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
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
