Russell rummages through a collection of black nylon duffel bags in the backseat. There are so many it looks like the cargo compartment of a small aircraft. One after another, she pulls out the toys of the investigator's trade: video camera, small camera, elaborate camera with telephoto lens, tape recorder with microphone, orange Fulton County sheriff's vest.
     Turning to her purse, a black leather bag big enough for a weekend's clothes, she pulls out her wallet. It flips open to a shiny gold investigator's badge.
     Russell loves to travel and is so fond of Germany -- especially Berlin, where on her last visit she wore a blond wig -- that she learned the language. "She even learned to argue in German," says Dunlap. "She got in an argument with a conductor once and I thought we were going to get kicked off the train."
     When they were in Prague last fall, a guard refused to let them enter the U.S. embassy. "We went back to the hotel and I got so angry thinking about it, I insisted we go back," says Russell. "It seems to me if you're an American citizen, you ought to be able to go into an American embassy anytime you want."
     "Anyway, I was looking for my passport when my wallet flipped open to my badge. The guard must have thought I was some kind of federal investigator, because he let us in immediately. I've never seen anyone jump like that who wasn't dancing."
     She puts the wallet back and pulls out a steel magazine, a spare, containing seven copper-tipped bullets. Noting the look of surprise it gets, she explains, "If you're out at night and trying to save your life, what's the point of having six bullets when you could have 12? If you're doing a case like workman's comp, guys can come out with shotguns and start shooting. I know someone that happened to."
     She reaches under her coat and behind her and pulls out a pistol. "Of course, I have this, too."
     It is a SIG Sauer 9mm "short," a sleek, purposeful weapon in a tastefully muted black that goes with everything. The very sight of it is odd and surreal, however. Perhaps because television and movies have made them commonplace, guns are as familiar as ashtrays and somewhat more palatable. Nevertheless, the sudden appearance of one on a tranquil afternoon causes a jump in the heart rate.
     Protection is a recurring theme in Russell's life. It began in Miami when, while living in a high-crime area, she took up Shotokan karate. She switched four years ago to a more fluid, less-punishing Korean style called Choi Kwang-Do. When she doesn't have time to go to the dojang and spar with live partners, she trains at home on a heavy bag Dunlap gave her one Christmas.
     (Another year he gave her a thigh holster. Dunlap is himself a volunteer deputy sheriff and a part-time paramedic. It was he who told Russell about a course that led to her job as a private investigator. Russell takes no pay for either activity so as to avoid any conflict with her duties at Headline News.)
     When she got her first-degree black belt last year, Russell celebrated by having a pale yellow circle tattooed on the inside of her left forearm. Inside the circle are an orange mark, a dragon and black characters that translate as "certain victory."
     "Your body is the only weapon that someone can't take away from you," she says. "Women need to be able to take care of themselves, to defend themselves. Besides, [as a private investigator] not everyone is your friend."
     Her concern is not unwarranted. She has had men stalk her, including one from New England who traveled to New York and Washington before he realized she was in Atlanta. When he finally found his way here, he was arrested, convicted and sent to jail.
     David Talley, public relations manager for Headline News, says the network gets more requests for pictures of Russell than anyone. Unfortunately, says Russell, some "you'd want to handle with gloves. They're disgusting."
     Although warm and friendly by nature -- she finds it almost impossible to be impersonal -- Russell is almost savagely vengeful when she feels injustice has been done. When Dunlap and his first wife divorced, a judge awarded the woman a dollar more than Dunlap was earning. Russell studied law books, typed up a brief and went to court to argue it before the judge.
     "She stomped and raged until they changed it," chuckles Dunlap. "If you're in trouble, you want her on your side."
     He also recalls the night Russell came home raging about seeing horses "'pulling assholes through the street,' as she put it." She called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and helped launch a campaign to regulate the treatment of the horses.
     Petrovich says one of Russell's gifts is her ability to "massage and romance the camera." There is no massage and no romance, however, no arched brow or toss of the shoulder when Headline News runs a story about cruelty to animals or children or the downtrodden. Even a whimsical piece about a circus that shows bears walking on their hind legs and elephants skipping rope causes her face to harden and her eyes to narrow.
     "Sometimes I'm too sensitive," says Russell of what she calls her &qupt;maniac Italian" persona, "but it's real. I can't be other than what I am. If I could, I wouldn't do it at all."
     Russell remembers no childhood injustice or definitive moment when she put on the mantle of crusader -- it just happened.
     "I don't know when I caught it," she says, "but it's been driving me crazy ever since."

Three hours later Russell is in front of the camera at Headline News. The studio is nothing more than an expanse of bare concrete in the middle of which is a carpeted platform and on that the desk at which she sits.
     Opposite her is a camera manned by a slender man in his 20s, one of the many young people who get their introduction to television at Turner Broadcasting. Next to the camera a young woman is seated at a table, watching a monitor and a teleprompter. Her job is to control the scroll rate on the teleprompter from which Russell reads.
     Behind Russell, through a glass wall, is a darkened room where at least five people sit at a bank of monitors and other equipment. To Russell's left an opening the size of a double garage door leads to the newsroom, where perhaps 25 people are working at computer terminals.
     Against the darkened room behind her and the teals, mauves and beiges of the newsroom, Russell is a visual firestorm. She is wearing a short black miniskirt, black stockings, black spike heels and a scarlet blazer. Factor the three-inch heels with her statuesque 5-foot-9 and this is a woman who looks almost larger than life. Small wonder she has been likened to such sultry actresses as Sophia Loren, Angie Dickinson and Dixie Carter.
     Lest she be mistaken for mere window dressing, however, chance gives her an opportunity to display her professionalism.
     Russell receives a new batch of scripts every few minutes. They also appear on the teleprompter next to the camera, and she reads from either. In this case, however, the front page of the scripts in front of her is missing, something Russell is not aware of until a commercial ends and she is on the air.
     The script in front of her is about the possibility of Jimmy Carter going to Bosnia, but the footage on-screen is of fighting in Chechnya. Russell notices immediately and with no more time than it takes to clear her throat, smoothly picks up the Chechnya script on the teleprompter.
     The transition is so smooth that viewers may scarcely notice. To those in the newsroom, however, it is a glaring mistake, and an almost perceptible shiver runs through the room.
     During the next commercial the runner who brought the script leans forward and puts his hands on Russell's desk. His face is red, his manner apologetic.
     "There was this huge gap...," he begins.
     "Tell me about it," Russell says calmly. "I was the one who had to read it."
     Tammy Hotchkiss, one of the producers in the glass room, approaches and stands with arms folded, several feet away, as if to protect herself from flying debris. But Russell is calm, almost placid. They speak quietly.
     Hotchkiss says later she's worked with Russell for nine years. "She's very professional, very nice, very detail-oriented. I don't know if I've ever seen a weakness in her. She can be very demanding, but she's even tempered. We had a problem tonight, and she handled it without getting angry."
     "Lynne's great," says Meg Andre, a supervising producer at Headline News. "She's really professional, but she also has this sense of humor, and in a crisis that helps. She's especially good during a major breaking story."
     Although the news is reconstituted by the writers in the newsroom every half hour, it would seem that Russell might get bored by the repetition.
     "I love it," she says. "The news doesn't change, but the way we present it does. We work hard on that. It's important to me because it's the only half hour of news some people get. So I learn to pace myself and make the energy last."
     Perhaps two hours into the evening, someone comes over during a break and compliments Russell. "Thank you," she says dryly without looking up from the script she's editing. "It's really more fun than a human being should be allowed to have."

It is inevitable that Russell and her colleagues at Turner Broadcasting are compared with those at other networks.
     CNN is dismissed by some in local TV as "our almost-network." The gibe is underscored by the fact that not only are news readers like Tom Brokaw and Diane Sawyer better known and better paid than those at Turner Broadcasting, but so are some of the anchors at their Atlanta affiliates.
     "It's true," says Russell. "We joke about having million dollar anchors here too; we just split it 40 ways."
     There is also the matter of appearances.
     There is a generic quality to the look at the other networks, as if anchors were selected because they embody the idealized all-American. The other networks, of course, are places where news is an adjunct to entertainment. Not that they are not interested in news. CBS once had a highly esteemed news gathering operation, and the recent spate of news magazines has led to increased interest in news (in part because it is cheaper to produce than entertainment). Nevertheless, it is clear that putting the best face on the news is very much a matter of cozying up to the demographic portrait of the average American.
     "One of the signatures of the other networks," says Petrovich, "is that they are able to build a look around their anchors. We can't do that here. We're really a factory. We use the same graphics, the same backdrop and the same music for everyone."
     Despite that "sameness," it pleases Petrovich that people like Russell have what he calls "pop-up quality."
     Indeed, one almost wonders if Turner executives might not select anchors whose idiosyncrasies make them memorable. CNN's Bobbie Battista, for example, has bright blond hair and startled blue eyes that suggest she is in a continual state of amazement. While co-anchor of the evening news on CNN -- she has since left to begin a new show -- Susan Rook sometimes lapsed into a languid, almost dreamy delivery that was a vivid counterpoint to the cool, clipped style affected by anchors at other networks. Russell herself eschews the oracular, talking head style, with its metronomic rise and fall, for a delivery that is longer, slower, almost conversational. Her body language, however, is powerfully kinetic. Where others are primly composed, Russell radiates a vibrant physicality that contributes to what one co-worker calls, "the suggestive way she tosses to the package." "Tossing to the package" is the anchor's live introduction to a filmed segment. Perhaps nowhere is the difference between Turner and the other networks more dramatic than in Nick Charles and Fred Hickman, co-anchors of CNN's sports show. Because Hickman is black and Charles has a glossy, Mediterranean glow, those who package the look elsewhere would almost certainly have dismissed the pairing as "too dark." Their show, however, is the best of its kind and better than most news shows as well. They are smart, savvy, hip, irreverent, amusing and, yes, entertaining.
     Precisely because they lack detachment and buffed, Big Apple shine, the anchors at Turner appear to have been recruited off the streets of mainstream America.
     "We come off like real people," says Russell, "and I think viewers can relate to that. We don't spend a lot of our salary on hair spray."
     The mention of hair spray, by the way, is no accident. Russell's may be the most carefully scrutinized television "do" since Howard Cosell put on a rug. Even casual viewers note that one night Russell looks carefully coiffed and the next as if she forgot to wear a shower cap -- which is what, in fact, sometimes happens.
     "Regarding my hair," volunteers Russell, accustomed to comments, "I have no control over it. I'm just wearing it."

Russell and Dunlap live in the same house in the suburbs they bought years ago for $70,000. They clean it and tend to the yard themselves, and while they have made improvements, they have done nothing that might alert the sybarites at Architectural Digest. Indeed, they laughingly refer to it as their "redneck hovel."
     Russell is a vegetarian -- "I don't eat anything with a face" -- meditates twice a day and is so disciplined that when she allows herself an extravagance such as champagne, she also drinks water to keep herself hydrated. Discipline fails only when she shops or is around sweets. Shoes and Twinkies are her downfall.
     "But lately she's been buying diet Twinkies," says Dunlap.
     Russell says she and Dunlap see "a few close friends" but generally don't socialize much. "We barely have time to see each other," she says.
     It pleases her immensely that son John, now in his 20s, is one of her best friends. "I know that when he calls, it's not out of obligation but because he really wants to talk to me."
     As she negotiated another contract with Turner Broadcasting in February -- she eventually signed for five years, the longest contract she's ever had -- Russell entertained offers to go elsewhere. Her preference all along, however, was to remain in Atlanta.
     "I really love this company," she says. "They let you spread your wings and they're open to you. I mean, this is the company that allowed a woman [Russell] to be the first solo evening news anchor. There's also a family atmosphere I like."
     It is also free, as far as Russell is concerned, of the petty politicking that makes network stars look like high school sophomores jockeying to be class officers. Esquire magazine reported in January that Barbara Walters once tried to co-opt an interview Diane Sawyer set up with Katherine Hepburn and persuaded Ross Perot not to do an interview with Sam Donaldson. Both Sawyer and Donaldson, it must be noted, were and are Walters' colleagues at ABC.
     "I can't imagine doing such a thing in any business," says Russell.
     One of the offers Russell pondered while negotiating her new contract was a talk show. The other was a sitcom based on her life. Asked if she has any acting experience, she says, "Only my first marriage, and that was more tragedy than comedy."

An award-winning magazine writer, John Christensen recently moved to Atlanta. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a book, "Looking for a Hero."

PHOTOS:

Cover: CNN's Secret Agent -- Headline News' LYNNE RUSSELL: Sex Symbol, Private Eye, Deputy Sheriff, Bodyguard (Credits: Photographer, Lou Freeman. Hair and makeup, Faith Brooks/L'Agence. Stylist, Christian Borden/Elite. Location, One Peachtree Center).

Pages 40-41: CNN's SECRET AGENT -- The hearts of male viewers race when Headline News' sultry Lynne Russell reads the news. But don't make a pass, buster. She's a volunteer law officer, private investigator, and bodyguard with a first-degree black belt.

Page 42: Russell celebrated her first-degree black belt by having a pale yellow circle tattooed on her forearm. The black characters within translate as "certain victory."

Page 43: 'Your body is the only weapon that someone can't take away from you. Women need to be able to take care of themselves, to defend themselves.'

Page 44: Russell studied law books, argued before the courts and got a divorce settlement changed between her husband, Jim Dunlap, and his ex-wife, who had been awarded one dollar more than Dunlap was earning (Dress by J. Reynolds Designs. Location: The Occidental Grand Hotel).

Page 45: "We joke about having million-dollar anchors here [at CNN]," says Russell. "We just split it 40 ways."

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