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 BAILY STOOD 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. 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.