“Let me give you a quick tour of the whole enchilada,” Rothlein said.
He took us through a series of architectural drawings that laid out the ship’s levels as well as the doors and staircases that connected one to the other.
“It’s a lot to process in a short time,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want to take some of my team with you? We do this kind of thing for a living.”
“Jim, if this guy sees a mob storming the boat, he’ll blow it to hell before anyone can stop him. Cates is giving us a shot at doing it our way.”
“I don’t know what your way is, but do me a favor,” Rothlein said. “Don’t try to do it in those Florsheims. At least let me fit you out with a couple of pairs of deck shoes.”
“And radios,” Kylie said.
“And while you’re at it, a little Dramamine,” I said. “I’ve never been much of a sailor.”
A voice came from the cockpit. “Target is in sight, Lieutenant. I’ll radio the captain of the yacht to reduce speed. We’ll be alongside in three minutes.”
“You guys ever jumped from one boat to the next?” Rothlein said as I slipped on a pair of Sperry Top-Siders. “It’s a lot easier than it sounds. It’s like hopping on an escalator at Bloomingdale’s. The hard part is all being done by my guy at the wheel. It’s his job to get close enough so you can jump, but not so close that I have to apologize to the Port Authority for putting a big hole in their shiny new boat.”
“Well, then I guess we’ve got the easy part,” Kylie said. “All we have to do is make sure Benoit doesn’t send a raging fireball through two hundred feet of Shelley Trager’s yacht and a hundred of his dinner guests.”
Chapter 87
THREE MINUTES LATER, we had dropped our speed and were cruising alongside the Shell Game.
Rothlein radioed Captain Campion. “We’re in position.”
A section of the yacht’s massive steel hull opened like the door on the fuselage of a jetliner. An aluminum ramp telescoped out about six feet.
“Is that as far out as it goes?” Kylie said.
“It was designed to be lowered onto a dock,” Rothlein said. “Not for changing horses in midstream.”
There was an even shorter ramp extending over the side of our boat, and I stood on the edge waiting for the two ramps to line up.
“Zach, if you’re waiting for them to lock together like a couple of Legos, it’s not going to happen,” Rothlein said. “This is as close as we’re going to get.”
It was only a three-foot jump. Half my height. Easy on dry land. Not so easy when point A and point B are bobbing and weaving like two staggering drunks trying to cross Broadway against a red light.
“Go,” Rothlein said.
I watched the rhythm of the two ramps as they moved back and forth, up and down, hoping to pick up on a pattern. There was none. The water was too choppy.
“Don’t think about it, Six,” came the familiar taunting voice from behind me.
I jumped just as the Kristina caught some chop, and what had started out as a graceful leap turned into a flailing lunge. But both feet hit the ramp, and I stumbled into the arms of two crew members who broke my momentum and lowered me to the steel floor of the cargo hold.
Within seconds, Kylie was right behind me.
“Have you ever tried to get on the escalator at Bloomie’s during the Christmas rush?” she said. “This was actually easier.”
“I hate you,” I said.
Ordway stepped to the edge of the Kristina’s ramp, sized up the gap, took a few steps backward, and got a running start.
Just as he was about to spring off, a crosscurrent caught the Kristina, tilting it, and dropping the front end of the ramp into the river. He didn’t have a chance. He pitched forward, and his chest slammed into the hard steel of the opposite ramp.
He slid into the water, floundering against the weight of his equipment to keep from going under.
I could hear Rothlein yell “Kill the throttle,” and the Shell Game zipped ahead, leaving the Kristina in its wake.
I radioed Rothlein. “Is he okay?”
“One of my guys dove in after him as soon as he hit the water,” Rothlein said. “We’ll have him back on board in two minutes, and if he’s game, we can line up another pass. Five minutes tops.”
If he’s game? Five extra minutes for Benoit to get off the boat? Another pass for him to spot us?
I keyed the mic. “Negative. Hang back. I’ll call you as soon as we have Benoit in custody.”
I turned to the two crew members. “Lock it up,” I said.
They retracted the ramp, and I took one last look at the Kristina as it slowly faded into the distance.
The steel door clanged shut.
Kylie looked at me. “Good call, Zach,” she said. “Let’s go find Benoit.”
Chapter 88
GABRIEL STOOD ON the main deck looking out at the splashes of red and orange in the western sky. “Magic hour,” he whispered, using the time-honored film term reserved for sunsets as glorious as this one.
No director could ask for more perfect lighting. And there in the distance was the star of the scene. She was still just a gray shape, but he could make out the torch held high in her right hand, welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but you’re going to have to settle for the rich, the oppressive, and the toxically greedy.”
The yacht had turned around and had just sailed under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which links Brooklyn to Staten Island. Miss Liberty would be ready for her star turn in about ten minutes. Plenty of time to plant the final bomb in the galley, go back downstairs to the Zodiac, and line up the parting shot.
He stood at the rail for one last lingering look, quietly marveling at the sun-streaked horizon, when he felt the first tear trickle down his cheek.
I can’t be crying. It wasn’t in the script. Everything was going so perfectly. It was all coming together as writ, but the tears—that caught him by surprise.
“Damn you, Lexi. You’re ruining my makeup,” he said, laughing into the warm evening breeze. “I miss you, baby. I should have let you have a bigger role. Maybe you wouldn’t have gone out on your own and—what the hell?”
It was another boat.
The river was filled with all kinds of fishing vessels and pleasure craft, but this one stood out because it was coming straight at them. The guy at the wheel was probably some millionaire, either drunk, stupid, or both.
It drew closer. But this guy wasn’t drunk. He was a pro, and Gabriel watched as he swung around and pulled up parallel to the bigger yacht.
He looked around to see if any of his shipmates saw it, but the buffet must have opened because there were fewer than a dozen people on deck, all of them too absorbed in themselves to notice the world around them.
Gabriel watched as the smaller boat kept pace with the bigger one, wave for wave, side by side, with military precision. And then, out of nowhere, a ramp extended from the yacht. A boarding ramp.
It was just at the waterline, and within seconds the other boat lowered its own ramp.
Impossible, Gabriel thought as he watched Detectives Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald pull an Evel Knievel across the makeshift bridge and disappear into the cargo hold of the Shell Game.
Im-freaking-possible. They were supposed to be dead, but there they were. Coming for him.
A third cop, decked in black fatigues and weighted down with a vest full of gear, stepped up to the edge of the ramp. Bomb squad goon here to put me out of business.
But the man in black wasn’t so lucky. Just as he was about to leap, the boat tilted, and he bounced off the ramp and into the water.
One less cop to worry about, but now there was no time to plant the bonus bomb. The three in the engine room were more than enough.
Gabriel had no idea how the two cops had managed to avoid getting blown up and then track him here. But it didn’t m
atter.
He stormed down the metal steps to the lower deck. “Glad to have you on board, Detectives,” he said, the tears in his eyes now replaced with white-hot rage. “You’ll be dead before the sun sets.”
Chapter 89
“ENGINE ROOM,” I said to the two crew members who helped us board.
“We can take you,” one of them said.
“Just point,” I said. “Then leave.”
They were trained not to argue with authority. One pointed, and they both left.
“This is my first time on a yacht,” I said to Kylie. “I hope they weren’t expecting a tip.”
We drew our guns and found the metal door that warned us to stay out in five languages.
The engine room looked exactly like the picture Rothlein had showed us, but it wasn’t nearly as loud as I expected. I was prepared for the clanking and banging I’ve heard in the movies, but this was more like the low rumble of a high-performance car.
We headed straight for the forward section, and there, molded to the hull, exactly where Ordway predicted it would be, was a thick gray block of C4, still bearing Benoit’s handprints. There were red, white, blue, and yellow wires buried inside the plastic along with a cell phone waiting to be triggered by a signal from a cell phone.
“It’s armed,” I whispered.
“Then we better find him before he jumps ship,” Kylie said. “We’ll split up. You go upstairs, and I’ll—”
The thud was loud, clear, and completely out of sequence with the steady rhythmic beat of the engine.
Kylie mouthed the word Benoit.
A second thud.
Engine rooms are not known for their acoustics, and we couldn’t tell exactly where the thuds were coming from. I went left, Kylie went right, and we slowly advanced in the general direction of the sound.
And then, a new sound. This one was human, but muffled. Déjà vu. It was the same thing I had heard from Spence less than an hour ago. Only this time, I couldn’t trust the source.
Benoit was smart, and for all I knew it could be a trap. He could have heard us come in and figured a muffled cry for help would get us out in the open.
I motioned for Kylie to stay down.
“NYPD!” I yelled. “Come out with your hands over your head.”
The voice came back loud now, desperate, angry, and totally unintelligible. I pointed my body and my gun in the direction of the sound. And then I saw him. An older guy, obviously a crew member, duct-taped to a pipe.
“Over here!” I yelled to Kylie, and I dropped down and peeled the tape from the mouth of Benoit’s latest victim.
“NYPD,” I repeated.
“Bomb squad, I hope,” the man said.
“No.”
“Then cut me loose and get me the hell out of—Mother of God—Kylie? Kylie Harrington? Is that you?”
“Hey, Charles. Right now, I’m Detective MacDonald,” she said as I slashed the tape from the man’s arms and legs. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine as soon as I get the hell off this ship. There are three bombs down here, and somewhere topside there’s a maniac with a cell phone who’s planning to set them off.”
“Benoit—how long ago did he leave?” I said.
“Maybe five minutes. He’s crazy. He thinks he’s making a movie. No camera, but this whack job is making a movie.”
“He can’t blow these till he’s off the boat,” I said. “Do you have any idea how he plans to get off?”
“He’s going to steal one of the Zodiacs, put some distance between us and him, then speed-dial us all to kingdom come.”
“Not if we can stop him first,” Kylie said, helping the man to his feet.
He was a little wobbly, and he grabbed onto a thick chrome pipe.
“Charles, you’re on your own,” she said. “What’s the fastest way to where Shelley keeps the Zodiacs?”
“Staircase D. Red door,” he said, pointing.
We took off.
“Kylie, wait!” he yelled out. “One more thing you should know.”
We stopped.
“Benoit showed me his script. He wants to blow up the ship with the Statue of Liberty in the picture,” Charles said.
“What does that mean?” Kylie said.
“It means that once he’s out on the river, and he can see the statue in the background, we are dead in the water.”
Chapter 90
RICH, POWERFUL BUSINESSMEN always have an exit strategy, Gabriel thought as he raced down the steps toward the stern. In Shelley Trager’s case, it was the Zodiac Bayrunner, a fifteen-foot yacht tender with a sleek, fire engine red fiberglass hull and a forty-horse Yamaha outboard engine. At about twenty thousand bucks a pop, it was the rich man’s dinghy, and Trager, of course, had a small fleet of them.
Two were waiting for him at the swimming platform. He untied one, slid it into the water, and got in, taking care not to do anything stupid that might get his cell phone wet.
The evening light was picture-perfect, bouncing off the wake of the yacht as it slowly pulled away from him. But the statue was still too far in the distance. He had to get closer.
He started the Zodiac’s engine and, with about a hundred feet between him and the yacht, followed her, cupping one hand to his forehead to block out the sun. With both eyes fixed on Liberty Island, he waited for the perfect shot.
“O beautiful, for spacious skies,” he half talked, half sang. But he was so wrapped up in the visual that he wasn’t even aware of the sound track.
The first bullet snapped him out of his reverie. The gunshot rang out, instantly followed by the cracking of fiberglass as it bounced off the hull.
“It’s a rigid inflatable, you idiots,” he yelled at the two cops standing on the swimming platform of Trager’s boat. “You think you can sink this baby like it’s a rubber raft?”
Another gunshot. And another.
He crouched low in the Zodiac and yelled over the gunwale. “Keep shooting, assholes. You’re only making this movie better.”
Chapter 91
BY THE TIME we got to the swimming platform, Benoit was following the yacht in one of the Zodiacs. He was far enough away to survive a blast, but close enough for us to open fire.
“Shoot out the pontoons!” I yelled. “Sink him. He can’t detonate with a wet cell phone.”
The Zodiac was going fast enough to raise its nose, and the blazing red sausage-shaped tubes that peeked just above the waterline made perfect targets.
We both fired. We both hit a pontoon. And we both expected the Zodiac to deflate like a balloon when the air is let out.
But it turned out that we knew as much about watercraft as we did about explosives. The bullets made direct hits, but nothing happened.
“Shit, it’s an RIB,” Kylie said. “The pontoon is rigid. It’s like shooting into Styrofoam.”
Benoit sat up and yelled at us. All I could make out was the word “assholes.”
“He’s slowing down,” Kylie said as our yacht started to draw away from the Zodiac. “He’s drifting out of range.”
“The hell he is,” I said, untying a second Zodiac and dropping it over the side. “Get in. I’m driving.”
I dove into the boat, yanked hard on the starter cord, and the Yamaha engine sprang to life. With my right hand on the throttle, I extended my left to help Kylie climb aboard.
She grabbed on, set one foot on the hull, and I leaned back to pull her in. It was a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, because as soon as I leaned backward, my right hand moved the throttle. The Zodiac lurched forward, and I pulled Kylie into the drink.
She was underwater for less than five seconds, then popped up, sputtering. “I lost my gun.”
I maneuvered the boat in a circle, and when I got close enough to Kylie, I killed the power just to make sure I didn’t chop her into fish bait with the propeller.
She put her fingers on one of the fiberglass sides, but it was slippery. I grabbed he
r hands to pull her in, but there was no leverage. I leaned over the side of the boat and put my hands under her arms. “On three,” I said. “You jump up. I’ll pull.
“One, two, three.” Kylie bobbed up, and I threw my body back hard. Her clothes were drenched, and the water felt like it had added another hundred pounds, but I managed to drag her halfway over the side of the boat. I hung on tight as her hands found a chrome grab bar, and she pulled herself all the way in.
“I lost my gun,” she said again.
“My fault. I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”
“Where’s Benoit?” she said, sitting up and pushing the wet hair out of her eyes.
Anyone else would have turned his boat around and tried to get away. But not Benoit. He had cut the engine and was letting his Zodiac drift. He’d had a front-row seat to every murder he’d committed so far, and he wasn’t going to miss the grand finale.
He sat up and raised his cell phone in the air.
Like a mime in the spotlight, he held up his middle finger. It hung there, silhouetted against the twilight, mocking us, defying us to stop him, and knowing we couldn’t.
And then, he turned the finger downward and pressed it hard on the dial pad of the cell phone.
I wasn’t sure if Kylie and I were far enough away from the yacht to survive the blast.
We were both on the floor of the Zodiac. I rolled over on top of her and covered her with my body.
“That’s twice in one day,” she said.
“Old habits die hard,” I whispered in her ear. “Brace yourself.”
Chapter 92
THEY WERE MAKING a mockery of his movie.
Another time, another place, and The Chameleon might have found it funny. But this was the climax of his film, and instead of acting like worthy opponents, MacDonald and Jordan had showed up and were floundering around in the water like a couple of Keystone Kops.
Liberty Island was not as close as he would have liked, but it was close enough. He had to act now. He waited for Jordan to haul MacDonald up into the Zodiac. This was the last scene, and he didn’t want them to miss it.
NYPD Red Page 21
