"Look for suspicious equipment."
"Hold the phone," Remo said, sweeping the control area with his deep-set eyes. "On second thought, this is a cellular. I'm going to carry you with me, Smitty. Try not to wriggle."
Remo walked around the sprawling control area. There were banks and banks of monitors, tape decks, and other broadcasting equipment Remo didn't recognize.
"I can't tell one thing from another around here," Remo told Smith. "Give me some clue."
"I cannot," said Smith. "I am not very familiar with broadcast equipment."
"Wait a minute. I just found something weird."
"Describe it."
Remo was looking through a long Plexiglas port. Inside was what appeared to be a video library racked in row upon row of shelving. There were two great tapedecks at the far end of the room.
And moving along a ceiling track, an aluminum robot arm. As Remo watched, it slid along, emitting a thin red laserlike beam. It was scanning the exposed sides of the racked cassettes. As the scanning beam came to a silver bar code label, it beeped, then stopped. The arm telescoped downward to grab the cassette between flat aluminum fingers.
Holding it firmly, it retracted, and tracked back to the dual cassette decks and with too-precise movements, inserting it into one deck. A red light went on as a matching red light in the other deck winked off. The second deck released its cassette and the arm swung in perfectly and seized it.
Slowly, it retreated along its track until it came to an empty slot. Smoothly, the cassette was returned to its receptacle.
"It's some kind of automatic cassette feeding thingy," Remo said.
"Thingy?"
"It's big, there's no one in charge and I don't even see a chair for someone to sit in."
"Remo, many cable outfits run automatic programming. The commercial tapes are programmed into a guiding computer."
"That explains the bar codes."
"Bar codes?"
"Yeah. Every cassette is coded."
"I do not think that is what we are looking for," Smith said disappointedly.
"Maybe I should rough up some of the technicians," Remo suggested.
"Where are they?"
"Out on the sidewalk waiting for the third shoe to fall."
"Er, I fail to understand."
Then above him, Remo heard the clattery rattle clatter of helicopter blades.
"Don't look now," Remo said guardedly, going to a window, "but either the bad guys are back for more hostages or the local SWAT team just arrived."
"Remo, can you leave the building unseen?"
Remo opened a window and looked down. The streets were choked with people looking up.
"No," Remo told Smith.
Smith groaned.
"Can you leave it safely?" Smith asked.
"Probably."
"Do so. If KNNN is off the air, you may have crippled any jamming capability they might possess. It is time to regroup."
"Gotcha," said Remo, dropping the phone.
He made for the elevator, and before he could press the call button, every door on every elevator opened simultaneously and out came floods of cameramen. They were looking through their viewfinders and didn't notice Remo at all.
Remo whistled. A baker's dozen lenses swept in all directions. They pointed up, down, up the corridor, down the corridor-in every direction except where Remo was standing.
So Remo shouted, "He just headed down the stairs to the lobby."
A man took up the cry. "He's headed for the lobby!"
Instantly, the cameramen ducked back into the waiting elevators, unaware that Remo was snugly in their midst.
No one noticed that Remo was riding to the lobby with them. They kept their videocams on their shoulders, their eyes glued to eyepieces, fingers on triggers-ready to record whatever sight the opening doors revealed.
They revealed, Remo discovered to his displeasure, a phalanx of Atlanta Metro Police in full riot gear.
A cameraman shouted, "He headed back this way!"
Bending his knees so no one could see his face, Remo rammed a pointing finger out of the clot of bodies and said, "There he goes now!"
Immediately, the elevators emptied. The lobby was soon boiling with riot helmets and videocams bumping blindly into one another.
Remo said, "What the hell," and abruptly pressed the Up button.
The lift took him back to the top floor, where he made his way to the roof stairs in time to meet landing police helicopters.
They were festooned with lights and M-16 rifle barrels prodded from the open sides of the bubbles. One sweeping light found him, and he heard someone yell through a bullhorn, "Don't move! We have you dead to rights."
Remo moved anyway. The light tried to follow him. Each time, he eluded it. Once he inserted his hands into the beam long enough to make a hand shadow of a bunny rabbit nibbling a carrot.
That brought a fusillade of bullets, and enough noise and confusion that Remo was all but invisible on the darkened tower roof.
Moving with a self-assured calm, Remo took hold of the tipped-over satellite dish. It was as big as a swimming pool, but light in proportion to its weight. Not that its weight would have mattered to Remo.