authorization.”
“Whoever gives you a hard time I will shoot in the face,” I said.
He nodded. “That should do the trick.”
He led us into an enormous room, the kind you associate with NASA mission control. There were probably a hundred seats at desks, each one with a large monitor. On the wall there were main monitors, with lights and numbers flashing, and maps with display lights. I’m sure it all had meaning to somebody, but not to me.
There were thirty or so people manning the desks, who I assumed were still the night crew. Robbins pointed towards a glass-enclosed office in the back of the room, on the balcony floor. “We’re up there.”
We followed him up to the room, which looked something like the communication center on the starship
“Howie, you have the floor.”
He nodded, and began. “We’ve never done this; we don’t have any interest in what people are watching in the moment; it’s always after the fact. That’s more than ample for advertising decisions.
“But I think we can set it up for ongoing monitoring; it just might take a little while, because some of the cross-checking will be manual. The computers aren’t set up this way, and it might take more time to try and program them than to get things going.”
“OK, good,” I said. “I need to tell Bryan what he should be doing.”
“Sarah?” Howie said, and Sarah took the floor.
“Our computers are designed for fifteen-minute increments. So he should watch something for fifteen minutes, and then go to the very next channel for fifteen, then the one after that for fifteen, and so on.”
“Got it. Does it matter which channels?”
“Mmmm,” she said, “good question. Tell him to start with 318, then work his way up. Sometimes the number jumps; for instance the one after 319 is 324. But that doesn’t matter; he should turn to whichever one is next.”
“When should he start?”
Howie again: “It’ll take us at least forty minutes to set it up.”
I looked at my watch. “OK, he’ll start at eight forty-five.”
Robbins said, “We’ll be back at eight twenty-five,” to Howie and Sarah. Then to us, “I’ll show you where the coffee is.”
I walked over with Robbins, Julie, and Emmit, but knew that if I sat there and had more coffee my head would explode. I decided to call Alex Hutchinson back. She answered on the first ring.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for calling me back. I’m sure you read about the man that was killed the other day in the explosion; they haven’t given his name out.”
“I’m aware.”
“He was walking around the area where we’re protesting just before he died. I thought what he was doing was strange, so I approached him.”
“What was he doing?”
“Sort of examining the land, checking out the drilling rigs that were already there, that kind of thing. But that’s not why I called you.”
“Why did you call?”
“Because I talked to him and he said some strange things that I thought you should know. I figured he was with Hanson, so I told him we wouldn’t let him drill on the land, and he said that nobody was going to. Then he told me to leave him alone, that he was saving my life. I may not have the exact words right, but that’s basically what he said.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, he said that the state police were going to throw us off this land, and said we should listen to them. Then he said I was a pain in the ass,” she said, and then laughed. “Which showed he knew what he was talking about.”
There would come a time when all this would be interesting to me, when I would try to bring down everyone involved in the Brayton mess. But that wasn’t the time, especially with Emmit across the room signaling to me about something.
“Thanks, Alex. Let me think about this for a while.”
“OK,” she said. “If you need me, I’ll be out here on the land. We’re not leaving, and we’re not the ones committing the violence, no matter what they say.”
I got off the phone and walked over to Emmit, who was reading something on his own cell phone. “What’s going on?”
Emmit looked up. “Richard Carlton is dead. Murdered in his own home.”
“I guess Gallagher got his justice,” I said.
Julie shook her head. “No, he didn’t. Carlton was alive when Gallagher left his house. Lou mentioned that he looked in the window and Carlton was holding his arm at a weird angle and yelling at some guy who was there with him.”
“William,” I said. “He was like Carlton’s assistant or something, but he looked more like a something than an assistant.”
“Could he have killed him?” Emmit asked.
“I don’t know, and right now I don’t give a shit. I’d be fine if they dropped a nuclear bomb on Brayton.”
I looked over at Howie and Sarah, still hovering over their computers; it was hard to believe that we were depending on them to save Bryan, but that’s where we were. Maybe it was to get my mind off that, but I started thinking about Gallagher again. “Carlton must have told Gallagher something. And whatever it was sent him to the drilling site.”
“And Carlton knew where he’d be going, and sent someone to kill him, so Gallagher couldn’t reveal what Carlton had said,” Julie said.
I shook my head. “More likely that somebody, maybe William, killed Carlton for talking and then went after Gallagher. My bet would be that the same person killed Carlton, Gallagher, and Rhodes.”
“It would have to be the protesters,” Julie said. “Carlton and Hanson have gotten what they wanted. So they killed Carlton for revenge, and they killed Gallagher because they thought he was on Carlton’s side.”
What she was saying didn’t ring true for me, but I shut my credibility bell off entirely, because Robbins was signaling for us to come over. Howie and Sarah were apparently done, and we were about to find out if our last chance was still feasible.
“OK, we’ve got good news and bad news,” Robbins said.
“Let’s hear all of it.”
“Howie?”
Howie took over. “The short answer is that we can do it. We can tell you who’s watching a particular show at a particular time, in the moment. We can’t do it in exactly the target area you’re talking about, our range is going to be a little wider, but we can do it.”
“And the bad news?”
“Two things. One is that a home will be recorded on the list as long as it’s on at any moment within the fifteen-minute time frame. So if they scroll through it, it’ll be there. That will increase the number of homes and the size of the list.”
“What’s the other thing?” I asked.
“We have no way of cross-checking the lists by computer; it will have to be manual.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Julie asked.
“Well, put it this way. We can print out a list of everyone watching ESPN from eleven to eleven fifteen. Then we can print out a list of everyone watching CNN from eleven fifteen to eleven thirty. But we can’t tell you, or at least our computers can’t tell you, who is on both lists.”
“Can you separate the lists by area?”
