Free Only the Hunted Run by Neely Tucker

Reagan), and assaults at the Capitol building (Jackson). There was a roundup of international reaction fromother capitals, with feeds about attacks on other national parliaments and how security was handled in London, Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, basically wherever the paper had a correspondent.
    Investigative and Metro and the political desk were combining on a ticktock of the attack—tracking Waters’s access to the building, Edmonds’s movements that day until the two collided, the resulting chaos, and how Waters could have escaped.
    Theories held that he’d used the subway that ran underneath the building, then popped out of one of the House or Senate office buildings. Others held that he’d taken a staffer’s ID badge and just walked right past police. Bolder ones suggested he’d changed into an MPD uniform.
    There were at least three stories on the manhunt, on how airport security was so beefed up that the lines were forever and flights out of National, Dulles, and BWI were all delayed, screwing up air travel across the eastern half of the country, and how yesterday’s near-total shutdown of the Beltway had buggered traffic from Charlotte to Philadelphia.
    This would amount to, more or less, Sully squinted an eye to figure, about fifteen thousand words, fifty pages in a book. It would all be reported and written—along with sports, features, local politics and zoning issues, the home section, movie reviews, real estate listings, classified ads, and wedding announcements, all adding up to a decent-sized novel—and then printed, more than eight hundred thousand times, for delivery to newsstands, gas stations, mini-marts, front porches, driveways, mailboxes, and apartment buildings in about, say, thirteen hours.
    On the Waters story alone, any error, no matter how small, would have to be corrected in print and possibly to the detriment of the entire effort. Fifteen thousand words . . . and if, say, four of them were wrong—four errors—the paper’s staff would look like douche-bag half-wits, mocked in the trades for blowing the big one.
    It gave him the beginnings of a renewed headache, made worse by a single line of writing on the whiteboard that began glowing. It was circled, set slightly apart from the rest.
    â€œSully,” it read. “Office/rewrite/phone.”
    â€œHey,” he said, walking to the board, tapping his name. “I’m the receptionist? I thought Special Agent Alma T. Gill was bluffing.”
    R.J. looked up, peering. “Calm down. You’re writing the lede-all. If Waters has a hard-on for you, probably best for you to sit tight in the building. And answer your phone. Every time the thing buzzes. I don’t care if it’s a little old lady in Crystal City telling you that she’s looking at black U.N. helicopters hovering over the White House. Answer. Waters calls again, you got to pick it up. That’s from Eddie, that’s from the FBI, that’s probably from the fucking White House.”
    Out in the hallway, a crowd came out of the elevator and there was Alexis, tense, walking head down, studying a sheaf of papers in her hands.
    â€œBe back,” he said to R.J., then hustled out of the room, catching up to her in the narrow hallway. She stopped, stepping to the side to let the people behind them pass, raising her eyebrows half a notch. Sully stepped beside her. Her eyes were sharp, glittering, looking into him, reading what she could find.
    â€œYou look like shit,” she said.
    â€œThank you for noticing.”
    â€œAnd—wait, is that you I
smell
?”
    â€œDon’t sniff me in the hall,” he said, leaning back. “People might—”
    â€œThis fucker nearly kills you yesterday, then calls you this morning, and I find out both through a Nat-Desk message-all?”
    â€œJosh, he told—”
    â€œWhat’s with your eye? What