A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (44 page)

“I’ve answered those questions. We planted a transmitter on their car.”

“On the Audi. It’s a cinder now,” Lou said.

“On both of their cars. We have a continuous signal. It brings us right in on the transmitter. That why we’re here. As a general principle, we’re not going to grab the low-level operatives the first chance we get, losing the opportunity to learn more from just following them to the big cheese. Right now, in this case, we don’t have him.”

Lou’s response made it clear he still didn’t trust Kilmartin. “The purpose that jumps out at you for the bridge escapade is too simplistic to be plausible. It’s a simple enough motivation to understand: payback for all our mischief on the canal all those years. Send a one-term president off to early retirement. Or was it the Patricia Buck motivation, another one easy to understand, in which the president charges in like the Seventh Cavalry to steal the election?”

“The case is still open. I want you to work with us on it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The public has already relegated the bridge thing to the
Stranger Than Fiction
history of bizarre presidential election maneuvers. You have never been publicly identified in connection with it. You can go to work tomorrow as usual in Paramus and nobody would bat an eyelash.
Almost
nobody would. Patricia Buck died in a robbery attempt as far as anyone knows. No one but us connects her to this. We want to use that.”

“How do you know about Buck?” Lou asked.

“She owned the Fort Lee apartment. She worked for Pierson Browne. She was a consultant to the Bliss election campaign. She got bumped off. The dots connect. How, you ask?

“We don’t know who the big cheese is, but it’s probably somebody who was close to Patricia Buck; somebody with access to your military records, all of them, all the little notes and correspondence, not just the public records. Somebody who conveyed this information to Nidio here, and Javier out there on the ground. By the way, Javier wasn’t a total asshole. He served three honorable years at Fort Leonard Wood.

“Now this somebody is waiting, too. Waiting to see what comes out of this messy business right here. Who has survived? Are all links to him neatly clipped off?

“Unfortunately, our avenues to identify this person are now mostly closed—mostly, but not totally. There’s you. So we dangle you in plain sight. Back in your glass office in Paramus, and your Westover account, unconnected with this bridge farce.”

“Nobody connects me to all this? You’ve obviously been poking around within Pierson Browne. You must have talked to Swisher and Westover. It’s got to be spread all over the office, if not the whole street by now.”

“We have ways of making highly discreet and innocuous inquiries having to do with trading activity that remain completely off the radar screens. We saw the trades coming out of the branch; we traced the account to Westover. Nobody knows we were looking at this stuff.”

“How did you know about my glass office?”

“Anybody looking like a potential client can walk in to Pierson Browne and ask for you. Correct?”

“You knew they were in the apartment. Why didn’t you tap their phone to see who they called?” Lou asked.

“They only used public telephones, a different one for each call. Are you ever going to stop suspecting me, Lou? All right, I did leave you in a highly precarious position back at Battery Park. They could’ve killed you right there, or in the car. I’m sorry, but that’s the business I’m in. I have to take what is given to me and keep my eye on the ball. Your safety was secondary if I wanted to remain unknown to them and keep holding on to a connection to the big cheese. You got yourself involved in this very dirty business, Lou. This is a chaotic, law-of-the-jungle world I live in. Your experience is with the military—a sometimes cruel and deadly occupation, too—but believe me, it pales in comparison.

“Now, hopefully, we can keep Margaret and your family out of it, although even that isn’t for sure. It may be a week, a year… Who knows? When all of this has cooled down and everyone else has forgotten, he will not have forgotten. He’ll make a move. Why? Because he knows who you are. He knows that Bear Mountain Bridge on election night was not a prank. It was not a Keystone Kops comedy sketch. It was someone: maybe in the government, maybe in the National Security apparatus, maybe somewhere in some embassy. We don’t know where. Somebody probably highly placed, very guarded, and secretive. Somebody manipulating the election process. It was something. It sounds wild, I know— something, okay? Something at its core, like a coup. And, you’re the smoking gun.

“I’m putting you out there in jeopardy again, yes. But, we’re sealing off all the potential leaks. I’ve clamped a lid on the NYPD: confiscated the police report of your arrest, shredded the report on the man Titus Moore from the trailer park, instructed Strachan and the rest of the force at the 53rd Precinct that there would be a world of hurt descending on them if they as much as thought about talking to reporters about this case again. We’re open to any other potential sources of information as we find out about them. You have a choice. Cooperate, or don’t cooperate and face the consequences. Now, can you identify any other potential links to damaging information?”

“A couple.” Lou said. “There’s a kid in a Mobil station in Fort Lee who rented me the van, and another kid working in administration at Ramapo College. There’s a groundskeeper at Ramapo I talked to. There’s a bunch of people who witnessed a hit and run on me down on Wall Street. There’s a clerk at Ames in Ramsey, and a clerk at Hertz who rented me a car.”

Lou fell silent as he searched his memory, consciously avoiding any exposure to Tom Holt and Dory.

“There’s the limo driver,” Maggie said. “And the MPs who stopped me outside of Fort Montgomery.”

“Is that it?” Kilmartin asked, glancing at Rieglehaupt who was furiously taking notes.

“That’s it,” Lou said.

“I’ll check with you by the end of the day to see if you remembered any more. Now, you’re free to go,” Kilmartin said.

Lou and Mag walked together to the door, straight to the Subaru. Arm in arm, marching past a SWAT team half a dozen strong in combat gear; past Stanfield’s body, still sprawled grotesquely against the wheel of his car; past the cop with the bullhorn. Lou opened the Subaru’s passenger-side door and Mag slid in.

He turned to face the men who followed them at a distance, Kilmartin still whispering into the phone. Out of the corner of his eye, Lou saw the blue and white patrol car move out of its position along the exit road. He stepped forward.

“Call your man down out of the rocks,” he said to the SWAT team leader. The man looked to Kilmartin, who hesitated and then nodded.

From the rocky cleft above the car, a man in black stood and slowly worked his way through the trees and boulders. He stopped ten feet from Lou, his feet spread defiantly, the butt of his sniper rifle against his hip and balanced in the crook of his elbow.

Lou walked slowly toward the man, straightening his back with every step, raising his chin higher. The others crowded in.

“Bring this man to attention,” Lou said. The team leader glanced at Kilmartin.

“Sullivan. Atten-
hut
!”

Sullivan lowered his rifle to the ground, pulled his feet together, and arched his back. He glanced over Lou’s shoulder at the team leader behind him. Then Sullivan grabbed the bill of his cap, set it straight over his forehead, spat a wad of gum onto the ground, and stared straight ahead.

Lou stepped directly in front of Sullivan, less than a foot away. He pulled his own shoulders back, gazed directly into the man’s eyes, and then shifted his gaze to inspect his hat, his chest, his rifle, and his boots. The team leader came to stand beside him.

“You gave your position away,” Lou growled. “I could see you a mile away.” He slowly reached and balanced on his index finger the small, gold earring that hung from Sullivan’s left lobe. Lou squeezed it with his thumb and ripped it down sharply through soft flesh, dangling the bloody orb at the man’s face to wing a glint of sun into his eyes. Then he popped it into his mouth and swallowed.

* * *

Lou at the wheel, Maggie beside him, pulled past the blue and white patrol car; past an unmarked ambulance-type vehicle; and over the knoll at the foot of Bear Swamp Lake. In the rearview mirror, Lou saw Kilmartin standing in the middle of the road, the phone still held to his lips.

Lou and Maggie rolled slowly along the curves and dips in the roadway; past the stream that crashed between boulders and over the stony bed; past a black limousine at the Ramapo Bridge and the Camp Yaw Paw sign.

On the highway, the Subaru flashed out of the shadows and into the sunlight, and rolled on beside the river.

* * *

NEW YORK—In the wake of one of the most startling political campaigns of all time, in which the underdog, incumbent president, Jordan Bliss, lost his office, Mr. Bliss announced from his “anti-crime headquarters” in the White House that two Panamanian men, apparently the last members of the bizarre fire bomb plot at Bear Mountain Bridge on the eve of the election, were killed early this morning in a dramatic showdown in a secluded, lakeside cabin near Mahwah, New Jersey.

About the Author

Larry Crane is a West Point graduate who began a seven year Airborne Ranger Infantry career in the mud in Germany, commanded Basic Trainees at Fort Knox, and served a tour in Vietnam patrolling the Central Highlands as an ARVN Ranger battalion advisor. He made the transition to civilian life as a stock broker with Dean Witter & Company, and later commuted to New York for eighteen years at Manufacturers Hanover where he managed a department of the bank involved in providing information and investment evaluation services to large corporate pension funds. He earned an MBA in computer applications and information systems at NYU. He has written non-fiction articles for outdoors magazines, numerous plays, and some short fiction. He is currently at work on a sequel to “A Bridge to Treachery.” He has two grown up children, and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife, Jan.