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engineers who operated them bellied up as if they were playing six-foot-tall pinball machines. That was unfamiliar territory: union engineers had no time for scruffy couriers.
    Straight ahead was the film crew’s ready room, with battered lockers, equipment cages made of chain-link fencing, and at the end, his destination – film processing.
    As usual, the place amazed him. A catwalk across the entire rear of the room held enormous white plastic tanks of chemicals. Alternating stacks of silvered aluminum and bright red plastic film cans covered the walls on either side, and on top were piles of shipping bags made out of a rough twine netting stamped with "Urgent Shipment Newsfilm" and the bright blue ABN logo.
    Power lines and plastic pipes of all sizes ran in racks overhead and converged in the center of the room at two large machines. These were the automatic processors, which never stopped grinding away. When there was no new film to develop, yards and yards of clear junk film would be running up and down between spindles and in and out of chemical baths – the first baths covered with lightproof seals, and the later ones open.
    The smaller unit to the left was for when the film needed to be darkened or lightened or have the color balance adjusted. The massive main unit on the right took up most of the room, churning out thousands of feet of sixteen-millimeter color-positive film a day. Rick could see the flickering images of developed film rolling toward the final take-up reels. The rest was clear. He knew that this meant Hadley’s story wouldn’t have to wait for another story to finish.
    Two men in white jackets, looking like doctors or mad scientists, tended to the machines – checking temperatures, tapping meters, running tests on the chemical baths. One of them, a slight man with a receding hairline named George, looked up as Rick walked in.
    "That’s Farr’s material?" he asked, and when Rick nodded, he sighed and said to the other technician, "Damn it, you know that Farr will have the aperture wrong."
    In a thick German accent, the reply was, "Well, then run it through the B unit and correct it." Rick had never learned the other film tech’s name. The man was taciturn and forbidding when he was working and not there at all when he wasn’t.
    With a dramatic sigh, George took the heavy magazine and headed toward the tiny darkroom where he would transfer the film to a lightproof covered reel that fitted to the input end of the processor. The film would then be rough-spliced into the endless reel of junk film and start its journey.
    Rick pulled the Bolex out of his coat and said, "Hey, I got Moten’s ‘B-Roll’ as well."
    George didn’t even turn around. "I’m not wasting my time with that goddamn windup toy; it takes forever to unload. Moten can pull the film out himself when he gets back. It’ll be good practice." He closed the door, and the red Do Not Enter sign lit up.
    The other technician said, "And don’t even think of leaving that damn camera in here. Nothing gets dumped in here unless it’s going straight into the soup."
    Rick shrugged and put the camera back inside his jacket. He glanced up at the inevitable clock on the wall. It was 5.10, which meant there was plenty of time for the film to make air, even if it was the lead of the broadcast. As he turned to leave, he wondered if it would make the show at all. The collapse of the Paris peace talks and the massive B-52 raids on Hanoi would probably take up most of the precious few minutes of airtime.
    Hadley would be lucky if he got his story in before the second commercial and the turn to incredible medical discoveries, "slice of life" tales of everyday nobility, and perhaps a water-skiing squirrel.

CHAPTER 5
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    The black Chevy pulled up in front of the house in Virginia. The driver was concerned that he had missed the courier but knew he had been successful with the reporter and the