A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (37 page)

“Okay, what do you want from me?” Lou asked. With those words, Kilmartin seemed to relax. A broad smile came over his face. He might’ve been fabricating the whole list on the fly, hoping that at least half of it was hitting the target. The words came out of Lou’s mouth spontaneously, and just as quickly, he was no longer a suspect but a perpetrator.

“You’re entitled to consult with a lawyer, Mr. Christopher.”

“I know that much.”

“Beyond that, we would like cooperation. We understand that at the time you were taken into custody, you appeared to be running from someone.”

“You got it right. I nearly got robbed at gunpoint. I ran.”

“What happened to your leg, Mr. Christopher?”

“I banged it up.”

“All right, we’re not moving fast enough here. Let’s lay out a scenario, just for the sake of expediency. Nobody is saying it’s true, but it might move things along. You’re the man identified as Cook. You got away from the bridge and hid out in the woods until you kidnapped Mr. Moore and had him drive you to Manhattan. Somewhere along the line, either at the bridge or at the location of the van, you sustained a gunshot wound to your leg; apparently not serious enough to immobilize you. Here in the city you were threatened and chased; and here we are. You’re in danger, possibly from others who are involved with the bridge episode. It might be possible for us to apprehend these people with your cooperation, but we need to move quickly to accomplish this.

“No offense, but we don’t have you figured as the brains in this operation. We want the brains. You work with us on this and there’s a fair chance you’ll get some consideration later on.”

“Consideration might not do me any good later on,“ Lou said.

“We’re thinking about a lot of possibilities. This smells something like the work of a Panamanian nationalist organization we’re following that’s pissed off about us invading their country and hauling Manuel Noriega off to jail. We’re hypothesizing that you got involved through some kind of money scheme. Never mind. We don’t have a lot of time to go through the whole thing. We have to move, now.”

“A Panamanian organization?”

“With Bliss crowing about ousting the corrupt, drug-dealing Noriega, this bunch is seething. They’d do anything to ruin his campaign. But it’s too early in the investigation to know anything concrete about them. We’re just tracking leads at this point.”

“Look, let’s say they’re just a couple of punks.”

“Do these punks have names?”

“One is Stanfield, the other Copeland,” Lou said.

“Did they chase you in Grand Central?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s my plan. They somehow cornered you. They’re now worrying about how much you’re going to spill to the cops. They’re deciding whether they want to run for cover or wait to see if you’re released from the precinct. If you’re right back out on the street, they’ll figure you didn’t say anything and we didn’t connect you with the bridge.”

“They’re smart. We have to move fast on this. The longer you’re in custody, the less chance we have to set some kind of trap. Whoever they are, they’re surely watching to see what the police are going to do. We’re getting to the point where they’re going to start smelling a setup, and they won’t come anywhere near you.”

“They can do wiretaps,” Lou said.

“How do you know that?”

“I know.”

“If they disappear now, you’re left holding the bag, Mr. Christopher. If we lose them, we still have you. You are important to them. Apparently, important dead. But they’re also curious to know exactly how much the cops know and how much you told them. You’ve been in custody for two hours now. At this point, they’re still dying to get their hands on you.”

“And you want me to go back out on the street.” Lou shaded his eyes from the overhead light and squeezed inward on his temples to ease the pounding in his head.

“We’ll be nearby all the time. We’ll wait until we feel the time is right before we grab them.”

“Who says they’re not going to just hit me as I walk down the street?”

“It’s unlikely. They want to know what we know.”

“I know it’s ridiculous, but I thought they might’ve been able to tap my telephone at home. They’re just a couple of punks, but they seem to be all over the place at once.”

“It only takes a little money to make a lot of things happen. Slip somebody a couple of hundred dollars and they’d have a tap on a phone in a minute.”

“I don’t know if I really believe that,” Lou said. “But anyway, I had nothing to lose trying the phone tap idea.”

“Meaning what?”

“It’s completely ridiculous. How could I be thinking that I could...?”

“We don’t have all day.”

“I thought if I could set it up so that I could get them to come to a specific place at a specific time...”

The story came in a torrent of words—all of it. Everything that had happened grew more and more embarrassing as he spoke. No complicated plans, no tenuous motivations, no originality—just a flood of banalities. “One more thing,” Lou said. “I just think if they can tap a phone, they could do all kinds of things to my wife.”

“We’ll have the house covered twenty-four hours a day.”

“I hope I can believe you… but I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“Realistically, no, you don’t.”

The NYPD desk sergeant poured Lou’s belongings out onto the interrogation table. Lou scooped up change, his wallet, and the tape recorder and stuffed them into pockets. Another FBI man crouched before him, strapping an ankle holster onto his right leg.

“It’s a Lorcin L-25 automatic straight out of mail order, if anyone asks. Fourteen and a half ounces with a full .25 caliber, seven-round magazine. Three hundred and forty nine dollars. You didn’t ask for it, but you never know,” Kilmartin said.

Kilmartin drove Lou out from in back of the station in a plain green Plymouth. He cut east on 50th Street and headed for East River Drive. It was already getting dark.

“We’ll be standing off a good hundred yards. They’ll never see us,” he said, looking over.

Chapter Forty

“I’ll just walk up to their car like I’m expecting to pick up the suit. God, nobody could be that dumb, could they?” Lou asked.

“Dumb? Guess what: they figure
you
dumb-ass dumb.”

The masts of the sailing ships at the
South Street Seaport Museum
loomed on the left below the highway. Lou could see the Coast Guard ferry straight ahead. Kilmartin pulled over to the curb underneath the Staten Island Ferry building ramp. The smell of pizza hit Lou’s face as he opened the door.

“Just act natural,” Kilmartin said.

“Right,” Lou said.

He walked in front of the Port Authority building, out beside the concession stand by the Statue of Liberty boats, and along the paving stones at the tip of Battery Park. The water was black and choppy; hundreds of bits of plastic and paper lapped at the pilings.

Straight ahead about a hundred yards was the city fire boathouse with a red and white craft rocking at its berth. Across the way was a broken smear of neon from Jersey City. Up high in the air to the right stood the World Trade Towers. He walked slowly. By the time he got to the boat, it would be seven o’clock on the nose.

The Clinton Monument hulked in the darkness to his right, fifty yards from the boathouse. Lou stepped over the thick, wrought-iron chain fence surrounding it, hesitated, and then crunched slowly through the gravel to the building, hugging the sandstone wall. He felt like climbing into one of the gun emplacements, but instead inched his way around to get a good view of the parking lot beside the boathouse. He knew no one could see him in the shadows.

Far down to the right, he saw a car turn off State Street and cut across the silhouette of the tollbooth at the parking lot entrance. He stepped out from the shadow and walked forward through the park benches overlooking the brooding boathouse. The car was large and dark, probably the limo. Maggie had done a good job of instructing the driver. Lou maintained his slow pace, glancing to either side in the darkness, trying not to move his head.

He was caught in the headlights of another car parked diagonally in the lot. He put out his hand and stumbled.

“Stop right there, Christopher.” It was Stanfield. He’d know that voice anywhere. It was coming from the side, out of the shadows of the cars in the lot. “Walk up nice and easy and slide in the back seat.”

Stanfield came up behind him as he reached the door. Then he was in the back seat beside him, reaching across to lock the door before Lou had a chance to even think about jumping out the other side. Stanfield found the Lorcin immediately and stopped searching.

He couldn’t see her face in the mirror, but he recognized the long hair that trailed down over the collar of her tan raincoat; the unique way she carried her head. From the most imperceptible movement of her hair, he could tell she was trying to steal a glance in the rear view mirror from her position in the driver’s seat.

“You live a charmed life,” Lou said wearily.

“Hello Lou. How are you feeling?” Sydney asked.

“I should ask you that. You must’ve been wearing a bulletproof vest out there.”

“I was just incredibly lucky again.”

“I guess they just suck as marksmen.”

“I heard you got hit. In the leg or something.”

“It went right through.”

“You did some dumb things, Christopher,” Stanfield now.

“Not in your class, right?” Lou said.

“You’d be home free except for a couple of things.”

“The jacket.”

“You left it right on the bridge.”

“I was glad to be alive at that point.”

“You must have left eight hundred sets of prints all over the trucks.”

“Trucks that are cinders now. And if they don’t have me, prints are useless,” Lou said.

“They had you.”

“You had a chance to scram, Lou. You could’ve skipped to Alaska or someplace,” Sydney said, looking through the mirror but not making eye contact.

“So you’ve been with them from the start. I should’ve figured that.”

“I’m a toad on a leash, just like you, commander. Something for them to play with.”

“Sure.”

Stanfield: “Then you went and paid a little visit to 14 Wall Street. That was really sweet. A bolt of genius. I don’t think you could’ve fucked up more if you tried. I used to think you had some brains.”

Where was Kilmartin?

If cops didn’t close in soon, Lou and the others would be out and away from the tip of Manhattan, ten times harder to trap. It was nearly seven thirty as the car blended into the traffic cruising up Harlem River Drive. The lights of the city were all around him. He stared out the window at the twisting arches of the Triborough Bridge cloverleaf. He’d never be able to find his way through this forest of concrete ribbons, but Sydney knew exactly where to go. She swung west and headed for the George Washington Bridge.

“It was cute, the call you made to your wife. I guess you never heard of a tap, did you, bright boy? How many places in the city do you think come complete with a loud-speaker system that announces trains?”

“My limo is going to be waiting for quite a while.”

“Oh, we already took care of that.”

“What happens now?”

“We’re going to meet up with Copeland. That’s all you need to know.”

Lou was trying to be calm about this, but it wasn’t working. They’d gone this far, offing Buck, and Red back on the bridge. They wouldn’t hesitate with him. All of the weariness that had built up in the safety of the precinct was gone, replaced with a renewed alertness, an almost animal-like keenness to everything that was going on around him. All it would take was one shot from a pistol in the middle of all the traffic. It would be over, Kilmartin’s theory or not. No FBI agent could do anything to help him.
Just act natural.