The Plan

by Stephen Cannell

  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.

  He went into the bedroom, flopped down on the canopied bed, and started doing his daily regimen of fifty stomach crunches.

  Two more weeks. Thirteen days. Three hundred twelve hours and Haze Richards would be the forty-third President of the United States of America. "Whatta fucking country." He grinned.

  He was flat on his back, doing aerial bicycles, right in the middle of the bed where Napoleon had once slept.

  Chapter 67

  TRUCKS

  The satellite news-gathering truck and mobile control center were easier to find than Cole would have guessed. When Ryan flicked on the morning news, the sportscaster announced that the UBC NFL Game of the Week was tomorrow at Giant Stadium. The truck was probably already there with the setup crew.

  They found the two trucks parked on the service road just inside of the stadium. They had switched cars and pulled a gray station wagon into the parking lot and parked. It was just past midnight on Sunday morning. They sat looking through the windshield at the portable satellite news-gathering dish that sat in the back of a six-wheel pickup and the enormous eighteen-wheel mobile control center attached to a Peterbilt tractor.

  "There she is," Babbling John said, fondly saluting an old friend.

  Ryan had worked construction during summers when he'd been playing ball and he had some experience driving heavy equipment. The eighteen-wheel MCC truck had one extra axle but he thought he could handle it.

  "Think you can hot-wire a Peterbilt?" Cole asked Lucinda.

  "If the ignition wires are under the dash by the key box, I can."

  Ryan had suggested that he and Lucinda should steal the trucks. If they failed and got caught, that would leave the experienced TV journalists Cole, John, and Naomi still at large to try another broadcast tactic.

  They watched in silence for about twenty minutes to make sure nobody was guarding the equipment. Then Ryan got out of the station wagon. His leg had stiffened and he felt awkward as he walked around to get the tire iron out of the back. Then he and Lucinda moved across the parking lot toward the trucks.

  The service gate was unlocked and they moved inside. Ryan climbed up on the running board and looked into the cab. There was an Acme sleeper behind the front seat with the curtain pulled.

  Ryan stepped down and whispered to Lucinda. "I'm gonna break the glass and open it up. If there's somebody in the sleeper, I'll try and handle him. Stand back," he said. He hadn't bargained for hitting an innocent driver on the head with a tire iron. He hoped he could control the situation without violence. If there was an alarm, he'd have to turn it off fast.

  Suddenly he was flooded with doubts. He thought about Kaz and, once again, wished the ex-fed was with them, growling and chewing the unlit cigar, telling them what to do. Ryan knew it was now up to him.

  He swung the tire iron at the window, shattering the glass and the alarm went off, hee-hawing in the still night. The curtain behind the front seat was jerked back and Ryan found himself a foot from a startled man in jeans and T-shirt with a gray beard.

  " 'The fuck?" the driver said as Ryan reached in and grabbed him by the front of the T-shirt and yanked him onto the front seat, holding the tire iron at the ready.

  "Shut off the flicking alarm," Ryan demanded.

  "Huh?"

  Ryan slammed the tire iron viciously into the doorjamb for effect.

  "Okay, okay, buddy, take it easy." The driver fumbled for the genie and shut off the braying alarm.

  "Gimme the keys," Ryan commanded, and the man handed them over. "What about the other truck. . You got those keys?" Ryan asked. The man shook his head in fright.

  Lucinda ran to the SNG truck and pulled the ignition wires loose. Then she touched them together and the engine started on the six-wheel Dodge pickup with the 4.1-meter K-U band satellite uplink in back.

  Ryan helped the frightened driver out of the cab and climbed in behind the wheel. The truck was different from those he'd driven years ago, but he hoped it worked roughly the same way. When he turned the key, the big brown Peterbilt rumbled to life. The driver turned and sprinted away in the dark.

  From the station wagon in the parking lot, Cole watched in amazement as the big eighteen-wheeler pulled away from the fence with the SNG truck behind it. Both vehicles started a slow, lights-out roll along the interior service driveway.

  Cole followed both trucks as Ryan turned right, past the tennis courts where the U. S. Open was held every year. Finally, lights on, they pulled onto the expressway, heading toward Kennedy Airport.

  Inside the Peterbilt, Ryan's heart was pounding. He looked over the shiny brown hood at the cars below. He downshifted and the big engine growled.

  He realized he was smiling.

  Earlier, they had spotted a truck sales lot right off the freeway two miles from Giant Stadium. A sign advertised:

  THE TRUCK MART CLOSED SUNDAY. They had decided to hide in plain sight, to park there with all the other used trucks. They would disguise the SNG truck with its telltal e s atellite and hope to get through the day and into the evening.

  John and Cole decided to broadcast on Sunday night for several reasons. First, there were relief crews on duty then and they would be more confused when the signal went down than the regulars. Confusion would buy them a few extra minutes. Both Cole and John were concerned about the ATIS. Once they started broadcasting, it would give their position away, but they didn't tell the others about it. It was a problem they hadn't solved. A second reason they chose Sunday night was that viewership HUT levels were high and they wanted a large audience. Third, the streets were less crowded and chances of getting across town to UBC' s Black Tower with the stolen trucks were marginally better. Cole wanted to get on before 60 Minutes aired on CBS, so that they would maximize viewership. They ended up deciding to take Brenton Spencer's old Six O'clock News spot on UBC, an irony no one seemed to enjoy.

  They found the off ramp and pulled the truck up to the sales lot that was decorated with a red and white fence. Cole grabbed the tire iron from Ryan and broke the padlock, then opened the gate, and Ryan pulled the stolen truck in between a white Kenworth and a blue Mack. Lucinda backed the SNG truck into a protected spot behind the office. Their hearts were pounding, their adrenaline flowing. No sooner were the trucks' lights off than two patrol cars screamed by on the expressway, going code three, toward Giant Stadium.

  Chapter 68

  IMPORTANT MEETING

  C. Wallace Litman got the call Sunday Morning at five A. M. Steve Israel woke him up.

  "Sorry to wake you, sir, but somebody stole an SNG truck and a mobile control center from Giant Stadium," he announced without preamble.

  Wallace was still deep in sleep as the information hit him. He didn't want to wake Sally, so he put Israel on hold, then moved into his den and retrieved the blinking line.

  "Okay, somebody stole the trucks," he said brusquely. "Go on."

  "The driver gave descriptions of the man and woman to the police. I got the small control room and a K-U dish coming down from Chicago and I'm making arrangements to borrow one of CNN's trucks, so we're okay for the Jets game this afternoon."

  C. Wallace Litman nodded. It didn't seem like something that should have pulled him out of bed at five A. M. The equipment was insured. It would be pretty hard for anybody to get very far with them. An eighteen-wheel remote truck with UBC in five-foot-high letters on the side, and a four-meter satellite dish in a pickup were going to be damn hard to hide.

  "I don't suppose this could have waited, Steven?" "I just thought you'd want to know."

  "And now I do," C. Wallace Litman said and hung up abruptly. He wondered briefly why somebody would steal a satellite uplink and a mobile control center.
He got into bed and within minutes was asleep.

  Another phone call woke him at seven-forty-five. He fumbled the phone off the cradle as he glanced at the clock. "What the hell is it now?" he growled into the phone.

  "You know who this is?" Mickey said sharply. Litman scrambled up into a sitting position, struggling to get his bearings.

  "There's a car waiting for you in front of your building. Be in it in the next five minutes."

  "I have plans for the day."

  "Cancel 'em." And the line went dead.

  C. Wallace Litman got out of bed as Sally sat up and looked at him with concern.

  "Business," he said, and moved into the bathroom to take a quick shower.

  Ten minutes later, he stepped out into the cold, fog-covered New York morning and walked a few yards to a black Lincoln Town Car with the engine running. Inside he found a swarthy man with too much hair wearing a shiny green suit of horrible design. He was sitting behind the wheel smoking a cigarette. C. Wallace Litman had never seen him before.

  "You waiting for me?" he asked, silently cursing Mickey. Litman wasn't used to being dragged out of bed or operating on another man's timetable.

  "I'm'a here, pick'a Mist'a Litman up," Pulacarpo Depaulo said.

  C. Wallace Litman got into the backseat and closed the door. "You mind not smoking?" Wallace said, and Pulacarpo flipped the butt out the window and put the Lincoln Town Car in gear.

  The meeting was held in a deserted barn at a farm outside of Trenton. It took them an hour to get there.

  When they pulled up, Wallace could see four men standing in a semicircle, their breath hanging in a mist above their heads. They approached the car and escorted him to the barn. Once he was inside and his eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw Mickey Alo sitting on a stool in front of a workbench reading computer printouts from a folder. He stood as Litman moved toward him, but didn't cross to meet him. He held his ground and forced the financier to come to him. It was a test of power. It was important to know who was fucking whom. They had spoken on the phone many times and seen each other's pictures on the news or in the paper, but, for reasons of security, they had not met since Mickey was a boy.

  "We got a problem," Mickey said.

  "How's that?"

  "Last night, your guys lost a remote truck and a satellite dish. It's already been on your seven A. M. Sunday news." "I know. I was told at five this morning."

  "I think it was stolen by Ryan Bolt, Cole Harris, my sister, and that photojournalist from Reuters."

  "I hardly think that they could. ." But then Wallace stopped because Mickey's expression hovered between exasperation and contempt. His pig eyes were hard and C. Wallace felt some sort of heat coming from him. He changed course, softening his tone. "I assume you have reasons."

  "What I have is an educated guess, which could be wrong, but if it's not, then we're all in a fuck of a lot of trouble."

  "Let's hear."

  Mickey filled C. Wallace Litman in on the whole story: the suitcase full of Justice Department wiretaps given to Gavriel Bach; the trip to Israel; the break-in at Bach's house; the explosion that killed Kazorowski and the three assassins; and his assumption that they would try to broadcast the story on UBC. When he was finished, the tw o m en stood in silence. A slight wind hit the empty barn, rattling the door and sprinkling hay dust from the loft above.

  "You ever talk to my dad about buying the network in the seventies?"

  "Once or twice a year. But we were careful about using pay phones. You think they stole the K-U dish and the mobile control center so they could broadcast our old conversations?"

  "I think it's possible. If I'm wrong, we've wasted a few hours. If I'm right, we have to stop them."

  Mickey's eyes left no room for argument. If, as they said, eyes were the windows to the soul, then C. Wallace Litman had just seen all he needed of Mickey's twisted psyche.

  "Are you asking me how to stop them?"

  "What the fuck do you think, Wally?"

  "I. . I'll have to ask engineering. If they try and kidnap our signal using that uplink, I think we can triangulate them. Mind you, I'm not an engineer. I don't really understand how they do it, but I'll find out."

  "I want you to monitor this personally."

  "How do you know they're still in New York?" "It's a guess."

  "A guess?"

  "I often get lucky with my guesses. I have ungodly senses and demons who direct me," Mickey said, sounding way too creepy for C. Wallace Litman.

  "I see."

  "Good. Call me on the scrambled line when you know the answer," he said.

  The two men stood facing each other.

  "That's it. That was everything I brought you to hear." Mickey dismissed the fifth richest man in the world as if he had just delivered a pizza.

  C. Wallace Litman could feel Mickey's eyes still on him as he walked the short distance to the door. It was as if some invisible force had reached out and touched him between the shoulder blades. He quickened his step and was almost jogging when he went through the barn door.

  Wallace went directly to the news director's office in the Black Tower, on the Rim. He got hold of Red Decker, the chief engineer who had taken over from John Baily, and laid out the problem.

  "Actually, it's gonna be pretty easy. Every uplink has an ATIS," Decker said.

  C. Wallace shot an annoyed look at his chief of engineering, who quickly explained that ATIS stands for automatic transmission identification signal. "It goes up to the satellite and indicates that the signal is coming from a particular ground system. We know the ATIS number on the stolen unit and it can't be changed. The satellite also registers the GPS, which is the global positioning system on the dish. The GPS has to be activated to position the uplink and lock on the satellite. We can determine the location of the SNG truck with a handheld GPS receiver. It will give us the location of the dish they're using within a few yards."

  "Good. Get it ready before nightfall."

  Decker left wondering what the hell had gotten into Wallace Litman-to have the owner of UBC personally direct a recovery operation on a stolen satellite dish seemed unusual. He didn't know that the presidency of the United States was hanging in the balance.

  Wallace called Mickey back on the scrambled line at three-thirty that afternoon. He had everything set up and had some additional information.

  Mickey picked up the phone on the second ring. "Yeah?"

  Its me," Wallace said, preferring not to mention his name, whether the line was scrambled or not.

  "Let's hear."

  "We're set to pick up the signal. If they try and hit the satellite and if they're in New York City proper, we'll get a printout on the location to within a few feet. Also, engineering says they would be able to tell if a pirate signal tried to hit our transponder on the bird in space. They can see it in the control room. It's like the image wavers; they call it double illumination. They can notify stations to drop the feed. It would take us off the air, but it takes about four minutes to do it."

  Mickey had considered ordering UBC to go dark but had eliminated the idea. It would be a big national news story and he didn't want that. . Also, he couldn't keep them from hitting another network's satellite. He felt pretty sure that Ryan and Colt would pick UBC for poetic revenge. People were like that. . They made decisions based on emotion.

  "Tell them to be ready. That material can't get on the air," Mickey said.

  Wallace sat in the news director's office on the twenty-third floor looking out at the activity on the Rim. Joseph Alo didn't frighten Wallace. But his son, this little fat boy Mickey, he scared C. Wallace Litman more than impotence or death.

  The New York City police and the FBI had thrown up a perimeter on all of the roads leading out of the city immediately after the police got Ryan's description from the truck driver. They figured Ryan and the others were the terrorists who were trying to assassinate Haze Richards. Why they had stolen the satellite dish, they couldn't fathom, but the f
ederal government had told the NYPD to spare no expense. The new standing order was to shoot the fugitives on sight.

  Sunday morning they camped in the mobile control center in the back of the eighteen-wheeler. They listened to the Sunday traffic on the turnpike a hundred yards away and tried to get some sleep.

  At two in the afternoon, they huddled around the small desk in the mobile control center under dim red submarine lights while Babbling John Bally drew the floor plan of the basement of the Black Tower at UBC. He showed Ryan and Lucinda where the two backup generators were located. Then he drew the roof of Hertz Castle and began filling in the position of the satellite dish and the staircase. John labeled everything precisely in large print. He explained that the eighteen-wheel Peterbilt and its forty-foot box were too tall to fit into the parking structure. They'd have to park the mobile control center on the street below. The SNG trucks had been designed to fit in the parking garage and had once been kept on the roof there. Cole and John decided that if they parked the dish on the corner of the roof and the big truck on the street, they would have enough coaxial cable to hook the two units together if they strung a line down the fire stairs four stories to the street below.

  Naomi took pictures of them grinning like Bonnie and Clyde Barrow before a Kansas bank job.

  At five, they synchronized their watches. Ryan climbed into the eighteen-wheeler and Lucinda got in the seat beside him. They pulled the forty-foot box out of the Truck Mart. Babbling John Baily rode in the back with the control center equipment. The SNG truck with Cole and Naomi followed.

  They had decided to stay on secondary streets to avoid being seen by the New York highway police. The huge truck rumbled through residential neighborhoods in Queens. The streets were strangely quiet as families gathered together for Sunday dinner.

  As the sun set, New York City was washed in a red glow that clung to the underbelly of the threatening iron-gray clouds. They moved with the traffic along FDR Drive toward the financial district. A mile away, they saw the Black Tower of UBC rising thirty stories into the night sky. It seemed to Ryan to be beckoning them in black-glassed silence.