Stephen Cannell - The Plan

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."