Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Jimmy
The Beacon Broadcasting building rose out of the Manhattan skyline in steel and glass, gleaming and self-important — the kind of architecture designed to make you feel small on approach and powerful once you were inside.
The logo, that lighthouse beam sweeping in a slow arc above the entrance, was lit against the evening sky, and I stood on the sidewalk staring up at it with the queasy fascination of a man who'd just agreed to move into a house he was fairly sure was haunted.
My first official day was tomorrow, Tuesday. The plan — Bruce's plan, carefully constructed and delivered with the nervous precision of a man defusing a bomb — was for me to arrive for a formal introduction to the staff, and for him to not tell Nelson until I walked in for my first day.
I thought it was a bad idea. Bruce said it would be better to apologize than to ask permission, because Nelson hated every hire he'd ever floated for the EP chair.
He'd spent the past two weeks dodging Nelson's questions about the search with the bureaucratic vagueness that was apparently his signature survival skill.
And yet here I was, a day early. On Monday.
I couldn't help it. I'd spent two weeks filling out paperwork and pretending I wasn't terrified, and now I was supposed to sit in my apartment one more night and not think about the fact that tomorrow I'd be running a show I'd spent my whole adult life calling a symptom of everything wrong with American journalism.
No. I needed to see it first. I needed to walk through the door, breathe the recycled air, get a look at the machinery up close.
I needed to know what I was walking into before it swallowed me whole.
I showed my temporary badge to the security guard, who barely looked at it, and pushed through the glass doors into the lobby.
It was worse than I'd imagined. And also, infuriatingly, better.
The lobby was enormous — marble floors, vaulted ceiling, a wall of monitors cycling live feeds from bureaus around the world.
London. Beijing. Nairobi. Jerusalem. The feeds were crisp and immediate, and despite myself the journalist in me leaned toward them the way a moth leans toward light.
That was Amal Khoury reporting from Beirut — I'd met her once, at a press-freedom conference in Geneva. She was good.
The newsroom was on the fourth floor, and the elevator let me out into organized chaos.
Rows of desks ran toward the far wall, each anchored by at least two monitors.
Phones rang. Keyboards clattered. Somebody was arguing about a graphic.
Somebody else was eating what smelled like reheated Chinese food.
And there, at the far end of the room, was the studio. I could see it through the glass — the anchor desk, the camera rigs, the lights hung from the ceiling like a constellation of mechanical suns. And to the right of the studio, behind another wall of glass, the control room.
My control room. Starting tomorrow.
I was staring at it, trying to make the words my control room feel real in my mouth, when a hand clamped down on my elbow.
"What are you doing here?"
Bruce Coleman had materialized beside me with the pallor of a man having a cardiac event. His eyes were wide and his hand was already at his tie, straightening it. Different suit than the restaurant, same expression — polished control with something frantic running underneath.
"Jimmy," he said, low and tight, like he was trying to yell at me in a whisper. "Your start date is tomorrow. We discussed this."
"I wanted to get the lay of the land."
"The lay of the—" He stopped himself. His hand went to the tie again.
"If Nelson finds out we hired someone without his input, he will—" He couldn't finish, as if the possible endings were too many and too terrible to choose among.
"He has burned through three executive producers in eighteen months, Jimmy.
Three. One developed stress-related health problems. Another simply stopped showing up.
And the last one? Nelson wrote a memo about him so devastating that the man's therapist called HR to request his personnel file. I’ve spent two weeks keeping your hire quiet.
Two weeks of avoiding Nelson Mackenzie, which is like avoiding weather.
He is everywhere, and he sees everything.
And you are standing in the middle of his newsroom on a Monday night looking like—"
He gestured at me. I looked down at myself. Jeans. The new blazer Jillian had bullied me into buying. My freshly cut auburn hair, which I had to admit fell a lot more like a professional's and a lot less like the weather event Dominic had wrestled into submission.
"Like what?"
"Like someone who doesn't work here yet!"
"Bruce." I kept my voice calm, which wasn't hard — I'd spent thirteen years staying calm in places considerably more dangerous than a cable news studio. "Relax. I'm not going to introduce myself to Nelson tonight. I just want to see the operation. Get a feel for the show before I'm running it."
His hand went to the tie a third time. The man was a walking tell. If he ever played poker he'd lose his house inside an hour.
Bruce stared at me a long moment, calculating risk, I guessed. Then something shifted in his face. Not relaxation — men like Bruce Coleman didn't relax. More like a man choosing the least catastrophic option from a menu of disasters.
"The control room," he said. "You watch from the control room and nowhere else. Nelson never looks in there during a broadcast. Not ever. You sit in the back, you don't talk to anyone, you don't introduce yourself. You are a ghost."
"I've been embedded with military units in active combat zones, Bruce. I think I can manage being inconspicuous in a television studio."
He didn't look reassured. He touched the tie one final time, muttered something that sounded like a prayer, and slunk away.
* * *
The control room was smaller than I'd expected.
Darker, too. Banks of monitors lined the walls — feeds from every camera in the studio, graphics queues, live satellite windows, a clock counting down to air.
A long desk ran the length of the room, bristling with switches and sliders and headsets, and behind it sat the crew: a technical director, a graphics operator, a couple of production assistants, and an empty chair in the center where the executive producer was supposed to sit.
My chair. Tomorrow.
I slipped into the back corner, against the wall, where a row of extra chairs sat empty. Nobody questioned me. In a control room running on deadline adrenaline, people came and went — network executives, visiting producers, the occasional lost intern. I was just another body in the dark.
The countdown clock hit zero. The theme music kicked in — that four-note brass fanfare I'd heard a thousand times through television speakers, now landing in the room with a physical weight that caught me off guard.
On the center monitor, the Beacon News Tonight graphic spun and dissolved, and there he was.
Nelson.
My breath did something involuntary, and I disguised it as a cough.
He looked — God, he looked exactly like himself, and nothing like himself at all.
The kid I'd known — the one who grinned too big and shook people's hands with both of his and once cried in an editing bay over a story about a homeless veteran — was gone.
In his place was a man carved from marble and lit by professionals.
Black hair with the faintest blue cast under the studio lights.
Ice-blue eyes locked on the camera with an intensity that made the air in the control room feel thinner.
Nelson wore a navy suit — structured, sharp, not a single element out of place — and he sat behind that anchor desk like the desk had been built around him.
He was beautiful. That wasn't new. Nelson had always been beautiful in a way that was almost aggressive — tall, angular, a face that could stop a conversation from twenty feet away.
But this was different. This beauty had been weaponized.
Cut and polished and aimed straight down a camera lens. It was terrifying.
"Good evening. I'm Nelson Mackenzie, and this is Beacon News Tonight."
His voice came through the control room monitors, and something in my chest cracked open so fast I had to grip the armrest. It was the same voice.
Deeper, maybe. More controlled, definitely.
But under the polish and the cadence and the years of practice, it was the same voice that had murmured into my hair at two in the morning in a walk-up off Morningside.
I pressed my back to the wall and made myself breathe.
You knew who he was when you took this job. You Googled him at least once a month for thirteen years. You watched every clip. You fucking knew!
But knowing and seeing were two very different things. A screen was safe. A screen had distance and pixels and the comforting fiction that the person on it wasn't quite real — not in the way that mattered. This was twenty feet away, through a wall of glass, and he was so real it hurt.
For the next hour I sat in the back corner of the control room and watched Nelson Mackenzie do the very thing I'd left him over, and he did it brilliantly.
He was ice. That was the only word. Every transition seamless.
Every pivot precise. When a live interview veered off the rails — a defense analyst grandstanding about something that had nothing to do with the question he'd asked — Nelson shut it down with a single sentence so elegantly devastating that the man actually apologized on air.
The crew exchanged glances. Somebody whispered, "Damn. "
His co-anchor, Marla St. John, sat beside him with the easy confidence of someone who'd been doing this for decades.
Even she deferred to him, and I could see why.
Nelson didn't share a desk. He presided over it.
The energy in the studio — visible even through the glass — orbited him like he was generating his own gravity.
And not once, in sixty minutes of live television, did he look at the control room.
Not once did he acknowledge the twenty people behind it making his broadcast possible. He looked at the camera, at Marla, at his copy, at the monitor. That was it. The control room might as well have been a wall of brick.
Part of me — the part that had produced shows for years and understood the mechanics — recognized this as discipline. The anchor's job was the audience. The control room's job was the anchor. You didn't cross those lines.
But another part of me — the part I wasn't examining too closely — recognized it as something else. A wall. Something that kept the world on one side and Nelson on the other, and if you happened to be standing in the wrong room, you simply did not exist.
I'd been very good at not existing to Nelson Mackenzie. I'd done it for thirteen years.
The broadcast ended. Nelson unclipped his mic and stood, and a young man — brown-haired, well-dressed, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times — appeared at his side.
They traded a few words I couldn't hear, and then he was gone, walking off the set without looking back, the crew parting around him like water around a stone.
The control room exhaled. People stretched, pushed back from the desk, reached for coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The monitors switched to the handoff for overnight coverage. Someone made a joke I didn't catch, and someone else laughed.
I stood in my corner and didn't move.
That is the man you're going to work with tomorrow. My voice will be in his ear, and this broadcast will be my responsibility and those ice-blue eyes are going to look at me across a room for the first time in thirteen years and—
I stopped the thought. Shut it down. Locked it in a box and shoved it into the back corner of my brain, where I kept everything I wasn't ready to look at.
He was extraordinary. That was undeniable.
Whatever I thought about corporate news, whatever I thought about the machine this network represented, Nelson Mackenzie was extraordinary at what he did.
The twenty-two-year-old I'd left behind had wanted to be a reporter.
This man was something far more dangerous. Nelson was an institution.
And I'd left him because I was certain he'd become a talking head. Shallow. Inconsequential.
The irony sat in my stomach like a stone.
I slipped out of the control room. The newsroom was still humming — it would hum all night, the overnight crew already settling in — and I moved through it fast, head down, a ghost, just like Bruce had asked.
In the elevator, I caught my reflection in the polished steel doors. Green eyes that looked wider than usual, and a little wild. Tomorrow, there'd be nothing between us but a wall of glass and thirteen years of silence.
Could I actually do this?