A few minutes later, they came out. Ghosn got in next to Marvin. He was nervous, too.

"Ready, man?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Russell dropped the van into reverse and backed out of the parking place. He pulled forward, checking that the rental car was following, then headed off the parking lot onto the highway.

The drive to the stadium required only a few uneventful minutes. The police were out in force, and he saw that Ghosn was eyeing them very carefully. Marvin was not concerned. The cops were only there for traffic control, after all, and they were just standing around, since the traffic had scarcely begun. It was almost six hours till game time. He turned off the road onto the parking lot at the media entrance, and there was a cop he had to talk to. Qati had already broken off, and was now circling a few blocks away. Marvin stopped the van and rolled his window down.

"Howdy," he said to the cop.

Officer Pete Dawkins of the Denver City Police was already cold, despite the fact that he was a native Coloradan. He was supposed to guard the media and VIP gate, a post he'd been stuck with only because he was a very junior officer. The senior guys were in warmer spots.

"Who are you?" Dawkins asked.

"Tech staff," Russell replied. This is the media gate, right?"

"Yeah, but you're not on my list." There was a limited number of available spaces in the VIP lot, and Dawkins couldn't just let anyone in.

"Tape machine broke in the "A" unit over there," Russell explained with a wave. "We had to bring down a backup."

"Nobody told me," the police officer observed.

"Nobody told me either until six last night. We had to bring the goddamned thing down from Omaha." Russell waved his clipboard rather vaguely. Out of sight in the back, Ghosn was scarcely breathing.

"Why didn't they fly it down?"

"Cause FedEx don't work on Sunday, man, and the damned thing's too big to get through the door of a Lear. I ain't complaining, man. I'm Chicago tech staff, okay?

I'm Network. I get triple-time-and-a-half for this shit, away from home, special event, weekend overtime."

"That sounds pretty decent," Dawkins observed.

"Better'n a week's normal pay, man. Keep talking, officer." Russell grinned. "This is a buck and a quarter a minute, y'know?"

"You must have a hell of a union."

"We sure do." Marvin laughed.

"You know where to take it?"

"No problem, sir." Russell pulled off. Ghosn let out a long breath as the van started moving again. He'd listened to every word, sure that something would go disastrously wrong.

Dawkins watched the van pull away. He checked his watch and made a notation of his own on his own clipboard. For some reason, the captain wanted him to keep track of who arrived when. It didn't make sense to Dawkins, but the captain's ideas didn't always make sense, did they? It took a moment for him to realize that the ABC van had Colorado tags. That was odd, he thought, as a Lincoln town car pulled up. This one was on his list. It was the commissioner of the NFL's American Conference. The VIPs were supposed to be pretty early, probably, Dawkins thought, so they could settle into their sky boxes and start their drinking early. He'd also drawn security at the Commissioner's party the night before and watched every rich clown in Colorado get sloppy drunk, along with various politicians and other Very Important People - mostly assholes, the young cop thought, having watched them - from all over America. He supposed that F. Scott Fitzgerald was right after all.