Strategic Moves (14 page)

The others filed in and took their seats.

“Where’s Estancia?” Todd asked.

They all looked around and realized their prisoner was not in the cockpit.

“He must be in the john,” Mike said.

Then a roar began to fill the cockpit, growing louder, and the aircraft seemed to be striking turbulence. Papers in the cockpit were flying around.

“The rear platform is lowering!” the pilot yelled over the noise, and Stone couldn’t hear what he said next over the roar of air.

Everybody got out of the seats, in spite of the turbulence, and moved into the cargo bay, looking for Estancia. Todd looked in the trailer and came back. “He’s not in the john.”

“Good God!” Holly yelled, pointing.

Stone stepped to the other side of the cargo bay and saw the interior lights of the Mercedes on and Estancia at the wheel. He ran toward the car, followed by the others.

Before any of them could reach the car, it reversed, sped down the ramp, and disappeared into the dark night.

Everybody was stunned into silence. Mike recovered first. He walked aft in the airplane, found the switchbox, and closed the rear ramp.

Relative silence returned to the interior of the airplane.

“He committed suicide?” Todd asked.

“No,” Stone said. “He was wearing a parachute.”

Fred Holland, a successful cosmetic surgeon, lay sound asleep in his Rye, New York, home when he was shocked awake by something like an explosion. He lay there for a couple of minutes, afraid to get out of bed, wondering if another explosion was on the way.

Finally, mustering his courage, he went to the bedroom window, which overlooked the gardens leading down to Long Island Sound, and peered through a small opening. It was dark outside, but the security lighting was on for some reason. It must have been a clap of thunder, he thought, since the walk around the swimming pool was wet with rain. He closed the curtains and went back to bed.

A couple of miles west of where Dr. Holland was trying to go back to sleep, Pablo Estancia looked down at the rapidly approaching ground for a place to land. It was his thirty-first parachute jump, a hobby of his youth.

Ahead and slightly to his left he saw a school, the grounds lit with streetlights. Estancia pulled on the left side of the harness to correct course and aimed for the darkened soccer field.

He touched down, buckled his knees and rolled as he had been taught, then he was on his feet, gathering in the billowing chute. He could not believe his luck. He carried the chute to the sidelines of the field, then walked past the bleachers and found a large oil drum, used as a wastebasket. He set down the chute and took some old programs out of the drum, then stuffed the chute into it and put the trash back on top. Then he started walking.

He had seen some railway tracks as he floated down, and he headed that way. When he found them he thought about it, then started walking south along the tracks. After half a mile or so he could see a train station ahead of him, and he made for that.

A sign on the station proclaimed the stop to be Rye, New York. Estancia hoisted himself onto the deserted platform and looked around. A schedule on the wall told him the first train of the morning would be arriving at five-ten. He checked his pockets for money but found only euros. He went into the station men’s room and urinated, then pulled out his shirttail and took out some dollars, replacing them with the euros from his pocket. He also removed an American passport. He put everything in his pockets, then tucked in his shirttail and buckled his belt.

He went back to the platform and sat on a bench, then he used his cell phone to call his home in Spain. His wife answered.

“Hello?”

“Listen carefully,” he said. “Plan B.” He waited while she thought about that.

“I understand,” she said.

“All is well,” Estancia said, then hung up.

Plan B meant that she was to immediately pack up the children, most of their clothes, put them and all the staff into four vans, drive to Gstaad, Switzerland, and occupy their house there.

A man walked onto the platform pushing a hand trolley loaded with a high stack of newspapers and began filling a row of coin-operated newspaper dispensers. Estancia didn’t have any change, but he negotiated the purchase of a
New York Times
for twenty dollars, the smallest bill he had, then he settled himself on a bench and waited for the train.

The C-17 settled onto the runway at Stewart International, braked, and taxied to the lighted ramp in front of the airplane’s hangar. The copilot went aft and lowered the rear ramp, then started releasing the cables holding the pallets in place. Two forklifts rolled up the ramp and began removing the pallets to waiting trucks.

Mike Freeman stood behind the trailer, looking at the sides of the airplane. “I count eight bullet holes,” he said to Todd. “You’d better get your maintenance people on that right away. They’ll either have to be patched or the panels replaced.”

Todd produced his cell phone. “I’ve got to call Lance Cabot,” he said.

Holly put a hand on his arm. “I think you’d better let me do that,” she said. Leaving Todd to speak to the maintenance crew, Holly, Stone, and Mike walked into the offices of Airship Transport and sat down in the lounge. Holly dialed a number on her cell phone.

Stone sat next to her, and he could hear both sides of the conversation.

“Cabot,” a voice said loudly.

“It’s Holly. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Where are you?”

“Back at Stewart.”

“I got your text message,” Lance said. “Congratulations on a successful extraction.”

“The extraction went perfectly,” she said. “Todd did an outstanding job of planning it.”

“Then why do you sound so down?” he asked.

“As we were approaching the coast we lost Estancia.”

“You
lost
him? How the hell did you do that?”

“He lowered the rear ramp of the airplane, then got into the Mercedes that delivered him, started the engine, and backed out of the aircraft.”

“Backed out of the aircraft? Onto the tarmac?”

“We hadn’t landed yet.”

Lance digested that for a moment. “You were still in the air?”

“Yes.”

“Estancia committed suicide?”

“Maybe not. Stone says he was wearing a parachute.”

“I saw the shoulder straps,” Stone said, leaning into the phone.

“Where the hell did he get a parachute?”

“There was a binful stacked right outside the cockpit.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lance said. “Estancia put on a parachute, got into the Mercedes, and drove it off the airplane into thin air?”

“Exactly,” Holly said.

“My God,” Lance said. “I hope it didn’t land on somebody’s house. We’d never hear the end of that.”

 

 

Fred Holland’s gardener arrived for work shortly after dawn, and on going to the rear of the house saw that the swimming pool’s water level was down by a foot. He got a hose, turned it on, and walked to the edge of the pool and dropped the hose into the water, then he looked down and saw a black automobile sitting on the white bottom. “
Jesus H. Christ!
” he said aloud to himself. “That must have been some party!”

 

 

Pablo Estancia got onto the five-ten train and took a seat. He bought a one-way ticket from the conductor and then got out his cell phone and dialed a number.

“Gelbhardt residence,” a sleepy woman’s voice said.

“Helga, this is Mr. Gelbhardt,” he said in German. “I’m sorry to wake you but I’m arriving in New York soon, and I should be at the apartment in about an hour.”

“Yes, Mr. Gelbhardt,” she replied. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“Yes, please: two scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice, and coffee.”

“I will look forward to seeing you,” she said.

“Goodbye, Helga.” Estancia hung up. He had owned the New York apartment for more than twenty years. It was in his wife’s maiden name, and the IRS had not discovered it when his difficulties arose. He had not visited it for more than a year, but Helga and her husband, Fritz, kept it in good order, ready for his arrival on short notice.

Estancia opened his
Times
to the Arts section and began to do the crossword.

Stone woke a little after nine, but he was not ready to get up yet. He ordered breakfast from his housekeeper, and she sent it up with the
Times
. He switched on the TV, which was tuned to the
Today
show.

He listened idly to the news as he scanned the front page, then something caught his ear.

“Matt,” a young female news reader was saying, “I have a mystery for you this morning. Let’s go to our local reporter in Rye, New York.”

Another young woman holding a microphone appeared on the screen. She was standing next to a large swimming pool in a lush garden.

“Matt, this is the garden of a surgeon who lives in Rye, and his garden runs all the way down to the beach of Long Island Sound. The doctor awoke this morning to find something in his swimming pool.” The camera crane moved high and over the water, pointing down. “That,” the reporter said, “according to a police diver, is a nearly new Mercedes 550 sedan. It has Spanish license plates and has two bullet holes in the left front fender, and no one is inside. Neither the doctor nor anyone else has the slightest idea how it got there.”

The camera switched to a shot of the reporter and the doctor, with his back turned to the camera. “Tell us what happened,” she said.

“Well,” the doctor replied, “I was wakened at four-thirty or five o’clock this morning by a very loud noise, like an explosion. I got out of bed and looked out the rear window and saw nothing. I figured it must have been thunder, since the area around the pool was wet with rain, and I went back to bed. Later this morning, the gardener found the car and we called the police.”

The camera switched to a uniformed police officer wearing a chief’s insignia. “We’ve looked all over the area,” he said, “and there was simply no access to the pool that would have allowed the car to drive into it. The only way it could have gotten into the pool was to have been dropped from the air.”

The camera switched back to the reporter.

“Regina,” Matt Lauer said, “has anyone reported a car missing from an airplane?”

“Not as far as we know, Matt,” the woman replied. “We’ve called every cargo transporter in the phone book, and they’re as baffled as we are.”

“Keep us up to date on this story,” Lauer said. “I’m dying to know what happened.”

The phone rang. “Hello?” Stone said.

“Stone, it’s Lance. What the hell happened last night?”

“It’s all as Holly said,” Stone replied. “I watched a movie in the trailer with Estancia, and I got sleepy and went to bed. When I woke up Estancia wasn’t there. Then we heard the rear platform open and all ran aft. I saw Estancia at the wheel of the car, and I could see the shoulder straps of a parachute. Mike had briefed us earlier about where they were stored. Estancia started the car, put it in reverse, and disappeared into the night. There was just a story on the
Today
show about the car landing in somebody’s swimming pool in Rye, but there was nobody in it.”

“I saw that just now,” Lance said. “Thank God it didn’t fall on a school or hospital.”

“Looks like you’ve bought Estancia a very expensive airline ticket to the United States,” Stone said. “Are the police looking for him?”

“Ah, no,” Lance replied.

“Why not?”

“To call in the FBI or the police would attract too much notice. We can hardly put out an APB on him.”

“Doesn’t he owe the IRS millions? Let them find him.”

“I don’t want to wrestle the IRS for possession,” Lance said. “We’ll have to find another way.”

“Well, good luck,” Stone said. “Goodbye, Lance.” He hung up.

 

 

Pablo Estancia had arrived at his Park Avenue apartment, had breakfast, showered and shaved, then phoned his barber and made an appointment for mid-morning.

The man arrived at ten o’clock, set a dining chair in Estancia’s dressing room, and had a look at his head. “The usual?” the barber, who had not seen him for more than a year, asked.

“I’d like it shorter, please, and I’d like to lose most of the gray.”

“Of course,” the man said, and went to work.

After the barber left, Estancia looked in the mirror and thought he looked ten years younger. He looked in a dresser drawer and came up with a box containing various bits of false hair. He selected a couple of pieces, brushed them carefully, and applied a thin coat of rubber cement.

 

 

Holly Barker sat next to Todd Bacon in Lance Cabot’s office at the Agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters and let Lance vent.