spilled some of the cream meant for her coffee.
“Forgive me, please. I’m nervous.”
“What are you nervous about?”
“They could be watching me.”
“Who?”
“Give me a moment. I want to do this. But I need to go to the lavatory.”
Rosa was a veteran reporter, not easily frightened or fooled. She sensed something genuine about this woman and was relieved when a few minutes later she returned.
“You know,” Gabriela said, “you should tell me what’s going on.”
“No one will believe it. It goes beyond Brazil. It’s why I chose your news agency. You must tell the world.” The woman extracted a brown envelope from her bag. “You have to investigate, it has to be exposed.”
“What has to be exposed?”
“Some of it is in these documents.”
At that moment, a man in a suit, wearing dark glasses, navigated his way among the tables of the crowded cafe. He reached inside his jacket for his wallet but dropped it.
As he bent over to retrieve it amid the din, no one saw him place his tan briefcase under a chair occupied only by shopping bags. The chair was being saved for someone who had not yet arrived at the crowded table.
Brushing off his wallet, the man walked into the restaurant and left unnoticed by a side door. He strode to a corner while pressing several numbers on his cell phone. A motorcycle stopped next to him and he put on a helmet then climbed on behind the driver.
At her table, Rosa began flipping through the documents as her source explained the story.
Two tables away, as a group of well-dressed women cleared the chair of shopping bags for their friend who had arrived, the tan briefcase under it fell over.
The woman nearest to it blinked in question.
One of them reached down toward it, but the briefcase disappeared in a blinding flash of hot light. Glass in buildings near and above the cafe exploded in the concussive wave. Blood, flesh and debris showered on the street, pelting people a block away.
A fireball rolled skyward.
3
New York City
The World Press Alliance headquarters is at midtown Manhattan’s western edge.
Jack Gannon hurried back to it, walking by the Long Island Railroad maintenance yards, where Thirty-third Street slopes into a bleak wasteland near the Hudson River. From here, he could see the helicopters lifting off and landing at the West Thirtieth Street Heliport.
Beyond that: New Jersey.
His cell phone vibrated again. Another text message: Where are you?
Be there in ten, he responded.
Nearly trotting now, he passed the graffiti-covered wall of a shipping depot where shopping-cart pushers sorted their morning bounty of cans. One man in dreadlocks and a faded Obama T-shirt was dismantling a TV for recycling.
“Can you help your brother? I need food.”
Gannon reached into his pocket where he still had the change from his hot-dog lunch and fished out a crumpled five.
“Bless you. Have a long, happy life.”
Gannon was still new to the city, and his heart had not hardened toward the hard-luck cases he saw every day.
Since he’d left Buffalo for his new job at the WPA, he’d taken to walking New York’s streets whenever he could. He was on desk duty today and had come to this isolated tract on his lunch break to be alone.
To think.
He was five months into his dream of working at one of the world’s largest news organizations and he still had not landed a good story.
So far he’d reported on a homicide, and helped with the coverage of a school shooting in California and a charter bus crash near the Grand Canyon. He’d inserted national paragraphs into stories from WPA’s foreign bureaus. He had also been assigned to night shifts helping edit copy on the national and world desks. Soon, he realized that not everyone at WPA wanted him there, something made clear the night he’d overheard two copy editors kibitzing by the features desk.
“What do you make of Jack Gannon?”
“I haven’t seen any pizzazz. He’s out of his league.”
“Didn’t the Buffalo Sentinel fire him, or something? I missed all that.”
“He’s one of Melody Lyon’s projects. She hired him after he broke that story on the Buffalo detective and the missing women.”
“That one wasn’t bad.”
“Gannon’s got more luck than talent, if you ask me. What’s he done since?”
“Not much.”
“That’s my point. And you’re right, he was fired by the Sentinel, so was his managing editor. It was a stinking mess. I heard that O’Neill and Stone were against Gannon’s hire but that Melody wanted it done. I hear he’s disappointed people and there’s talk they might let him go.”
“Really?”
“It’s a rumor. I think he should be punted back to Buffalo.”
“Didn’t his bio say that he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer way back for the story on the jetliner and the whacked-out Russian pilot?”
“A Russian-speaking guy in the Sentinel’s pressroom did all the talking to sources overseas, Gannon just took dictation.”
That was a load of bull!
Gannon had bristled on the other side of the file cabinets, out of sight.
They were wrong about him.
Dead wrong, he repeated to himself now, as he jogged to a crosswalk to make the light. He’d earned his shot with the WPA, crawled through hell to get to New York. He belonged here and he’d prove it.
Gannon entered the twenty-story WPA building, swiped his ID badge at the security turnstile and stepped into the elevator.
He checked his phone. Nineteen minutes since Melody Lyon, the deputy executive-the WPA’s number two editor after Beland Stone-had summoned him with her first text.
We need to see you now.
He got off the elevator on the sixteenth floor with a measure of honor as he strode by the reception wall displaying WPA news photos of history’s most compelling moments from the past hundred years.
The World Press Alliance was one of the world’s largest news wire services, operating a bureau in every major U.S. city, and two hundred bureaus in seventy-five countries, providing a nonstop flow of information to thousands of newspapers, radio, TV, corporate and online subscribers.
The WPA’s demand for excellence had earned it twenty-two Pulitzer prizes and the respect of its rivals, chiefly the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bloomberg, China’s Xinhua News Agency and Russia’s fast-rising Interfax News Agency.
Gannon entered the newsroom with a sense of foreboding.
Something was breaking on the flat-screen monitors that streamed video and data from around the world. Whatever it was, it had hit the WPA. Some reporters looked shaken. A few were standing, hugging each other.
“Did you know Gabriela? Poor John.”
