Strategic Moves (Stone Barrington 19)

“Maybe not. Stone says he was wearing a parachute.”

“I saw the shoulder straps,” Stone said, leaning into the phone.

“Where the hell did he get a parachute?”

“There was a binful stacked right outside the cockpit.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lance said. “Estancia put on a parachute, got into the Mercedes, and drove it off the airplane into thin air?”

“Exactly,” Holly said.

“My God,” Lance said. “I hope it didn’t land on somebody’s house. We’d never hear the end of that.”

Fred Holland’s gardener arrived for work shortly after dawn, and on going to the rear of the house saw that the swimming pool’s water level was down by a foot. He got a hose, turned it on, and walked to the edge of the pool and dropped the hose into the water, then he looked down and saw a black automobile sitting on the white bottom. “Jesus H. Christ!” he said aloud to himself. “That must have been some party!”

Pablo Estancia got onto the five-ten train and took a seat. He bought a one-way ticket from the conductor and then got out his cell phone and dialed a number.

“Gelbhardt residence,” a sleepy woman’s voice said.

“Helga, this is Mr. Gelbhardt,” he said in German. “I’m sorry to wake you but I’m arriving in New York soon, and I should be at the apartment in about an hour.”

“Yes, Mr. Gelbhardt,” she replied. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“Yes, please: two scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice, and coffee.”

“I will look forward to seeing you,” she said.

“Goodbye, Helga.” Estancia hung up. He had owned the New York apartment for more than twenty years. It was in his wife’s maiden name, and the IRS had not discovered it when his difficulties arose. He had not visited it for more than a year, but Helga and her husband, Fritz, kept it in good order, ready for his arrival on short notice.

Estancia opened his Times to the Arts section and began to do the crossword.

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.