A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (17 page)

“Tell me, Lou.”

“Okay. Something weird happened.”

“You told me that already.”

“The money isn’t free.”

“Oh, my God.” .

“See? See what happens?”

It was all a matter of perspective. He had to look at it that way. Not a problem to overcome. Not a threat. Put that aside and think of it as a chance. It
was
a chance, an opportunity to reclaim what he once was, the person for whom all things were possible. Even if no one would ever know.

“This is it. The end. I can feel it.”

Worry was morphing into panic. He could see it in her face, hear it in her voice.

“Don’t go ballistic on me, Mag.”

“I need to know what’s happening.”

“It’s nothing. It’s just two days and...”

“Lou, start at the beginning and tell me what it is.”

He had to get busy, lay out a detailed plan that had some chance of succeeding, just in case he decided to go through with it. He couldn’t go ahead without a plan. And he couldn’t scrub it without checking it out first. He’d have to take his car to reconnoiter the area around the bridge, see for himself, and then decide.

“If you go, Lou. If you go away from this table without telling me everything, I won’t be here when you get back.”

He hated to lie. Hated to quibble.
Just tell her something
.

“All right. All right. Okay, Maggie. Okay? They want me to be more than a broker.”

“Who are
they
?”

“They. The company. Pierson Browne, Patricia Buck.”

“What do they want?”

“It’s weird, Mag. It’s crazy.”

“What?”

“It’s...Well, it’s training. With me handling this new account, they want to be sure that I have the knowledge I need about the market, the global market.”

“That’s it? I don’t believe you.”

“I’ll be incommunicado for a full two days. Starting right away. Tomorrow.”

“You’re lying to me. Your eyes are darting all over the place.”

“It’s up at Arden House, that mansion sitting up in the hills alongside the Thruway. Columbia’s giving this seminar and a whole bunch of people from banks and brokerage firms are going to be up there. I’m one of them. It came out of the blue.”

“Two days. Incommunicado. How would you feel if I suddenly said, ‘okay, I’m off to California’?”

“I knew you’d give me a hard time about it.”

“The global market. What about the global market?”

“There are all kinds of ramifications of trading in foreign stocks and bonds, Mag. If I knew all about it, I wouldn’t be going. But there’s a whole set of factors that don’t matter in regular domestic trading, like currency fluctuations, and time differences that I need to know about if I’m going to be dealing with Barry Westover.”

“I’m going to San Jose. I’ll be at Mom’s.” She sounded tired, resigned.

“They don’t want us distracted, Mag. It’s a high-intensity seminar, is all. So I go away for a day or two, pour it on, focus. What’s the big deal?”

“When you feel like it, you can call and tell me the truth. Are you scared of me, Lou? Are you afraid of what I’ll think, what I’ll say? Training is the whole thing? This is what you didn’t want to tell me?”

“You’ve never been able to understand that I need to be able to operate outside of the constraints of you and me sometimes. High powered people have...”

“The ‘constraints’ of you and me.”

“They want to move fast while the concept is hot. To be in their league, you can’t be tied down by ‘what is the wife going to think?’ Anyway, there’s more.”

“What is it? What more could there possibly be?”

“I have to go to a preliminary meeting, today, now. A meeting of all those from Pierson Browne who are going to this thing. They want to make sure we understand the company’s position.”

She was quiet for a moment. He could almost see her trying to choose her words, find a way to break him, get him to spill.

“Lou, I’m on your side. You can tell me anything. Anything at all. But you’re afraid. Whatever it is that’s really going on, you’re afraid that I’ll object. Afraid that I’ll make sense. We couldn’t survive another affair, Lou.”

“I have to go. You’ll have to trust me. I’ll be back late. We’ll talk some more.”

He almost ran to the car.

No, no, not the Subaru. The Lexus, stupid.

For a long time, he just sat gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands. He
was
afraid, afraid Maggie would haul the absurdity of it out into the bright light of day, as she always did. It had happened before.

And in truth, it
was
an affair. Of a different sort, but no less illicit. He had known it before, the clench well below his sternum. It wasn’t up in his brain where logic lived. It was down there, where the juices that fired a sort of frenzy flowed.

Chapter Fifteen

Somehow Lou had to get Red thinking along his wavelength. To make it short and sweet. The whole operation couldn’t consume more than forty minutes. Any longer than that and police cars would be swarming. The first shot fired by anyone would touch off the biggest fireworks display in the history of the Hudson Valley since the Revolutionary War. One thing was sure: he had only half a day to come up with a viable plan, with all the timings. It was the only chance they had.

Lou drove past the bridge on 9W into Fort Montgomery and parked the car. With his video camera in a bag on his shoulder, he walked back to the little highway bridge that spanned the gorge over Popolopen Creek. He leaned against the high steel railing and looked out toward the Hudson and the Bear Mountain Bridge.

From where he was, away from the sounds of the traffic on the bridge and far enough distant to appreciate the relative size of the dominant terrain, Bear Mountain Bridge looked like a silver Erector Set suspension, set into place between two papier-mâché mountains. Anthony’s Nose on the eastern and Bear Mountain on the western ends of the bridge loomed abruptly, dominating the span, shrinking its relative size by half.

It was clean, beautiful, in its simplicity and strength, anchored on two mountains and straddling a broad river. He recorded the scene in one slow sweeping arc, then lowered the camera and simply stared at the panorama in awe.

In his mind’s eye, he often saw himself as if he was being recorded: on a parade field, reaching to take the battle flag of his own infantry brigade; kneeling on a sled behind Pete and Oliver as it
whooshed
down a snowy hill. And these pictures fused with pictures that had never been recorded, but which lived in his mind’s eye just as vividly: a slow, graceful windup on the pitcher’s mound, and the vapor trail of the ball on its way to the plate as if on a track, spinning and glancing down off a slanted pane of glass, across the outside edge of the plate for a strike.

He made the trip to the bridge using the Palisades Parkway approach on the west side of the Hudson. Now he verified that the bridge was semi-guarded—if you wanted to call it guarded at all—by a single toll taker in a little booth on the west side. He zoomed in to record the smiling man as he reached to take bills from the driver fifty yards ahead. At night, Lou thought, the traffic would be much lighter.

Next, Lou timed the trip down around Anthony’s Nose and into Peekskill. He went on to the Tappan Zee Bridge, a much more tortuous route, especially for a semi-trailer truck.

He drove up by Camp Smith atop Anthony’s Nose, and studied the map of the military reservation. There, they would make their getaway into the woods. It would be a hell of a climb, up the face of the rock at the end of the bridge, to get into the reservation. He reconnoitered around the area east of Camp Smith to find a likely linkup point.

It was not the best place for a rendezvous. Ideally, a well-defined feature they could easily locate while stumbling through the area in the dark would be best; a place prominent enough to describe to someone like Copeland, who had never been in the area before. Lou settled on a point north of the bridge and Anthony’s Nose, on a winding, backwoods road that intersected Route 9D about three kilometers north of the bridge near St. James Chapel.

They would wait, hidden in the vicinity of Curry’s Pond for a visual linkup on foot. They weren’t going to just stand around on some road. He recorded the scene with his video camera.

Lou sketched out the main concept in his mind, reconnoitered on the ground. Now he started thinking about alternatives. Anyone who had ever had anything to do with combat operations knew you had to provide for the unexpected. There wasn’t a single operation in his memory that went off without a hitch. There was always some aspect of the plan that would prove inadequate.

The troops would have to improvise or go to the alternate plan. Having a backup plan was distinctly preferable to winging it. If he got waylaid, who was in command? Where was the standby linkup point? How about people who got hurt? As the enormity of the planning effort descended on him, Lou felt the horrible feeling of helplessness that comes from not having a fraction of the time needed to bring off a plan.

They needed to rehearse, to actually go over the plan on similar terrain, like a football team walking through the plays to make sure every man knew exactly what he was to do at all times. How could they absorb in a couple of hours what he’d learned over an entire career in the Army? Like the essentials of patrolling; or how to form up to infiltrate out of the area once the demo was blown; or the elements of avoiding detection at night. They should have lampblack on their faces and hands. They should tape all equipment to prevent noise. It was hopeless. The only chance they had was if they caught the police off guard. The whole plan rested on the authorities reacting slowly enough to allow them to get out.

Lou traced the western approach to the bridge. Trucks weren’t allowed on the Palisades Parkway. He’d have to go down Route 6, Route 293, and Mine Torne Road. Mine Torne Road twisted beside steep outcrops on one side and a plunging chasm on the other. It was a lonely two-lane with an occasional house appearing around a bend. Old bungalows they were, with pilings supporting the back porches and a dog yelping somewhere down the gorge. The gorge was a good secondary escape route. In the ravine, they were less likely to make navigational mistakes in the panic of a hot escape. It would be dark down there, and noiseless.

On the horizon ahead, as he came around a sweeping curve, Lou saw a massive, black crag that dominated the surrounding terrain. It was an ideal secondary rendezvous, an unmistakable landmark. He pulled onto a gravel road on the far side of the crag and flicked on the inside light. The map clearly showed Mine Torne Road snaking through the hills, with Popolopen Creek rushing at the bottom of the gorge. He was in the drive leading to Borrow Pit. Above him, its shadow looming over the car, was the Torne.

He slid out of the car and turned to face the mountain. Trees grew halfway up, then stopped. Its peak was solid rock—jagged, black. Standing there, suddenly, he felt chilly. He committed this image to memory, alongside the parade ground flag ceremony, the kids on a sled, and the
thunk
of a baseball in a catcher’s mitt. As he panned the camera to capture the full sweep of the crag, its iciness seeped through to his chest. The possibility of death invaded him, heavy and absolute. He knew that he needed to go far beyond what he comprehended now; far beyond what he could imagine about this mission and these people. He needed something to call on when all other options had been exhausted.

Route 17W climbed steadily out of the valley in which the Thruway curved. The hills beyond the Hudson River were smoother than the rock-strewn slopes around the bridge. They opened up into broad pastures and wood lots. He pressed the accelerator, squeezed the wheel, and held his speed to a steady eighty-five mph.

On the west side of Monticello, Lou slowed to a crawl to catch the dirt road that he knew rambled north, just a mile or more beyond the abandoned Shell station. After two minutes on the dusty rut, he saw the dirty, white clapboard farmhouse on the hill and the rickety barn looming up behind it. Four half-breed dogs yipped at the door as he swung his feet out of the car and took the two long steps needed to meet Tom Holt halfway across the barnyard. Private Thomas Holt, radioman.