The Plan

Chapter 70.

RED DECKER WAS IN HIS CHIEF ENGINEER'S OFFICE AT UBC when Wallace Litman called and told him to go directly to an office in midtown Manhattan. He had packed o ne of the little Sony GPS hand units and a large electroni c s atellite map of New York that gave latitude and longitud e a ccurate to feet and inches. It filled a small suitcase. Th e m ap had been developed by Lojack, a car alarm syste m t hat gave precise electronic locations of stolen cars throug h a radio signal. It would also work for the portable GPS.

Red found the office in a turn-of-the-century building decorated by ornate columns and pigeon shit. The office he was looking for was on the third floor and the fogged-glass door said DIMARCO AND SON, FREIGHT FORWARDING. He had been told to be there at five P. M. and was right on time. He tried the door and found that it was unlocked, so he moved slowly into the little room.

"Is'a okay, I'm'a wait for you…"

Red spun around and saw Pulacarpo Depaulo leaning back in a swivel chair, a Sony Walkman on his curly, black head. Pulacarpo flashed a broad, white smile across iridescent green lapels.

"You from'a TV?"

"Yeah. From UBC. I'm here to help find the stolen equipment," Red said, demonstrating his total lack of understanding of the real mission.

Pulacarpo pulled the headphones down around his neck and got up. "Everybody, they next door…" Red Decker followed him down the hall to the rickety lift, which groaned like an old whore as it rattled and lunged down four flights to the underground garage.

A blue van pulled up and Red was ushered into its plush gray interior. Once inside, he found himself looking into the four faces that C. Wallace Litman had confronted that morning. Two of them sat on jump seats. The other two made room for Red on the back seat. They were all dark-skinned men, with hooded eyes and five o'clock shadows.

" 'AV sa my cousins." Pulacarpo waved a green-suited arm at his four cugini.

"Nice to meet you," Decker said.

They didn't respond.

`They no speak'a no English just now. 'At'sa my pretty good, in'a school, I'm'a think," Pulacarpo explained, getting the idea across badly.

They pulled out of the underground garage into the cold, New York twilight. The sun was just going down as they headed across town.

Everybody wasn't next door as Pulacarpo had said.

The blue van went east four blocks. It pulled up in front of sixty stories of poured concrete and mirrored glass. The marquee said LINCOLN PLAZA. The building was half owned by the Alo family. Joseph Alo had always liked to put American names on his real estate properties-Lincoln Plaza, Hancock Square-but everybody in New York called it the Pasta Palace because the building housed crooked unions and mob front businesses.

Red was accompanied by Pulacarpo and his cousins into the elevator and taken to the top floor with such speed that his ears popped. He was led out toward a staircase and eventually found himself on the roof, which was covered with AstroTurf.

The center of the roof was dominated by a heliport and a gray and red Bell Jet Ranger. Six men were standing in the misty rain on the raised heli-platform, but Red's gaze was drawn to a short, round-faced man with oily hair who stepped forward.

"You got the doohickey?" Mickey Alo said, not introducing himself.

"Right here." And Red pulled the small Sony GPS receiver out of his pocket and opened the suitcase with the electronic map.

"That's it?" Mickey said, surprised at the size of the thing.

"Yes, sir." Red had a funny feeling about this little round man. Something told him to be respectful.

"Fucking-A. I thought it was gonna be like some kinda big deal."

"No, sir, it's very miniaturized."

"What's your name?"

"Russ Decker."

"Decker? Like the chain saw company?"

"People call me Red."

"Okay, set up where you want. This okay, up here?"

"It's great. Good place, no interference. I should be able to receive if they send." Then Red noticed several automatic weapons lying on the seat in the back of the Jet Ranger. Some survival instinct told him he should just keep his mouth shut, get the job done, and go home.

"Hey, Chain Saw," Mickey said, "You want a special?"

"No, sir."

"Nickadoma, give him a meatball special."

A tall man with broad shoulders handed Red the chunky sandwich.

"Thank you," Red said, taking it even though he didn't want it. He tuned in the GPS, and wondered what C. Wallace Litman could possibly have in common with this bunch of thugs.

They found a sledgehammer in a tool cabinet under a workbench. Ryan hefted it. It had a ten-pound head. "What're you gonna do?" Lucinda asked.

"I don't know, but we gotta stay on schedule. We disable the generators, then we'll turn off the shore power and try to break these handles."

They both knew that if security guards came down and the handles were still attached, the guards could simply shove them back into place and knock Cole's broadcast off the air. The UBC ten-meter C-band dish on the roof next to their SNG truck was more powerful and could cut right through their transmission. They had to break the handles somehow. Lucinda spotted two carbon dioxide fire extinguishers hanging in brackets near the door.

"Maybe if we cool them down first, it will make the metal more brittle," she said.

"Worth a try."

Ryan looked at the closest generator, the air starter perched on top of the unit like a giant prehistoric insect. The starter would drive a heavy blast of air down into the motor and turn it on. By blocking the intake, John had said, they could stop the process.

Ryan climbed up on the generator and looked at the intake. It was about two feet by one. "Gimme a blanket," he said to Lucinda. Ryan took it and jammed it down into the air intake.

"Get the fire extinguisher." He looked at his watch; they were almost out of time. The network would be in the forty-five seconds of black in under two minutes. "We gotta throw the switches," he said, as he climbed atop the second generator, and stuffed another blanket into the intake.

He climbed down as Lucinda set the flashlights up, turning them on and pointing them at the circuit breakers in the brightly lit room.

"Thirty seconds," he said, his voice tight with tension. "Start cooling down the handles."

Lucinda began to spray the ice-cold carbon dioxide gas from the fire extinguisher onto the handles of the circuit breakers. Ice crystals began to form.

On the Rim, Steve Israel came out of his office to supervise the changeover from the NFL remote broadcast of the Game of the Week to their regular network programming, The Nightly News with Dale Hellinger.

Dale was behind the anchor desk, slipping his ear angel in as they were getting set to go into the forty-five seconds of black. The camera operators adjusted their shots.

Rick Rouchard settled into his director's chair in the control room and pushed the "God button" that let his voice boom out over the set. "Okay, Dale, we're in black in fifteen seconds. Coming out of black in a minute. Everybody stand by, we're fifty-nine, forty-nine to straight-up."

They all watched the clock in the control room tick down.

"We're in black," the director said. "Coming out of black in forty-five seconds…" And then the entire room, including all of the monitors and cameras, went dark. "What the fuck?" the director said as Steve Israel grabbed for the computer phone-the only thing on the Rim still working.

"Gimme Engineering," he shouted into the phone.

The operator was sitting in the dark on the third floor of the Tower. "Do you know what extension Engineering is, sir? I don't have any light down here."

"Jesus H. Christ, ginune a break," the VP of The Nightly News screamed to a much higher authority.

The phones went dead as Ryan threw the fourth circuit breaker in the basement.

Then Steve Israel uttered the worst phrase imaginable in a network control room:

"We've lost the signal. We're off the air," he said.

In the basement, when Ryan and Lucinda threw the last power circuit, they could hear the airflow starters struggling to get the backup generators going. Both generators turned on for one rotation, then fell silent as the blankets were sucked deep into the intakes.

The basement was dark except for the battery flashlights that threw their beams on the wall. Ryan continued to bang away at the ice-cold power lever handles. Lucinda had been right, the cold had hardened the viscosity of the metal and the first handle snapped off with the third or fourth blow from the sledgehammer. It flew across the room and clattered against the far wall.

Ryan closed his eyes to increase the effort as he swung the heavy sledgehammer, occasionally missing his target in the dim light. Lucinda stood to his right, aiming the nozzle of the fire extinguisher at the base of the steel levers while he swung.

"What's going on down here?" a man's voice called.

They turned around but couldn't see him. "Engineering," Ryan said. "Trying to get these damn levers back on.

"Stay where you are. I'm Security. Drop that."

Ryan and Lucinda were dimly lit by the flashlights and they couldn't see the security man standing in the blackened doorway. "I got a gun. Drop it."

Ryan wasn't about to stop. The guard could reverse everything by just putting the remaining three circuit breakers back up. They'd gone too far. He wasn't convinced the man had a gun, or would use it, so he kept swinging the sledgehammer. The second handle broke off, snapping halfway up the arm, and flew across the room. When the security man fired, the noise was deafening in the enclosed concrete space. The bullet hit near Ryan's head, chipping out a piece of the wall and blowing concrete dust into his eyes. For a moment, he couldn't see. Then Lucinda turned the nozzle of the fire extinguisher toward the sound of the gunshot and filled the doorway with cold, white carbon dioxide gas.

In the truck, Cole was waiting. The network was off the air, but the local stations didn't know it because they still had ten more seconds of local airtime before the network was scheduled to take the signal back and come out of black. John had already done a cross-check on the polarity to guarantee they were solidly on both the East and West coast transponder.

"Okay," John said. "Uplink… in ten we're coming out of black."

Cole started the tape and John hit the Transmit button, shooting the signal up onto the bird. "We're on in five… four… three… two… one…" he said, as the network news break bulletin music led the tape. John had found the Special Report music in the sound caddy in the truck. John opened the "announcer's pot," and Cole leaned in toward the mike: "This is a UBC Special Report," he said sternly.

The tape they had made at Madison Junior High came onto the screen, but without the Special Report bulletin card which would normally precede a break-in. Then Cole's image filled the screen.

"This is Cole Harris with a late-breaking story," he said into the camera with professional reporter ease. He was sitting at the desk in the small video lab in his tie and paisley suspenders. They had pulled a school bookcase in behind him to create an office set. To both Cole and John, it looked cheesy, but they hoped it would get past the local station directors. John knew that they would become suspicious shortly, so he was going to send them a "network alert." Normally, when a special bulletin hit the airwaves, it was preceded by a network alert, warning the local stations it was coming. For obvious reasons, they had not been able to do that, but in emergencies, the network alert could come a few minutes into the news break. John could type the special-frequency message onto the transmission and it would appear at the bottom of the screen so that only the local program director and his staff could see it. He decided to send it a minute or two into the broadcast, just as the news directors were becoming concerned and reaching for their phones. It would be part of a familia r p attern and should calm them. Meanwhile, Cole was doing his preamble on the line monitor. The story was raining out from Galaxy Four all across the United States: "Governments are fragile," Cole started, importantly. "They exist by virtue of the whims and passions of their populations. Power is, indeed, a heady perfume, so it is not surprising that in this decade, we have seen governments fall to political insurrection and intrigue."

Naomi had pushed the small Trinitron camera in the Madison Junior High School video lab in slowly, tightening the shot to give Cole's words more impact.

"Normally, these coups d'etat take place in third world countries. So it is doubly surprising when one is attempted here, at home in the United States of America." He stood and walked around and sat on the corner of the desk. "We will show proof that the Democratic nominee Haze Richards entered into a contract with Mafia kingpin Michael Alo in New Jersey. The goal of the alliance between these men was to put Haze Richards into the White House. Before this broadcast is complete, we will show you tapes and film connecting these two men with the late underworld financial boss Meyer Lansky. More importantly, we will prove that the New Jersey Alo crime family, working through Meyer Lansky, financed C. Wallace Litman's purchase and control of the United Broadcasting Company. These men used this powerful electronic communications network to influence, control, and script the events of the primary campaign… To influence public opinion for the purpose of hijacking next week's national election for the presidency of the United States."

John started to type his "network alert" into the transmission.

"Attention Stations… This Special Report will conclude at 6:14." He signed it: "Air Control, New York."

On the roof of the Lincoln Plaza, the printout flashed on Red Decker's GPS Sony hand unit. He scribbled the latitude and longitude on a piece of paper.

"Get the helicopter going," Mickey yelled.

The pilot, who was already in the Bell Jet Ranger, started to turn the blades.

Red Decker looked at the map in front of him and found the latitude and longitude: 4(047'1" north, 73deg48'8" west. He tracked his fingers on the map until he found the exact location. "Gotta be a mistake," Red said.

"Why? What's wrong?" Mickey yelled over the noise of the helicopter.

"This is our own dish. It's right here." He pointed on the map to the block where the UBC parking structure was located. "That's where we have our main C-band uplink. This is our own signal."

Mickey looked at him, trying to understand. "Whatta you talking about?"

"That's our uplink," Red said, trying to get Mickey to understand.

Babbling John Baily had hoped to create confusion by broadcasting right next to the UBC ten-meter C-band dish. He hoped it would buy valuable time. It did. It bought fifty-three seconds.

Red Decker moved away from the helicopter and reactivated his GPS unit, waited for it to get the bounce-back ATIS signal, then shook his head. 'This is nuts," he said as he got the same reading.

"What!" Mickey was losing patience.

"Our big dish is a C-band and this GPS receiver is only for K-U band transmission, so it can't be our signal… But it's coming from the same place. How can that be?"

"They're on the fucking roof with that stolen dish, asshole!" Mickey turned and ran to the helicopter and jumped in

Red watched as some of the men in the helicopter grabbed up automatic weapons and began pulling the slides, chambering rounds. He saw the chopper take off and lean to starboard. Then the rotor changed pitch as they streaked off toward UBC and the final confrontation.