Strategic Moves

TWENTY-SEVEN

Stone woke a little after nine, but he was not ready to get up yet. He ordered breakfast from his housekeeper, and she sent it up with the Times. He switched on the TV, which was tuned to the Today show.

He listened idly to the news as he scanned the front page, then something caught his ear.

“Matt,” a young female news reader was saying, “I have a mystery for you this morning. Let’s go to our local reporter in Rye, New York.”

Another young woman holding a microphone appeared on the screen. She was standing next to a large swimming pool in a lush garden.

“Matt, this is the garden of a surgeon who lives in Rye, and his garden runs all the way down to the beach of Long Island Sound. The doctor awoke this morning to find something in his swimming pool.” The camera crane moved high and over the water, pointing down. “That,” the reporter said, “according to a police diver, is a nearly new Mercedes 550 sedan. It has Spanish license plates and has two bullet holes in the left front fender, and no one is inside. Neither the doctor nor anyone else has the slightest idea how it got there.”

The camera switched to a shot of the reporter and the doctor, with his back turned to the camera. “Tell us what happened,” she said.

“Well,” the doctor replied, “I was wakened at four-thirty or five o’clock this morning by a very loud noise, like an explosion. I got out of bed and looked out the rear window and saw nothing. I figured it must have been thunder, since the area around the pool was wet with rain, and I went back to bed. Later this morning, the gardener found the car and we called the police.”

The camera switched to a uniformed police officer wearing a chief’s insignia. “We’ve looked all over the area,” he said, “and there was simply no access to the pool that would have allowed the car to drive into it. The only way it could have gotten into the pool was to have been dropped from the air.”

The camera switched back to the reporter.

“Regina,” Matt Lauer said, “has anyone reported a car missing from an airplane?”

“Not as far as we know, Matt,” the woman replied. “We’ve called every cargo transporter in the phone book, and they’re as baffled as we are.”

“Keep us up to date on this story,” Lauer said. “I’m dying to know what happened.”

The phone rang. “Hello?” Stone said.

“Stone, it’s Lance. What the hell happened last night?”

“It’s all as Holly said,” Stone replied. “I watched a movie in the trailer with Estancia, and I got sleepy and went to bed. When I woke up Estancia wasn’t there. Then we heard the rear platform open and all ran aft. I saw Estancia at the wheel of the car, and I could see the shoulder straps of a parachute. Mike had briefed us earlier about where they were stored. Estancia started the car, put it in reverse, and disappeared into the night. There was just a story on the Today show about the car landing in somebody’s swimming pool in Rye, but there was nobody in it.”

“I saw that just now,” Lance said. “Thank God it didn’t fall on a school or hospital.”

“Looks like you’ve bought Estancia a very expensive airline ticket to the United States,” Stone said. “Are the police looking for him?”

“Ah, no,” Lance replied.

“Why not?”

“To call in the FBI or the police would attract too much notice. We can hardly put out an APB on him.”

“Doesn’t he owe the IRS millions? Let them find him.”

“I don’t want to wrestle the IRS for possession,” Lance said. “We’ll have to find another way.”

“Well, good luck,” Stone said. “Goodbye, Lance.” He hung up.

Pablo Estancia had arrived at his Park Avenue apartment, had breakfast, showered and shaved, then phoned his barber and made an appointment for mid-morning.

The man arrived at ten o’clock, set a dining chair in Estancia’s dressing room, and had a look at his head. “The usual?” the barber, who had not seen him for more than a year, asked.

“I’d like it shorter, please, and I’d like to lose most of the gray.”

“Of course,” the man said, and went to work.

After the barber left, Estancia looked in the mirror and thought he looked ten years younger. He looked in a dresser drawer and came up with a box containing various bits of false hair. He selected a couple of pieces, brushed them carefully, and applied a thin coat of rubber cement.

Holly Barker sat next to Todd Bacon in Lance Cabot’s office at the Agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters and let Lance vent.

“This is a total fiasco,” he said. “I thought you had this extraction planned down to the last detail.”

“We did,” Holly said, “but in our planning we somehow missed the possibility of the extractee driving a car out of the airplane and into a Rye, New York, swimming pool. I think Todd and I now realize that was an oversight,” she said wryly, “but I have to point out that, in approving the extraction, you didn’t spot that flaw in the plan, either.”

Todd wisely kept his mouth shut.

Lance stared out the window and smiled a little.

“What are you thinking?” Holly asked.

“I was just thinking that this would make a wonderful story for my memoirs, but the Agency’s censors would never allow it to be published.”

Stone was at his desk in the late morning when Joan buzzed him. “There’s a gentleman to see you,” she said. “He won’t give his name, but he says you know him.”

“Oh, what the hell,” Stone said. “It’s a slow morning; send him in.”

A man Stone had never seen before appeared in his office doorway. He appeared to be in his mid-fifties, was dressed in a well-tailored suit, and wore a dark mustache and goatee and heavy, horn-rimmed glasses.

Stone stood up as the man walked toward him with his hand out. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” he said.

The man laughed and took a chair. “I am Erwin Gelbhardt,” he said, “but you can call me Pablo.”