Molina bit his lip.
Grafton smacked the table again, and the map fell off the blackboard. “Answer me!” he roared.
“Yes.”
“Consider yourself a prisoner. If you try to escape, you will be shot.” He turned to Travis. “Lock him in one of those cells in the concentration camp. See that he is guarded twenty-four hours a day and arrange to have him fed.”
“Yes, sir.” Travis Clay grabbed Molina’s arm, hoisting him from the chair in which he sat. I pulled out my .45.
“Get rid of the web belt,” I told Molina. “Take it off.” He was wearing a pistol.
He reached down, released the buckle, and let the belt fall on the floor.
“Your leather belt too,” Grafton said. “We’ll save you for a firing squad.”
The belt came off and went onto the floor.
Molina could barely walk, so Travis almost dragged him.
THIRTY-ONE
“You could have confided in me,” I told Grafton.
He looked surprised. “I told Sarah to tell you about the eavesdropping scheme. Did she tell you?”
“Well, yes, but not about all this other stuff.”
“Tommy, you have a good brain between those ears and you had better start using it.”
You would think that after all these years around Grafton I would know how to keep my mouth shut. One of these days I am going to get that trick down.
“The local radio station is back on the air,” Sarah told the boss. That female could read minds. “I don’t know if the power is on or if they are using a generator.”
“Okay,” Grafton said. “Tommy, take Sarah over there. She is going to put some of that stuff from the White House on the air. She has winnowed it down to about sixty hours. Convince the radio staff to do it, and then set up an ambush around the station and transmission tower. Use Travis and Willis Coffee. Take whatever weapons you need. If the military is still in the game, they’ll take the tower out with a Hellfire or commandos. If it’s FEMA or Homeland, expect a few truckloads of thugs. Don’t take any prisoners — we don’t have anywhere to keep them. The beds in the concentration camp are being used as barracks.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sarah, you know what to do.”
“This will set off an explosion in the White House,” she said flatly.
“I hope. Infuriated, frightened men don’t think very well. Go.”
Sarah repacked her computer and we left, with Willis Coffee trailing along behind. We picked up Travis ten minutes later and took my stolen FEMA pickup truck.
Downtown Kingwood was a typical American small town, in my opinion. A Walmart on the edge of town had pretty much turned the old downtown into a wasteland of vacant stores interspersed with insurance agencies, lawyers’ offices, gift and craft shops. All of them looked closed, and there were no parked cars.
The radio station’s offices were in one of the old storefronts on the east side of the street in the middle of the block. The transmission tower was obviously offsite, probably on a nearby hill. I parked right in front, and Sarah and I strolled in while Willis and Travis, each with an M4 in their hands, walked to the adjacent corners.
The lady at the front desk was still on the right side of forty and had a cute hairdo and a ready smile. She even had on a plastic name tag: “Sue.”
“Good afternoon,” she said brightly. The studio was right behind her, visible through a double-pane window. A woman was in there talking into a boom mike, and a young guy in a ponytail was fielding telephone calls. We could hear the station feed over a hidden loudspeaker system, background noise. Above the window was a large clock with a sweep second hand.
“Are you with the government?”
“Not anymore. We were federal employees and left under a cloud.” I smiled.
“Really!” she said, her eyes widening.
I confided in a low voice, “I stole our truck.” Then I introduced Sarah and myself.
The desk lady stared. I continued smoothly, as if stealing a government vehicle needs no explanation. “How long has the power been back on?”
“Since yesterday morning. We got back on the air as quickly as we could.”
“Don’t you have an emergency generator?”
“We ran out of gas for it. The station manager is down waiting in line at the filling station to fill some cans now.” With only a little prompting from us, she chattered on. The station was licensed at one thousand watts, sunrise to sunset. The transmitter was outside town on Mount Morgan, named after a local farmer who leased the site to the station. “He’s such a nice gentleman,” she added.
“We should probably wait for the manager,” Sarah said, glancing at me. “When do you expect him back?”
“In a little while, certainly, unless the line is too long or the filling station runs out of gasoline. We close the office here at five.” It was ten till. “And go off the air at…” she glanced at her calendar. “… seven thirty-two.”
There was a hallway that looked as if it went all the way through the building, and a door at the end of it. The door opened and a portly man of medium height with a fringe of gray hair around a white pate came bustling through it. He opened the door to the studio and went in. In less than a minute, he came out. He addressed Sue. “I got the last of the gas at Plunkett’s. I just told Jan. She’ll put it on the air immediately.”
“These folks want to talk to you,” Sue told him. She said his name, Howard Shinaberry. He glanced at us, at our web belts and holsters, and waited.
“Sarah Houston,” I said, nodding at my companion, “and I’m Tommy Carmellini. Sarah wants to talk to you in your office.”
He shrugged and led the way down the hall to another door. Sarah followed with her computer case.
I smiled at Sue, then walked down the hallway and went out back. There was an alley and a parking lot. Three cars and an old Chevy pickup were parked there. I surveyed the alley. All I could see was a cat wandering around and a bunch of garbage cans. The gas cans were in the back of the truck, so I unloaded them and put them in the hallway.
I closed the alley door and waited by the front desk with Sue. “Does Mr. Shinaberry own the station?”
“Oh, no. He’s just the manager. Three doctors own it.”
“Local doctors?”
“They live in Maryland, Bethesda I think.”
Sue chattered on. She was a local and had worked at the station for five years come November. She liked it. She met such interesting people. “Do you have an ad you want us to air?”
“Something like that,” I replied.
She got busy locking the cash register and putting things away. Five o’clock came and went.
“If you want to go home, that’s all right,” I said. “I’ll tell Mr. Shinaberry.”
“I’ll just wait, in case he has something else for me to do.” She was obviously getting nervous. I didn’t blame her. I gave her my best innocent smile that had melted a thousand hearts.
At nine after five, Mr. Shinaberry and Sarah came from the office out to the front desk. She paused beside me and said, “He doesn’t want to do it.”
“Our license is up for renewal in three months,” Shinaberry explained. “That stuff on that computer is dynamite. The FCC—”
I went out the front door to the sidewalk and gave Travis Clay the Hi sign. He came walking back, his M4 cradled in his arms. We went back into the radio station together.
Shinaberry was explaining to Sarah why the owners would fire him if the file on the computer were put out on the air. “I know the president’s voice, and it certainly sounds like him, but if the file is fake, airing it would be libel, and if it’s real I can’t imagine how that recording was obtained legally—”