Boomsday
Chapter One
Cassandra Devine was not yet thirty, but she was already tired.
"Media training," they called it. She'd been doing it for years, but
it still had the ring of "potty training."
Today's media trainee was the chief executive officer of a company
that administered hospitals, twenty-eight of them throughout the
southeastern United States. In the previous year, it had lost $285
million and one-third of its stock market value. During that same
period, the client had been paid $3.8 million in salary, plus a $1.4
million "performance bonus."
Corporate Crime Scene, the prime-time investigative television
program, was doing an expose and had requested an interview. In her
negotiations with the show's producers, Cass had learned that they
had footage of him boarding the company jet ($35 mil) wearing a
spectacularly loud Hawaiian shirt and clenching a
torpedo-shaped-indeed, torpedo-size-cigar in his teeth while hefting
a bag of expensively gleaming golf clubs. Unfortunate as it was,
this footage was only the appetizer. The main cinematic course was
video of the company's recent annual "execu ... read full excerpt from Boomsday ebook
