He wanted to kick himself. The bright, white thing was a television satellite dish. Around it was a high hurricane fence, topped with coils of razor wire. Chino wanted his MTV? No, the satellite dishes he had seen in Kalispell were much smaller, with less complex structures in the center of the dish, and nothing like the big white box beside it. This was more than a very big one, he wanted to believe, it was the biggest one he had ever seen.

No, there were dishes like it all over Florida. At the Space Center. At Homestead Air Force Base. And outside television stations in downtown Miami. A dish this size was for transmission, not reception.

And unless you owned your own satellites, like the government, you didn’t transmit without renting time on a satellite from one of the politically powerful conglomerates that owned it. But to someone like Chino, none of that would mean anything. But it nevertheless put a limit on his airtime. Pirate radio had not lasted long, and a pirate television station would be on the air only for the time it took Patriot missiles to lock onto its signal.

And this dish had been installed in the last three months?

For all Merrill knew, it had not been used yet. And Amy had just screamed inside the building? What was he doing outside?

At the elevator he pushed the rock out of the way and let the door close and pulled the revolver out of the other track and let the door close, too. He rotated the control lever to the Up position. There was an electric click, but no movement. He didn’t want to go down — Amy’s voice had not come from downstairs. He opened the gate.

The door to the corridor wouldn’t move. Merrill tried again. It was stuck fast.

Locked?

Yes. Merrill opened the other gate. The door to the outside was locked now, too.

Chino wanted him downstairs? Could Merrill shoot his way out? The doors were heavy and the locking mechanism was embedded in the metal track. He could expend all his ammunition and still be locked in this cage.

What was downstairs? It was the source of all that dirt piled in the yard, for one thing. Chino wanted him there?

One thing was sure: Merrill wasn’t getting any closer to Amy by standing still.

He rotated the control lever to Down.

“There he goes!” Gregory crowed through the television speaker.