Three Classic Thrillers (100 page)

A small army of black-tied waiters moved deftly about the decks, hauling drinks on silver trays and finger food too pretty to eat. Carl ignored most of his guests and spent his time with those he controlled, one way or another. Brianna was the perfect hostess, gliding from group to group, kissing all the men and all the women, making sure everyone got the chance to see her.

The captain circled wide so the guests could have a
nice view of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, then turned north in the direction of the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan. It was dark now, and the rows of skyscrapers lit up the financial district. Under the Brooklyn Bridge, under the Manhattan Bridge, under the Williamsburg Bridge, the
Brianna
sailed up the East River in all its majesty. The string quartet retired, and the best of Billy Joel boomed through the ship’s elaborate sound system. Dancing erupted on the second-level deck. Someone got shoved into a pool. Others followed, and clothing soon became optional. It was the younger crowd.

As per Carl’s instructions, the captain turned around at the United Nations building and increased speed, though it was not noticed. Carl, at that moment, was giving an interview in his sweeping office on the third deck.

At precisely 10:30, on schedule, the
Brianna
docked at Pier 60, and the guests began their slow departures. Mr. and Mrs. Trudeau saw them off, hugging, kissing, waving, wishing they would all hurry along now. A midnight dinner was waiting. Fourteen remained behind, seven lucky couples who would cruise south to Palm Beach for a few days. They changed into more casual clothing and met in the formal dining room for yet another drink while the chef finalized the first course.

Carl whispered to the first mate that it was now time to leave, and fifteen minutes later the
Brianna
pushed off again from Pier 60. While the guests were being charmed by his wife, he excused himself for a few
minutes. He climbed the steps to the fourth level, and on a small elevated deck found his favorite spot on this fabulous new toy of his. It was an observation post, the ship’s highest point above the water.

As the cool wind blew his hair, he gripped the brass railing and stared at the mammoth towers in the financial district. He caught a glimpse of his building, and his office, forty-five floors up.

Everything was up. Krane common stock was just under $50 a share. Its earnings were through the roof. His net worth was over $3 billion and rising steadily.

Some of those idiots out there had been laughing eighteen months earlier. Krane is finished. Trudeau is a fool. How can a man lose a billion dollars in one day? they howled.

Where was their laughter now?

Where were all those experts now?

The great Carl Trudeau had outfoxed them again. He’d cleaned up the Bowmore mess and saved his company. He’d driven its stock into the ground, bought it cheap at a fire sale, and now owned virtually all of it. It was making him even richer.

He was destined to move up the Forbes 400 list, and as Carl sailed along the Hudson at the very top of his extraordinary ship, and gazed with smug satisfaction at the gleaming towers packed around Wall Street, he admitted to himself that nothing else mattered.

Now that he had three billion, he really wanted six.

T
he decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease. Only three people were involved in the process. The first was the man with the money. The second was a local operative who knew the territory. And the third was a young patriot and zealot with a talent for explosives and an astonishing knack for disappearing without a trail. After the bombing, he fled the country and hid in Northern Ireland for six years.

The lawyer’s name was Marvin Kramer, a fourth-generation Mississippi Jew whose family had prospered as merchants in the Delta. He lived in an antebellum home in Greenville, a river town with a small but strong Jewish community, a pleasant place with a history of little racial discord. He practiced law because commerce bored him. Like most Jews of German descent, his family had assimilated nicely into the culture of the Deep South, and viewed themselves as nothing but typical Southerners who happened to have a different religion. Anti-Semitism rarely surfaced. For the most part, they blended with the rest of established society and went about their business.

Marvin was different. His father sent him up North to Brandeis in the late fifties. He spent four years there, then three years in law school at Columbia, and when he returned to Greenville in 1964 the civil rights movement had center stage in Mississippi. Marvin got in the thick of it. Less than a month after opening his little law office, he was arrested along with two of his Brandeis
classmates for attempting to register black voters. His father was furious. His family was embarrassed, but Marvin couldn’t have cared less. He received his first death threat at the age of twenty-five, and started carrying a gun. He bought a pistol for his wife, a Memphis girl, and instructed their black maid to keep one in her purse. The Kramers had twin two-year-old sons.

The first civil rights lawsuit filed in 1965 by the law offices of Marvin B. Kramer and Associates (there were no associates yet) alleged a multitude of discriminatory voting practices by local officials. It made headlines around the state, and Marvin got his picture in the papers. He also got his name on a Klan list of Jews to harass. Here was a radical Jew lawyer with a beard and a bleeding heart, educated by Jews up North and now marching with and representing Negroes in the Mississippi Delta. It would not be tolerated.

Later, there were rumors of Lawyer Kramer using his own money to post bail for Freedom Riders and civil rights workers. He filed lawsuits attacking whites-only facilities. He paid for the reconstruction of a black church bombed by the Klan. He was actually seen welcoming Negroes into his home. He made speeches before Jewish groups up North and urged them to get involved in the struggle. He wrote sweeping letters to newspapers, few of which were printed. Lawyer Kramer was marching bravely toward his doom.

The presence of a nighttime guard patrolling benignly around the flower beds prevented an attack upon the Kramer home. Marvin had been paying the guard for two years. He was a former cop and he was heavily armed, and the Kramers let it be known to all of Greenville that they were protected by an expert marksman. Of course, the Klan knew about the guard, and the Klan knew to leave him alone. Thus, the decision
was made to bomb Marvin Kramer’s office, and not his home.

The actual planning of the operation took very little time, and this was principally because so few people were involved in it. The man with the money, a flamboyant redneck prophet named Jeremiah Dogan, was at the time the Imperial Wizard for the Klan in Mississippi. His predecessor had been loaded off to prison, and Jerry Dogan was having a wonderful time orchestrating the bombings. He was not stupid. In fact, the FBI later admitted Dogan was quite effective as a terrorist because he delegated the dirty work to small, autonomous groups of hit men who worked completely independent of one another. The FBI had become expert at infiltrating the Klan with informants, and Dogan trusted no one but family and a handful of accomplices. He owned the largest used car lot in Meridian, Mississippi, and had made plenty of money on all sorts of shady deals. He sometimes preached in rural churches.