On the bright side, having no roots meant it was easy for Natalie to jump when she’d gotten the call two days ago. She’d put her New York life in storage, and found a temporary corporate apartment in DC, all in time to have a meet-and-greet with the management of the DC bureau.

Matt chuckled. Unable to resist her curiosity, Natalie glanced over at his phone. “What’s happening?” she asked impatiently.

“BamBam brought his son, the rape-y one,” Matt said, grinning as he typed furiously. Then he looked up and declared, “Henceforth we shall call this the Regrettable Sex Summit.”

Until this moment, the biggest news of the day had been the start of the PanAmerican Summit, a White House gathering of the leaders from seven Latin American countries. The president had ruffled some official Washington feathers by inviting the undemocratically elected, human-rights abusing president of Colombia, Carlos Lystra, aka BamBam, who derived his nickname both from his preferred method of silencing critics and his adoration of the TV show The Flintstones.

Matt’s news about BamBam’s son, Rigo, was certain to light up tout l’DC.

Twenty-one-year-old Rigo Lystra was a gossip column gold mine. He’d cut a name for himself on Page Six and the Daily Mail for his frequent visits to New York nightclubs on his G5, his late-night drives through Bogotá brandishing an AK-47 while shouting slogans for his father, and as of last week, a rape accusation lodged against him by the most famous ex-child actress in Latin America, Sonia Barbaro. Sonia was Venezuela’s beloved twenty-one-year-old star of stage and screen who had accused Rigo of violently attacking her in a hotel room after some celebrity wedding in Caracas. Venezuelan politicians, already at odds with the Lystra family, were taking this as an assault on their national identity. Rigo had dismissed the encounter as a night of “unfortunate sex” with a girl who was too “flat chested to be memorable,” and had spent the last week in Bali swimming with the sharks and a number of scantily clad models. Celebrity gossip sites had been saturated with the Rigo photos, while speculating that Sonia Barbaro was pushing the rape accusation as part of a publicity campaign around her soon-to-be released film Trafficked. Now with Rigo in attendance at the president’s summit, any fireworks between Venezuela and Colombia were liable to erupt into a four-alarm blaze.

“Can we work some puns into the story?” Matt was barking into his cell phone. “Summit Without Consent.” He paused. “Or is that too insensitive?”

“That’s not insensitive. That’s neuropathy,” Natalie mumbled as she looked down at the list of priority questions she’d painstakingly prepared for the briefing.