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“Give it twelve minutes on the button,” he said.
“From here?”
“From here,” he said, putting down the camera and climbing into the back of the van.
He’d just slipped into all the gear and rechecked the kit bag when his wife’s iPhone alarm started ding-a-linging.
“Ready?” she said.
“Hit it.”
She zipped the van out of the lot and got them up on the ramp for the Belt Parkway west. Leroux held on to the back of her seat, looking out the windshield as they drove. The dark water on their left. The lights of Staten Island on the other side. There wasn’t a car on the road.
Another mile up, they took exit 3 on almost two wheels to West 278 and then got in the lane for the lower level of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Half a minute later, they were under the upper deck, girders steadily going by on the right beyond the low concrete divider wall.
They passed the first of the suspension bridge’s two seventy-story towers, and then Sophie slowed and stopped the van midspan, and he jumped out with the bag and the ropes. A car went by on his left a minute after Sophie drove off. He didn’t even glance at it. In his coveralls and reflective vest and bridge worker’s hard hat, he knew he was wallpaper.
Twenty paces up from where he’d been dropped off, he found the premarked girder, set up his six-millimeter accessory cord anchor around it, and then clicked onto the two hundred feet of climbing rope and chucked the rope over the side. Under the sodium light beside the bridge’s guardrail, he knelt on the concrete and looped and clipped the rope into his rappelling harness’s maillon and tightened the lock. Then he climbed out over the rusted guardrail and leaned back out into the wind and space.
Chapter 24
On the outside of the bridge, Matthew descended a few feet out of sight of the roadway and waited, dangling there twenty stories over the dark water. When he tilted his head back, he could see the lights of Manhattan sparkling against the cold night.
It arrived less than a minute later. He looked down, and rolling beneath him was the mighty arc of the MV Vestervig’s bow, followed by the orderly rows of colored containers stacked up from its hold like hundreds and hundreds of giant Legos.
The swush of the massive ship pushing through the water drowned out the whistle of rope through the maillon as he lowered himself in a slow, controlled rappel.
He stopped himself when he was ten feet above the top row of containers and stared at the wheelhouse coming at him. The container tops sliding by beneath his boots looked like the cars of several slow-moving trains. He lowered himself some more, and when he was five feet above the plain of rolling container steel, he let go with his brake hand and landed on his side on one of the container tops with a hollow thud.
He lay there for a full minute, listening for some outcry. The ship had a twenty-three-member crew, but only two navigation officers and an engineer worked the night shift. But there was nothing. Just the wind and the rhythmic slap of the water off the ship’s moving hull. Good, he thought as he took his map out of the bag and clicked on his flashlight.
Even with the exact bay row and tier on his ship map, it took him five minutes to find it, a battered blue Maersk box on the top row. He snipped through its high-security bolt seal with the cutters he’d brought, creaked open the container’s swinging door, and stepped inside and swung it closed behind him.
“My, my, my,” he said as he passed his flashlight over what was inside.
It was a car. But not just any car. A sleek, museum-grade ’67 Lamborghini Miura, cherry red with a mustard leather interior. It was worth well over a million dollars.
“Stop your drooling and get to work,” he mumbled to himself as he opened the supercar’s door and pulled the latch for the hood. Under it, instead of the engine, there was a spare tire and the battery. Leroux reached into the bag and brought out the device.
It was a sheet of plastic explosive along with a small radio-controlled detonator and a microphone. After activating its transmitter, he reached in under the hood on the driver’s side and sealed the device up against the chassis, just to the right of the left front wheel well. Then he wiped engine grease all over it until it was hidden.
After he was finished, he tested the device’s signal, then closed the hood and the car’s door and smiled. Now, unbeknownst to the owner, the occupants in the car could be heard—or, better yet, killed—at any moment.
He checked his watch.
“Okay, time to go.”
He came back out of the container and resealed it with an identical high-security bolt seal from his bag.
When he climbed back on top of the container’s roof, he could see that the ship was already in the tight Kill Van Kull waterway that separated Bayonne, New Jersey, from Staten Island’s north shore.
Some industrial tanks went by along the right shore of the shipping channel. Then he passed a smaller container ship, called a feeder, sitting at a dock before he saw the Bayonne Bridge.
With only one hundred and fifty feet of clearance from the bridge to the waterline, the huge MV Vestervig’s radio and radar antennas would clear it by only twenty feet. He spotted the rope ladder hanging down off the bridge a minute later, and he walked over the tops of the containers and caught it and quickly scurried up to the bridge deck.
He had to wait a few minutes, hangi
ng from the bridge’s guardrail, after the ship was gone before Sophie arrived.
