19 Purchase Street (48 page)

“So, why not do that?”

“We could, but I think the chances of getting away with it would be against us. The guys in that monitoring room aren't assholes. They're sure to have a way of detecting such a scramble or jam designed into that remote unit. I know I would. No, it seems to me the better try would be to somehow get me into the monitoring room. I'd need ten minutes, maybe only five to fool the alarm on that end.”

“We'd need Hine's help.”

“Tell him it's crucial.”

“I'm sure he wouldn't go for it,” Gainer said. “He was firm about not sticking his neck out any further than it is.”

“Then I guess we're stuck,” Chapin said.

“It's only a snag,” Leslie encouraged.

The heat sensor alarm.

The heart of Number 19's security system.

To fool it they had to get to it. But how could they get to it when just being in the same room with it would cause it to go off.

They turned the problem over and over in their minds.

For help Leslie made up a special flower remedy that she called
Remedy R
(for Robbery). It had equal parts of madia and penstemon and Scotch broom in it. Madia to keep their thinking focused. Penstemon so they wouldn't be overwhelmed by the challenge. Scotch broom for perseverance and to offset feelings of what's-the-use. At least twenty times a day Leslie had Gainer, Chapin and Vinny tilt their heads back and open their mouths for her to squirt it into them. When the Remedy was used up, Leslie mixed another batch, doubled up on the Scotch broom.

It didn't matter.

The give-ups started setting in.

They weren't so smart after all.

Seemed as though it just wasn't meant to be.

Too bad they went to all the trouble for nothing.

Gainer took some of the time to catch up with business. He'd already missed the opening week of pro football. He'd been so wrapped up in this other thing. Now he got up to date on the injury reports, what players had been picked up or placed on waivers. He reached out for information from guys he knew in the cities of all the teams. When he phoned in to Pointwise, Inc., his people were about to make a pick of their own, they sounded neglected and relieved. He told them for Sunday to give out the Falcons over the Saints by ten and for Monday night, Denver plus four over Oakland.

Chapin, meanwhile, began doodling an idea to beat the telephone company. It would allow anyone, for only a hundred dollar investment in materials, to use satellite telephone transmission for nothing, forever.

Vinny went out and bought a package of swag with a lot of gawdy David Webb stuff in it.

Leslie baked some bread that came out well. She paged through several mail order brochures, including those from Neiman Marcus and Tiffany. She sent away for a lot of things.

She also washed her Corniche. Put on white short shorts and a T-shirt and red rubber boots, got a bucket, chamois and other things from the garage.

Gainer saw her from their bedroom window.

She was hard at it, sudsing the trunk and taillights with a big, sloppy terrycloth mitten.

He went down to her.

No, she told him, she didn't want any help. She stretched to reach across the hood causing her shorts to ride up.

Gainer sat on the nearby stone wall to enjoy her. As usual, her movements seemed choreographic to him. His love, washing her hundred and fifty thousand dollar car, he thought.

She sang to herself as she worked. “La dee da, see how they da. La dee da, see how they da. They all ran after ladadee da, she cut off their tails with a ladeeda, did you ever see such a sight in your life, la dee da …”

“Any loose change you find under the seat you can keep,” Gainer said.

“Thank you, sir!” Leslie snapped brightly.

She went on washing and humming. Then she stopped as though paralyzed. Car washing suds ran down her forearms and dropped from her elbow. From the covered look of her eyes she seemed to be listening. Then, just as abruptly, she was animated. “Lady Caroline!” she exclaimed. “I knew she'd come through!”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

D
USK
.

Thursday, September 17.

The white truck was on Route 120 passing close by inlets of the Kensico Reservoir.

When it reached a point approximately two hundred feet from where the Westchester County Airport began, it pulled over and stopped on the wide, paved shoulder.

Vinny was at the wheel, Gainer beside him.

The truck was the sort of bucket-hoist vehicle used by tree service companies and New York Telephone and the State Highway Department. For reaching high places with a man. Behind its cab on a flatbed was housing for the motor that provided power for the hoist. The hoist could be rotated at its base. It consisted of two extensions or arms, each twenty feet long, connected in a hinging, adjustable manner, like an elbow. Fixed to the uppermost end of the second arm was a pair of plastic containers called buckets, waist-deep and large enough for a man to stand and move around in.

This particular bucket-hoist was painted white. The United States Government seal decaled on its doors was encircled with the words
Federal Aviation Administration
. Red, white and blue government license plates. None of that was fabricated. It was, indeed, an authentic official FAA truck. Stolen to order from Teeterborough, New Jersey Airport for a five thousand fee by a couple of Vinny's people.

Gainer climbed down from the cab. Both he and Vinny were wearing white, loose-fitting coveralls and had FAA photo identifications pinned, above their left upper pockets.

Gainer studied the airport area ahead. None of the hangars or other buildings could be seen from there because of the terrain and high brush. However, the landing approach lights stood up in clear view on thirty foot stanchions evenly spaced in a straight line every fifty feet, a rack of five lights on each stanchion to help guide pilots straight to the runway.

Vinny handed the rifle and cartridges to Gainer. It was Rodger's rifle bought by him several years ago to take to Canada for bear. A premier grade Remington 760 Gamemaster carbine. Gainer was a little careless with it now as he crawled beneath the truck, scraped the butt of its stock on the pavement. He positioned himself close to the inside of the front wheel, where he was less likely to be noticed. The sparse traffic along that stretch of road at that hour also helped. Spread belly down, elbows supporting the rifle, Gainer looked through the 4-12 telescopic sight.

The sight brought the individual landing approach lights right to him. He cross-haired on one and squeezed the trigger. Saw the light and its reflector explode under the impact of the 30-06 bullet. The report of the rifle was loud but somewhat contained by the underside of the truck.

Rapidly, without a miss, Gainer shot out ten landing approach lights from four different racks. It sounded as though some old truck was backfiring badly or perhaps some kids were setting off leftover Fourth of July M-80 bombs. Before anyone could come to investigate the shots, Gainer and rifle were back in the truck and under way.

Vinny took a left for the road that ran along the eastern side of the airport. Past the Air National Guard hangars to the main access gate.

The steel-mesh gate was closed.

A guard on duty there came to the truck.

“About half your goddamn
Malsr
is out, maybe even the
Rail
,” Gainer said brusquely, sounding technical and very much like an FAA maintenance man irritated by the inconvenience of so much work.
Malsr
was an acronym for Medium-Intensity Approach Light System Rail.
Rail
itself stood for Runway Alignment Indicator Lights, Gainer had learned.

“What do I know?” the guard said. He went into a cubicle and put in a call.

A Lear jet came sibilantly skimming in, blinking red.

The guard returned. “Control didn't know anything about it until just now when that Lear complained. What are you guys, psychic or something?”

“We got the call,” Gainer said with annoyance.

The guard pressed a button and the electrically controlled gate rolled open.

Vinny drove through and in about a hundred feet. Stopped there. In their side mirrors Gainer and Vinny observed a gasoline tanker behind them stopped at the gate. An eighteen-wheeler. Orange and blue Gulf insignia and AVGAS 100LL painted on it. The guard waved it through. The tanker drove in all the way to the concrete apron, turned left and continued on—along the face of Hangar “D.” Most of the doors to the various corporate sections were closed.

The tanker maneuvered and came to a stop on the apron, its front end facing the field. Idled there.

Vinny pulled the bucket-hoist truck up next to the tanker.

“How's your watch?” Gainer asked out his window.

“Six-forty-one,” Chapin replied from the cab of the tanker. He was alone. The Gulf tanker was another acquisition by Vinny's people for another five thousand. Taken from an eating stop on Route I just outside Bridgeport. It was full when they took it so they'd made a little extra selling its eighty-six hundred gallons half price to an independent service station that was also a numbers office on Queens Boulevard.

“We'll wait until ten to seven,” Gainer told Chapin.

Darkness had already come.

It was the best sort of night for a robbery. Clouds had formed a thick ceiling from horizon to horizon, were just hanging there a mile up. The three-quarters moon had no chance of getting through.

A twin-engine propeller job glided in three hundred from where the two trucks stood. It passed from right to left down the runway.

“I don't like this part,” Vinny remarked.

Gainer didn't either.

Keeping headlights off, Vinny put the truck in gear and got it rolling. Chapin in the tanker was under way in the larger, longer tanker alongside. They went full-out through the pitch dark, across the apron and over a dry grassy strip onto the taxiing area, guessing where they were merely by the feel of the surface beneath the wheels. It was so dark Gainer had the sensation that they were about to go hurtling off an edge.

Within seconds they were passing over another area of grassy ground. This one wider and slightly depressed for drainage, and Gainer knew from his mental map of the airport that the next hard surface would be the main runway.

He looked off to his right.

Saw the landing lights of a jet on its approach to the runway. Large private jet coming in. Gainer was about to warn Vinny to brake but at that moment their wheels got hard runway and they were committed.

The landing lights of the jet grew wider apart as it came nearer. Like a pair of motorcycles forty feet off the ground. It did not see the two trucks until its beams caught them. It roared as though furious at having them in its way. Its undercarriage cleared the hoist-truck by three feet, the taller tanker by six inches.

“Vehicles on runway!” the jet's pilot radioed the control tower.

An official in a jeep went out on the runway to investigate, but by then the two trucks were on the fringe of the undeveloped area that buffered the airport from the residences on Purchase Street. Letting up on their speed but not stopping, the trucks, in tandem, plowed into the high grass and on through the brush that enveloped them.

Now they turned on their headlights, and Gainer got his bearings.

When he'd been in this area two weeks earlier he'd seen how dense it was, but he hadn't realized there were so many mature trees. The difference, of course, was being on foot and the reduced clearance that required. Now, with the trucks there were few spaces between trees that offered room enough, and several times it was necessary to cut back and go around in order to proceed. Also, the terrain had not seemed so uneven before. The huge trucks went bouncing, grinding, scraping along, few feet by few feet. At one point they came on an outcropping of granite ledge that was impassable, had to back off from it with great difficulty and find another direction. As it turned out that was fortunate, because it brought them to the easier going of a level clearing where they made better time, and then there was only wild sumac that their bumpers crushed down.

All the way to the steel mesh fence.

Gainer got out. He went along the fence. Every dozen or so steps he stopped, shined his flashlight through onto the brick wall of Number 19. When he found where the wall cornered, he used that as his reckoning and knew from the measurements Sweet had provided where it would be best to go over. He paced back along the fence to that point.

Vinny ran the hoist-truck up close parallel to the fence, cut its headlights. Chapin pulled the tanker up behind it.

They removed the white coveralls. Under them everything they had on was black: long-sleeved shirts, jeans, sneakers and a cloth pouch like a bib tied around the back of the neck and twice on each side. To serve as a deep carryall. Gainer had the ASP harnessed on. Chapin, a snub-nosed .38 Magnum. They took a moment to blacken their faces with greasepaint make-up and to pull on black stretch cotton gloves, snug.

Chapin put a tiny object into his right ear. Held it in place with strips of surgical tape. Gainer and Vinny did the same. Those were microcircuit receivers. They worked with separate remote transmitters about half the size of a pack of gum. Each of the transmitters was fixed on an identical frequency, thus anything one of them said would be heard by all. Chapin had designed these little “whisper-coms,” as he called them, a couple of years ago as a Christmas gift to Vinny, whose people put them to good use during house break-ins. The receivers, super-sensitive as they were and positioned within the ear, picked up the faintest whispers. A shout or scream would split the eardrum.

Chapin checked to see that he had everything he'd need. He lit a cigarette, took three overlapping drags and let it drop. He climbed up onto the bed of the truck and into the hoist's plastic bucket. Attached to the upper edge of the bucket was a control box and lever that allowed Chapin to maneuver the hoist, its rotating base and its arm. He'd had two days' practice with it at the Bedford house, felt he knew fairly well how to handle it.