The Sixth Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

up. They’re almost here!” I screeched, and we rushed the UN gates. They’d already started closing.
    “Please, please, sir, please let us pass,” I cried to the guard, who looked right through us and continued the slow slide of the automatic gates.
    “No, wait!” Dona said to him, holding her press pass aloft. “I’d love to get your comments on camera—Dona Grimm, Fox News,” she said, reaching in with her video cam.
    “This one is for history,” Dona added. The offer proved too much for the officer, and he said in clipped English, “Okay, but hurry up,” smiling into the camera. “Sergeant Mohammed Fahreed—that’s spelled F-a-h-r-e-e-d,” he said as he checked and rechecked our credentials and we slipped all the way inside the gate.
    I could feel my stomach relax a bit for the first time all morning. At least we were inside the gates. After a perfunctory interview with Fahreed, which would never see air, we rushed to the press area outside the entrance to the building. Hundreds of reporters from all over the world were jockeying for position.
    Settling for spots in the back of the horde, which was three reporters deep, I said, “You should carry me on your shoulders for what you’ve put me through today.”
    The pack of hungry reporters suddenly all moved as one as the gates swung open again. “Tell me what’s going on! Please,” I begged, because I could see nothing but a lot of backs.
    “The gates, they’re opening. Wow … two tanks, five vans, you name it,” Dona reported.
    As the caravan started to make its way around the pavement in front of the General Assembly Building, the reporters went wild, rushing the vehicles. The cops, in turn, rushed the reporters. It couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds before a scuffle broke out between three cops and four reporters who’d tried to climb the lead van, hoping to shoot from its roof.
    Suddenly, the entire bunch rushed from the sidewalk, giving Dona and me the chance to move directly to the curbside. Better to have a front-row view of “him” than report on a bunch of squabbling reporters.
    When two dozen cops in riot gear moved in, the pack of reporters angrily but obediently moved back to the curbside. Two of them even tried to unseat us from our new curbside positions. Good luck.
    “Step two checked and completed,” Dona said. “Now it’s just a matter of seconds before I meet ‘him’ personally and deliver into my producer’s grubby little hands the interview of the century.”
    “Right,” I answered, looking skyward. “And I’m going to have his baby.”
    I whipped out my notebook, and she set up her Minicam on a tripod and started shooting footage of the police commissioner, who got out of the lead vehicle behind his own bodyguards and walked up to a mic on the police podium that had been erected on the lawn to address the reporters.
    “Now listen up, you guys,” he said. “That scene that just transpired? On my watch? If I have to ban the whole damned lotta you, I will. And don’t think I’m some candy ass who won’t.” The reporters, unbowed, jeered as he signaled for the circus to begin.
    The vehicles began slowly moving again around the section where we were standing.
    “This doesn’t feel good,” I said. “Do you think they’re scamming us and bringing him in a whole other way?”
    “Probably not. I wouldn’t be able to meet him if that happened, would I?”
    “Will you stop with that? Anyway … something isn’t right.…” I felt my stomach flip. Dona peered over the cops’ heads in front of us to watch the circus train and its clown cars full of freaks, Feds, and fanatics move forward.
    The twentieth vehicle, an armored van, pulled up and around the driveway, and then it stopped—directly in front of us. Would what happened next have happened if it had stopped in front of different reporters? That I can never say, can never know.
    What I do know is that the doors slid open and six Secret