The pit bull of television news entered like a kitten, aware that she was officially part of the privileged few who had visited Keating’s inner sanctum.
“Not much to look at, is it?” he said.
It was a simple room, no fancy furnishings. The conference table was Formica. The chairs around it were covered in dull vinyl. The carpeting showed signs of wear. Only the electronics were state of the art, no expense spared on the monitors and display screens of all sizes, each broadcasting a different show, some from sister companies of BNN, some from competitors.
“I guess I don’t know what I was expecting to see.”
He smiled the only way he knew how, which wasn’t much of anything, just a crease across his mouth that rose almost imperceptibly on the right side. He offered her a drink, but she declined.
“Good show tonight, Faith,” he said as they moved toward a small sitting area, away from the conference table. Corso took a seat on the couch and Keating in his leather chair.
“Thank you.”
“You’ve been riding the Sydney Bennett train a long time. How much more steam is left?”
“Honestly, I thought it would be over already. But this story could be bigger than the trial. Sort of the way the Watergate cover-up became bigger than the break-in.”
“Interesting way to look at it,” Keating said. “But not what I want to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?”
“I just had a marketing meeting yesterday. When I started BNN, the median age of our viewers was fifty-five. Now, it’s sixty-five. Basically our bread-and-butter commercials cater to the fallen-and-can’t-get-up age group-folks for whom the good, the bad, and the ugly are now the immobile, the infirm, and the incontinent. If we stay on this track, the only things our sponsors will be able to sell are burial plots and quickie cremations. The audience that got us where we are today isn’t going to be here tomorrow. You’re my new girl, my chance to change that demographic and tap into the more lucrative thirty-five-to-fifty-year-old audience. So stop making references to things like Watergate.”
“I understand.”
He tasted his scotch, then continued. “I don’t think you do, fully. Here’s a little pop quiz on BNN history. Do you know how many viewers BNN had on the very first day it went on the air?”
“I don’t know. Half a million?”
“Twenty-five million.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“No one did. That’s because in the normal course of the television business, cable companies paid content providers like MTV or ESPN for the right to air their programs. I turned that whole paradigm on its head. I didn’t just give BNN away. Before we aired a single program, we paid the cable companies to sign an agreement to put us on the air. As much as twenty bucks a subscriber. A half billion dollars later, before we even went on the air, we had our mass audience, bought and paid for.”
“That’s not why they keep tuning in, day after day, year after year.”
“True. But our audience is shrinking, and advertising revenues aren’t what they used to be. It’s not enough for my shows to be a success. We need mega-success.”
She could barely contain her glow. “Thank you.”
“But there are some things to clean up first. Starting with coma girl.”
Not even Corso had stooped to calling her coma girl. “Celeste Laramore,” she said.
“Yes. Celeste. I’ve authorized my lawyers to put up to a million-dollar offer on the table to make it go away.”
That raised her eyebrows. “Excuse my disagreement, but I am a lawyer myself. I have serious qualms about paying that kind of money when we have done nothing wrong.”
“Well, Faith, consider this your official welcome to the brain room: We
She chuckled, then realized that he wasn’t joking. “What do you mean by ‘we’?”
“One of our boys in the field,” he said, shooting a sideways glance at the door. He knew that the Shadow was standing guard on the other side of it.
“Okay, I got it. And exactly what did ‘we’ do?”
“We got a little too aggressive and cracked into the LIFENET system that allows the EMS crew to transmit vital signs wirelessly. Again, it’s wireless, so intercepting that data to be the first news station to know if she was dead or alive would have been no big deal, except that somehow our techie crashed the whole damn system. The EMS crew was essentially flying solo all the way to the hospital, no input from cardiologists back at the hospital on how to treat the patient.”
It took a moment to digest what she was being told. “So. . we did cause her coma?”
“No, no, no,” said Keating. “We crashed the wireless system. The thug in the crowd who grabbed her by the neck caused her coma. But that’s a nice distinction that I don’t care to press in a public forum. It happened on your show, and I can’t take the risk of tarnishing the image of my newest superstar.”
Corso took a breath. “This is. . disturbing.”
“Yes. But the fact that we’ve earmarked a million dollars to solve the problem is the good news.”
“So what’s the bad news?”
“The million dollars is coming out of your salary.”
Her mouth fell open. “That’s not fair.”
“You’re right. It’s not. But like I said: Welcome to the brain room.”
“I just don’t see why you’re punishing me. I didn’t know anything about this. Why should it come out of my salary?”
“Are you suggesting that it should come out of mine?”
“No, but-”
“If you don’t like it, Faith, there are other networks.”
He could almost feel her shiver.
“Sean, I didn’t say, you know, that I was walking out the door. I just said a million dollars out of my salary isn’t fair. But I’m. . happy. Overall. Just, uh, not about this.”
It wasn’t easy to make Faith Corso stammer, but Keating had made tougher cookies crumble. “Then help me find another solution.”
“Okay. How can I help?”
“My lawyers tell me that the only way to make the Laramore case go away quickly is to settle it. Find me another way to make it go away.”
“I’d have to give that some thought.”
“That’s what we do best right here,” he said, opening his arms wide, reminding her that they were in the brain room. He walked to the bar, added another finger of scotch to his glass, and then sat on the edge of the table, facing her. “Let me tell you how I see it. One option is to settle the case and get a confidentiality agreement. That would cost us-excuse me, cost
“How do you make a lawyer even think about dismissing a personal-injury lawsuit when his client is a twenty-year-old woman in a coma?”
“We’ve already got Swyteck on the run. Ted Gaines tells me that the judge is furious about the Facebook postings in violation of the court order. Gaines said that cases do get dismissed for willful violations of court orders.”
“It’s rare,” said Corso.
“Exactly. Which is why I prefer a more direct approach.”
“Meaning what?”
“We need to exploit this jury-tampering story.”
“I agree that we need to exploit the story,” said Corso. “But I don’t see how jury tampering in the Sydney Bennett trial leads directly to the dismissal of the civil suit by Celeste Laramore.”
