The Los Angeles Times booked more advertising than any newspaper in the United States, churning out fortunes for its owners even in an age when most print media were in decline.  It was quartered downtown, in an entire high-rise, which it owned and which covered one city block.

Strictly speaking, the Los Angeles Post was not even in Los Angeles.  It occupied an aging four-story building in Sun Valley, near the Burbank Airport, within the metroplex but not within the L.A. city limits.

Instead of a multiple-level underground garage, the Post provided an open lot surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with spirals of razor wire.  Rather than a uniformed attendant with a name tag and a welcoming smile, a sullen young man, about nineteen, watched over the ungated entrance from a folding chair under a dirty café umbrella emblazoned with the Cinzano logo.  He was listening to rap music on a radio.  Head shaved, left nostril pierced by a gold ring, fingernails painted black, dressed in baggy black jeans with one carefully torn knee and a loose black T-shirt with the words FEAR NADA in red across his chest, he looked as if he were assessing the parts value of each arriving car to determine which would bring the most cash if stolen and delivered to a chop shop.  In fact, he was checking for an employee sticker on the windshield, ready to direct visitors to on-street parking.

The stickers were replaced every two years, and Joe's was still valid.  Two months after the fall of Flight 353, he had tendered his resignation, but his editor, Caesar Santos, had refused to accept it and had put him on an unpaid leave of absence, guaranteeing him a job when he was ready to return.

He was not ready.  He would never be ready.  But right now he needed to use the newspaper's computers and connections.

No money had been spent on the reception lounge: institutional-beige paint, steel chairs with blue vinyl pads, a steel-legged coffee table with a faux-granite Formica top, and two copies of that day's edition of the Post.

On the walls were simple framed black-and-white photographs by Bill Hannett, the paper's legendary prize-winning press photographer.  Shots of riots, a city in flames, grinning looters running in the streets.  Earthquake-cracked avenues, buildings in rubble.  A young Hispanic woman jumping to her death from the sixth floor of a burning building.  A brooding sky and a Pacific-facing mansion teetering on the edge of ruin on a rain-soaked, sliding hillside.  In general, no journalistic enterprise, whether electronic or print, built its reputation or revenues on good news.