two dog fanciers started talking. Jenna patted Kato’s head—their daily ritual—and turned back to her work. Kato and his master exited moments later.
“You’ve got more security than the airports,” Dafoe said.
“Hmmm. I wonder who’s doing it right,” Jenna answered over her shoulder. “Them or us? Nobody’s blowing up our sets. Of course, we get a lot fewer people coming through here, and most of them aren’t looking to hijack the network.”
A stylishly coiffed dark-haired woman poked her head in the door. “Are you reh-dee?” she asked in a distinctively French accent.
“Be right there,” Jenna said and the woman walked away. “Hair and makeup,” she explained to Dafoe. “I’ll look a little different when you see me next.”
A quick stroll across the hall landed her in Chantal’s hands. The woman exclaimed, as she did most days, “You ’ave zee most boo-tee-full ’air.” Jenna sat in one of five chairs before a mirror that extended across the entire wall. She still had the packet of worldwide weather in her hands. Her attention was quickly captured by data about thunderstorms. These could be real beauties, she thought, spotting a temperature difference of almost one hundred twenty degrees from the minus forty degree top of the sixty-thousand-foot-high system to the ground. That could produce awesome T-storm activity.
She’d have to keep an eye on this one. The jet stream, cruising at 175 miles an hour, could help pull the budding storm right into the troposphere. Or, to put it another way, right smack into the face of every New Yorker. A funnel cloud—aka tornado—could follow. One of the interim signs she’d be looking for would be hail the size of baseballs. The Razorback State didn’t have a monopoly on twisters.
Nicci popped into hair and makeup. “I’ve got Cindy”—as in Clark, chief of the National Weather Service—“for a quick Q and A on the storms.”
“I was just reading about the biggie heading this way.”
“Not to mention Florida, Texas, and California.”
“Really? I hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
“You want to do a minute with Cindy?”
“Sure. Let’s ask her to talk about protecting yourself from electrical storms. We haven’t done that in a while.”
“I’ll prime her.” Nicci pivoted to leave, then spun back. “Dafoe? He’s a lot cuter without the gun.”
Chantal finished Jenna’s hair and makeup and stood back to admire her handiwork. “Boo-tee-full, boo-tee-full,” trailed Jenna to wardrobe, where she donned an Anna Sui dress with a hint of red, a color that always looked stunning with her white-blond hair. This completed her transformation from an attractive businesswoman to a Morning Show superstar. A few moments later, in her office, she watched the makeover register on Dafoe’s face—and wished she hadn’t. His lips tightened, and he actually pulled his head back a couple of inches, as if he feared touching her now. She hated having that effect on people but it was a fact of television life: every hair in place; lips reddened; eyelashes curled; and her cheeks, chin, nose, and brow powdered precisely. A friend once said Jenna looked so perfect going on the air that she appeared untouchable and not quite real. “Like a porcelain doll.”
“I’m still me,” she said to Dafoe softly, “the woman who was kissing you just a little bit ago. It’s just that you can’t kiss this me because it would smudge my makeup.”
“I know what you mean. I run into that every day with the cows.”
She laughed, loving the fact that he could make a joke of it so quickly. She settled at her computer and saw a message from Nicci saying that she’d finally run down the tornado video.
Then Jenna realized that she could be sitting front and center for New York City’s own tornado. Better check the roof cam.
It was hard to see much in the dim early daylight but she definitely spied clouds massing to the northeast.
Nicci buzzed her that the morning meeting was about to start.
Every day at 5:45 A.M., they convened in executive producer Marv Balen’s office. The twit would offer a show overview that Jenna could listen to with one ear: Her role was so defined that on most days she could keep paging through updated weather summaries while he yammered. She’d been blessed with a photographic memory for weather charts, and had been studying them for so long that she could spot a troublesome trend in a nanosecond.
Jenna discreetly slipped her earpiece into place. Her long hair made its presence nearly undetectable. On set, Marv, Nicci, and James Kanter, the wiry director, used the