The Driver (33 page)

“Please, Seth, never in the United States.”

“Good, but the investigator is now well aware of your reputation from Gumball, and he is
most
curious as to what you were doing in
that
car in
his
city, fully equipped with everything you talk about on your website. They know Gumball isn't in America this year,
and
that there aren't any other events going on right now,
and
that your car isn't wearing any stickers anyway. So they're quite curious about that phone call from the airport.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them the truth…that you were driving cross-country, that you're an animated speaker, and that you were probably trying to impress some girl with your amazing driving adventures.”

“That
is
a plausible explanation, and ninety-nine percent true. How did they take it?”

“They want to know what happened in Pennsylvania. He's sending an investigatory request to the Pennsylvania State Police, asking whether a blue BMW was reported involved in any accidents or crimes in the last three days. If they don't check your credit cards and the toll records, we can always suggest that no car could possibly have traveled from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma in such a short span of time. Don't even tell me how long it took you. I might have to fire you as a client. Just tell me…did you have any runins in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes. A scanner report. Someone called in a blue BMW at a high rate of speed, heading west…without taillights.”

“And that was you.”

“Yes, it was.”

“That
might
be enough to get a warrant to open the car. Alex, think. Is there anything inside that would suggest what you were doing?”

“I…I…yes.”

“Precisely what?”

Lacking any luggage and assuming we were free and clear, I'd left behind…everything. The Steiners and Kenyon gyrostabilizer would appear odd, but innocent. The Raytheon Thermal Imaging System was an unknown. The rest read like KITT's technical specs from
Knight Rider,
crossed with Jackie Chan's Subaru from the original
Cannonball Run,
only far worse. Both scanners—set to the Oklahoma State Police frequency bank—and the instructions given me by the radio expert I'd hired to program them, including his name and number. Both Garmins, one displaying our route, the other our elapsed time and distance. If connected to a PC running Garmin's (conveniently expensive) MapSource application, our precise tracks—including time, speed, bearing, latitude and longitude—could be downloaded and viewed. The Blinder laser jammers.
Driveplan 1 Alpha (Assault Final),
and a card from Maggie wishing us luck.

Seth, audibly scribbling notes, took a deep, long breath. “Alex, does the driveplan actually
say
‘Assault Final' on it?”

“No.”

“It's still bad, but not as bad. What does Maggie's card say?”

“I can't remember verbatim, but something to the effect of ‘Don't kill anyone,' ‘Break the record!,' ‘See you in L.A.!,' and ‘Love, Maggie.'”

“That, too, is going to be a problem.”

“What if I fly back to Oklahoma City
right
now, walk in there, and remove all that stuff? Or steal my own car and hide it somewhere else?”

“Alex,
do not,
under any circumstances, set foot in the state of Oklahoma.”

“The BMW guys love Gumball. Can I just ask them to pull those items and ship them to me?”

“That might have worked before the police showed up, but now they've put a hold on your car. No one can touch it, not even open it. If you're charged, it would be considered tampering with evidence.”

“So there's nothing I can do?”

“Alex, you're a schmuck for putting either of us in this situation, but here's the good news. What do they have on you? You have a spotless record. You're a successful young businessman. You pay your taxes on time. You're involved in your local community. You volunteer for charitable works. Maggie loves you. Besides having a fetish for dressing like a cop once a year while on vacation, you're a model citizen. So here's the deal. They're going to hold your car for three days. If nothing comes back from Pennsylvania within that time, BMW will ship your car back to New York.”

“That's it? I'm free?”

“That's it. Wherever you are, just stay there. And do us both a favor. Don't drive. Anywhere. Until further notice. Take a cab. Since I'm a nice guy, give me the receipts and I'll take it off your bill.”

“And if they open that car, what can they charge me with?”

“That's a tough one. Maybe nothing. Maybe speeding, reckless endangerment, road racing…there's no precedent for what they could do. You did say you're the first, or at least you think you're the first, to try this in what? Twenty-five years?”

“Something like that. Seth, I should have asked you this before I left, but I was afraid you'd ask why, and then you'd have refused…and maybe even turned me in.”

“I'm sure I would have. What is it?”

“I want a complete list of all the applicable criminal statutes in every state I passed through, on this and the recon run. Statues of limitations, tolling laws, everything.”

“We've already started. Just in case. It'll be ready by the time you get back. But, Alex, I want you to think about something. I never knew your father, but it seems from everything I've heard that he was quite a man. Once this is over, I want you to ask yourself…is this what he would have wanted?”

Seth couldn't have known the terrifying depth of his question, nor could I have answered it just then, or for the three days I intended to hide—speechless, shell-shocked, and terrified—with Maggie in my hotel room in L.A. I had always been ready to pay the price for my actions. To do so victorious was noble, but to do so in defeat made the risks taken and sacrifices made appear those of a madman, or an idiot.

I was going again. But my clock couldn't start until this one stopped. In motion or at rest, plaguing me at all turns, was time.

Time was the Devil.

But on Thursday, April 6, the Devil's clock ran out.

I reset mine.

The M5 returned to AI yet again for refitting and upgrades—among them a second Vertex radio, and
two
more Garmins and roof-mounted antennas.

The target date was Saturday, October 7, 2006. Columbus Day weekend. Twenty-six weeks and two days away.

I became blind to everything beyond what was necessary to reach the summit. Nothing and no one was spared. Although she would say the opposite, Maggie left me, and understandably so. She had suffered for my arrogance, and continued to suffer as I committed every waking hour—often nightly, until 3
A.M
.—to research that made the prior drives look childish. She asked whether I was capable of balancing my task with a life that included her or anyone else. She deserved to be happy. I deserved to be alone, and had to be until someone—aware of the potential, terrible cost to both of us—could understand and forgive me for what I intended to do. I was incapable of lying about who I'd become, and who I yearned to be by the second week of October. She gave me an ultimatum. A wiser, more grateful man would have tossed everything else aside and said yes.

I said no.

Ross had called. He needed a copilot for Gumball. If Nine didn't change his mind soon, that October so would I. Briefing, orientation, and practice would take his replacement months. Ross was first on the list.

The 2006 Gumball would have three legs—London to Belgrade, Phuket to Bangkok, and Salt Lake City to Los Angeles—the latter the perfect method of auditioning the world's most veteran Gumballer for the task at hand. I sent Ross, with whom I hadn't spoken in ten months, an NDA, which he signed and returned without question. Our relationship existed in a peculiar netherworld in which there was only one reason to send such a document. On Sunday, April 30, precisely four weeks after the Oklahoma breakdown, Ross—hereby designated Team Polizei's new Master Pilot—and I left London in his temporary contribution to Team Polizei's 2006 garage, a jet-black
Commonwealth of the Bahamas Nassau Tax Evasion Intercept
liveried Bentley GT.

“Now, Mr. Roy, tell me more about this little drive you have planned.”

 

Ross and I—with a combined eight Gumballs, three Bullruns, and one and a half cross-country runs between us—ripped across France and Belgium so rapidly that fans watching the ALK.com tracks thought we'd placed our CoPilot transponder on a train, or possibly a plane. The fearsome Morley—“I'll
get
you!” he'd threatened the night before the start. “You'll see!”—somehow caught up despite crossing the Channel one train behind us, Ross having wisely purchased a VIP Eurotunnel ticket without which even we'd have had no chance against him. Luckily, the police stopped both of us in tandem two miles shy of the first checkpoint at Belgium's Château Beloeil, and we—an overstuffed manila envelope of euros at the ready—had the exact change to pay our fine and were released while Morley's SLR was seized for improper documentation—a shockingly inconvenient oversight for a veteran of his stature.

This, and our commanding lead over the third-and lower-placed cars—blindly cruising into an ambush whose manpower grew by the minute—gave us sufficient time to visit the château's stunning orchid gardens before heading toward Vienna. Five hundred and seventy-four dark, silent miles later, punctuated only by the occasional flash of halogen bulbs overhead—each triggered by sensors embedded in the Autobahn asphalt, and irrelevant thanks to our Euro-spec anticamera plate covers—we arrived to a heroes' welcome at the Austrian border control. We signed autographs and met the local police chief before another first-place finish in Vienna, where we sipped tea in Kursalon Park while awaiting Muss and Seamus for the final leg to Budapest. They, having remembered our prior year's magnanimity, led us all the way into the city before pulling aside to gift us first place. Ant and Pete might have beaten us, had they not broken down one block short of the flag.

I wasn't upset upon discovering that our car had been sabotaged overnight. I was fascinated. Having determined that the saboteur's placement of a rotting trout in the Bentley's air dam had loosened several screws vital to its stability at high speed, Ross immediately fashioned new locking brackets out of three wire hangers and a handful of cable ties. I didn't care about having to forfeit that day's leg through Serbia to Belgrade. We already had a commanding lead in the overall stage rankings. All I could think about was what might have happened had Ross been in the M5, stopped in Oklahoma just one month earlier.

SUNDAY, MAY
7, 2006
HARD ROCK CAFE HOTEL AND CASINO
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
FINAL MORNING OF GUMBALL

“Sabotage again?” said Ross, putting a good face on his worsening flu as he knelt beside me behind the GT. “Who was it this time, Mr. Roy?”

I snipped off the last long strip of cellophane that had only five minutes earlier wrapped the entire car. “Well, since the key to sabotage is for the maximum possible inconvenience to be wrought upon the target by a proportionally lesser act, I'd say this was the work of—”

“A lesser intellect?”

“Yes, I'd attribute this, the London salmon, the London license plate theft, the Budapest trout, the Salt Lake stink bomb, and the Budapest dog shit on the door handles…all of it to Ed Leigh.” Leigh, perennial host of the Gumball TV show, had been tasked with annoying us—for the viewers' entertainment, theoretically—which, given our resilience and his failure to impede our progress, had led to increasingly juvenile and dangerous pranks.

“Mr. Ross, we need to make a strong showing.”

“A
statement
.”

“We need to be first, and not by a little bit. It can't be close.”

“Agreed.”

“I'm talking about a huge margin, Master Pilot Ross.”

“But of course, Mr. Roy.”

“
No
mercy.”

One critical problem remained. I'd failed to repair or replace the external Garmin antennas essential to navigating the 381 miles of the final stage through Death Valley to the finish line in Beverly Hills. The Bentley's insulated glass blocked the built-in antennas' reception, and the factory system—like the ALK CoPilot—wasn't designed to replot routes or render and update maps at speeds in excess of 100 mph.

We needed help.

ROUTE
190
WEST
DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK
235
MILES FROM RODEO DRIVE FINISH LINE

“It means they're tracking us!” I yelled over the 120 mph wind roaring in through Ross's open window. “Some of them! Maybe
all
of them!”

“How do you mean?” he yelled back.

“
Look
at the CoPilot! It's suggesting taking
this
to U.S. 395, then following
that
all the way to L.A. Just keep holding the Garmin out the window until it gets the plot—”

“How much longer do you suppose? It's getting rather sandy in here—ah! There it is!” He raised his window before placing the sandblasted Garmin back in its dash-top mount. “I hope this was worth it. I also hope your unit wasn't destroyed.”

I wiped the display with my thumb. “Yes! You see? The Gumball-recommended CoPilot route is 250 miles, but my gut tells me that one of these tiny roads off to our left can shave at least 20 or 30 off that.”

“If we don't get lost or run out of gas.”

“Better yet, Mr. Ross, if one or more of our pursuers really is tracking us, I mean calling their girlfriends back home to check the ALK site to find out where
we're
going, that is
precisely
what I hope will happen, but not to us!”

“Mr. Roy…you truly are a bad man.”

“That's not all. Our little Porsche friends are somewhere in that row of red cars following us. I have something very special in mind.” I grabbed the CB handset to address the car directly behind us, a black Ford GT with white stripes, the only Gumball car ever equipped as well as the Polizei M5, a car copiloted by one Dr. Gruene (aka Eric Ward), a first-timer whose psychotic professionalism matched my own, and the driver, a former enemy whom we alone—despite his history—had chosen not to underestimate. Gumball had forbidden him from participating as aggressively as in the past, but nothing prevented him from convoying in relative and cooperative safety with Team Polizei, even if we were in the lead.

“Dr. Greune, this is the Polizei, do you copy?”

“Gruene's busy on the Garmin, Polizei, this is Jerry, over.”

“Our Garmins are out. Can you take the lead and plot a shortcut off one of these side roads?”

“Copy that, Polizei…Dr. Gruene projects…next left in two miles…Wildrose Road. Will save at least 25 miles. Aren't you worried about all these guys following us?”

“Let's make the turn. I've got an idea. Stand by.”

We made the turn. A line of red and black dots followed in the mirror.

“What next, Mr. Roy?”

“We turn off the CoPilot so no one can track us or follow us. This route is definitely
not
in their CoPilots.”

“Mr. Roy, you really are far worse than I thought.”

“Oh, there's more. We refueled in Las Vegas and our fuel is
already
low, which means every car following us that didn't fill up is even lower. And if any of them can hear their radar detectors, when they light up they're gonna brake hard.
And
we can assume that if they see us accelerating, they're going to think it's safe, and punch it to catch up, and if
that
happens a couple of times, they're going to run out of gas on
this
road, and—”

“Mr. Roy”—Ross smiled, taking the CB from my hand—“you drive. Please allow me…Hello? This is Mr. Ross from Team Polizei, do you copy?”

“Ten-four, Mr. Ross, this is Jerry.”

“Why, hello there. Mr. Roy has two requests…first is that you turn off your ALK unit, over.”

“That's a Ten-four.”

“Mr. Roy would also like permission to pass. I do believe you know why.”

“Dr. Gruene is already laughing, over.”

“Thank you so very much. Now, if you would be so kind…Torquenstein, please deploy the radar drone.”

 

Torquenstein's Ford GT was equipped with the one item I'd long considered unethical, yet now essential given our foes' lack of spirit—a rearward-facing police radar gun. As expected, multiple blasts emitted minutes apart elicited enormous clouds of sand and dust to our rear, our pursuers responding as I predicted.

I hoped no one we liked was back there. I rationalized this as a civic duty ensuring everyone—except us and our coconspirators, of course—a slower, safer drive. By the third blast, our pursuers were but red and black dots in the mirror. Through his tears Ross handed me a second handkerchief. I made a mental note to procure—if I ever rallied again—a boxful. Laughing blindness was extraordinarily dangerous at any speed, but more so at 140 mph.

 

“I've been thinking,” said Ross as I turned onto Wilshire Boulevard, 250 miles and two and a half hours later. “Torquenstein and Gruene…”

“I know exactly what you're thinking. It's the right thing to do.”

“How far are we from Rodeo Drive?”

“With lights and sirens, less than five minutes.”

With legitimate first-place finishes into four out of nine checkpoints so far, we already had an insurmountable lead. There was only one thing left to do for our friends in the black Ford GT in our mirror.

“Torquenstein, this is Mr. Ross, do you copy?”

“Ten-four, this is Torquenstein.”

“Mr. Roy and I propose we pull into the finish line side by side.”

“Copy that, Polizei. FYI, people tracking us are saying we've been fighting it out all afternoon.”

“Now, that is a good one.”

Ross and I were minutes away from our first unequivocal Gumball victory—for time—verified and validated by our on-board cameras, fans, witnesses, and the ALK CoPilot tracks.

But the celebration wasn't ours alone.

“Mr. Ross, please tell them drinks are on me until midnight.”

We made the final turn. The LAPD moved the barriers and waved us through. Rodeo Drive was devoid of cars except for those that had skipped the Death Valley checkpoint. They beckoned us forward, toward the end of the street, where Grimaldi had held them open—just for us.

Of the thousand-odd people watching as we shook hands with Team Torquenstein, there was but one I noticed as she approached from across the street—a slim young woman with short platinum hair, dressed all in white, pulling a wheeled suitcase. She'd come to surprise me. We both smiled, and for a moment I saw another, happier life in which the only wheeled transportation I used was a bicycle. It might not have been too late, but then Maggie saw beside me the Englishman she'd heard so much about, and I saw in her eyes recognition of terrible plans still in motion.

 

“The bunnies are waiting for you,” said the Gumball TV show's producer. “Michael, Alex…what are you doing? We've got to get a shot of the winners with the bunnies!”

“Just
one
moment,” said Ross, the two of us standing at the edge of the Playboy Mansion's outdoor pool, just a few feet away from a pair of rouge-cheeked, fuchsia-clad, round-bottomed, fishnet-legged, high-heeled, bunny-eared cougars seated upon a large rock, their mottled skin aglow under the TV lights. Dozens of Gumballers lurked around them in a tightening semicircle, pondering when and how best to proceed. “Alex and I need just one moment of privacy.”

“Good thinking,” I said semisarcastically, “a thousand people crowded around us, and not one of them will pay attention to us as long as those bunnies are sitting there.”

“An incredible run, Alex, the most exhausting Gumball yet. We should be proud of ourselves. Really, first has a quality all its own.”