The Panic Zone Read Free

City
    T he 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.
    â€œCan 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.
    â€œBless 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. Hewas 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.
    â€œWhat do you make of Jack Gannon?”
    â€œI haven’t seen any pizzazz. He’s out of his league.”
    â€œDidn’t the Buffalo Sentinel fire him, or something? I missed all that.”
    â€œHe’s one of Melody Lyon’s projects. She hired him after he broke that story on the Buffalo detective and the missing women.”
    â€œThat one wasn’t bad.”
    â€œGannon’s got more luck than talent, if you ask me. What’s he done since?”
    â€œNot much.”
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œIt’s a rumor. I think he should be punted back to Buffalo.”
    â€œDidn’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?”
    â€œA 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