The media giant exhaled angrily. "You're fired," he growled, flinging the gun into the back of the truck.
Dropping into his seat, MacGulry snatched up the receiver, flicking off bits of kangaroo flesh. "What?" he demanded.
There was only a handful of people on Earth with access to this private number. The voice on the phone was clipped and obsequious. Very professional and very, very British.
"Mr. MacGulry, sir, I hate to bother you, but it's important."
"What's wrong?" MacGulry pulled the phone away before the caller could answer.
"Stop puking, ya underdaks-wearing bastard! If you're gonna be crook, do it in the dunny!"
The driver looked around for a dunny. The prairie was vast. No outhouses in sight.
"Nature's dunny, idiot," MacGulry snarled.
The driver understood. Climbing from the truck, he went over and puked in the dirt.
"What is it?" MacGulry growled into the phone. The caller picked his words carefully.
"There is someone-that is to say, there's something here you should see, sir. At once."
Like all News Company employees-which was the corporate umbrella under which virtually all of Robbie MacGulry's businesses existed-the caller knew enough not to waste his employer's time. The Englishman was being vague for a reason. MacGulry sighed hotly.
"I'll be back quick as a can," he grumbled. He slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
MacGulry sat there for a long moment, staring at the bleak horizon.
The kangaroos were a distant cloud of hopping dust. He pulled off his glasses, blowing dirt off the thick lenses.
"Bastard," he whispered so softly even the wind failed to hear. Had someone been there to hear, they would have gotten the clear impression MacGulry was talking about neither the Englishman on the phone nor his incompetent driver.
MacGulry glanced to his right. His driver was still doubled over. The young man seemed to be almost finished.
Quietly, MacGulry slid over behind the wheel. When he started the engine and stomped on the gas, his driver had to jump out of the way to avoid the lurching Land Rover.
The media tycoon floored it and cut the wheel. When he zoomed back the way they'd come, he could see his panicked driver waving helplessly from within a cloud of beige dust.
"Teach you for ruining my day off, mate!" Robbie MacGulry yelled.
The vehicle sped across the endless plain, away from the distant looming mountains of the Great Dividing Range.
THREE HOURS LATER-showered, shaved and dressed in an impeccably tailored Bond Street two-piece blueblack suit-Robbie MacGulry stormed into the main production facility of his Wollongong, New South Wales television station.
South of Sydney, the Wollongong station was small compared to others in his globe-straddling television empire, but it was the one closest to his main home. If Robbie MacGulry had a heart, Wollongong would have been the one nearest and dearest to it.
Wollongong was the first TV station he'd ever owned. Although off the beaten path of his global media empire, an uncharacteristic lapse into sentimentality by its owner made it the flagship of his entire entertainment empire.
Banks of television screens lined up like unblinking eyes above dozens of computerized stations all around the production room. A visitor might have mistaken the facility for a space-shuttle control room if not for the images on the screens. On most of the monitors, a yellow-headed cartoon family was sliding around an icy parking lot. The cartoon was one of the most popular shows in the decade-plus history of MacGulry's American television network.
"You better not have called me back here to watch bloody cartoons!" MacGulry roared.
The men in the room wheeled on the booming voice. As the rest resumed working double-time, one hurried over to Robbie MacGulry.
"I'm sorry again for disturbing you, sir. I presumed you'd want to see something we received from America."
Rodney Adler was as English as frigid women and warm beer. It seemed as if the very act of speech pained his perpetually locked jaw.
MacGulry only liked the British as employees, and even then he didn't care for them very much. As a people, he'd always considered them to be condescending nitpickers whose sole joy in life was to piss in the party's punch bowl. His dream was to amass a big enough fortune to buy the British Isles and order the entire population to march off the bloody White Cliffs of Dover.
The billionaire followed Adler to one of the stations. There were two nervous men seated before it. MacGulry dropped into the empty swivel chair between them.
"We have been monitoring the situation in Harlem," Adler said, "per your instructions."
"I don't need to be reminded of my orders," MacGulry growled. "Stop wasting my time and get to the point."
Adler nodded crisply. "Sorry, sir," he said. He had one of the seated men insert a big black videotape into the slot on the face of the monitor station.
"I can't be completely certain at this point, mind you," Adler said. "But I believe we've found what you were looking for. Or, rather, who."
On the four television screens above the station, the cartoon cut out. A video image began playing. It had been taped at a weird angle. Blurry, snow-covered branches jutted directly in front of the lens. Beyond them, MacGulry saw a lone man walking down a bombed-out street.
"It's out of focus," MacGulry complained gruffly. "I can't see his face." In his head, the media magnate was already planning on firing the anonymous camera operator.
Adler leaned forward, peering up at the blurry image.
"I thought it was the fault of the cameraman," the Englishman said, his big jaw locked tight in concentration. "But according to our person on the ground, the subject did that to his face by himself."
MacGulry's eyes grew flat. "So he's hooked up to a bloody paint mixer?" he snarled. "People's heads don't move like that. Not without scrambling their brains to mush. How many baby brains do your nannies have to puree before you Brits figure that out? Who told you he could do that?"
As he spoke, the man with the blurry face stepped over to where the cameraman was hiding. Things went crazy for a moment before the camera settled on a pale, pretty face. The woman was standing up from behind a broken-down section of wall in an otherwise empty lot.
Robbie MacGulry's face sagged with strained patience.
"Cindee Maloo," he muttered to himself.
"Yes," Rodney Adler said uncomfortably.
He knew that MacGulry had been linked romantically to the woman in question. Adler assumed it had ended when she had gotten a job at rival BCN on the high-profile Winner show. He had only recently found out that she was still somehow secretly on the team.
"He's not even a Vox cameraman," Adler said. "He works on 'Winner' with Ms. Maloo. Even though he did a poor job, that is still probably, er, possibly the individual--or rather one of the individuals-you were looking for."
He held his breath, hoping he wasn't about to join on the dole queue a thousand other Vox employees who had been foolish enough to upset the great Robbie MacGulry.
MacGulry crossed his arms, his perpetual scowl drawn into deeply angry furrows.
"Ten words or less. Why is it him?"