Golf clubs suggested an outing, and the clothes he’d been wearing…it hadn’t fully registered at first, but he was in black-and-gray polypropylene or something similar, zipped to the neck. “Technical gear,” some of the sporting-goods outfitters like to call it, a fancy way of saying cold-weather sporting clothes. Yeah. He was on his way to the links.
Shit, I didn’t remember the address of his club. If I did, I could have gotten ahead of him, which is almost always preferable to tracking from behind. The Village Club, it was called, but where was it? As I drove back down Hilldale, then right on Middle Neck, the same way I had come in, I looked for local points of interest on the nav system. Country clubs, country clubs, come on… I couldn’t find it. Okay, the hell with it, plan B.
I pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. If Accinelli came this way, I’d let him go right past me, then fall in behind. A few minutes of a big BMW behind him, especially if he were heading to Sands Point’s golf club, as I expected, wouldn’t alarm him. And if he went the other way on Middle Neck, I would just swing around and follow him in the other direction.
Sudden paranoia jolted me: what if the Hilger team I’d been so watchful for turned out to be Accinelli? Maybe they know each other from the war. Maybe Accinelli owes a favor. Hilger tells him roughly when to expect me; Accinelli watches the road from the house, with the car warmed up; he sees me, then walks out pretending not to, with a golf club bag that’s actually holding a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with sabot slugs.
I scanned the area. A black SUV was coming toward me down Middle Neck, and I started to get that deep-down Oh, fuck feeling. I held down the brake with my left foot and put my right over the gas, ready to floor it if the SUV slowed, or sped up, or swerved. But it didn’t, and as it came closer I could see the occupants were just an elderly couple. Shit, they were probably on their way to church.
I let the SUV pass and checked the rearview. There was the Mercedes, pulling out of Hilldale and making a left on Middle Neck, away from me. For a moment, I’d been so keyed up that I was surprised he wasn’t coming at me. Then I realized I was being ridiculous. What was Accinelli going to do, blow someone away from his own car a hundred yards out from his $10 million home, right in front of the horrified neighbors? No. Hilger might have been trying to set me up, but it wouldn’t be that way.
I did a U-turn on Middle Neck and followed from about a hundred fifty yards back. It was a long, straight road that gradually curved from east to south, and tailing him from far back was easy. I continued to scan for surprises as I drove.
After about two miles, Accinelli made a left onto Thayer Lane. Thayer, right, now I remembered, that was the address of the club. I followed along behind him. About eight hundred yards up, Thayer curved around to the right and I lost sight of him for a moment. Then I came around the curve, too, and saw Accinelli’s car again, stopped next to an island with a guard post at the center of it. Beyond the post was a parking lot; beyond the parking lot, a compound of enormous tile-roofed brick buildings that I remembered from the website comprised the former estate of Isaac Guggenheim. This was it, then, the entrance to the club. Accinelli moved forward past the post. I swung around on Thayer and headed back out.
I recognized there was an opening here, if I could move fast enough to exploit it. I input the coordinates for Midtown Manhattan into the nav system. Twenty-five miles. Allowing time for parking and the purchase I planned to make, with just a little luck and light traffic I could be back here in not much more than an hour and a half.
I took the Long Island Expressway west as fast as I could without risking a ticket. What was Accinelli planning today-nine holes, or eighteen? And how long would he be playing regardless? Surely no less than two hours, even for a shorter game. And it would be lunchtime after that. Maybe he’d grab a bite at the club. Maybe this was a Sunday ritual for him, leaving his wife a golf widow, spending two, three, maybe four hours on the links, and with his cronies thereafter. It made sense. Anyone who played in these temperatures had to be a fanatic.
Maybe. But of course I couldn’t really know. There was no time to hone in on his patterns, and all my suppositions were just that. But with only five days to work with, I had to exploit whatever openings presented themselves, no matter how narrow.
It took me less than forty minutes to reach the Spy Shop on 34th between Third and Lexington. I remembered it, along with a few other handy places, from the last time I’d reconnoitered New York. Predictably, there were no parking spaces anywhere nearby. I considered parking illegally-I was going to be in the store for only a few minutes-but decided it wasn’t worth the admittedly small risk of having the BMW’s presence here logged in a New York City law enforcement database. I found a garage around the corner, gave the attendant a twenty to keep the car on the main floor for fifteen minutes, and jogged over to the Spy Shop. It was a bit warmer now than when I’d arrived that morning, but I was still going to have to make time to buy some proper clothes when I had a chance.
The store was well outfitted with various options for vehicle tracking, overt and surreptitious. I chose a top-of-the-line model I was familiar with, the Pro Trak Digital, a magnetically emplace-able real-time GPS system, and was suddenly down another twenty-six hundred dollars. Along with warm clothes, I was going to have to find a bank.
I picked up the car and headed back to the Village Club. Traffic was manageable again and I made good time. While I drove, I unpacked the unit, placed the eight D cells I had also bought into the battery pack, assembled everything, and tested it for power. It all seemed to be working. I put the unit in the glove box and stuffed the empty packaging under the passenger seat. I was wearing the gloves, not just because of the weather, but to keep my prints off the device, too.
As I turned onto Thayer Lane again, exactly ninety-seven minutes after I’d left it, I started thinking in Japanese, like my good friend Yamada, who this time was being transferred to New York and would live on Long Island. Like many Japanese, I was an ardent golfer, and relished the chance to become a member of a top club for less than the million dollars entry cost in Japan. I was hoping to take a look at the Village Club because it sounded so good on the Internet… Would that be all right?
I pulled up to the guard post and rolled down the window. The guy inside, about seventy with ruddy cheeks and fading blue eyes, leaned toward me, away from a portable space heater. Something about him felt like retired law enforcement, but I took in the impression only in the most fleeting mental shorthand. I was too deeply in character to consciously consider anything operational, although of course I was still aware of and responsive to it.
He looked me over, and again in some compartmented part of my consciousness I realized he wasn’t used to seeing Asians pull in here. “May I help you, sir?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” I said, in the thickest Japanese accent I could muster, with an accompanying helpless, timid expression. “I move soon Long Island. Want club member become. Can pick up…brochure here?”
The guard smiled. Amazing the generosity of spirit a little helplessness can bring out in some people. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “The main facility is directly in front of you. Just park anywhere you can find a spot and they’ll help you inside.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, nodding. The gate went up and I drove forward, my heart starting to beat hard.
The parking lot was on my right. I pulled in, driving slowly through. Damn, it was full. The place was popular.
Black Mercedeses weren’t exactly in short supply in the parking lot, and I had a couple of false starts before seeing each time that the license plate of the car I was looking at was wrong. But the third time proved to be the charm. There was Accinelli’s car, in one of the lot’s center spaces, next to a deep green Aston Martin Vanquish S. Perfect.