Star Time (61 page)

"I've got some very good news," Greg told him.

"What is it?"

Greg smiled broadly. "You're fired."

Ev
snorted. "Good try,
Lyall
. I figure by this time tomorrow I'll be occupying your office."

"I'll still be here tomorrow. You won't." And one less challenger will be fighting for my job in November, Greg thought. "You're a smart man, but just too greedy. It turns out the directors don't like underhanded employees who try to smear FBS's reputation for their own ambition. They especially don't like the ones who lay the cost off on the company. We located the bill for the private detective in Accounting. Barnett Roderick hates
them
most of all.
Bad mistake."

"You're lying."

"Even your friend Dickenson had to abstain on that one. Try him."

"I sure will."

"But do it from a pay phone on the street. You no longer work here."

Ev
evaluated Greg's words and facial expression, and then, seeing in the doorway the two Security men Greg had summoned, he rose to leave.

"I always figured I'd beat you out in the end,
Lyall
, because you were hampered by a drawback I never had to worry about."

"What's that?"

"You like to fool yourself into believing you're a moral man. Those pictures prove you've got the morals of a rapist. Time you admitted that your charade of having a conscience just gets in your way."

"Both of us can chalk up a big mistake we made about the other. Mine was taking my eyes off you long enough to make love to a woman I'm in love with. Yours was not firing me years ago in L.A. when you had the chance."

Ev's
eyelids hooded slightly and his mouth curved into a slyly reptilian smile.

"I still intend to."

"Take the whore off the air!" one demonstrator screamed into the video cameras.

"Bring God back into our homes," yelled another.

A demonstration had formed outside the FBS Building, with people impassionedly shouting and waving signs condemning Christine
Paskins
and homosexuality. A small man in his forties named Jonathan
Dearey
stepped up to the bouquet of microphones. His hair was almost all gone, which accentuated the nondescript roundness of his face and head, which looked like a roseate egg with dark, bright eyes. He had organized the demonstration, as well as a scattering of inconsequential anti-gay rallies around New York City in recent months. This appearance at FBS's doorstep, he was sure, would give his evangelism the kind of publicity that had evaded it before. Behind him stood his small band of followers: five men who looked like bodybuilders and an otherwise modestly dressed woman, all wearing yellow T-shirts with the words "Warrior of the Lord" on them.

"God has punished the godless," Jonathan
Dearey
began in an unexpectedly sonorous voice. "The sinner he has punished is Christine
Paskins
because she failed to give coverage on her broadcast to the New York City Police Department's brutal blockage of our attempt to halt the sinful Gay Pride Parade, as the Lord commanded us to do."

Fervency vibrating in every word and gesture,
Dearey
demanded that FBS fire Christine
Paskins
and her "whoremaster boss, Gregory
Lyall
." He called upon viewers to boycott the network, upon the FCC to force the network off the air, and upon investors to band together to wrest FBS from the hands of "Satan and his minions and put it into the hands of God-fearing Christians."

As his words came to a ringing end, the strains of "Onward Christian Soldiers" rose on cue from the throats of his followers. At that moment Jonathan
Dearey
felt his entire body had become incandescent with God's power. He was a solitary beacon in the world's black wickedness, God's chosen messenger on earth, his prophet, his Jeremiah come to foretell of doom and destruction if the human race failed to change its sinful ways. But he was also a canny, modern man who understood the power of the media to multiply his audience by a factor of millions and to validate his message by deeming it important enough to broadcast to the nation. Tying this demonstration to the fortunate happenstance of the Christine
Paskins's
scandal would gain coverage at last for his crusade against the homosexuals perverting American purity.

A video of the demonstration, shot by one of his followers, went up on YouTube that evening. With all of the Warriors put to work flooding the social media and contacting conservative Christian groups and websites, by the next day nearly three hundred thousand viewers had watched the clip. 
By the day after, over a million.
  All the while conservative radio commentators were pointing to Jonathan
Dearey
as a beacon of morality in the struggle to preserve American morality and
national security, both of which were threatened by Christine
Paskins's
dissolute character and her attack on Phillip Grant, the revered patriot leading the Department of Defense. On Sunday morning, some thousand ministers included a reference to Chris, Greg, and FBS in their sermons, often with a mention of the secretary of Defense, who had been promoted to "saint on earth."

Late that day, Grant appeared in the press briefing room of the Pentagon. An athletic man with a military bearing and firmly forthright features, he had been wounded while serving in Korea and still walked with a slight limp, which Pentagon reporters privately insisted became more pronounced during military ceremonies. After law school he had gone into politics.

"I have an announcement to make," Grant said into the last of the chatter. Then he began to read. "As many of you know, Christine
Paskins
and FBS News recently broadcast a report that accused me and this government of building a nuclear-missile base in Maine in contravention of our treaties with the Russians. That is a lie. There is no such base. We take our treaty obligations very seriously and consider peace our primary goal.

"After consultation with legal counsel, I wish to announce that the Defense Department and
myself
will be serving papers as soon as they are drawn on the Federal Broadcasting System and Christine
Paskins
to commence an action against them for defamation and libel. I will personally be asking five hundred million dollars in actual and punitive damages. Ms.
Paskins
was warned beforehand that her story was untrue. Yet, in an act of gross malice and negligence, she deliberately and knowingly broadcast it with reckless disregard that it was false." A few knowledgeable reporters in the briefing room understood that lawyerly last sentence. A Supreme Court decision had declared those factors essential for a public figure to have a cause of action for libel.

"We contend that Ms.
Paskins
manufactured the evidence on which she based her charges against
myself
and this department. In fact, the soldier she interviewed was AWOL at the time. We believe she induced him to lie on camera so that she could fabricate her malicious story."

Grant held up a piece of paper. "I also have a message from the President. The President states: 'I have no personal knowledge of any secret missile base, have not approved any such base, and am certain that the secretary of Defense is completely innocent of FBS's charges.'
" Grant
stepped away from the rostrum. "No questions."

He turned on his good leg and strode out of the room. 

A simple denial from the secretary would have merited perhaps a couple of paragraphs in major newspapers. By initiating a lawsuit for
half a billion dollars, he had turned his denial into front-page news. A reporter commented to FBS's Pentagon reporter as they were obtaining printed copies of the statement, "Five hundred million! Grant really wants to break you guys."

Chris used the last two minutes of the news broadcast that night to defend journalism and her journalistic honesty. She regretted, she said, the recent revelations about her private life, but they should have remained private and should not be taken as a slur on her honesty as a reporter. She and FBS would not be cowed by the administration's threats. She did not intend to relinquish this anchor chair, no matter how vicious the attacks on her character became. She stood by the truth. She had always believed in the fair-mindedness of the American people and relied on it now.

A moment after Chris retired to her
office,
she heard a knock on the door.

"Is Miss August in there?" a man's voice called out.

Chris laughed, recognizing Greg.

"Isn't this the Playboy channel?" he said as he entered and extended a single white rose toward her.

She accepted it and kissed him. "Can we go somewhere?"

"My new apartment.
It's got an underground garage we can use to avoid reporters."

Chris began to gather up her belongings. "My father called me today."

"Was he shocked?"

"He didn't say, and I certainly didn't ask." Her expression turned shy. "He just wanted me to know he thought I was a chip off the old journalistic block. Something
like
that."

"Good for him."

"My mother got on the phone, too. She told me that even with all the notoriety, it wasn't too late for me to go back to my husband and start a family. She told me I could think about having a career again when all my children were in school."

The FBS's directors' dismay over the incriminating photos had been heightened and given focus by the Defense secretary's charges and half-a-billion-dollar damage claim. This was a quantifiable threat. Sentiment was overwhelming for Chris to be fired, or at least suspended.

Greg argued that notoriety and government indignation had occasionally assailed other network news figures and eventually passed without their ratings suffering unduly. Constitutional issues were involved here: freedom of the press, right to a fair trial, innocence until guilt was proven. Considered pragmatically, replacing a popular anchor temporarily under a cloud would bring accusations of cowardice, and as viewers switched to better-known anchors on other networks, a sharp fall-off in ratings, perhaps as low as they were during Ray
Strock's
last days. Did the directors want to risk that—or Chris's lawsuit if she turned out to be right about the Defense Department?

One of the older directors replied bluntly, "Hey, none of this gets around the fact that you two were caught in bed together. To a lot of people Christine
Paskins
is now a smut queen who got her job because she was sleeping with you. To be honest, the whole network looks like some kind of orgy den. I understand that she's got a strong contract we can't ignore, but we've got to clear out the stench in people's nostrils somehow."

Another director said, "She
deceived
her husband, who's an important man in the government. Maybe she lied about the Defense Department, too."

The next regular board meeting was scheduled for mid-November, well after the new lineup premiered and halfway through the sweeps period that would determine the following quarter's advertising prices. By then the present controversy should have simmered down and the company's prospects for the coming year would pretty much be known. If the ratings proved to be lackluster, Greg was out anyway, but if he could point to one or two big shows, a gathering strength in the schedule, an assurance of profitability,
then
more directors would rally to his side, and he would be in a better position to battle both for himself and for Chris.

Barnett chose that day to return full-time to his office at FBS. He, too, was manning the phone, urging the directors to take action against Chris. The Defense secretary's charges provided a more defensible cause
than the leaked photos that humiliated his daughter. Chris also provided the weakened flank from which he could launch an attack on Greg.

Hoping to dissipate the issue before the directors' resistance stiffened into a call for a premature board meeting that might end in his dismissal, Greg arranged to meet with Barnett in the latter's office.

Greg walked to the opposite corner of the floor from his own office, remembering his awe the first time he was ushered into the presence of the communications titan—and everything that day set into motion. As he expected, Barnett kept him waiting.

"If you're here to beg me for a favor," the Chairman insolently announced when Greg was finally admitted, "you came to the wrong place."

Unlike a decade earlier, Greg seated himself unbidden across the desk from Barnett and got down to the point of the meeting.

"Pushing Chris permanently off the air will kill the news's ratings."

Barnett's eyebrows lifted into an angry V. "More than those pornographic photographs? Just as important, I will not allow a woman to speak for us who might have libeled the government of the United States."