the Plan (1995)

by Stephen Cannell

"I'm just saying we need your help."

  "Elizabeth was a friend. She came to my rescue when I was hurting. Now she's dead because of me."

  "I'll tell you who shot her . . . that mook in the baseball cap. This is hardball, Ryan."

  Ryan moved across the room, and pulled Cole to his feet. They stood there with fistfuls of each other's shirt. "If you warm swing at me, go ahead," Cole said.

  "All you want is to get back at those guys for kicking you out," Ryan yelled. "That's all this means to you. Kaz and Elizabeth were killed because of this. This is about a hell of a lot more than your bullshit career."

  `This is about the fourth estate. It's about the hijacking of high-tech communications by a bunch of grease stains. By the time anybody starts listening to us, Richards will be in the White House," Cole shouted back.

  Ryan let go of him and turned to the window, still breathing hard and struggling to get control.

  "Believe me, we can steal this signal. But we gotta stick together."

  Ryan finally looked at Cole.

  "We'll need an engineer, and I think I know just the guy to help us," Cole said, seizing on Ryan's renewed attention.

  "He won't turn us in?" Lucinda asked.

  "I don't think so. UBC threw him out two weeks before he was to get his pension. They claimed he stole engineering equipment from them."

  "Did he?"

  "Well, kinda . He was working at home on a new switching device. They did a random trunk search one night and found all this equipment in his car. He tried to explain but they tied a can to him anyway. Guy's name is John William Bally. Everybody called him Babbling John 'cause he's the quietest son of a bitch you ever met."

  "You can still get out of this, Naomi, " Ryan said. "We could say we kidnapped you."

  `Thank you, Ryan. I was wondering who was going to suggest that."

  "I didn't because I've worked with you. We'd have to kill you to get you off this story," Cole said.

  "He's right, but thanks for the suggestion."

  The moment seemed to bring them together again and Cole sat at the phone and pulled out his tiny leather pocket phone book, looked up John William Baily's number, and called him.

  Baily answered on the second ring.

  "I suppose you've seen the TV," Cole said after identifying himself.

  "Yep."

  "Look, John, were onto something big. But we need help." Nothing came back from John Baily, so Cole plunged on. "We need to put a big story out."

  "How?" Baily asked.

  "We need to access the Galaxy Four transponder. Take it over." There was a pause. "You know what I'm saying?"

  "Yup."

  "But before you meet with us I have to tell you that a lot of people are trying to catch us and it could get dangerous."

  "Fuck 'em," John Baily finally said. He agreed to be on a street corner in Westchester in an hour.

  Cole informed them that they needed to steal a car, but he had no idea how to do it. Lucinda said, "I do. My brother taught me."

  Ten minutes later, Lucinda pulled up to the side entrance of the small hotel in a gray Ford Falcon.

  Naomi and Cole drove off to meet John Baily, while Lucinda and Ryan waited at the hotel.

  Chapter 65.

  RF ENGINEER

  JOHN BAILY STOOD ON A CORNER IN A DIMLY LIT SUBURB outside Manhattan. It was almost midnight when he saw a gray Ford cruise past with a woman behind the wheel.

  John remembered Cole Harris from UBC and couldn't stand him. Cole had been demanding and brusque and treated the people in engineering like servants. But hatred obeys the law of relativity, and John hated the brass at UBC worse than bleeding hemorrhoids. He relished the chance to show them how vulnerable they were. He'd told them that they didn't have adequate security at Hertz Castle, which is what he had named the roof parking lot adjacent to the thirty-story Black Tower. The lot, reserved for visiting executives, was loaded with rental cars all parked right in the shadow of the huge ten-meter dish that was the network's main East Coast link to the Galaxy Four geosynchronous satellite UBC used to rain its signal across the United States. "The bird" was one of the new hybrid satellites that could broadcast C-band as well as K-U band uplinks.

  "John, over here," a voice whispered from the darkness, breaking his thought. He turned and saw Cole Harris standing in the shadows away from the streetlight. John walked over to the IR. He noted, with some satisfaction, that time had not been kind to Cole Harris. He had lost some hair and had the sallow, undernourished look of a racetrack lout, but he still wore the yuppie uniform. Tie and suspenders over pleated pants and lace-up wing-tip shoes.

  "Great to see you," Cole said, grinning, slapping the tall, skinny engineer on the back, hoping to elicit a response. He didn't get one. The gray sedan pulled up, and Cole opened the back door to usher the engineer into the car.

  "This is Naomi," Cole said, introducing the woman behind the wheel.

  "Pleased to meet you," she said.

  "Yep," he replied and that about covered it, all the way back to The Angler.

  They arrived back at the hotel around one o'clock in the morning. Cole introduced John Baily to Ryan and Lucinda.

  "John knows all about the network's technical facilities. He's the RF engineer."

  "RF?" Lucinda asked.

  "Radio frequency," Cole explained.

  "So, how do we do it? How do we kidnap the signal?" Ryan asked.

  John had one topic on which he was willing to speak in full sentences and that was the physical plant at UBC. He'd designed it, or most of it. He'd kept it running. He'd devoted his life to it. He had repaired, rebuilt, and juryrigged all of the equipment in the early days when money had been short. The switching panel he decided to make at home would have allowed the network to go from the main uplink to the backup with absolutely no phase jitter or flutter. Currently, you had to shut one system down and then turn on the other, waiting for the forty-five seconds of black that was scheduled between each hour of broadcast. That time was used by affiliate stations for local ads and station IDs.

  He'd been accused of stealing and had been fired for cause. He lost his job, his pension, and his life's work. He had been unable to get a similar job elsewhere and was now a maintenance man at a junior high school.

  "Thing you gotta understand is how it works," he said. He'd often described the system to visiting executives, so he had the speech prepared and could do it on autopilot. "The network owns two transponders on the Galaxy Four satellite. They broadcast on two transmitters simultaneously--one for the East Coast and mountain time zones called the ETB feed and the WTB for the western time band. The satellite is twenty-three thousand, four hundred miles out in space and the signal goes up from the big C-band dish at Hertz Castle to the bird out in space," John continued. "The power to run the transmission is hardwired from the building and is called shore power. There's two backup five-hundred KVA generators in the basement of the Black Tower that can run the main C-band dish in case the shore power is interrupted; the ten-meter dish runs on a range of four to six gigahertz. If there's a shore-power failure, it automatically switches to one of the backup generators in the basement, which supplies the dish with lower power, something like eight or nine hundred kilowatts, but still enough to get a clean bounce-back signal from space."

  "What's a gigahertz?" Ryan asked.

  "One gigahertz is a thousand million cycles per second. Doesn't matter, really; all you have to know is we gotta take out the shore power and both generators to put the network off the air."

  "We have to do two things," Cole explained. "First, we have to kill the signal at UBC Central, then we have to have our own taped broadcast ready to go. We need to steal an SNG remote truck. That truck has a smaller dish and it runs on a K-U band. We line it up on the satellite and, as soon as we blow the power on the main and backup generators, we transmit our pirate signal."

  "In order to do it, we need to shoot our pirate signal up before we blow the main feed while they'
re still in that forty-five seconds of black," Babbling John said. "The trick is to make it so smooth that the hundred and eighty local affiliate stations can't see the signal waver."

  "Why is that?" Naomi asked.

  "Every local station watches the signal like a hawk," Cole explained. "If they suspect the network feed is being tampered with, they'll call UBC Central, and they'll find out those guys on the Rim have been knocked off the satellite. Then they'll drop the network feed and put up a `stand-by.' . . . We'll be off the air locally all over the country." These were problems Ryan had never considered.

  "The people in the control rooms are gonna see it if we don't do it smooth," John picked up. "You get an effect called double illumination. They're gonna know somebody is screwing with the signal. If we get on the bird, we're only gonna have about ten to fifteen minutes and then they're gonna find us. They can figure out where we're broadcasting from very easily and we'll have enough cops for a parade."

  "Okay," Cole said. "Here's how we do it. . . ." And he laid out the rest of the plan.

  As he listened, Ryan had butterflies worse than before the Notre Dame game at South Bend his junior year. That game ended in disaster. He'd dropped the ball in the end zone for the go-ahead touchdown just as the gun sounded. If he dropped the ball this time, the gun would probably be the last thing he ever heard.

  "UBC has ten SNG trucks scattered around the country and several mobile control centers," John said. "The trick is gonna be to find one we can get our hands on."

  "Okay. Naomi, you and I are gonna produce this special," Cole said, clapping his hands, suddenly energized.

  "We need videotape editing equipment. We're gonna have to break in someplace. The show must go on."

  "They've got video equipment at the school where I work," John said. "It's one a' the reasons they hired me, to help set up the video lab."

  Big stories were like that. When things started to go right, they went right in bunches. Cole had already forgotten all the bad breaks that had been exploding in clusters around them.

  Chapter 66.

  MOON SHADOW

  MADISON JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL WAS A ONE-STORY MONument to brown stucco and bad design. The video lab was on the east side of the campus in something called the Learning Center. When John Baily opened the door an d s witched on the lights, Cole Harris knew he was in trouble.

  The lone camera was a ten-year-old Trinitron on a rolling foot stand. The recording equipment was three-quarter inch but also very old. The area the students were using as a s tudio was just a wall covered with dull green paper.

  "Ain't exactly UBC Central, is it?" Cole said. John grunted. All of the other equipment was outmoded, but John promised he could make it work.

  Cole set up a work table on the far side of the room and handed John the half-inch cassettes of Meyer meeting with the Mafia princes.

  "I need to get this onto three-quarter for editing."

  John took the tape and moved to the back of the video lab. Naomi sat behind the desk and turned on an old Apple computer. Ryan and Lucinda moved around the room, feeling useless.

  "Want me to write the copy?" Ryan volunteered.

  "I'll do it," the IR said. He always wrote his own stories. "This is gonna take an hour, maybe two."

  Ryan and Lucinda walked out of the video lab and found a bench outside that overlooked the moonlit playing field. Ryan turned and looked at her for a long moment, not sure exactly how to start what he wanted to say. He had been worried about something for almost two days.

  "I want you to know something," he said, his voice blowing away from him in the light wind. "I owe you my life. I can't tell you how close to the edge I was when I got on that plane in Burbank. Somehow, you got the lights back on."

  "There's no charge for that."

  "I know this nightmare is coming to an end . . . and somehow I know that it's going to come down to Mickey and me."

  "Maybe it's just your sense of drama at work . . . the bad guy has to confront the good guy. It won't happen that way." She didn't want that to be the way it ended, because Ryan would lose. She knew nobody could beat Mickey. Nobody ever had.

  "Maybe not. But I've been having strange thoughts about it. I'm going to have to stop him. He won't let it end any other way, and I don't think I can do it without killing him."

  Somewhere in the darkness a hoot owl sent up a mournful orchestration.

  "What are you asking me?" she finally asked. "If that happens, can you still love me?"

  Lucinda reached out and took his hand. It was very cold in the darkness. "Love isn't something you control. It doesn't turn on or off. Love is something that happens. It's there, whether you want it to be or not."

  The hoot owl sang a lonely chorus.

  "Ryan, two months ago, if you'd asked me that question, I would have had a different answer. Two months ago, I was living in a fantasy, even though the evidence was right in front of me. I'd been protected by my family f rom everything. And then all of this happened. I've had to say good-bye to that fantasy."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. . . . You didn't ask for this any more than I did. I won't say it hasn't been hard. Those first days after Jerry Paradise came aboard your boat, I was waking up at night wondering how my brother could have sent someone to kill me. And I can still remember the good things. . . . He could be charming and funny. . . . He made me laugh when I was little. But, Ryan, he was acting. I know now he feels nothing for me or anybody else." She looked away for a moment before continuing. "He laughed after Rex was shot. He tried to kill us." She turned to look out at the frozen, brown field. "It really hurt. But now I see that all of the things I loved about Mickey and my father were created by them to manipulate me. I know that if Mickey controls the presidency, he'll destroy everything this country stands for."

  She looked at him squarely. "But most of all, I know that I love you. More than my life. Or anything in my life. If it ends badly, at least I found you."

  They heard the predator's wings beating a whispery cadence. Ryan and Lucinda looked out into the darkness. At first, they couldn't see him; then the huge hoot owl passed for a second between them and the moon.

  "There he is," Lucinda said in awe as he drifted by, throwing a moon shadow across the frozen field.

  Mickey knew that the final confrontation to save his father's plan was going to be up to him. He had grossly underestimated Ryan. The fact that Lucinda had crossed over and was now against him fueled a strange remorse. . . . It had consumed him for days, and he had finally identified it as anger. Anger was an emotion, and Mickey had never had to deal with emotion before. It sat in his stomach and gnawed on his insides. Revenge. Ravenous, uncontrollable. He needed to get even.

  Ever since he'd found out he was a sociopath, he had studied up on the condition. He learned that sociopaths often had IQs in the genius or near genius range. He learned that they often became great actors and could fake emotions that others felt, allowing them to manipulate and control people. Sociopaths, he learned, could lie and scheme, even kill, without paying any internal price.

  In one book, titled Aberrant Psychology, he had stumbled across a strange chapter in which a psychiatrist wrote that past the age of forty, sociopathic behavior tends to disappear. The subject becomes normal. He or she learns to feel, much like any other human being. The doctor called his discovery a hopeful breakthrough, but the thought terrified Mickey. The idea that this gift he had come to cherish above all others might disappear haunted him. He would lose a tremendous edge. He had always been able to select targets analytically, attack them viciously, and suffer no remorse.

  He sat in his father's study looking at the paintings Joseph had collected. Oils depicting Palermo Harbor and the fields around Naples. He'd called a meeting to discuss a way to find Ryan. The men waiting downstairs would kill for Mickey.

  Mickey walked into his father's bathroom and looked into his own eyes. He looked at the round face, the oily hair, the pudgy fingers. He held h
is hands out in front of him. The sight of his own trembling fingers shot a new feeling through him. Fuck, he thought Then a new emotion hit him. It made his stomach freeze. An electric charge buzzed his nerve endings. It made his sweat turn cold.

  For the first time, Mickey Alo tasted fear.

  Haze Richards was having the time of his life. He was at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, meeting with world leaders at an ad hoc financial conference that A. J. had arranged.

  When Haze spoke, people stopped talking. He had a limited grasp of world economics, but A. J. had given him some key facts and observations. Men who already ra n t heir own governments fell silent and made notes while he spewed out prepackaged ideas.

  Despite being a horrendous pain in the ass, A. J. had been right. He'd kept Haze on the front pages and on the covers of national magazines. Shots of the candidate with Boris Yeltsin and Francois Mitterrand or with the heads of OAS and NATO appeared everywhere. He was introduced to the most beautiful women in the world. He signed autographs like a movie star.

  But A. J. had been less reliable of late. He was drinking heavily. He'd missed a staff meeting two days before. They'd found him passed out in the hotel bar. A . J. was going to have to go.

  Haze was in the Imperial's presidential suite with its twenty-foot-high ceiling and ornate paintings. The arched windows commanded a view of the picture-book city. The floor of the main room had an inlaid wood surface and was half the size of a basketball court. Ten-foot-high portraits of various Hapsburgs hung on the walls. Napoleon, he'd been told, had slept in the huge bed in that very room when he'd been in Vienna in 1797. . . . Kennedy, Eisenhower, DeGaulle, and Churchill, as well as just about every famous ruler in three hundred years, had wandered these floors and looked out of the arched windows. And now it belonged to Haze Richards, the next President of the United States of America.

  The election was two weeks away, and Haze was scheduled to return home the next morning. The staff wanted him to make a quick swing through the farm states, where they were showing a slight weakness; but everywhere else, he was way ahead. It looked like Haze was going to chair a blowout over Pudge Anderson.