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the survey results, and then no one will be able to touch you."
     
    "Yeah," Sandy said, grinning.
     
    Then an ugly thought occurred to her. She looked at me and her eyes narrowed.
     
    "Wait a minute. Why are you telling me all this? What's in it for you?"
     
    I smiled at her reassuringly. Sandy still had a lot to learn. That should have been the first question she asked, not the last.
     
    "Well, for one thing I'm not happy about the way that Reed is doing this," I said. "I've never liked cheats. And for another, I can read the numbers. You're going places. And I'd like to have a friend in those places."
     
    Sandy nodded knowingly . It was an explanation she liked.
     
    I stood up.
     
    "I'll let you get ready for the evening news. Oh, and one last thing-- You should probably start thinking about what you want to do with the anchor position once they give it to you."
     
    "What do you mean?"
     
    "Well, Stonewall had his own style when he was the lead anchor. You know, with his political tirades and Satanic phone-in segments and such. But there's no reason you have to do things the same way. You might try going to more of a talk show format, something that would let you interact with the studio audience and capitalize on your people skills. I'd be happy to give you some ideas if you want to talk again."
     
    "Yeah. Maybe we should do that." I nodded in agreement and took my leave. The blond muscle boy and the notebook lady were waiting out in the hall, looking a little perturbed that I was weaseling in on their meal ticket. I ignored them, and made my way to the elevator.
     
    Down on the ground level I headed for the back of the building and slipped out an emergency exit. From there, I had to circle the block to get to the parking garage. It was an indirect route, but still faster than trying to elbow my way through all the Justin Weir fans out in Freedom Plaza. Reverend Stonewall had shown particularly bad judgment in tossing the singer off his own building. At the very least, he could have murdered the guy out in the woods somewhere, so that the pilgrims wouldn't create a traffic jam for everyone trying to get in or out of the tower. There's just no excuse for sloppy planning like that.
     
    For a while it had looked like Weir's fans might get bored with their vigil and go home. About a month ago, the numbers had started dropping, and it had gotten so a person could actually walk across the plaza unmolested if they waited till after 9 pm or so. And then the Graffiti Poet had hit.
     
    The folks at BNN were still trying to figure out how he did it. All anybody knows is that when the pilgrims started thinning out late one Thursday night, they discovered a poem painted on the plaza floor in two foot tall letters. It hadn't been there the day before, and it hardly seems possible that someone could have painted it there while the crowd was milling around, walking over the letters and such. But nonetheless, there it was. A little ditty on searching for God in all the wrong places. The fans had immediately decided that it was a miracle and that Justin Weir was sending them song lyrics from beyond the grave.
     
    Since then, the poet had struck at odd times and in very odd places. Once, he even got into BNN's system, and replaced the end credits on the evening news with the scrolling text to one of his poems. I couldn't help wondering who was behind him. He obviously had some technical sophistication to be able to pull off these kind of stunts. And by inciting Weir's fans, he had kept their hatred for Stonewall burning white hot, making any rapprochement between BNN and the under twenty-five demographic next to impossible.
     
    At the garage I grabbed my car, and drove the six blocks to the Hilton. The Christian Alliance had rented one of the business suites there as a temporary office. I parked the car, took the elevator up to the top floor, and presented myself at their door. A blond kid with a crew cut and a Christian