The Driver (29 page)

“Yes, Matt signed the nondisclosure. I gave him the whole story.”

“Don't worry,” he said, “we've got dirt on guys much more famous than this nutjob, but none of theirs is nearly as entertaining.”

“Matt,” she said, “do you think the record can be broken?”

“Everyone says it's impossible, but if anyone can, it's Alex Roy.” He proudly pointed at my new pair of trunk-mounted scanner antennas. “No one on the planet preps as much as he does. He's crazy, but in a good way. Crazy, but smart.”

“Tell 'em about the Enzo guy!” Kenny yelled from inside the M5.

“Oh yeah!” Matt smiled. “So you should see some clients' faces when they recognize Alex's BMW, even without the Police and Gumball stickers. One guy comes in with a Ferrari Enzo, and you know what he says? ‘Do you think it's okay to sit in Alex Roy's car?'”

The Weis rolled his eyes. “Don't get too cocky. It's not you, it's the car.”

“I'm telling you,” said Matt, “this
has
to be the most famous BMW in the world.”

The Weis nodded at me, his eyes devoid of humor, and pointed over his shoulder at Matt's empty office. I followed him like a truant child. He closed the door and turned to me with a dour expression I'd only last seen on my father's face, five and a half years earlier.

“Wait,” I said, then hoped to lighten the mood by adding, “Bad news first?”

“No jokes, Aliray. You listen to me, because this is as serious as it gets. I'm proud of you for going all the way with this race business, but if you think you're special because a bunch of kids and some idiot with a Ferrari think you're cool, someone's gonna die. You do this for yourself, not to beat some record or those rally idiots, and you'll come home safe. You want to prove something? Tell Nine now before you kill Cory, too. Everyone else thinks you're some crazy genius who gets away with breaking the law because you're funny, but it's not funny anymore. I
know
you're scared. I'm scared for you. This is the most dangerous thing you've ever done. You'll be driving so fast so long, your fastest day on Gumball will look pathetic, and if you ever become famous for any of this, and I mean paid, not just pictures on a website, and you come back acting like some Hollywood prick, I'm going to smack you in the face the way I wouldn't my own son.”

“The Weis…can I say something?”

“No, but are ready for the good news?”

“You hate me?”

“The weather looks good.”

“So now that I might get killed, you don't hate me?”

“I'll hate you less if you break 35. Why are we talking? Let's go and make faces at Nine while he checks out Cory.”

I was wrong. Yates was wrong. Everyone was wrong.

It might have begun in Ohio, when my driveplan projection first went awry, or in Oklahoma, where my recalculations grew so inaccurate we began ignoring the plan altogether. Awash in white noise, we switched off the scanners in New Mexico, breaking such protocol for the first time. By Arizona, we stopped calling out police cars, so many having evaporated after we'd concurred on their positions, makes, models—even the height of their antennas. Nine and I exchanged harsh words for the first time. Cory began cutting off our increasingly incoherent remarks. It wasn't merely fatigue. Something was wrong. I wasn't scared when we crossed into California. I was terrified, but I could not stop.

I had 16,500 miles of experience doing precisely this. I could have written the book on high-speed, illegal endurance driving. Nine had ten years of semiprofessional racing behind him. Cory had spent three years studying the U.S. Express. No one was more knowledgeable, no team more capable.

But all our assumptions were wrong, and we couldn't know why or by how much until our wretched, tedious ordeal was over. I theorized we'd been hallucinating since our thirtieth hour. No one knew, because, in our penultimate breach of protocol, we'd stopped talking.

The V1's alerts no longer made sense. I turned it off, the first time in fourteen years I'd driven without it. Approximately 100 miles from L.A. we spotted dozens of patrol cars' lights flashing on a service road. The predawn convoy sped north toward the U-turn/overpass under which we'd just driven south. Our electronic countermeasures (ECM) and comms were useless, Petersmeyer asleep, Cory silent, Nine spent. All I could do was drive. Blinded by an eerily luminous fog bank through Lone Pine Canyon, I slowed to 40. No one complained. In the left lane I saw what appeared to be an overturned yacht. “Guys,” I rasped, slowing to fifteen, “is that—”

“Yes,” Cory said flatly. Nine didn't answer. The fog cleared as we neared the I-15/I-10 interchange, our final turn, after which a mere 42 minutes remained. We caught up with a four-lane-wide rolling roadblock, their blue and red beacons flashing at the end of the traffic jam behind which we were trapped. We were still one exit from our turn. An otherworldly light suddenly flashed over the car. A helicopter flew past, its spotlight dancing among the cars ahead. Traffic stopped. The police ahead began funneling cars toward the shoulder.

There was only one possible explanation, but before I could suggest faking a breakdown, abandoning the car, and running, Cory had an idea.

 

Based on a 36:27 drivetime, our ETA in L.A. was 5:34
A.M
. (PST). The witnesses were to stage at the Santa Monica Pier Finish Line at 5:30
A.M
., just in case we were early. We missed them by more than an hour and a half.

Because Cory knew a service-road shortcut the Garmin didn't.

Because they were still asleep when she tried to call with our new ETA.

Because our speed had inverted the cascading projection errors.

Because everyone had been wrong.

Except for a Santa Monica police cruiser unwittingly parked 30 feet from the finish line, no one saw us pull up and stop on the pier. I took a picture of the Garmin screen. Our overall average read 80.5 mph, but I was unable to calculate its significance. The total elapsed time was clearly wrong. We sat silent, each reaching through our undead stupor for the correct answer. The pier's stilts creaked as the police car rolled toward us. I lowered the window and steadied my shaking hands on the wheel. It wasn't fear. I was too tired to laugh when the officer ordered us to move. I reluctantly said yes, unwilling to risk slurring my words through a temporary reprieve.

We couldn't have known how much we'd suffer. No one did. I thought we might have died, only to arrive in a city emptied of life. This was the punishment for what we'd done.

 

Cory tapped me on the shoulder and nodded. One minute had passed since arrival. It was 3:54
A.M
. (PST). It was Sunday, December 18, 2005.

It was true—34:46

Thirty-four hours and 46 minutes.

One hour and eight minutes
faster
than Brock Yates and Dan Gurney—the Master and the Champion—when they won the 1971 Cannonball Run in 35:54.

One hour and five minutes shy of the legendary David Heinz and David Yarborough, who set the final 1979 Cannonball Run record of 32:51.

Two hours and 39 minutes short of David Diem and Doug Turner's 32:07.

We'd been wrong about almost everything, but we hadn't failed. We had just set the eleventh fastest cross-country time in history. By accident.

 

Cory lived four miles away. Half an hour, at an average of 9 miles per hour. No one spoke until we arrived.

“The proof,” I whispered, “the tapes…do you have a safe?”

“I bought one. Just in case.”

I was too tired to cry.

Just before dawn, standing over her dining table, with a large calendar and a laptop displaying historical weather patterns, we selected the next available target window.

Nothing could stop it.

MONDAY, MARCH
6, 2006
I
-15
SOUTHBOUND
APPROACHING I
-15/
I
-10
INTERCHANGE
0306
HOURS (APPROX)

We had much to learn. We had to re-create the conditions of 3446's calamitous final leg. We had to see. We had to know. I bought another V1. Cory would shoot the entire practice drive, allowing me to correlate the V1's alerts down to the mile marker, waypoint them true or false in the Garmin, then study potential traps in Google Earth. I had to evaluate my new, professionally programmed scanner. We had to understand what happened in Lone Pine Canyon. I had to do this having not slept for the 41 and a half hours we'd been awake the last time we reached this point.

I glanced at the Garmin again.

Our driving average had been 86.1 mph. Overall, including fuel stops, was 83. Only the latter mattered, and it was an incredible figure given the conditions, 2.5 mph faster than our 80.5 on 3446. We wouldn't beat Diem/ Turner's 89.4, but we didn't expect to. They only achieved 32:07 on their second run in 1983, incorporating the lessons from having come in third in '82.

I was elated.

Based on the 215 miles driven this test, I extrapolated a run of just under 34 hours. Without a CB radio or laser jammers. Without Nine operating the GPS, checking bridges and on-ramps for speed traps, or helping keep me alert. Without kill switches for the brake lights, or
all
the rear lights. Without the Kenyon power gyrostabilized Steiner 7X50 (military) binoculars for long-range, daytime spotting. Without our new Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera system or its twin seven-inch displays—one each for the driver and copilot—for medium range, nighttime spotting. Without a ground controller reporting traffic and weather in real time. Without a trunk-mounted fuel cell nearly doubling our capacity. Without an air-to-ground radio. Without a spotter plane.

All of which would be ready for our all-out assault on 3207. The target date was twenty-six days away—Saturday, April 1.

 

“I've had enough,” my dad groaned. “I'm tired.” It was one of my last visits before he died, but I couldn't remember exactly when. It had to have been before the talk that changed everything. Maybe.

“Your father is tough like a lion,” Genia said when he was first diagnosed. “If he wants to live longer, he will.”

But the corollary was also true.

“Dad, you can't say that, I…I don't know what I'm doing—”

“You'll figure it out. You've always been…a little lazy. Too much. So tired.”

“Don't say you're”—my voice went up an octave—“tired! I
know
what that means! I need—”

“You…you were such a good boy…a beautiful pianist. But you didn't want to play. I stopped paying for lessons. You wanted to draw. Beautiful drawings. So fine. Always making big pieces. So much detail. Too much. Then…too big, not enough time. I don't know what to tell you.”

“But what does this—”

“You gave me a birthday present. You were eleven. A model car you built. An Austin-Healey, like I had. I was so happy. You brought it to my office, but the wheel…one of the wheels broke in your pocket—”

I remembered.

“—and you took it back. You promised to fix it. You were very sorry. In tears. Becky thought I made you cry. But it was you.”

That, I didn't remember.

“I never saw that car again. You made me very sad.”

“Dad…I'm sorry. That was a long a time ago. I don't remember, but I
am
sorry.”

“Not so long ago. You made me cry. You don't know. You don't know.”

 

I
did
die on 3446. But I was also reborn. It wasn't clear to me at first, but it became so in the voice mails and e-mails left unreturned, curious friends asking my whereabouts on birthdays and dinner parties missed. On those few occasions I ventured out socially, I, the great rambler, could barely speak—let alone listen—to anyone I didn't already know. I hated myself for succumbing to invitations from old friends, even if only for an hour. Every minute unspent on reviewing
Driveplan .91Beta (Assault-22),
or parsing www.speedtrap.org for new entries, or individual states' sites for road-construction schedule changes, or watching hundreds of hours of Cory's interviews with the U.S. Express drivers, or scrolling through the Garmin maps or Google Earth to find speed traps (actual or potential) I'd missed after watching the entire 3446 video in real time, was one that could put me in jail, or cost me my life.

Every Friday and Saturday remaining in March had to be spent testing the M5, the new night-vision system, and the power gyrostabilizers for the binoculars and camcorders. I had to test traffic levels, tollbooth wait times, and police-patrol frequencies and locations, from the CCC as far as the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border. I had to determine whether—since the M5 wore different size wheels/tires front and rear—we could or should carry two spares. I had to measure the range and refueling time of the M5's new 35-gallon double fuel tanks, which meant driving the car round-trip to Washington or Boston every week until departure, during which I had to test the fuel transfer speeds of the different pumps used by the major gas-station chains. I had to call every suitable station within our target refueling windows (+/-50 miles, in case we missed our projected fuel consumption), confirm their pump types and hours of operation (since two-thirds of the run was at night), and only then could I waypoint them in both Garmins. I had to determine by how much the 19.9 MPG fuel economy achieved on 3446 would decline at speeds 12 to 20 percent higher. I had to determine whether we could lower our mandatory fuel stops from 3446's seven to Diem/Turner's five and a half (or better), then synchronize them with putting Nine at the wheel through Arizona.

I had to test our Travel John emergency urination bags—under race conditions. I had to rewrite my will, brief Alfred and Genia as to what might happen, and what to do if it did. I had to see my mother and brother, in private, separately, to do the same, then apologize at length for having to do so.

I had to test the air-to-ground radios, which required driving to up-state New York when The Weis could find time away from Astrid and their newborn son. I feared stepping inside their house and seeing her cradle six-month-old Owen, my godson whom I'd barely seen—for obvious reasons. That any young, successful father would leave, even for 72 hours, to fly a single-engined, Cessna rental cross-country on a dangerous and potentially criminal enterprise, out of loyalty, for free, merely because a childhood friend requested it, made no sense even to me. I wasn't sure I'd do the same, but I had the benefit of being last among my friends on the life-marriage-baby time line, nor did I have any friends crazy enough to make such a request, which saved me from wasting time pondering the hypocrisy of it all.

I had to find a backup pilot The Weis would both approve of and get along with, since I couldn't fathom why his slated copilot—Keith “The Captain” Baskett, part of our inner circle since becoming The Weis's flight instructor fifteen years earlier, who now piloted 747s weekly from New York to Shanghai—would possibly go through with it.

I was the worst among us, and running out of time, so I lied with increasing virtuosity to everyone I knew and met as I networked, trying to find friends—or friends of friends—who worked for major news organizations, would shoot our departure and/or arrival,
then
sit on the story until some undetermined later date, or, if I failed, a major law or accounting firm that would validate our time as if it were an Olympic event. I had to find out why Rawlings had been in New York at least twice since the prior September, and if he had paid a telltale visit to the Classic Car Club. If Rawlings and the CCC's helpful but unwitting manager, Zac Moseley, had spoken, or if I couldn't convince Moseley to stay open later than in December, I had to find a backup departure location. I had to find somewhere to hide the M5 once in L.A., a location close to the pier yet totally concealed, from which a shipper could retrieve it out of sight from passing traffic, just in case the authorities came looking. I had to rent another car, locate an airport with a regional carrier the police were unlikely to contact during a manhunt, book a flight with the fewest possible stops in states we'd driven through, then arrange for the car's return to L.A. by the fastest method, all at the lowest cost.

And I had to sleep, but what few hours I could were those of the undead.

I had to see my doctor again, so scared was I about my physical state that Dr. Shapiro, a family friend whom I'd known since childhood, to whom I confessed the reason for my visit, didn't believe me, then—based on my longtime hypochondria—rejected a request for my third visit in as many weeks. I sought out Dr. Manevitz—a fellow Moth board member and the only psychiatrist I knew—who specialized in celebrity, government, corporate, and high-stress cases, for my first-ever such visit. He suggested I reconsider my plans, and ordered me to eat better and get more sleep.

And then there was the big one. Nine and I could make it even if
Driveplan .91Beta (Assault-14)
was toilet paper, except for a strategic hinge of such magnitude our entire run would fail were it not properly oiled. The driveplan dictated that PolizeiGround and the all-new PolizeiAir intersect for the first time in St. Louis just after dawn, no later than 10 and a half hours into the run, split up only for their respective refuels—to occur simultaneously, if possible—and stay in communication so as to shorten any gap to reinterception. But, outside of the Coast Guard and military, the only organizations with experience managing the cooperation of low-speed aircraft and ground traffic were the very enemies we desperately wanted to avoid: highway-patrol aviation units.

Calling them for advice was inconceivable, so I decided to call them for advice. I called those most feared along our planned route—the Ohio State Police—and inquired (as a writer) about the various distances, speeds, and altitudes at which patrol cars and spotter aircraft communicated. They told me little of use.

I had a lot of work to do.

And for all this I sacrificed my dear, uncomplaining, Grace Kelly reincarnate, Skylar. She'd seen me off on Gumball 2005. She'd seen the video of my bad passes in Italy. She knew about the Battle of Rome. She knew more about my world than many of the drivers, but while their girlfriends fretted about competition from Prague's best, Skylar knew I might not make it back. She hadn't just feared the recon itself. She'd had faith in me that I lacked. She'd feared what would happen if we made it. By the day I got back, it was too late. She knew I'd returned a different person, now responsible for volunteers willing to risk their lives solely for friendship, planning a mission whose potential lethality could be talked around but not laughed away, blindly committed to staking everything for reasons I could no longer clearly explain, even to myself. Not once did she try to stop me, but if I saw her face beside the car door on the night of April 1, I could promise nothing without lying. I couldn't forget her mournful expression the night of Friday, December 16, and I couldn't bear to see it again, which is why within a few days of coming home I closed off my heart to focus on the task at hand.

THURSDAY, MARCH
30, 2006
POLIZEI EXPRESS JOINT OPERATIONS CENTER
2030
HOURS
49
HOURS TO DEPARTURE

“If you think you can do 31,” said The Weis, “why are you projecting 31:48?”

“Why not 31:30?” someone called out.

“Let's not get cocky,” I said, looking at my copy of
Driveplan 1 Alpha (Assault-2),
which I had just distributed to everyone in the room. “Recalculating the projections because we're feeling good is—”

“Why not 30?” came another voice.

“Aliray,” said The Weis, “why don't you just duplicate the 3207 guys' plans?”

“I'd rather have goals we can surpass than miss targets and make decisions, in a moving car, based on desperation.”

“Look, Aliray, we want you to go fast. We're not flying the plane so you can sit on the cruise control at 105. The only way to break this record is to go irresponsibly fast.”

“Ladies, gentlemen, and The Weis,” I said, “let's be serious. This is not a laughing matter.”

“Then stop smiling,” Nine called out. This was the first and last time PolizeiAir and PolizeiGround would meet before departure, assuming weather didn't push us to the April 8 rain date. Although we could drive through weather, all of us wanted to see the first illegal cross-country racing spotter plane in twenty-three years deployed to maximum effect. Diem/Turner's interviews suggested the plane hadn't been the decisive factor in setting 32:07, but their aircrew had been hired guns.

We had The Weis and the Captain.

“Aliray,” The Weis said, “we were laughing because you were laughing. Now we can't laugh? Some of us have families, you know, wives and children waiting for us, and we're here listening to some bald guy who tricked us into flying a Cessna cross-country? Don't tell me to stop laughing, tough guy, because this
isn't
funny, it's sad.”

“Actually,” said Nine, “now that you mentioned Aliray being in charge of you guys with the wives and kids, it
is
pretty funny. You guys, man, you're crazy.”

“No,” said the Captain, “you guys stuck in that car are crazy.”

Graeber sat and took notes. Lelaine, to whom I'd long bragged about my oldest friends' intellect and charisma, smoked a cigarette by the window. Cory's bespectacled business partner and cameraman, Robin Acutt—a six-five, thirty-four-year-old South African whose gentle demeanor belied strict adherence to protocol and procedure, and who, despite his height, was assigned to the plane—loomed over me, camera in hand.