by his side. Even with the sound on mute, the duo was entertaining and expressive. BamBam looked like he could have stepped out of Modern Dictator Catalog in his signature tight orange Nehru jacket and his purple-black hair fluffed out beneath a beret. The son, Rigo, appeared fresh from a shoot for a hip-hop yachting line, wearing an ascot and a navy double-breasted blazer festooned with gold braid. Looking more closely, Natalie saw that the blazer bore the insignia of the Colombia Navy in which, according to his epaulettes, Rigo held the position of admiral. Not bad for a twenty-one-year-old who had surely never worked a day at sea, or anywhere for that matter. Natalie realized she didn’t even know whether Colombia had a navy.

  BamBam had a gregarious smile and a jovial bounce that made him seem charming when he refused leaders’ outstretched hands and instead leaned in for a full embrace with the presidents or foreign ministers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Natalie glanced over at Bibb who was now on headset berating another poor soul about the Breaking News banner fail.

  This is not breaking news, Natalie thought. A Happening Now banner would be just fine. In fact, if eyeballs are the goal, a #HeWoreWhat tag is probably the better way to go.

  With every uncomfortable embrace, BamBam and Rigo edged closer to the president of Venezuela, Luis Gomez. Natalie could sense the tension rippling across the stage. Only Paraguay stood between the two adversaries when BamBam, already approaching President Gomez, arms outstretched, was blocked by four men in identical dark suits and mirrored glasses as they materialized onstage. Almost instantly, Rigo Lystra was surrounded by the men and then whisked away. Without the sound, it looked like an old-timey magic trick: Rigo there one minute, gone the next.

  The camera, trained on the scene, caught it all.

  Now BamBam was waving his arms frantically. Security details from every country swarmed onto the stage, hustling PanAmerican leaders off to safety this way and that way until only the president of Paraguay remained onstage, alone, dazed, and confused.

  It had all taken less than sixty seconds and, best as Natalie could tell, none of the people running the ATN control room had noticed.

  “Excuse me, Bibb? Did you see that?” Natalie called out. Even without a banner, this was news worth breaking.

  The laconic producer she’d been talking to earlier gazed up at her. “Don’t bother. I used to try. They never pay attention to what’s happening on air.”

  “But—”

  “If you really want them to notice, tweet it. One of the websites will pick it up and then someone in the newsroom will spot it. Probably off Drudge. If it comes from one of us, they’ll just ignore it.”

  As if on cue, three wild-eyed producers came racing into the control room, shouting.

  “Rigo was kidnapped!”

  “Drudge says he was shot!”

  “Beltway thinks he might be dead!”

  “Where?”

  “Is there video?”

  “Who is reporting this?”

  Various mouths screamed at once.

  Natalie looked at the producer and then back up at the monitors. She had been in enough control rooms in meltdown to know the wise choice would be to stay silent and make herself invisible. But conveying facts was her job.

  “No one was shot,” Natalie shouted over the din, in her most just-trying-to-help tone.

  The room didn’t notice that she’d emitted a sound. Producers were yelling, “Beltway says they were Venezuelan security forces.”

  “Fox is calling it a foreign attack on US soil.”

  “What do we want to go with?”

  Bibb started barking orders like the commanding officer on a sinking submarine. “People, rerack the video! I want a Developing Now banner on air, and a headline. ‘Colombian Leader’s Son Abducted! Summit Attack!’”

  The video started running in slow motion replay live on air with the banners Bibb requested. There was Rigo smiling and extending a hand when he was again surrounded by big men in earpieces and whisked away.

  “Unlikely,” Natalie murmured to herself.

  “What is?” the associate producer asked.

  “Kidnapped? I just don’t see how Rigo Lystra gets abducted in the middle of a high security White House event in the heart of DC. On live TV,” Natalie said in a low voice.

  “Eh.” The producer shrugged. “These days anything’s possible.”

  “That place must be crawling with Secret Service,” Natalie insisted to the producer. “How would kidnappers get around them?”

  “Who knows,” the producer said, in the tone of a man who witnesses the improbable on a daily basis.

  Bibb’s voice pierced the room. “As soon as we can, we’re switching to New York control! I’m getting New York on the phone.”

  “Or maybe the Service took him,” Natalie said. “Maybe he’s in US custody.”

  “I buy that,” the producer said, nodding as he pulled out his phone. “Do you want to tweet it or should I?”

  Natalie shook her head. “Bibb,” Natalie said, walking up to her boss. “Bibb, do you think maybe the Secret Service took him?”

  “What?” Bibb snapped, turning on Natalie with a look of rage in her eyes.

  “I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense to assume he was abducted? Maybe we want to pull back on the—”

  Shaking her head, Bibb gave Natalie a dismissive wave. “Wait for me in my office. I’ll be there when this is done.”

  The producer glanced at Natalie’s phone, then back at her.

  “You do it,” Natalie whispered to him, as she walked out of the room.

  * * *

  Natalie studied the decor in Bibb’s office while she waited. It was an eclectic mix of British colonial and deconstructed Serengeti. Many of the pieces had begun life grazing the land on four legs, and those that hadn’t were carved in the shape of things that had. For example the elephant feet on Bibb’s mahogany desk, and the gnu figures to one side of the uncomfortable wooden chair that Natalie would be expected to sit in.

  “That was a gift from the headman of the Maasai tribe,” Bibb had told her during their meeting the prior Friday. “And so was my throwing spear.” Gesturing to a human-size harpoon hanging within arm’s reach of the desk. Airily, Bibb had explained that she’d collected all these artifacts while working “in country” as a young producer, but Natalie would bet her agent’s cut that Bibb had picked up most of them antiquing in Virginia.

  After what felt like an hour, Bibb rushed into the office wearing the look of an exhausted school principal, albeit a principal who could afford three-carat diamond stud earrings and the expensive balayage required to turn her hair that especially natural-looking shade of blond.

  “You have no idea how hard my job is,” Bibb sighed. She sank into the chair behind her desk and grabbed one of the six remote controls arrayed on top of it, stabbing the volume to high. Natalie momentarily turned around in her chair to take in the wall of monitors. Every channel was replaying the Rigo “abduction” with pundits doing live play-by-play analysis. The ATN monitor now had the words Breaking News in shouty all-caps in the bottom crawl along with the banner “PanAmerican Summit Mayhem.” At least they’d dropped the abduction line.

  “Thank god, they got it fixed,” Bibb said with relief, punching the volume to low. Then her eyes shifted to Natalie and her voice got stern. “So. You,” she said and Natalie felt dread rise in her chest. “Today,” Bibb said, tilting her head with either sympathy or contempt, Natalie couldn’t tell which. “The briefing.”

  Natalie swallowed. “In retrospect I realize I should have cleared it with you before asking but at that moment I thought—”

  Bibb frowned. “Cleared what? I don’t know what you are talking ab
out.”

  “My question?” Natalie said. “About the First Lady?”

  A shadow of a line appeared between Bibb’s brows. “Oh that was fine. That’s not the issue.” She sighed. “Natalie, dear, I want you to succeed. Do you want to succeed?”

  “Yes,” Natalie said breathlessly. “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, let’s talk about the hard things.” She pushed a stack of glossy magazines across the desk toward Natalie.

  Reaching for them, Natalie saw they were copies of Hamptons magazine, Greenwich Style, and the Washingtonian open to at-home profiles of women news anchors. The spreads showed perfectly groomed TV ladies posed in their decorator-perfect homes, making breakfast for their three—always three—handsomely scruffy children, hard at work in their immaculate offices filled with a row of designer dresses on hangers and boxes of carefully stacked eight-hundred-dollar shoes, captioned with sentiments like, “I love getting up at 3 a.m. for the morning show because I get off work at noon, and that gives me a full nine hours to be wife and mom.” And “On my days off, I like to whip up homemade butter, do triathlons, and make mosaics with the children.”

  “This is what I need you to shoot for,” Bibb said.

  Natalie almost choked, trying to swallow back her laughter as she imagined a photo shoot at the shabby breakfast bar of the UnComfort Inn where she was currently staying. “This is where I eat processed turkey out of the package alone for dinner after work,” she would say with a comely smile.

  “I—I don’t have kids,” Natalie said when she realized Bibb was waiting for a response. “Or a place.”

  “What?” Bibb asked tersely, jamming a finger at one woman’s head. “Their hair. It’s the hair you should be looking at.”

  Suddenly Natalie felt she was on familiar ground. Of all the things she’d mastered in her years climbing the news ladder, giving herself the perfect straight blowout was at the top of her list. In news, a good blowout was an essential survival skill.

  “How would you like me to change my hair?” Natalie asked, thinking, I got this.