“Bring it on!”
“Just the two of us, all stealth, no press, no TV, nobody knows.”
Rory shook his head. Rawlings looked at me like I was crazy. “Alex, the Bullrun boys are all pumped to shoot it for Spike TV, it’ll be sweet! We’ll get choppers, a party at both ends—”
I raised my hand to cut him off. “That’s the worst idea of all time.”
“You are scared!”
“Yeah, scared of having guns pulled on me, scared of being arrested at the finish, scared of going to jail! Are you nuts?”
“Come on,” said Rory. “Andy and Handsome Dave are ready to do it.”
“Of course they are,” I said. “Their asses aren’t on the line.”
“All right, then,” said Rawlings, “you think about it and let me know.”
“Oh, I’ll do it, on my conditions. You think about that.”
“Ain’t got nothing to think about.”
I lay down and watched the shadows of the overhead fan blades’ slow rotation across the ceiling. Twenty-five hours. Rawlings couldn’t have read Cannonball!, and he obviously knew nothing of what I’d already learned about the Express from Cory. This would give me a huge advantage, if I accepted. He also believed I was the second best illegal endurance driver in the United States, after him, of course. I was flattered. I was terrified. His offer was the only alternative to the gradual, seemingly inevitable end of my quest, but it wasn’t quite fear that made me hesitate. We’d long been inextricably bound by our costly and public rivalry, but however parallel our paths, I now realized we were very far apart. I had become, in every way but one, the man I sought—a man whose very existence was based solely on faith. All I had to do was lift the phone, call those on my list, and set a date and time, yet still I hesitated. I was scared. I wanted someone else to lead me up the mountain.
Rawlings didn’t want a guide. He wanted someone to go with him.
I had to call Cory immediately, and not merely because a Rawlings solo run might affect the film’s prospects. There was no one else to call. She stopped me the instant I uttered his name. “Alex, there’s no such thing as coincidence. He and Rory have been fishing for info on the movie, and I’m not talking. What’d they want?” She remained silent after I told her.
“Cory, are you thinking what I am?”
“There’s a lot to think about. You first.”
“We’re in a catch-22. I can’t do the show, but if he goes on his own and breaks it, no matter how good our movie is, America’s gonna be watching our boy from Texas instead.”
“Relax,” she said. “Rawlings doesn’t want you to go with him. Rawlings needs you to go with him. He can’t go without you.”
America loved a winner. Rawlings needed a loser, and every red-blooded citizen would cheer the Texan’s triumph over the fake German cop with a shaved head.
But not one of them grasped my true inner calculus. I wasn’t interested solely in notoriety, as was everyone’s first guess, nor in money. Breaking the record wasn’t another checkpoint en route to my goal. In the absence of The Driver, it alone had become the goal. Rawlings would go even if it couldn’t be broken. I’d only go if it could. Spike and Bullrun were willing to risk others’ lives—and Rawlings even his own—for entertainment. I would not.
Rawlings had an excuse to go. I’d been waiting for one. And he’d just given it to me.
Although I couldn’t go with him, he couldn’t go without me, and the first public attempt to break 32:07 in twenty years would bring down a draconian curtain of civil and criminal charges on the participants. The final step on my path, so inconceivably dangerous that I had never considered the one option now forced upon me, now lay beyond a closing door.
I had to see. I had to know.
I had to go. Alone. Without a guide. As soon as possible. Before Rawlings.
“Alex, are you there?”
“Sorry, just thinking…Cory, if Rawlings did go, could he break it?”
“I’ll send more on Diem and Turner, show you the rough cut, then you tell me.”
CHAPTER 26
Badidea.com
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2005
NEW YORK CITY
“So whaddya think?” said Cory at the end of the world’s first screening of 32 Hours, 7 Minutes. She was sitting on my couch in between The Weis and Nine, Team Polizei consigliere Shawn Canter on my emergency movie-watching futon, Skylar in my lap on one recliner, Lelaine Lau—my Audrey Hepburn-esque business partner—on the other.
“Maaaaaaan,” said Nine, “I can’t believe these Diem/Turner guys had a spotter plane.”
I turned to Cory. “Now we know where the spotter-plane legend came from.”
“Cory, Alex,” said The Weis, “if all these Express guys said they’d go again, how come no one has? Why haven’t you?’”
Cory cracked a smile at him, then at me. “It would be great to shoot some B-roll in the M5.”
“Aliray,” said The Weis, “do you think 32:07 can be broken? Seriously.”
Everyone’s eyes darted between us.
“I don’t know.”
“So you,” said The Weis, “supposedly one of the best in the world at this kind of thing, even with all your scanners and gear, say it can’t be broken?”
“Of all the drivers I’ve ever met, Rawlings is the only one who thinks it’s possible, but he’s basing that on far less information than we have.”
“Alex,” said The Weis, “what does Yates say about the old records?”
“Remember, he only recognizes the 32:51 record from the ’79 Cannonball. Once the movie comes out, the 32:07 time will be recognized.”
“But what does he say is possible now?”
“Thirty-six hours.”
“I’ll quote Diem,” said Cory. “Records are meant to be broken.”
“Call it a recon run,” said Canter. “Shoot your B-roll, drive safe, see what happens. Alex does some talking-head stuff, and there’s your movie.”
Cory nodded. “A peek over the edge.”
Nine glared at me. “Moron…is this what you wanted?”
“Aliray,” said The Weis, “you do it, I’ll help you prep.”
“Alex,” said Canter, “what time are you going to shoot for?”
“It’s just a recon,” I said, looking Cory in the eye. “I’ll do the math, let’s say…36 hours?”
“I say 37,” said Nine.
“I say 34,” said The Weis.
“Guys,” I said, “if we don’t do it by mid-December, we have to wait until April.”
“Are you insane?” Cory shook her ahead at Nine, then turned to me. “I can’t believe you of all people want to wait until April. Suppose we go and get some amazing time, and then you decide you want to give 32:07 a shot. The real deal. We’ll have to wait until after next summer. We’ve got to do this now, just in case. Just in case.”
The silence made it clear that everyone had greatly underestimated this young independent filmmaker from L.A. Everyone else went to Sundance and prayed. Cory didn’t care. She would do anything for this movie, including a run. A big run. The run only Rawlings and I, whatever our motives, were willing to attempt. Everyone else, the rally people who didn’t run, or come back, the muscle-car guys, the Ferrari guys, the Cipriani diners, the mattress-tamers, every sports-car-driving banker in New York except Maher—all of them were joking. Cory Welles was not joking.
“Cory, the M5 will be ready within four weeks. Whatever it takes.”
“Christ,” said Nine, “you’re talking right before Christmas. The weather, man, it’s suicide. This is like badidea.com.”
“I’ll buy max-performance all-season tires. Everyone, even I don’t know the legal ramifications of what we’re going to do, so this conversation cannot leave this room.”
“Always inventing drama,” said The Weis. “I’m hungry and I miss my wife. I say we adjourn.”
Everyone sighed with relief until I stood and said, “I think we should all sign
nondisclosures. Cory?” She nodded. “Good, in that case, I love you all, thanks.”
Cory cornered me immediately. “Alex, you’re scared that if Rawlings finds out we’re going, he’ll go solo, no matter what.”
“Precisely. If anything goes wrong, if he’s caught, or kills someone, we’re screwed. My name’s on a movie called 32:07. If some crazy prosecutor starts digging around and asks anyone who’s the most likely to try to break it, I’m probably in the top three. Then we’ll never go, ever.”
“Done. I’ll have my attorney prepare NDAs for everyone. We’ll keep it secret until…I guess until we figure out what to do?”
“At least until we’re back safe, or maybe until the movie comes out. The beauty of it is that no one who knows Team Polizei will ever believe that I could make a run and not go public the same day. Any leak will sound like a bullshit rumor. They know I can’t keep my mouth shut. Enough talk; time for pizza, ice cream, and bed.”
“Good boy,” The Weis said on his way out. “You’re gonna be fine. I’m proud of you.”
“Enough man love,” said Nine, behind him. “Aliray, do I have to ask who’s copiloting?”
“No.”
“I hate you.”
“I hate you, too, but think of it! The first ones to try in twenty years! Nine, if we beat 36 hours then Yates is wrong, which means everyone is wrong.”
“Man, you’re gonna owe me a lot more than Taco Bell this time.”
“I’ll buy you In-N-Out Burger when we get to L.A. And I’ll even split the driving with you.”
“That sounds like a really good deal, Mr. Trump, now should I turn around and bend over, too? Try this one…I take the burger and you do all the driving.”
“Cute. FYI, I can’t drive in Arizona. If we’re stopped for any reason, my ’04 Bullrun arrest might come up on a police computer. We have to stop at one or both ends of Arizona so you can drive that leg.”
“Wait a second, if you’re driving and we’re pulled over outside Arizona, how do you know all the police databases aren’t connected?”
“I don’t. In fact Homeland Security has been trying to connect them since 9/11.”
“Thank God,” said Nine, whose new IT consultancy lent him unique insight into such matters. “That’ll take years. Anything else?”
“I need you here every day after work, six to ten, Monday through Thursday, until we go. Someone’s got to double-check my nav and fuel tables.”
“But I suck at math.”
“Me, too. Get some sleep, Mr. Goodrich.”
Everyone left but Skylar, with whom I watched TV in bed until she fell asleep without a word about the evening’s events. Only now did I see how much I’d changed since we’d met a year earlier. I wondered if she loved me too much to try to deter me, or if she feared being sacrificed because nothing would.
At 2 A.M. I snuck out of bed, my vibrating phone noisily walking itself across my hardwood floor. “Aliray,” Nine whispered, his words spoken from a tiled bathroom like that in which I, too, now hid, “have you thought about what happens if we break 36? I mean…in a big way?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“Dammit, now I’m definitely not gonna get any sleep. Seriously, do you think we can?”
“Do you? Now I’ve got to go to bed before my girlfriend leaves me over this, and so should you.” I hung up, but suspected he hung up on me first. I closed my eyes and tried in vain to sleep.
I stopped answering the phone roughly two weeks later, uncomfortable with having to lie even to close friends about why I’d stopped going out, and why my visit to the West Coast, purportedly to work on the film, might last as long as several months. I wondered how career criminals explained their periodic long absences to civilian friends, then quickly understood.
I needed eight weeks to complete work for which I had three. Our conversations, although held in English, became a hybridized jumble of military and mathematical terminology utterly impenetrable to all but Cory, The Weis, and Nine. Nine and I had each already spent at least 40 off-work hours preparing and test-driving the M5. I’d spent another 20 on police-radio-frequency research, barely a quarter of what I thought necessary. We spent painstaking hours of slowly scrolling, at maximum screen resolution, mile by mile through the Garmin’s Shortest Route feature’s best guess at the shortest route. The elimination of errant turns and gratuitous mileage was so important we began eyeballing the trip on-screen in near-real time, an ordeal made worse during our shift change, groans punctuating the hourly prying of a computer mouse from an atrophied claw that had once been a hand. Having cut the route down to 2,817 miles and revised the fuel/time tables, we attempted to correct the errors cascading down the spreadsheet with every mile and minute shaved.
We cursed Microsoft tech support’s policy of hanging up on anyone using their software for what might be a criminal endeavor, then cursed each other for not suggesting we tell them it was a high school science project. Whatever errors remained on our increasingly complex driveplan, we settled on its projection of 36:27.
Between Nine’s IT background and my love of the Military Channel, countless driveplan revisions led to nomenclature such as Version .86Beta (Recon-12). Not only did this add gravitas to a document of such vast felonious import that we fought to conceal our giggles from The Weis (seated at my desk, hoping to save our lives through nightly analysis of National Weather Service forecasts), but the numerical suffix also counted down the days to departure, a constant reminder no fear-inspired levity could cloak.
On Friday, December 2, I began my survey of potential departure points as close as possible to one of Manhattan’s three Hudson River crossings. The Garmin’s mystical calculations suggested the Holland Tunnel was one mile closer to Los Angeles than the Lincoln, and nine miles closer than the George Washington Bridge. The Garmin also listed thirteen parking lots within one-quarter mile of our dream pick, which on a Friday night at midnight was only 10 minutes from my garage. I prayed, circling the tunnel entrance in increasing, stepladdered arcs around Tribeca’s complex network of one-way streets, always returning to the center to gauge its distance from the few indoor, guarded lots I found suitably proximate. A cluster of Port Authority police officers awaited me on my sixth slow tunnel drive-by. One pointed at me, another raised his radio, and just when I thought another pass might get me arrested under suspicion of scoping out one of New York’s most visible terror targets, I spotted a familiar but unexpectedly placed sign over their heads. The London-based Classic Car Club, a high-end sports-car time-share dealership, had just opened its gorgeous New York showroom 50 feet from the mouth of the tunnel. The patron saint of Nonviolent and Unprofitable Crimes must have been listening, because in a fortuitous coincidence I’d long ago met the CCC’s owners, and they’d been more than familiar with both Gumball and Team Polizei.
Cory returned Sunday, December 11, with a mountain of large, hard plastic camera and DV deck cases. With the surprise addition of James Petersmeyer, a twentysomething assistant cameraman Cory deemed essential on the run, four of us would share a space smaller than allotted just one in supermax solitary confinement.
“Two best friends who’ve run out of good jokes,” said Nine, “a hot, nonsmoking, hippie black belt who’s got us by the balls if we tell a bad joke on camera, and some surfer dude we don’t know? It’s the worst road trip of all time, only ten times longer.”
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2005
AI DESIGN—TUCKAHOE, NEW YORK
58 HOURS TO DEPARTURE
“But how are you going to prove it?” said Matt Figliola, president of AI Design, the Robb Report’s pick for the country’s best automotive customization specialists. Matt’s six feet three inches barred him from sitting in clients’ cars of Italian origin. Resembling Paul Sorvino, he alternated between the latter’s on-screen grimace and his own young son’s red-cheeked glee whenever I personally appeared to request installation of yet another illegal device. The Weis, Nine, and Cory approached as we st
ood by the M5, by far the dirtiest, most dented, highest-mileage car present, its $35,000 book value (not including thousands of dollars of modifications useless to anyone else) but a fraction of the next cheapest car in the garage. Charles Graeber, a six-five, thirty-two-year-old, Hunter Thompson-esque writer for Wired, the New York Times, and National Geographic, who spoke like he gargled with charcoal and gravel, and who, unarmed, had survived many unexpected meetings with Africa’s surliest meat-loving predators, sat uncomfortably hunched forward in my driver’s seat, already pushed back against its detent. Kenny Karasinski, AI’s young, goateed, shaved-headed Master Electronics Specialist, a man as responsible for keeping me out of jail as Seth, sat beside Graeber, pointing out and explaining how much of my gear had been concealed from prying eyes—and what couldn’t be.
“We wanted to bring him,” I whispered, looking down at Graeber, “but he wouldn’t fit in the back that long without crying for mercy. We’re doing witnesses at the start and finish, all the video, E-ZPass, gas and toll receipts.”
“Why bother if you’re not trying to break it?”
“Maybe something good will happen,” Cory piped in, poking me in the arm.
“If Aliray had any balls,” said The Weis, “he’d give it a shot.”
I gave him a nasty glare. “You’d try to stop me if I really wanted to.”
“What a coincidence.” Cory chuckled. She gave me a furtive glance and silently mouthed the letters N, D, and A.
“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.
The Driver Page 24
