I could hear her voice faintly now through the panel as she began rehearsing. The other people were moving about the whole time now, checking equipment, and one of the monitor screens lit up and began showing her image as a camera started shifting its angles, zooming in on her face, pulling back to head-and-shoulders.

In the last quarter her show cost $80,000 a night and brought in $150,000, giving a profit for the network of more than $4,500 a minute. They pay her a million dollars a year and she's obviously worth it, with all the syndications thrown in.

One of the technicians was taking a quick bite at a sandwich as she worked, and the anchorwoman said without turning her head, 'No food in here, you know the rules. This isn't a goddamned construction site.' A man looked in from the corridor and one of the crew put his thumb up and the man went out again.

'Cameras?'

'I'm ready, Jeff.'

'Where's Harry?'

'He took a day off and forgot to tell anyone.'

'Jesus. Get Phyllis in here.'

'Erica, what's our timing?'

'When I'm ready I'll tell you.'

She's a legend in her time already. She can go into a studio cold turkey and in ten minutes you can start the cameras and she can hit thirty or forty million people with the kind of charm and authority and sheer presence that hasn't ever been seen before. Offstage she's gotten a reputation for being a real personal bitch, but on-stage she's got a red-light reflex you wouldn't believe. The minute the light goes on, she projects herself right into those twenty-one million households and stops everything right there, and all people can do is watch. You know something? She could stop a family fight, knives, guns, you name it, without even leaving the studio.

'Bennie.'

'Uh?'

'Cut those lights.'

'Sorry, Erica.'

The backdrop behind the anchor desk was a map of the United States covering the whole flat, with a backlit transparency of downtown Miami by night. One of the on-screen monitors lit up with a still head-and-shoulders shot of Senator Mathieson Judd, smiling and waving.

She is also – and this is pretty rare in the industry – she's also of what they call good family. They came over on the Mayflower and Jonathan Cambridge II is the founder and president of Marlborough Chemical Bank. She doesn't mix very much in high society – she went through a leftist kick just out of high school and left the ancestral home to live by herself in a sixth-floor cold-water walk-up on Lexington for two years – but the pedigree's there if she needs it. She could walk in to just about anyone's country house and they'd ask her to stay.

Some people were moving one of the theatrical flats and adjusting the lights. A man was kicking cables clear and using duct tape. Another monitor screen came live with a tight head shot of the woman at the desk and the camera pulled back. The girl who'd been eating the sandwich loaded the Tele-PrompTer and checked it and stood away, not looking at the woman at the desk but just waiting. Others were standing back, one of them twisting a rubber band round and round his fingers. There was no sound now.

'Bennie, is that your stuff hanging there?'

'Yes, I'll -'

'For God's sake put it somewhere else, it's distracting me. Jeff, are we ready?'

'When you are.'

'All right, let's go.'

A flood of light, no movement anywhere until her eyes had reacted to the glare, then her head tilted to look straight up at the TelePrompTer and the red lamp came on at the main camera and she flashed a brief, brilliant smile.

'Good-evening. I'm Erica Cambridge, and these are my views. Yesterday in New Hampshire it looked as if Senator Mathieson Judd was for the first time pandering to the dictates of those on his campaign staff who have been trying to persuade him to "throw in a little healthy theatricality", as Josh Weinberg of The Post has put it, to counterbalance the Republican candidate's serious and perhaps solemn approach to the matter in hand. But in my view, ladies and gentlemen, the matter in hand is indeed serious and indeed solemn, nothing less than the task of your goodselves, the people, of choosing the man who will become one of the two – and I say this advisedly – one of the two most powerful statesmen on this planet.'

Pause, a glance to the papers on the desk to give weight to the silence, the violet eyes lifting again. 'And Senator Judd himself knows the seriousness and the solemnity of this occasion, and had more than once declared himself categorically disinterested in cheapening his respect and regard for the electorate. So what happened yesterday in New Hampshire was not rehearsed, was not premeditated. It was real. Some of you were there, I believe. You saw the little boy with the childishly-lettered placard on his chest, reading I HAVE AIDS BUT IT'S OKAY TO HUG ME. You saw Mathieson Judd's instinctive move towards him in the crowd, brushing aside his bodyguards. You saw him hug that little boy, and if you were close enough you saw the sudden springing of tears on that man's face as he stood with his arms around his small, suffering fellow-American for those few seconds of amazing grace.'

And again a pause, but this time her eyes remained on the TelePrompTer. 'I do not think, ladies and gentlemen, that I need to translate that scene into the banality of mere words for you. Allow me to say only that those who consider Senator Judd a figure of almost majestic dedication to the serious and solemn business of leadership, those who consider him as no more than an intellectual devoid of feeling, should now rejoice in the knowledge that he is also a man of heart. And it is this, above all, that we must have in the White House – a man who will not only lead this nation with the high skills of management and statesmanship, but a man graced with humanity.'

Her eyes on the TelePrompTer for two seconds, three; then she looked down and shuffled the papers.

'Haven't seen you around here before, Mr Keyes.'

Faint smell of sweat.

'I'm not surprised.'

He'd come in quietly a minute ago and I'd checked his reflection in the glass panel without looking up. Thick-bodied, bland-faced, moved like a cat. Sitting beside me now, been working out somewhere and hadn't had time for a shower.

'You're not surprised?'

I wished he'd go away. 'But Governor Anderson's theme -' Erica Cambridge on the monitor screen – 'is that there's so much wrong with America after the Republican four-year term -'

'Mr Keyes?'

He didn't know me; he'd read the name on my lapel pass.

'If you want to talk to me you'll have to do it when Miss Cambridge has finished.'

' – Whereas Senator Judd's theme is reassuring. The country is in good shape -'

I could have read this for myself. Word for word.

The chill came creeping, hadn't expected it. I'd been trying to think it was all over now, done with, the subliminal infiltration of my mind.

'I have to check up. Are you with the crew?'

He was nothing to do with the studio. He was probably her bodyguard. Blue suit, black shoes, rubber soles.

' – to consolidate the gains that have been made under the present administration.'

Word for word.

I remembered Ferris, leaning across the desk, talking to the psychiatrist, Purdom watching me from his chair, Upjohn switching off the recorder.

Then Ferris had turned to me. Do you know how long you spoke for?

No.

Nineteen minutes, with no interruption. Do you know what you were talking about?

Yes. Anderson's campaign theme. And Judd's.

I sat for a long time watching the woman with the violet eyes, listening to the words she spoke, the words that I had spoken before.

When had she thought of them, written them?