Mike Tomlinson said simply, “Okay.” At first she was relieved. He reverted to being perfectly professional. He met with her only in company with other people, and issued orders to the group together so everyone would know what the others were doing. The rest of the time he never spoke to her. Messages came through underlings and colleagues. Things stayed that way for two years.
She was thirty-three years old by then, and she understood. The stories she was assigned were the same sort she had been doing as a beginner in Charlotte, and less important than the ones she had done in Kentucky. She was still doing some modeling, but as she aged, there were fewer offers.
The Fourth of July came on a weekend that year, so the holiday was celebrated on the following Monday. She switched with Claudia Shin so she could do Claudia’s Friday early broadcast and take what amounted to a four-day weekend. She drove to San Diego and checked in at the Hotel del Coronado. She liked it because Channel Ten wasn’t shown in San Diego. People who saw her on the beach seldom recognized her.
She spent two days lying on the beach—always under an umbrella and wearing 100 SPF sunscreen—walking vast distances morning and evening with her feet in the surf, and thinking. She evaluated her life. She had been a television newswoman for over ten years, and she was still about at the level where she started. She was skilled enough and she was still beautiful enough to be at the network, but her time was nearly over to qualify for the jump. If she didn’t get promoted at Channel Ten to a slot where she’d get noticed within two years, she’d have missed her chance.
After two days of thinking during the day and drinking on her balcony at night, there had been about three times when she had decided on suicide. Once she had stuck to it long enough to walk to a sporting goods store in town, bring back a nasty-looking fishing knife, and run a warm bath, but she passed out before she’d used it.
Near the end of the second day she called Mike Tomlinson, the station manager. She was told he couldn’t take her call just then, but someone would call her back in about ten minutes. His secretary had been saying that for two years. Gloria said never mind, and called the private cell phone number he had given her two years ago.
“Yes?” he said.
“This is Gloria,” she said.
“I thought you were off this week,” he said.
She closed her eyes and made her voice sound cheerful and soft. “I was sitting here on my balcony at the Hotel del Coronado wondering why you never called me again after that one time.”
He paused for a moment. Maybe he was looking at his phone to switch on a recording and protect himself.
She thought about it, but she didn’t care.
He said, “I made overtures because I was attracted to you. You made it clear you weren’t interested. Since I’m not a psycho, and didn’t want to put pressure on an employee, I’ve left you alone.”
“Well, maybe that wasn’t the last word. Maybe we should get together soon and talk about it. As I said, I’m at the Del Coronado for the next couple of days. What do you think?”
Within a month she had been promoted to weekend anchor with Todd Tedesco. When Jerry Zingler had a stroke she became a weeknight anchor, a job she’d held all the years since then. The relationship with Mike had gone on for a few years, and she had begun to think he might be planning to marry her, but then he married another woman. When that marriage ended after a few years he was with Gloria a few times, and then married a second wife. Now and then—after a Christmas party or when they were away at a conference—he still occasionally knocked on her hotel room door. She tolerated it and acted cheerful on those occasions.
She was ashamed. She hadn’t been a na?f right out of college. She had by then been a professional for over ten years. And she had been the one to suggest the arrangement. All it had taken was seeing the situation clearly. She felt she’d been driven into a dead end. She was humiliated and cheated and hated what had happened to her, what she’d had to do. And she was confused. She was a victim who was making three million dollars a year and winning awards, but she felt worthless.
At the studio today she had felt as if she was reporting her own story. She had been trying to protect that young policewoman from what happened to her. As soon as the police chief ended his press conference announcing that pig Stahl’s firing, she had begun to get nasty e-mails from viewers. Every one used the word “bitch.” The viewers all had other things to say, but that word seemed to be required.
She knew all about the demeaning crap Diane Hines was being subjected to by her wonderful new boss. Was that supposed to be tolerated from a public official? Apparently. She had begun to screen her e-mails for the word “bitch.”
Gloria got into her Ferrari, stepped on the clutch and started the engine, let the car coast backward a few feet, and then touched the brake. The bomb kicked the spinning, flaming car upward to light up the night air, turning the dead body strapped into the driver’s seat over and over with it.
33
The bomb maker’s special phone rang. Since the terrorists had turned up, he had moved it from the kitchen cupboard and kept it close. He opened his eyes and stretched his arm to the nightstand beside his bed to pick up the phone. “Yes?”
“We’re up the road about five kilometers. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
He looked at the phone. “It’s three a.m. What do you want at this hour?”
“We want to talk to you.” The man hung up.
All the bomb maker could do was put on the clothes he had taken off only a couple of hours ago and prepare for an unpleasant talk with them that was sure to culminate in some awful new task or condition they wanted to add to the bargain. He went into the living room to wait.
In a minute he saw the same two cars with what seemed from a distance to be two men in each. They pulled up at the end of his driveway, and the phone rang again.
“Yes?”
“We’re coming in. Turn off anything you have that will hurt us.”
“What would that be?” He was hurrying to his front closet to switch off the mines, but he didn’t want them to know there was anything to switch off.
“You tell me.”
“I don’t have anything like that. Come ahead.” He had reached the closet, and now he swept the side of his hand down the toggle switches to turn off the firing circuits and closed the door. As he completed the action he saw their headlights brightening and coming closer. He shut the closet door to hide the panel.
The headlights went off and he opened the front door.
The car doors swung open and the four men hurried to the porch in the darkness and filed inside. They were smiling, but it was the same kind of smile he expected to see if they were about to kill someone in a particularly cruel way. In a moment they had crowded into his foyer. The man who was in the habit of speaking for the others hugged him. “Wonderful night,” he said. “You pulled off another one.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said impatiently.
“The woman! That television reporter. Tomorrow the newspapers and television stations will be full of stories about it. We heard about it on the radio.”
The bomb maker had felt a half second of hope that something had happened he knew nothing about. Now he knew it was only the television reporter, so they’d brought him no information at all. He had needed to bomb something to keep the panic growing in the city, and he hadn’t been ready to do anything more difficult. He expected people in the city might think this meant something, but he hadn’t anticipated any reaction from his clients.
He said, “She was nothing. Easy. While I’m busy working I need something to keep the pot boiling. Do you know that expression?”
The four men were pleased. “Brilliant,” one of the men said. “They’ll be confused, and not know where to look next.”