Ryan came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, sat on the bed, and said nothing. When the stories started to repeat themselves, Cole turned off the set.
'Ain't this a bitch?' he said. 'But I got an idea that could get us where we wanna go.'
'This I gotta hear,' Naomi said.
'I want you to hear this all the way out because I've been giving it a lot of thought. We kidnap the UBC feed. Put our story up on the satellite ourselves. Broadcast it the way we want it. We'll use C. Wallace Litman's own network to destroy his plan. We've got enough evidence and the know-how. . All we need is a little guts and Ingenuity.'
'What're you smoking?' Naomi said.
'They were going to use the network to accomplish their plan. We'll use it to destroy them. We broadcast this, then the other networks are gonna have to pick up on it. They'll force Justice to trace Litman's records.
'If we produce the right broadcast, we can bring them down. . It's not impossibly hard to kidnap a TV signal. It's doable.'
'I still think we should take it to Brokaw, Naomi said flatly.
'Nobody is going to believe us now. We're crackpots. They're going to spend all their time indicting us. Nobody is going to look at what we have.'
'You don't know that,' Lucinda said.
'I know it. Come on. . I was one of those arrogant jackals for thirty years.' He spun on Ryan.
'And you gotta come to the party, Ryan. I know you just got a helluva shock, but snap out of it. I can't have you sitting there looking at your shoes.'
'Go fuck yourself, Cole.'
'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
John Bailystood 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.
