"Who's going to do the West Coast update?"
"Don't worry about that," the producer promised, shoving her into the office and closing the door. "Better lock it to be safe."
As the producer hurried away to deal with his temperamental anchor, Cheeta banged in the door and asked, "What about my Eyeball to Eyeball edition?"
"We'll let you know when the coast is clear."
Cheeta spent the next hour with one ear pressed to her locked office door, listening to the horrible sounds coming from the newsroom as the staff attempted to placate Don Cooder.
"We'll give you a raise, Don."
"Don Cooder's very soul has been wounded. It will take more than mere money to bind up his mortal wounds," he announced.
"We'll increase your operating budget. Add that backup science correspondent you wanted."
"You insult Don Cooder with a bribe of another color."
"How about you do a special special tonight?"
"A special special?"
"Yeah. On the blackout. You can do it in the Eyeball to Eyeball slot."
Cheeta tried to choke it down, but the shriek of anguish came out of her too-red mouth as raw sound.
"You bastard!"
"I'll do it," said Don Cooder in a suddenly placated tone.
At eight o'clock, Don Cooder had gone on the air, his hair sprayed into submission, his wild eyes almost calm.
As she watched on her office TV, Cheeta Ching's greatest hope slowly dwindled to nothingness. Namely that the brass would see the seven-minute blackout as a repetition of the famous seven-minute Don Cooder walkout and can the prima donna once and for all.
"My time will come," she hissed at the screen, while eating cold jungol soup. Once, the baby kicked. Cheeta slapped her belly and he settled right down.
When it was over, Cooder was knocking at the door, saying in an imitation Robert DeNiro voice, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."
Cheeta sat very still in her desk and said nothing until the clumsy sound of his boots creaked away.
Less than an hour later, he was back doing a Jack Nicholson.
"Heeerre's Donny."
Cheeta refused to respond. Fortunately, no ax came splintering through the panel. Cooder went away again. From time to time, furtive footsteps returned to her office door. Cheeta ignored them, mentally vowing to outwait him, just as she would outlast her arch-rival in the long haul.
Hours had passed without any further sign of Cooder. Cheeta called around the studio. No one had seen him. But no one had seen him leave the building either.
With any luck, Cheeta hoped, he had gone to the john to have his long-overdue nervous breakdown. If only someone would tell her for sure. The cold spicy soup was repeating on her. Either that or she was having the weirdest contractions.
Cheeta was steeling her nerve for a tentative hallway reconnoiter when her office fax tweedled and began emitting annoying noises.
She turned in her seat and watched the sheet slide from the slot. She ripped it free and read it.
It was short:
BROADCAST CORPORATION OF NORTH AMERICA:
UNLESS TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS IS DEPOSITED IN SWISS BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER 33455-4581953 BY NOON TOMORROW, THE NEXT BLACKOUT WILL BE SEVEN HOURS, NOT SEVEN MINUTES. THINK OF WHAT THAT WILL DO TO YOUR RATINGS.
CAPTAIN AUDION
"Audion?" Frowning. Cheeta went to her wordprocessor. Her chief asset as a news reporter had been her aggressive take-no-prisoners style and her flat-but-photogenic features.
As weekend anchor, it had been her attention-getting voice and her mane of raven black hair.
Writing had nothing to do with any of it. She was paid over two million dollars a year to be a corporate logo that talked. The truth was, Cheeta Ching could barely spell. So she input the word "Audion" and waited for her electronic on-line dictionary to help her out with the unfamiliar term.
The database responded instantly.
AUDACIOUS: Brash, outrageous or unconventional.
"That's not what I asked for," Cheeta complained. Then she noticed she had misspelled the word and the database had given her the nearest equivalent. She retyped the word again, this tune using both typing fingers.
AUDION: A triode or vacuum tube used in early television development.
"Hmmmm," said Cheeta, swiveling back to her faxphone. As a journalist, she had received her share of anonymous death threats-most, she was convinced, came from Don Cooder. As a precaution, Cheeta had an AT D device attached to her phone that gave a digital readout of the last number that had called. She pressed the memory button.
A ten-digit number marched along the readout screen and froze. Picking up the phone, she dialed it. The phone rang six times, and there came the click of a second line cutting in.
A crisp woman's voice at the other end said, "Burner Broadcasting."
Cheeta hung up an instant ahead of her own gasp.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she told her nest of inanimate electronics. "You have just given me the greatest story of my career."
"Story?" A low voice called through the door. "What story?"
Cheeta froze. Forcing a lilt into her barn owl voice, she called, "Fooled you, Don. Just testing to see if you're still there."
"I'm not Don Cooder," said the unmistakable voice of Don Cooder.
"And I'm sleeping on the office couch tonight," returned Cheeta Ching, getting up to turn off the lights.
After waiting a full minute, she got down on her hands and knees and peered under the door.
An unblinking bloodshot blue orb was staring back at her.