“Kidnapped? I just don’t see how Rigo Lystra gets abducted in the middle of a high security White House event in the heart of DC. On live TV,” Natalie said in a low voice.

“Eh.” The producer shrugged. “These days anything’s possible.”

“That place must be crawling with Secret Service,” Natalie insisted to the producer. “How would kidnappers get around them?”

“Who knows,” the producer said, in the tone of a man who witnesses the improbable on a daily basis.

Bibb’s voice pierced the room. “As soon as we can, we’re switching to New York control! I’m getting New York on the phone.”

“Or maybe the Service took him,” Natalie said. “Maybe he’s in US custody.”

“I buy that,” the producer said, nodding as he pulled out his phone. “Do you want to tweet it or should I?”

Natalie shook her head. “Bibb,” Natalie said, walking up to her boss. “Bibb, do you think maybe the Secret Service took him?”

“What?” Bibb snapped, turning on Natalie with a look of rage in her eyes.

“I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense to assume he was abducted? Maybe we want to pull back on the—”

Shaking her head, Bibb gave Natalie a dismissive wave. “Wait for me in my office. I’ll be there when this is done.”

The producer glanced at Natalie’s phone, then back at her.

“You do it,” Natalie whispered to him, as she walked out of the room.

Natalie studied the decor in Bibb’s office while she waited. It was an eclectic mix of British colonial and deconstructed Serengeti. Many of the pieces had begun life grazing the land on four legs, and those that hadn’t were carved in the shape of things that had. For example the elephant feet on Bibb’s mahogany desk, and the gnu figures to one side of the uncomfortable wooden chair that Natalie would be expected to sit in.

“That was a gift from the headman of the Maasai tribe,” Bibb had told her during their meeting the prior Friday. “And so was my throwing spear.” Gesturing to a human-size harpoon hanging within arm’s reach of the desk. Airily, Bibb had explained that she’d collected all these artifacts while working “in country” as a young producer, but Natalie would bet her agent’s cut that Bibb had picked up most of them antiquing in Virginia.

After what felt like an hour, Bibb rushed into the office wearing the look of an exhausted school principal, albeit a principal who could afford three-carat diamond stud earrings and the expensive balayage required to turn her hair that especially natural-looking shade of blond.