Requiem for an Assassin (17 page)

Sands Point turned out to be possibly the most moneyed town I’d ever seen. Mansion after mansion on plots the size of small countries, some of them set so far back from the road they were nearly invisible through the bare branches of all the winter trees. Because the town was set on the Port Washington peninsula, many of the homes fronted Long Island Sound and had their own marinas, the better to dock, of course, private sailboats and yachts. The cars I saw were all Mercedeses, BMWs, and Lexuses, along with one antique Bentley, and I was glad to have a ride that felt at home among them.

I was on high alert as I approached Accinelli’s house, on a quiet, tree-lined road called Hilldale Lane. If Hilger had decided to set up a welcoming reception, the area around the residence would be a key choke point. But the street was entirely quiet. I rolled up just past the driveway and took a peek.

Accinelli’s was one of the town’s more modest dwellings, but his home was still a mansion by any definition: a massive, Romanesque-style building of gray stone set a hundred yards back from the road; a rolling, manicured lawn, frosted over now, with a circular driveway cutting through it; old growth trees and plots of flower gardens, empty now but for a few hardy perennials hanging grimly on in the frozen dirt. The air of the place was ease, a relaxed confidence in the rightness of the natural order, money and status untouchable by the vicissitudes of the outside world.

Next to the house was a detached two-car garage of the same stone as the main structure. At the driveway’s center, at the front of the house, there was a stone portico, and under it, a black Mercedes S Class, the 2007. The way it was parked, I couldn’t see the license plate, but most likely it was his. Was someone coming, going, or did they typically just park the car there? No, there was no frost on the windows, so it hadn’t been there all night. Someone had just come from somewhere, some errand, maybe, maybe grocery shopping, and they had parked the car in front of the house to carry something inside.

Just then, the front door opened and I saw Accinelli.
Son of a bitch.
I eased off the brake and let the BMW roll forward. But not before I saw what he was carrying: golf clubs.

He hadn’t looked out toward the street, and I didn’t think he’d noticed me. Even if he had, I doubted he would have made anything of a fancy BMW driving past. I kept driving, thinking, weighing the possibilities. I hadn’t expected anything actionable to happen so fast—I had planned only on a drive-by, a get-acquainted-with-the-neighborhood visit—but this looked like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Golf clubs suggested an outing, and the clothes he’d been wearing…it hadn’t fully registered at first, but he was in black-and-gray polypropylene or something similar, zipped to the neck. “Technical gear,” some of the sporting-goods outfitters like to call it, a fancy way of saying cold-weather sporting clothes. Yeah. He was on his way to the links.

Shit, I didn’t remember the address of his club. If I did, I could have gotten ahead of him, which is almost always preferable to tracking from behind. The Village Club, it was called, but where was it? As I drove back down Hilldale, then right on Middle Neck, the same way I had come in, I looked for local points of interest on the nav system.
Country clubs, country clubs, come on…
I couldn’t find it. Okay, the hell with it, plan B.

I pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. If Accinelli came this way, I’d let him go right past me, then fall in behind. A few minutes of a big BMW behind him, especially if he were heading to Sands Point’s golf club, as I expected, wouldn’t alarm him. And if he went the other way on Middle Neck, I would just swing around and follow him in the other direction.

Sudden paranoia jolted me: what if the Hilger team I’d been so watchful for turned out to be Accinelli? Maybe they know each other from the war. Maybe Accinelli owes a favor. Hilger tells him roughly when to expect me; Accinelli watches the road from the house, with the car warmed up; he sees me, then walks out pretending not to, with a golf club bag that’s actually holding a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with sabot slugs.

I scanned the area. A black SUV was coming toward me down Middle Neck, and I started to get that deep-down
Oh, fuck
feeling. I held down the brake with my left foot and put my right over the gas, ready to floor it if the SUV slowed, or sped up, or swerved. But it didn’t, and as it came closer I could see the occupants were just an elderly couple. Shit, they were probably on their way to church.

I let the SUV pass and checked the rearview. There was the Mercedes, pulling out of Hilldale and making a left on Middle Neck, away from me. For a moment, I’d been so keyed up that I was surprised he wasn’t coming at me. Then I realized I was being ridiculous. What was Accinelli going to do, blow someone away from his own car a hundred yards out from his $10 million home, right in front of the horrified neighbors? No. Hilger might have been trying to set me up, but it wouldn’t be that way.

I did a U-turn on Middle Neck and followed from about a hundred fifty yards back. It was a long, straight road that gradually curved from east to south, and tailing him from far back was easy. I continued to scan for surprises as I drove.

After about two miles, Accinelli made a left onto Thayer Lane. Thayer, right, now I remembered, that was the address of the club. I followed along behind him. About eight hundred yards up, Thayer curved around to the right and I lost sight of him for a moment. Then I came around the curve, too, and saw Accinelli’s car again, stopped next to an island with a guard post at the center of it. Beyond the post was a parking lot; beyond the parking lot, a compound of enormous tile-roofed brick buildings that I remembered from the website comprised the former estate of Isaac Guggenheim. This was it, then, the entrance to the club. Accinelli moved forward past the post. I swung around on Thayer and headed back out.

I recognized there was an opening here, if I could move fast enough to exploit it. I input the coordinates for Midtown Manhattan into the nav system. Twenty-five miles. Allowing time for parking and the purchase I planned to make, with just a little luck and light traffic I could be back here in not much more than an hour and a half.

I took the Long Island Expressway west as fast as I could without risking a ticket. What was Accinelli planning today—nine holes, or eighteen? And how long would he be playing regardless? Surely no less than two hours, even for a shorter game. And it would be lunchtime after that. Maybe he’d grab a bite at the club. Maybe this was a Sunday ritual for him, leaving his wife a golf widow, spending two, three, maybe four hours on the links, and with his cronies thereafter. It made sense. Anyone who played in these temperatures had to be a fanatic.

Maybe. But of course I couldn’t really know. There was no time to hone in on his patterns, and all my suppositions were just that. But with only five days to work with, I had to exploit whatever openings presented themselves, no matter how narrow.

It took me less than forty minutes to reach the Spy Shop on 34th between Third and Lexington. I remembered it, along with a few other handy places, from the last time I’d reconnoitered New York. Predictably, there were no parking spaces anywhere nearby. I considered parking illegally—I was going to be in the store for only a few minutes—but decided it wasn’t worth the admittedly small risk of having the BMW’s presence here logged in a New York City law enforcement database. I found a garage around the corner, gave the attendant a twenty to keep the car on the main floor for fifteen minutes, and jogged over to the Spy Shop. It was a bit warmer now than when I’d arrived that morning, but I was still going to have to make time to buy some proper clothes when I had a chance.

The store was well outfitted with various options for vehicle tracking, overt and surreptitious. I chose a top-of-the-line model I was familiar with, the Pro Trak Digital, a magnetically emplace-able real-time GPS system, and was suddenly down another twenty-six hundred dollars. Along with warm clothes, I was going to have to find a bank.

I picked up the car and headed back to the Village Club. Traffic was manageable again and I made good time. While I drove, I unpacked the unit, placed the eight D cells I had also bought into the battery pack, assembled everything, and tested it for power. It all seemed to be working. I put the unit in the glove box and stuffed the empty packaging under the passenger seat. I was wearing the gloves, not just because of the weather, but to keep my prints off the device, too.

As I turned onto Thayer Lane again, exactly ninety-seven minutes after I’d left it, I started thinking in Japanese, like my good friend Yamada, who this time was being transferred to New York and would live on Long Island. Like many Japanese, I was an ardent golfer, and relished the chance to become a member of a top club for less than the million dollars entry cost in Japan. I was hoping to take a look at the Village Club because it sounded so good on the Internet…. Would that be all right?

I pulled up to the guard post and rolled down the window. The guy inside, about seventy with ruddy cheeks and fading blue eyes, leaned toward me, away from a portable space heater. Something about him felt like retired law enforcement, but I took in the impression only in the most fleeting mental shorthand. I was too deeply in character to consciously consider anything operational, although of course I was still aware of and responsive to it.

He looked me over, and again in some compartmented part of my consciousness I realized he wasn’t used to seeing Asians pull in here. “May I help you, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I said, in the thickest Japanese accent I could muster, with an accompanying helpless, timid expression. “I move soon Long Island. Want club member become. Can pick up…brochure here?”

The guard smiled. Amazing the generosity of spirit a little helplessness can bring out in some people. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “The main facility is directly in front of you. Just park anywhere you can find a spot and they’ll help you inside.”

“Thank you very much,” I said, nodding. The gate went up and I drove forward, my heart starting to beat hard.

The parking lot was on my right. I pulled in, driving slowly through. Damn, it was full. The place was popular.

Black Mercedeses weren’t exactly in short supply in the parking lot, and I had a couple of false starts before seeing each time that the license plate of the car I was looking at was wrong. But the third time proved to be the charm. There was Accinelli’s car, in one of the lot’s center spaces, next to a deep green Aston Martin Vanquish S. Perfect.

I kept going until I found an open spot, at the farthest edge of the lot. I parked and took the unit out of the glove box. The battery pack and accessories went into my front pockets. The GPS and cellular modem housing I tucked into the back of my pants, under the jacket. I took two quick breaths and got out of the car.

I walked slowly, my breath fogging in the cold, swiveling my head as though taking in the view of the lovely golf course and grounds surrounding the lot. In fact, I was checking for people. The cold was on my side at the moment—it wasn’t the sort of day anyone sane would linger in a parking lot. And if there were people waiting in one of the cars for some reason, they’d certainly have the engine running, with a billow of exhaust rising up from the tailpipe.

No, the lot was empty. It was lunchtime; that was also on my side. I reached Accinelli’s car, scanned it and the surrounding vehicles to ensure I hadn’t missed anyone, then took a step in next to the Vanquish, easing the GPS unit from my waistband as I moved. I doubted I was the first person to pause for a closer look at that gorgeous emerald of a race car. It was built to be ogled as much as to be driven.

I leaned closer, my hands on my thighs, then dropped into a squat. I pivoted, and in less than fifteen seconds, had emplaced the main unit and battery pack on the Mercedes’ undercarriage, the GPS antenna to the underside of the rear bumper, and the miniature cellular antenna underneath the side skirting. I glanced around from the squat and saw no one, then stood and, for the benefit of anyone who might just possibly have seen me disappear for a moment, shook my head at the Vanquish one last time in envious admiration.

For form’s sake, I continued on toward the main building. Continue all the way through with the charade, or pull out now? There were risks and benefits both ways. The more time I spent here and the more people I engaged, the greater the chance I would be remembered. On the other hand, if that former cop of a guard asked anyone inside about a Japanese visitor looking for a brochure, it would look odd if no one remembered me.

I decided there was less risk in just killing five minutes walking along the golf course, then waving my thanks to the guard as I left. I had parked so far down that I was out of his view in any event.

I strolled along the access road, my hands in my pockets, shoes crunching the frozen gravel, breath fogging, ears numb. A group of four well-insulated diehards was leaving the course in my direction, golf bags slung over their backs. I kept my head down, and from the cadences of their conversation as they passed I sensed they had paid me no mind.

I stopped at the edge of the access road and admired the green for three minutes, freezing my ass off. Then I turned around and headed back to the BMW. I waved to the guard as I drove past, but he seemed not even to notice. His attention was directed at cars coming in, not ones that were leaving.

There were a few things I still needed, things I could probably find in the suburbs, but I wanted to do the bulk of my shopping in the more anonymous city. So I drove back, stopping first at a military-surplus store I knew—Galaxy, on Sixth Avenue between 30th and 31st. I went inside, and emerged fifteen minutes later wearing polypropylene long underwear under a new pair of jeans and a wool turtleneck sweater; wool socks and work boots; a black wool watch cap and a navy peacoat; and a pair of ski gloves. Thank God. I also had on a pair of sports shades, the swept-back style bikers and marathoners use, which would cut the winter glare and, not coincidentally, obscure my appearance. In my pocket was a Victorinox Swiss Army knife with a four-inch blade. Not exactly a fighting knife, but the kind of tool I preferred was hard to find in New York and this was better than nothing. The clothes I’d been wearing I carried in a store bag, along with a few extra pairs of socks and underwear.