The Fourth Perimeter Page 18

  Kurt had already gone through the boat’s equipment, and the new fishing gear he’d ordered had arrived the day before. The boat was outfitted as if Kurt was a professional guide. He’d carefully familiarized himself with all of it so that on his trip with the president it would look like this was a regular pastime for him, which it wasn’t. In one corner of the stern was a toolbox, built into the hull of the boat. Using the tools from a workbench right there in the boathouse, Kurt had constructed a false bottom in the toolbox with a spring-loaded release. By pushing down on both sides simultaneously, he could cause the bottom of the box to pop up, revealing a three-inch well underneath. Made from sheet metal and covered over with the appropriate greasy set of tools, the bottom would look just like the real thing.

  Beneath it was a 9mm Browning loaded with ten hollow-point slugs. On top of the haphazard mess of tools, he had placed two brand-new flare guns that looked alarmingly like snub-nosed pistols. They would create a false alarm that would distract the agents searching the boat from the real threat underneath the chest. It was an arrangement that Kurt fussed over like a nesting hen, checking it every time he came on the boat to see if it was just right, often deciding that it wasn’t and stopping to poke around.

  Once the dive equipment was fueled up and on board, Kurt looked at his watch. Jill had taken Gracie to the airport and wouldn’t be back for another hour and a half. Kurt had finally convinced his older sister to go back to their house in Greenwich. She had a small group of friends there, and he had also arranged for his other older sister, Colleen, who lived in Boston, to stay with her for a while. Kurt still regretted leaving Gracie behind, but he knew for certain that it was best for everyone.

  Their conversation last night had unsettled him. Over the past several weeks, Gracie had undergone a change that Kurt hadn’t fully noticed until then. She seemed to have somehow found a level of peace that was foreign to him. It was possible that intense mourning had worn down the edges of her pain.

  Maybe that was why she tried to stop him. Perhaps she no longer felt the acute agony that plagued him every time he thought of his son.

  “I don’t think you should kill them, Kurtis,” she had said. “Whoever they are, I don’t think it will help you.”

  Kurt had stared at her in disbelief.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Gracie had said, “but you and I are at different points in all this. I have had the luxury of grieving these last few weeks. You haven’t.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she’d said. “You’re using it to spur you on, to motivate you. You’re keeping your hate alive. I felt the same hate, Kurtis. But I see now that it can’t help. You need to mourn Collin’s death to heal yourself. Killing his killers won’t help you, Kurtis. It can only hurt. It can’t bring him back . . .”

  Kurt had glowered at his sister. That wasn’t what he needed to hear, and he told her so.

  “I know I can’t change you, Kurtis,” she had wearily replied. “I know you too well. I know you’ll do what you have to do, and I don’t know . . . Maybe for you it’s the right thing. I just want to help you. You know I love you and you know I’ll always be here for you, no matter what you decide to do.”

  It was those words that made Kurt certain she would forgive him, not only for killing the president but for leaving her to live by herself.

  It wasn’t that Gracie hadn’t been attached to him through the years, but Kurt knew that it was Collin she really lived for. And he wasn’t leaving her without any means. The house in Greenwich had been transferred into her name, as well as a fifty-million-dollar trust fund. Gracie would live in comfort, if alone.

  Kurt backed the boat out of its slip and onto the lake. It was Tuesday, a slow day on the water, especially during midmorning. Kurt headed out to the middle and then north toward the village. The closer he got, the more the little village reminded him of the eclectic tangle of colorful homes and shops that was characteristic of the hamlets along the waterways of Europe. The stunning water and the multiplicity of flower boxes gave the unkempt row of buildings a charm that was decidedly un-American. A mile out, almost directly in front of the country club, he eased up on the throttle and began to search the depths over the side for the enormous intake pipe for the nearby city of Syracuse’s water supply.

  The pipe itself, fifty inches in diameter, could still be seen at a depth of around thirty feet. It terminated, he knew, at about forty feet, and that wasn’t very far from where it disappeared from sight. Following the line of the pipe, Kurt spotted an orange ball floating twelve feet below the surface that was chained as a marker to the intake valve. He dropped his anchor at that spot and looked around. Two jet skis were noisily tearing up the water down closer to the village, and another fishing boat half a mile away to the south trolled steadily. There was no wind, so the sailboats were idle. Kurt felt confident that this part of the lake belonged to him alone.

  Ten minutes later, he was in his scuba gear. After a quick nervous look around, he hoisted one of the five AV-1 underwater scooters from the boat’s deck and carefully dumped it over the side. Next he tossed over a black net bag that contained a second set of scuba gear with a dry suit that was fitted for him, as well as a weight belt, regulator, some chemical hot packs, and an air tank, all of which sank quickly to the bottom. He adjusted his mask and went over backward and into the lake. The water was thick with smallmouth bass hovering around the intake. The fish scattered quickly to the edge of Kurt’s vision; he knew this would be a spot where the president would want to stay anchored.

  The AV-1 was barely buoyant. Kurt started it up easily and used it to shoot through the water this way and that, familiarizing himself with its operation before propelling himself down to the bottom. He found his gear without a problem and dragged it twenty feet to the north of the intake cage, an eight-foot cube that prevented curious divers from being sucked up by the steady influx of water.

  He tucked his gear under the edge of the pipe, even though there was no reason to believe anyone would be down there who could find it. The divers who cleaned the intake did so twice a summer, once in late July and not again until September. And, while Kurt was aware that divers would scour the area around the judge’s mansion, he also knew that the Service protocols called for no kind of underwater inspection for a presidential boating excursion. They would check the boat, they would flank Kurt’s craft with boats of their own, they would even have a helicopter standing by on shore, but his gear would fall outside their predetermined area of consideration. Using the drawstring that held the net closed, he tied the AV-1 down and wedged that too under the edge of the pipe.

  Halfway to the surface and looking down to inspect his work, Kurt changed his mind and swam back to pile some rocks around his gear. His life would depend on having that equipment there, and he didn’t want to take the chance of having some teenage kid inadvertently discover it while he was impressing his girlfriend by showing her he could dive down to the cage. Kurt knew it would be unusual for someone to free-dive forty feet to get at it in the first place, but it wasn’t unheard of.

  Finally satisfied with his work, he hung suspended in the brilliant aqua green water between the pipe and his boat above. He snapped an underwater GPS unit the size of a pack of cigarettes from his vest and logged in his position. Back on board the boat, he toweled off his face, hoisted the anchor, and headed south. Using his depth finder as well as the GPS, he located a spot three miles away where the lake’s bottom was only fifty feet deep. He looped a nylon strap through a twenty-five-pound weight, then clipped it to a second AV-1 and another air tank. To the handle of the AV-1 he attached a mesh bag full of chemical hot packs. Then he put his diving gear back on, heaved the machine, the tank, and the weight overboard, and followed them in. When the flurry of bubbles from his plunge cleared, Kurt let the air out of his vest and slowly swam down into the depths after his equipment. At thirty feet he could see the unit resting placidly on the gravel bottom. He looked around. There was n
othing to see but the luminescent water and the rocky lake bottom. Hovering above the equipment, he set his position on the GPS.

  Because the underwater propulsion units ran on batteries, each one had a range of just over three miles. After three more stops, Kurt had five units at the bottom of the lake and thus the capacity to traverse almost its entire length underwater. That was how he intended to assassinate the president at close range and get away. He would wait until the fishing trip was well under way and the agents flanking his craft on either side in boats of their own were lulled into complacency by what he hoped would be the heat of the afternoon sun as well as the tranquillity of the setting. He could spring the gun from its hiding place, put a bullet in the president’s brain, and be over the side before the Secret Service knew what had happened.

  The AV-1s were essential because Kurt knew it would only be a matter of minutes before divers were dispatched from nearby helicopters to seek him out. But he was quite confident that he would have enough time to get his tank on and zip well away from the scene of the crime before the divers could arrive. He also knew that while the infrared images taken from NSA satellites could locate almost anything on the face of the earth, they wouldn’t be able to penetrate even thirty feet of the relatively cold lake water. A deep underwater retreat like Kurt’s was probably the only way a single person could escape after killing a U.S. president.

  The auxiliary air tanks that he was staging on the lake bottom were filled with a special mix called Nitrox 32 that would also help enable him to remain below the surface until dark. By then, the area of search would include the entire Skaneateles Lake region, which would yield more than forty-three miles of shoreline to cover. That was if they knew to cover it at all. First, they would have to figure out what had happened. After shooting the president, Kurt would simply disappear over the side. His gear was deep enough down so that no one would be able to see him from the surface. The agents on board the boats who weren’t racing to the president’s aid would be scouring the water’s surface, expecting him to come up. There was a good chance that one or more of them would get off a shot in Kurt’s direction, and that might lead them to believe he was lying dead somewhere on the bottom.

  The ensuing confusion, the coming night, and the extensive shoreline would give him ample opportunity to break through any dragnet the Service could establish, drive to northern New York, slip across the back roads into Canada, and take off on an already scheduled corporate flight on his GV to Switzerland. Kurt had handled the paperwork himself. In the small town of Bedford just outside of Montreal was a little airport that accommodated numerous private international jets. One of the things Kurt had done in the past several weeks was to create a Canadian corporation operating out of Montreal, sell his plane to that shell company, and have it delivered to a hangar at the Bedford airport.

  The plane was one of the easiest aircraft in the world to fly. Kurt, a licensed pilot since his early days in business, had taken the time when he first bought the GV to have his pilot, Bob Brown, instruct him on its use. Since everything was completely automated, the only time a pilot ever had to handle the controls was while taxiing and occasionally during the initial takeoff. Otherwise, Kurt simply had to program his long-range navigation units and handle the communications with the various air traffic control centers about every forty-five minutes.

  Kurt scanned the shoreline. He was less familiar with the south end of the lake. It was deeper and narrower than the northern end, in some places almost four hundred feet to the bottom and only half a mile from shore to shore. The sides of the rich green hills on the south end were steep and forbidding, and substantially fewer and much farther between were the camps and homes that crowded the north end. It was as if Skaneateles were two entirely different lakes: the north flanked by rolling hills and dairy farms, the south more like one of the secluded Adirondack mountain lakes in the far northern reaches of the state.

  To the west an unmarred blanket of trees stretched to the distant height of the towering ridge and Bear Swamp, an uninhabited state park just south of the tiny hamlet of New Hope. That was where Kurt planned to hide the black BMW R 1150 GS motorcycle that he kept in the last bay of his four-car garage. It was a big, fast machine that could go on or off road. He had purchased the bike on a whim, and only rode it as a novelty when he felt like taking in the countryside. Jill refused to get on the back. Now it would be the perfect vehicle to help him escape. He could dump it in the woods, deep in a thick clump of evergreens not far from where they would sometimes park to cross-country ski on the rare occasions they came upstate during the winter.

  He wasn’t going to ride the bike all the way to Canada, but it was easy to hide, and he would only use it to get to the Suburban he would leave loaded up with supplies and ready to go at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Auburn. The bike would also allow him to ride the unmarked farm roads through woods and fields and avoid an inevitable dragnet. The only remaining question was how best to ascend the precipitous mountainside in the dark.

  It wasn’t too long before Kurt came upon the Mann lakefront property. He remembered vaguely noticing it before, only because the gravel roadway that had been cut into the bluff was so dramatic and at the same time so remote. Most people who took the time and energy to accomplish a project of that magnitude did so to develop their lakefront. But the Mann property was bereft of any sign of life except an old retaining wall and a thick rope swing hanging from a massive old willow. It reminded Kurt of an undeveloped office park with meticulously paved and lighted streets but lacking a single building.

  This was the perfect place for Kurt’s ascent to Bear Swamp. Tomorrow morning, while Jill was out for her bike ride, he too would be out before most people were up. That would allow him to find his way up to the swamp in the light of day before he tried it again in the dark of night. After two trial runs, and with the help of his GPS, he knew he could make it. He knew he could kill the president—and get away with it.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next day on Skaneateles Lake, the sun rose ghostlike behind a sky that was already boiling with clouds and awash in a thick orange haze.

  Three times since their first morning swim, Jill and Jeremiah had doubled back halfway across the lake instead of completing the loop. While the sense of fulfillment wasn’t as great, the distance wasn’t much different, and it allowed them to take an early morning swim together. The decision was predicated entirely on the weather. A particularly hot spell had taken hold of the Northeast, and the thought of plunging into the cool clear water from the apex of the rope swing was just too much to turn down when the pavement was already bleeding tar by six-thirty in the morning.

  At the old blue farm silo that marked the halfway point of their ride, Jill didn’t even have to ask. She simply looked at Jeremiah. He nodded and immediately began to slow down. Jill did likewise, and after checking for traffic circled her bike around and headed back the other way. Sweat drenched them both, but it looked to Jill as if steam from the heat was building up beneath Jeremiah’s red face. She was reminded of a hot dog on the grill ready to split open without warning.

  “Are you still losing weight from all this riding?” she asked. Jeremiah had told her a week ago that he’d dropped ten pounds from the added activity.

  “No,” he huffed at her as they began to build up speed. “I gained it back.”

  “Really?” Jill replied. “Well, it’s not unusual for exercise to increase your appetite.”

  He shook his head and said, “No, I eat more, but not from appetite. I eat from nerves.”

  “Nerves?” she said. “What are you nervous about?”

  They rode for a minute before Jeremiah pulled up alongside her and said, “You.”

  “Why are you nervous about me?” she asked.

  He glanced her way and shrugged. If it were possible, his face became even redder. “I don’t know. I think about you a lot.”

  He paused to catch his breath before continuing. “You’ve b
een a lot more quiet. You used to . . . to talk a lot. Lately it seems like something’s wrong. It makes me nervous, I guess . . . Just not knowing . . .”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s nothing bad about you.”

  “No,” he told her, “I didn’t suspect it was . . .”

  “What did you suspect?” she said curtly.

  “That it’s . . . about him,” he replied slowly. “I guess, honestly, I’m thinking you might be having second thoughts.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” she said flatly.

  Jeremiah shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did, Jeremiah,” she said kindly.

  They rode in silence for a time before he said, “You want me to lead?”

  “All right.”

  Jeremiah pulled ahead and Jill edged right up behind him to catch his draft.

  She was glad he hadn’t taken her harsh tone to heart. He was right anyway—she had been acutely preoccupied with Kurt. She was suspicious as to why she had to go to Montreal two days before the president’s visit. Well, she thought smugly, she’d soon know the answer to that and a lot of other things. On her way home from the airport the day before, she had stopped at Fradon Locks in Syracuse. The same skinny blond kid who’d tipped his hat to her at the house was behind the counter. Three smiles later, Jill had her own copy of the key to Kurt’s office. It was resting at the bottom of her makeup bag waiting only for the right time to be used.