Chips Are Falling-Ch. 4

A/N: This is a very talky chapter but there are a lot of things that need saying just now.

Disclaimers: First, Aaron Sorkin and HBO own all rights to the characters and show; I make no pretense. Second, when I started this story, I was unaware of any Season 3 spoilers; the direction of the story was just my own reading of the figurative tea leaves of Seasons 1 & 2. I am now uncomfortably aware of two serendipitous parallels but I want to assure the reader that I'm still pursuing my own track. Sorkin is pretty brilliant (and I am not), so there shouldn't be any coincidental overlaps.

Entering the 40th floor on Monday morning, Mac was surprised to see Millie at her desk outside Charlie's office.

"I wanted to make sure you had what you needed this morning." Millie offered a tremulous smile. "I worked for that cantankerous old man for fifteen years. He wouldn't forgive me if I left you in the lurch. Anyway, I'll stay until noon, and I probably won't be any good to you after that. It's going to begin to hit home, you know?"

Mac nodded. She did know.

They went into Charlie's office.

"There are some calls you're going to want to return; I put them on Outlook. Jim Walton from CNN. The current guy at CBS News, whatever his name is, they change so quickly. And Roger Ailes from Fox." Millie arched her eyebrow. "I don't have to tell you what Charlie would have said about that one." She flipped a page in her pad. "Union contract negotiations Wednesday morning and you'll have to be a part of that, along with HR. I left some background material on his—your desk. Reese Lansing wants to see you at 1130, his office. And there are some decisions that need to be made about ACN's involvement in the service on Thursday." She stopped. "Are you okay, Ms. McHale? You look a little overwhelmed."

"I am." Mac inhaled deeply. Her eyes darted at the desk, at the TV monitors on the far wall, at the memorabilia of a life in journalism cluttering the room, a brass spyglass at the window, framed family photographs on the credenza, and a shadowbox of medals and a combat infantryman's badge on the wall behind the door. "And it's Mac," she smiled bravely. "Thanks for everything, Millie. I'll try to ask questions before you leave. If you would, call the newsroom and ask Jim Harper to have one of the interns come up and staff your desk this afternoon."

Millie nodded and backed out.

Mac dropped her bag and went around to the desk. Overwhelmed indeed. Perhaps not since Genesis had so much happened in a six day period.

A lazy Saturday afternoon interrupted by shocking news. A hasty trip to Connecticut that evening to offer condolences and support to Nancy and Sophie. Will had been composed if distant on the drive back, but once home, his composure cracked. Whatever protective emotional wall he had built crumbled and Mac held him through alternating hours of agonized silences and recriminations, until, exhausted, he fell asleep in her arms.

And there was her own anguish as well, the depths of which she was still plumbing. She remembered Charlie twice chancing her: the first when she was still largely untested, and once again when she was in desperate need of redemption. The tale of two Mackenzies. In a very Dickensian way, Charlie had recalled her to life.

She remembered another crucial encounter. How Charlie's had been the voice in her ear when she was in a stiff bed in a military treatment facility in Germany. The frantic phone call to ascertain her real condition (so much can be misrepresented and gotten wrong, even amongst journalists) and reassure her—perhaps both of them—that things would get better. At the time, she hadn't been able to tell what was wrong with his voice. He may have been sloshed; he often was. She may have been drugged; she had no control and little knowledge of what was being administered to her.

He may have been crying.

When she returned to ACN, neither of them had mentioned that phone call.

Grief, raw and choking, rose in her and her eyes burned with tears she'd been struggling all weekend to contain. Sighing, she put her head in her arms down on the desk, on Charlie's desk, and released the tears.

oooo

Leona was on the phone when Will entered her office. "He's here now. Right." She replaced the phone on her desk and gestured for him to take a chair. "Rebecca's on her way." Then, after a pause, "Did you know the heart has four chambers?"

He lifted an eyebrow and waited for her to continue.

"I've only been able to account for three of mine since meeting him, you know. He just… occupied important places in my life. Forty-five years. God, I'm going to miss having him around." For a moment, her imperious manner slipped and Will witnessed Leona unmasked, anguished and disarmingly human. She wrung her hands and turned her head toward the window, a gesture he recognized as a diversionary tactic. He rose and went toward her, but stopped inches short.

Will and Leona did not have the relationship of equals, and it seemed presumptuous, invasive even, for him to initiate a reassuring touch. This was Leona Lansing. ("You know who I am.") Media tycoon, business barracuda, unflinching and opinionated. Formidable on every count.

"We all will."

Turning, she relented and permitted a brief hug, momentarily easing the barrier between them. "Yes. Well." She exhaled and pulled away. "It's just that I depended on him being here. Doing this alone will take some getting used to." She moved back behind her desk, barriers up once more.

"We're clearing the F block," Will began. "Two minutes..."

Leona snorted. "The conceit of this business, that a heartfelt tribute is all of two minutes." She put up a hand to stop Will from responding. "I know. He'll be lucky to get a mention on any other news show, and the only place his name will appear in the paper is on the obit page." She sighed. "Do you think the Wall Street Journal will run an editorial that calls Charlie's death expiation for our coverage of Genoa?"

"We don't sacrifice lives for civil suits, Lee." Rebecca strode in, depositing her purse on a chair. She took a chair at the table and opened her folio. She motioned for the other two to join her and fixed Will particularly with a stare. "Tell me. What's so important that I had to come here personally to add to our response to Dantana's petition?"

"Because we need to get something on record."

She spread her hands, encouraging him to go on.

Will shifted in the leather chair and leaned across the table. "I want the real villain of this piece, not the cartoon villain. Dantana was just the unwitting facilitator of Genoa. He has much to answer for, but he wasn't the instigator. This was orchestrated at another level, by an unseen Machiavelli, for another purpose. We were given a lie by a trusted source, then given phony evidence to substantiate the lie."

"I'm intrigued," she nodded. "However, Mr. Dantana is the one who has filed suit and against whom we must defend ourselves. Well, defend you." She picked up her pen. "But tell me what you think needs to be included in order to bust this case wide open."

"David Pressman. Young kid, an intern at News Night a couple of years ago. We let him go after three months when he began leaking newsroom information on social media."

"And you think he masterminded Genoa for a comeuppance?" Rebecca's pen paused.

"No. David Pressman is dead. He killed himself shortly after we let him go."

Leona inhaled sharply, still without comment, and exchanged a glance with Rebecca before turning back to Will.

"So, if not the former intern—"

"His father," Will said flatly. "Pressman Senior was the source who confirmed Genoa to Charlie. He was the one who urged me to stand by the story when it began to disintegrate." He shook his head. "I don't have all the whys-and-wherefores yet, but he is somehow connected to something else, something bigger."

"Bigger than Operation Genoa?"

Will rubbed his chin, seemingly a nervous tic. "Unlike what we thought at first, Genoa wasn't institutional failure. It was a cascading error, set in motion by a calculated calumny. A cascading error is a failure in a system of interconnected parts wherein the failure of a single, perhaps small, part triggers the failure of successive parts. The individual parts have integrity but they are pressed beyond operational parameters."

"Quite a mouthful," Rebecca said admiringly. "You must have been the most articulate prosecutor in the D.A.'s office."

He gave her a sour look.

Leona cleared her throat. "I don't have to tell either of you that there's something morally repugnant about dragging the suicide of a screwed up kid into our defense strategy."

"However repugnant, Pressman was the one who made his kid a factor. He told Charlie as much," Will said, looking to Rebecca for confirmation. She nodded. "Anyway," he continued, "the only thing to include is just the part about the kid having worked here and been fired. I'm not sure it makes a difference if we say he killed himself. But Pressman made this personal and I want to take it back to him."

Leona gave a bitter laugh. "And we're going to put this implied connection between Pressman's son and Operation Genoa in our response to Dantana's suit? Isn't this what you lawyers call hearsay evidence?"

"Civil suit, different rules of evidence," Rebecca said shortly. "But I'm more concerned about the end game here, Will. Is this a vendetta?"

"No. But there's going to be justice."

Rebecca capped her Mont Blanc pen. "I don't have to tell you that the aim of defending ACN against this suit has to do with money. I want to look at this, think about it, discuss it with Leona. If I determine it doesn't conflict with our primary objective—well, we'll mention the kid in the response. We've got another week before we have to file." She zipped her folio and rose to leave. "Let me talk to my staff and I'll give you a call later, Lee." Nodding at Will, she left.

Will rose and started for the door himself, but turned. "Service is Thursday morning. Will Reese want to be a pall bearer?"

"Ask him," she said, a pained look returning to her face. "No, I will. I have to talk to him soon anyway." She sighed heavily. "We'll let you know tomorrow."

Will ducked his head in acknowledgement.

After he left, Leona pressed a button on a remote and the sound of the Allman Brothers filled her office.

Nobody left to run with anymore, nobody left to do the things, the things we used to do before…

oooo

Will skipped the pitch meeting but buzzed for Jim after it had concluded.

"Hey, I caught the David Gregory show yesterday morning. I thought Mac did well." Having opened with the most positive thing he could think of, Jim's expression slid into one of doubt. "Will, I've gotta ask—are you going to be able to do this tonight?"

Will tapped the digital clock on his iPad. "Mac's going to join us in about fifteen minutes. The three of us are going to go through the rundown. But before she gets here, you and I are going to review a few things."

"Sure."

"First, talk to me about this West guy. He was the one with the original tip to Dantana."

"Cyrus West was a problem waiting to happen. He was—um, ambitious is the word I've been using, but perhaps that's too ambiguous. He had a personal agenda, he wanted to be noticed." Jim laughed. "If I'd been here, we wouldn't have even used him for a military man on the street interview."

"He's that unreliable?"

"No, he's that insignificant. West wasn't even a field grade officer, he was company grade. And that means he never had the kind of big-picture experience to offer relevant commentary. On anything. No service college, no joint forces command, not even defense attaché experience. I mean, Mike Tapley is a retired Navy captain, but that's the equivalent of a bird colonel in the other services. Cyrus West was an air force captain, barely three years senior to the average West Point cadet. It should have been an embarrassment to have him to offer any military analysis."

"Why didn't Mac catch that?"

Jim shrugged. "The D.C. bureau has a bit of an inferiority complex. I think Mac wanted to let Jerry have enough room and the ability to develop his own sources, so she gave him autonomy. Probably more autonomy than he should've had. Probably expecting that he'd police himself."

"Are you saying she got sloppy?"

"Actually, I'm trying very hard not to say that."

"Okay, one more thing," Will said. "I need you to go back a year ago to when you were vetting Solomon Hancock—"

"Hancock?" Jim frowned. "You mean that guy that came to Charlie with some info about NSA intelligence gathering?"

"Yeah. I guess my question is how you got the biographical info on him."

"Some from OPM, the Office of Personnel Management. Then I talked to the HR wonk at NSA."

"You were just handed a psych eval? No HIPAA constraints? No Privacy Act consideration?" Will shook his head. "And what about the downgrade to his clearance, wouldn't that have been considered a punitive action—"

"I see where you're going. If Hancock's clearance had been downgraded for any reason other than a change to the scope of his job, it would be considered an adverse personnel action. He'd have been notified and have the right to reclama. There's a whole administrative process." Jim considered for a moment. "I was fed information to discredit Hancock as a source."

"We've been asleep at the wheel, Jim. All of us."

"Is this why you wanted the info on the Utah data storage facility? I haven't had much time to work on that so far, certainly not enough to carry a block tonight."

"That's okay. We'll take it on later this week. But put a couple of folks on it. Thorough folks."

Tamara rapped lightly on the door and leaned into the room. "Someone just delivered something for Mac—" She carried an ostentatious vase of gold and pink flowers into the office. "Can I leave them here or should I send them upstairs?"

The men exchanged a glance.

"You can leave them here," Will replied, affecting nonchalance. As soon as Tamara departed, he reached for the card and smiled. "Welcome to the ivory tower, Mac."

As if on cue, Mackenzie appeared, tossing her pad on the table, startling Jim. "I hope you two have worked most of this out. I've had a bitch of a morning. Reese has made all kinds of commitments without talking to me and without even seeming to think about the implications, and—" She noticed the flowers and looked to Will. "What?—"

He couldn't keep the amusement off his face. "For you. Congratulations on your promotion from a fan." He slid the card to her.

She looked at it and rolled her eyes. "Jane Barrow!"

Jim snickered. "Trying to bury the hatchet?"

"Trying to lick the boots, more like" Mac replied dryly. "Anyway, I'm yours until 1:00, when I have to be on a conference call." She dropped into a chair, one hand snaking out to squeeze Will's. "What have we got?"

Jim reviewed the rundown for the night, registering Mac's nods as approval. He got to the F block and paused. "Um… Will's going to read something about Charlie. There's some archival footage Maggie's been putting together—reporting from Saigon, from Johnson Space Center during the first shuttle mission, from the sidewalk outside the Washington Hilton after Hinckley's attempt on Reagan, and from L.A. during the South Central riots in 1992. We're allowing two minutes."

Mac looked at Will. "That's long for something like this. Can you carry it? We can get Elliot to narrate it as a package and you can just bookend it—"

"I've got it," he said.

She smiled and nodded. "Okay."

Citing things to do, Jim took his leave.

"How are you doing?" she asked, eyes crinkling in fond concern.

"I'm good. You?"

She sighed. "An exasperating meeting with Reese. He wants to start interviews for Charlie's position in two weeks. He asked me to sit in on the interviews."

"What did you say?"

"Absolutely not. It's wildly inappropriate for me to help panel someone who could conceivably be my boss."

"Is your name on his interview list?"

She made a dismissive sound. "I doubt it. This is Reese, remember? Anyway, I have no aspirations in that direction. I'm just sitting in for a little bit." She paused. "Reese was really worried about whether you would do the show tonight."

"I'm okay," he reassured her. "Got time for lunch? One of the interns made a run for sandwiches and should be back any minute."

"Sounds wonderful. Just please have it delivered before I have to be somewhere. You saw Leona this morning? How's she doing?"

"Hurt. " The word seemed at once accurate and inadequate.

"And you spoke to Rebecca? What did she—?"

He held up a hand. "It's why I didn't want you there. I didn't want you to be disappointed in me. One of us has to maintain some integrity."

oooo

Mac slipped into Control at 8:45 and Jim passed her an extra headset. After Herb counted them down to break, Jim cleared his throat. "Good show, everyone. But we need you to clear the room."

Kendra, Herb, and Jake exchanged surprised glances before standing and exiting. "Back in 30," Herb reminded, on his way out.

Joey had risen but stood in front of his control board with open palms and a confused look.

"I've got this," Jim said, seating himself at the graphics panel. "Thanks, Joey."

After Joey left, Mac keyed her mic. "Will, Control is clear."

Will seemed to be looking directly at her through the monitors. "Copy that." A corner of his mouth hitched up into a slight smile. "Good to have you back in my ear, Mac."

Jim counted down and switched the board.

"Lastly, Atlantis Cable News is tonight mourning the loss of the president of the news division, Charles Alphonse Skinner, who died suddenly last weekend. Charlie, as he was known to everyone both at this network and throughout television news, was the embodiment of professional integrity and diligence in a business that has become increasingly partisan, superficial, and commercially-driven. A native of Newport, Rhode Island, Charlie was drafted and left the University of Rhode Island before finishing his degree. He served as infantryman during two combat tours in Vietnam and was decorated for his actions under fire. Later returning to Vietnam as a reporter for United Press International, he reported from helicopters and rice paddies, and most famously covered the fall of Saigon in 1975. His reporting from Cambodia in 1979-80 helped expose the mass genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Upon his return to the States, he bounced between several newspaper and broadcast television news bureaus, helping cover the 1976 presidential election for ABC News, the 1980 Republican National Convention for UPI, and coordinating coverage of the fledgling space shuttle missions from Houston for CBS News. He was recognized by the Radio and Television News Association in 1995 with its Edward R. Murrow Award, and the following year, he was brought to Atlantis World Media and charged with the creation of an upstart cable news network, ACN.

"Charlie Skinner was a husband and a father; he was a hero, and an intrepid newsman. He was the natural heir to Murrow, Fred Friendly, and Don Hewitt. He was the eminence grise of cable news and an elder statesman in a profession that sometimes seems to have fallen upon rocky times. There isn't a person at ACN who does not regard him as a mentor and a friend. To me personally—"

The feed switched from the tape package back to Will and Mac thought she heard hesitation in his voice.

"Hold it together, Will," she said softly. "You can do this…"

"—Charlie Skinner is the reason I am here tonight, and why I will be here tomorrow night and the night after that. Literally, he put me in this chair a dozen years ago and he continually challenged me to stay here and to make it count for something. Charlie Skinner's legacy is a commitment to high standards and a passion for the news. We at News Night and at Atlantis Cable News intend to carry on as Charlie would have wanted, in the manner that he first modeled for us."