be grateful that the fucker hadn’t bled to death. Dying, Birk had seen, did nasty things to fingers—curled them up like croissants. Made them goddamn near as crusty, too. You learn all kinds of shit as a reporter. That could get Raggedy Ass searching for a new supplier of fingers. Even seeing double, Birk couldn’t come up with any potential donors but Suicide Sam and himself. And Sam over there, with his fucking bomb, had a little more clout—in every sense of the word—than Birk.
Speaking of Sam, the bottle of Johnnie Walker was damn near empty, so Birk waved it around to give him a heads-up that the talent needed a new one. But he did it off camera. Least he was pretty sure he’d done it off camera. Maybe not. Who gives a flying turd? Look at me. Birk waved the bottle at Sam again and mouthed, “Go get a goddamn refill, asshole.”
Sam wasn’t moving. Birk stared into the tiny computer camera, glanced at Raggedy Ass snoring contentedly on the other side of the wheelhouse, and covered the lens with his bandaged hand.
“Get me another one,” he growled at Suicide Sam, “now.”
Birk swallowed the last of Johnnie Walker’s best and threw the bottle at Sam, underhanded. Easy catch, but instead of grabbing the goddamn thing and doing what he was told, Sam jumped aside like it was a bomb. The bottle crashed to the deck and shattered. When the jihadist looked up from the broken glass, Birk made the “hurry-hurry” motion with his unbandaged hand, palm up, fingers waving. A little impatient, perhaps, but given the Job-like challenges Birk was facing, he felt that he’d offered the cretin a pretty forgiving gesture. But goddamn, the “hurry-hurry” didn’t move Sam a wee bit, so Birk flipped him off. And when that didn’t do the trick, he gave him one more universally understood hand signal: He slid his index finger across his throat.
It never occurred to Birk that threatening to murder a suicide bomber was among the world’s most ill-advised acts. And now Raggedy Ass was arising, no doubt shaken from his slumber by the bottle breaking. He glared at Birk.
But Suicide Sam didn’t spare the aged eminence so much as a glance, returning his eyes to the Shopping Channel and a particularly alluring pair of zirconium earrings.
* * *
It was almost 5:00 A.M. and still dark when the dilapidated Subaru rattled up to the elegant entrance of the Shaughn Hotel on the city’s West Side, which felt marginally safer to Jenna than returning to her apartment. Seeing the dilapidated car, the hotel’s doorman started to wave them on—then recognized Jenna climbing out of the front seat. He hurried to open her door. She left the rifle behind.
“We’re keeping the keys and leaving the car right there where you can keep an eye on it,” Jenna said to the doorman. Nicci would be showing up in an hour and there wasn’t a moment to spare.
He shook his head. “Maybe for a few minutes, but no longer. The owner”—real estate magnate Daniel Straub, who was reputed to have pretensions so grand that they trumped Trump’s—“is not going to want this thing out here at all.”
Jenna strode past him, stuffing a Benjamin into his neatly pressed navy blue jacket. “Take care of that car, and I’ll take care of you again on my way out.”
After checking into a well-appointed suite, Dafoe went to work on his laptop. She’d never seen him in hacker mode. His fingers flew over the keyboard so fast that he looked like a maestro on a baby grand, and she realized that he must have had a ton of RAM because she’d never seen a laptop with that much speed.
Jenna rushed into the bathroom, spending the next forty-five minutes showering and trying to make herself look professional enough that network security wouldn’t bar her from the building.
When she stepped back into the main room, she saw Nicci arriving. Dafoe corralled the weather producer to review a long list of instructions he’d prepared for her. Jenna’s phone rang, but she ignored it; let voice mail pick up. She sat next to Sang-mi on the couch.
After carefully going over the list, Dafoe told Nicci, “If you don’t hear from us after The Morning Show has been on for fifteen minutes, or you don’t see Jenna on the air talking about those rockets, then do everything on this page just the way you see it. This is critical.”