With the coming of darkness the fair became something more than the gaudy, primary-colored exhibition of the daylight hours. As night fell the crowds thinned dramatically, the broad walkways and avenues almost empty, the soaring architecture of the buildings and exotic temples becoming more like the strangely lit and oddly serene ruins of some future age mysteriously brought back into the past. Strangely, for a fair that presumed to encompass the entire world, there was a sameness to it all, as though it came from the vision of a single mind, colors seen by a single eye.
Nothing seemed real. Fountains lit from within turned water into white, liquid marble; trees were bathed with light from invisible miniature spotlights at the base of their trunks that turned their bottoms rich green, their leaves and branches deep blue. Aircraft warning lights blinked on the Trylon, four on each face and one at the summit. Strangest of all, cloudscapes projected on the face of the Perisphere slowly revolved while ethereal otherworldly music played, a single amplified length of piano wire vibrating in an almost ominous cosmic wind.
From one side of the fair to the other it was the same: Big Joe, the stainless-steel worker on a seventy-nine-foot-high tower in front of the tomblike Soviet pavilion, was bathed in light as red as blood; the zigzag lightning bolt spire of the General Electric Building flashed hugely in yellow and white, while the flared, venetian blind fins of the triangular Petroleum Building glowed sapphire blue in the deepening night. The scale of everything was overwhelming; the human visitors were reduced to small strolling shadows in the darkness.
It was the darkness John Bone craved. Dressed in the dead FBI agent’s suit and driving his Ford instead of Leo Hamner’s Dodge, the assassin drove north through Brooklyn and then east along Horace Harding Boulevard to the fair. Turning off Horace Harding at the newly built cloverleaf he drove a few hundred yards along the Grand Central Parkway extension, following the amber lights that took him to the entrance gate at Fountain Lake. He showed Agent Gordon’s badge and identification to the guard, explaining that he was on official business.
“This king thing tomorrow, right?” said the young man, smiling.
“Can’t really talk about it,” Bone answered, but he smiled and gave the guard a wink.
“Gotcha,” the kid said and winked back, holding up his thumb and index finger like a gun and clicking his tongue. He waved Bone on through the gate. The assassin turned left onto Orange Blossom Lane, dark and deserted now, then turned right into the small parking lot to one side of the Florida Exhibit a hundred yards farther on. The Spanish-style building with its palm trees and carillon tower was one of the fair’s orphans, an exhibit placed out of its theme area, in this case a state exhibit in the Entertainment Zone rather than with its sister states on Rainbow Avenue or Lincoln Square.
Working swiftly in the darkness, Bone stripped off the FBI agent’s clothes, revealing Leo Hamner’s dark blue coveralls underneath. He reached back behind the driver’s seat, pulled out Leo’s tall gumboots and slipped them on. Changed, he climbed out of the car, unlocked the trunk and took out the canvas duffel bag from Lavan’s gunshop. He locked the car, pocketed the keys, then headed back along the wide sidewalk to the maintenance workers’ dock at the edge of Fountain Lake. There were a half dozen wooden flatboats tied up, each one powered by a small Electrol twelve-volt outboard.
There was a security guard dozing in a canvas deck chair at the end of the dock, a thermos and a lunchbox beside him. “Who’s that?” he called out without bothering to get out of his chair.
“Leo,” Bone answered, keeping his voice low.
“You’re early,” said the guard.
“Yeah,” Bone answered, and that was all there was to it. The guard slumped back into his chair and Bone eased the canvas bag down into the nearest boat, undid the line, then stepped down into the boat, positioning himself in the transom seat. Using Leo’s keys he found the one with the Electrol lightning bolt, turned it in the ignition slot of the motor and headed out into the lake. Had the guard questioned him more closely Bone would have used the silenced S&W Hammerless again and taken the body with him across the lake to be disposed of later.
Three hundred yards ahead of him were the glittering lights of the amusement area midway, with everything from the gigantic roller coaster screening Frank Buck’s Jungleland with its chicken-wire-and-stucco volcano to girlie shows designed by Salvador Dali and bare-naked ladies frozen in giant blocks of ice. Even from the far side of the lake Bone could hear the rumble and roar of the roller coaster and the raucous come-hither music from the sideshows.
As he neared the middle of the artificial lake he veered slightly to avoid the jutting pipes of the fountain jets and the fireworks barges waiting for the midnight show. To his left, on the western shore, he could see the amphitheater of the Billy Rose Aquacade, dark now until the 8:30 performance, while to his far right there was only darkness. Somewhere over there was the fair’s end, vacant spoiled ground, old drainage pipes and construction materials, a tall fence, and beyond that the real world and streets of Queens County. He was getting close to the opposite shore of the lake and he made some small adjustments with the rudder lever, aiming the blunt prow of the flatboat at a rectangle of darkness that marked the entrance to the lake’s outlet into the concrete floodway of the Flushing River. Letting the boat find its own way for a few moments he pulled open the drawstring of the duffel and took out the shapeless U.S. Rubber raincape he’d purchased at Macy’s sporting goods department after choosing the lie. He dropped it over his head, pulled up the hood, then took hold of the engine tiller once again.
Silently the flatboat slipped under the bridge that led from the concert hall to the amusement area and Bone found himself gliding down the narrow waterway, music and screams from the roller coaster and parachute jump on the right mixing with the chatter and bang of the chained rifles in the shooting galleries on the left. A shadow on the water loomed and he steered around it—the permanently moored canal boat beside the outdoor Heineken beer garden with its electrically operated windmill and its clog-footed waitresses in full Dutch dress. No one seemed to notice as he passed by on the dark water. Another hundred feet and he reached the second bridge spanning the river.
“I gotta be out of my mind doing this,” said Dan Hennessy, pulling away from the rear entrance to the Plaza. He was driving an unmarked police department Chevrolet instead of his own car, with Jane Todd and Thomas Barry sitting beside him on the wide front seat.
“Out of your mind if you don’t,” Jane answered. “I’m going to make you into a hero, Danny boy.”
“I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to get my pension, and I’m about to lose it because of a weird broad who wears pants half the time.” The New York cop checked the traffic, then swung up Fifth Avenue. Reaching Fifty-ninth Street he turned right and headed for the Queensborough Bridge approaches. “What about the Irish dame we left back at the hotel? She going to run out on us? Leave us in the lurch?”
“I don’t think so,” said Barry. “She could have done that any number of times over the past days.”
Jane lit up a Lucky and handed the pack to the Scotland Yard man. “She’s our hole card, Dan. But it’s a good thing you got a man on her. Our British friend here thinks the world of her, but he’s thinking with something other than his brains, if you know what I mean.”
Barry shifted in his seat but Jane could feel the heat coming off him. She knew she’d taken one step too far and could have kicked herself.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Barry quietly.
“She’d better hang on to the affidavit you all signed,” Hennessy warned. “If things screw up, that’s all we’ve got.” It had taken the New York detective the better part of an hour to get things organized and drive up to the Claremont. In that time Jane had banged out a ten-page affidavit on the battered old Royal typewriter in the Claremont office. She, Barry and Sheila Connelly had all signed it; then Jane had sealed it in an envelope and dripped red candle wax over the flap for good measure. In the event that they were arrested or otherwise detained over the next thirty-six hours, Sheila, with the help of Pelay and Bill Hartery, the Plaza house dick, was to see that the affidavit was put into the hands of Noel Busch at Newsweek. As extra security Hennessy had left a cop with her in the room.
It was a rough document without a lot of detail, but what detail Jane had written down was damning. In effect it said that there was a high-level conspiracy to assassinate the king and queen, involving people in business as well as government, and that for various reasons the conspiracy was being not only ignored, but covered up for the sake of political expediency.
“Who knows?” Hennessy said and shrugged. “Maybe she’s already torn the stupid affidavit up and is setting sail for the old sod even as we speak.”
“I seriously doubt that,” said Barry, holding his temper. They hit the bridge, the wheels thrumming noisily. “She’ll never go home again. There’s nothing for her there now except a bullet in the head.”
“Unless she was part of it right from the beginning. Christ, they’ll give her a medal for leading you people around by the nose like she did.”
“You’re wrong,” Barry answered flatly.
“You think that just because you’re dizzy for her.”
“What?”
“He means you’re infatuated with her and she’s maybe pulling the wool over your baby blues,” said Jane. “Think that could make some sense? Any other ideas on why someone who looks as good as her would fall for someone like you?” They were passing over Welfare Island, the asylum dark below them, its central tower darker than the air around it, like a black hole in the night. She still hadn’t gone to see Annie since the bombing, telling herself there hadn’t been any time, knowing it was a lie, knowing she was more concerned with herself and her fears than with her sister. She knew she was a complete mess because she’d also been wondering about what Wolf the lawyer had said. How much of this was really for her memories of Howie and how much was for the brass ring she’d grab if she managed to get an exclusive on the story unfolding around her?
They reached the end of the bridge and drove through the bright lights and bustle of Queens Plaza before heading down Northern Boulevard into the deeper darkness of the semirural area, their headlights grazing the sides of tumbledown farm buildings and roughly made greenhouses.
“I thought I saw a sign back there written in Chinese,” said Barry, looking back over his shoulder. “Is that possible?”
Hennessy laughed. “This is New York, pally, Anything’s possible.”
“There’s a lot of Chinese farmers out here,” Jane explained. “They grow special vegetables for the restaurants on Pell Street.”
“I still don’t know what it is we’re going to accomplish with this little jaunt,” said Hennessy a moment later. “Other than me losing my job, that is.” He shook his head wearily. “Every cop on the force is going to be lining the parade route tomorrow, you have to get a special ticket to go into your own building if it’s on the way and they’re putting shooters on every roof. On top of that the feds have everything else covered while this king guy and his wife are there.” He turned to Jane. “You said yourself that Foxworth put a plug in the guy’s plans with that phone tap.”
“That’s the problem,” said Jane. “Warren from the State Department and Foxworth think they’ve scared our man off.”
“And you don’t believe it, right?”
“No. He’s supposed to be the best in the world. He’s got to have some other plan to go to if one doesn’t work out.”
“And you don’t have the slightest idea what that plan would be, do you?”
“We know he needed to get in there at night. All three of the people he asked about were night workers.”
“What else?”
Jane nodded toward Barry. “Our Limey friend says he’ll be within a couple of hundred yards of the British pavilion.”
“Because you figure that’s where he’ll make the hit?”
“Yes,” said Barry. “From what I understand there are no speeches or presentations planned, nothing out in the open anyway. The only time he’ll have a stationary target is outside the pavilion.”
“If the killer is there at all.”
“Yes,” said Barry, “if the killer is there at all.”
“Is he going to be there?”
“I think so.” The Scotland Yard man nodded. “He may assume that Foxworth and Warren will do exactly what they have done—stand down their alert.” He shrugged. “As far as they’re concerned, Russell has been dealt with and the second assassin’s plan has been compromised. From the killer’s point of view it may be a very different story. Presumably there is a great deal of money at stake. He won’t give up if he thinks he stands a reasonable chance of completing his assignment and getting paid.”
“Which he does,” said Jane hotly, “especially considering the way things have gone so far.” She glanced at Barry. “Your people left you out on a limb so you could be the scapegoat in case anything went wrong with the Russell situation. Now Foxworth and Warren can’t run fast enough to get away from the idea of a second assassin. All this stuff I brought them about Flynn and Kennedy must be scaring the pants off them. If this gets out somehow it’s going to raise some serious hell.”
“Which,” said Hennessy, a sour note in his voice, “is no doubt why the people behind this tried to blow you into little tiny pieces.” He shook his head, both hands gripping the wheel tightly. “Just remember I told you so, pally, okay?”
“Why don’t you sit on your thumb and just drive the car, Dan?”
“Sure thing, Jane,” said the cop with a grin. “But has anyone given any serious thought to exactly what we’re going to do when we get to the damn fair?”
“Do what Foxworth and his friends won’t,” Jane answered promptly. “Find the son of a bitch and kill him.”
By 8:30 Bone had piloted the flatboat along the concrete river to the back side of the Court of States just beyond the overpass for World’s Fair Boulevard, the four-lane thoroughfare that acted as a convenient divider between the serious sections of the fair and the amusement area around Fountain Lake.
The Court of States, representing twenty-three states and Puerto Rico, was a multibuilding exhibit shaped like a long horseshoe around a shallow, rectangular pool, all of which straddled the Flushing River from the boulevard overpass to the Japanese and Czechoslovakian pavilions a hundred yards or so to the northwest. At first glance it appeared as though the artificial river simply vanished under the base of the Jeffersonian-style Virginia exhibit, but in fact the flow out of Fountain Lake was diverted through a wide concrete culvert, fitted with a trash rack for catching refuse thrown into the stream and just big enough to allow the flatboat to pass through.
Among other things it had been Leo Hamner’s responsibility to travel the length of the river from the lake to the spillway, clearing the accumulated garbage tossed into the river each day that wound up being trapped in the trash racks, then taking his nightly haul downstream to the Flushing Bay Piers, where it would be pitchforked onto a barge and taken to a landfill in New Jersey.
Keeping to Leo’s schedule Bone killed the engine, tilted it up on the transom and then used a long-handled wooden rake from the bottom of the boat to clear the garbage from the wide mesh of the trash rack. There was an extraordinary amount of it: food wrappers, dozens of copies of Today at the Fair, copies of various real newspapers, several soggy hats, both men’s and women’s, diapers, stuffed toys and other smaller prizes from the midway, at least a dozen unrolled, bloated prophylactics, a shoebox that turned out to hold one red child’s shoe and a perfectly modeled birchbark canoe eight inches long and fitted with a carved cork Indian seated in the middle. Etched into the side of the canoe with some kind of burning tool was the word Opemigon.
Trash dumped into the bottom of the boat, Bone moved the flatboat forward by bracing his hands flat against the rough concrete of the culvert and pulling. Within a few seconds the boat had been completely swallowed by the culvert and Bone found himself moving through complete darkness, sweating hard now under the raincape. Halfway along his right hand grabbed empty air and he knew he’d reached the side passage that fed the pool that ran the length of the Court of States. The side passage and everything else about the intricacy of the site’s waterworks had been shown on the blueprints the clerk in the administration building had proudly shown him on his second visit to the fair.
He reached the far end of the culvert and paused, using both hands to keep the flatboat from being pulled out into the open by the current. He glanced up at the radium dial of his wristwatch. It was 8:41. From this point on, timing would be critical. The exit point of the culvert was directly under the south end of the Pennsylvania pavilion, a three-quarter-size reproduction of Independence Hall, complete with its own copy of the Liberty Bell, with appropriately placed crack, a carillon tower like the original and a recording of a bell that rang out every hour on the hour from opening in the morning to closing at night.
Two hundred feet away along the watercourse was the main floodway entrance to the Lagoon of Nations. Along the left bank was a shrub-covered slope at the rear of the Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Belgian pavilions, while on the right bank there was the looming, featureless slabs of marble marking the Soviet pavilion and its centerpiece, the floodlit statue of Big Joe at the summit of his tower, striding over everything, the red star of communism held high in his strong right hand.
On his last two visits to the fair, Bone had paced off distances along the length of the river and clocked the speed of its current. Although the speed varied depending on the time of day and width of the river, he knew that between his present position and the entrance to the lagoon the river flowed at an average of a little more than seven miles per hour, or 616 feet per minute. At that rate, unpowered, it would take the flatboat roughly twenty seconds to go from the culvert to the lagoon.
At 8:45 Bone began to notice a steady increase in the number of people moving along the walkway beside the shrub-covered slope on his left and the sidewalk in front of the Soviet pavilion, all of them moving in the direction of the lagoon. It was almost time.
“It really is quite amazing,” said Detective Inspector Thomas Barry as they made their way along tree-lined Constitution Mall. “I’ve never seen anything remotely like it.” He smiled. “It’s very . . . American.”
“We’re not here to sightsee, pally,” Hennessy grumbled.
“Quit complaining,” said Jane. “You were the one who started me off on this whole thing, and this is where it led.”
“No,” said Hennessy. “This is where you took it, and it’s going to get us in deep trouble before the night is over.” He looked back over his shoulder. “You notice no one gave us a second look coming in here with my badge? All those plain black Chevys parked around the New York City building inside the main gate? This place is already swarming with dicks. This place closes down they’re going to be welding all the manhole covers shut and putting their best shooters on all the roofs. By the time the sun comes up the whole fair’s going to be locked down tighter than my aunt Fannie’s fanny.”
“Our guy knows that as well as you do,” Jane answered. “He’s figured it out. He’s got a way around all that.”
“And a way out as well?” Hennessy shook his head. “You’re dreaming, Jane. Your guy, if he ever existed, is waiting for the midnight sailings from the West Street piers. He’s gone. I should have known better. This whole thing is a wild-goose chase.”
“No,” said Barry, “Jane’s right. He’s here.”
“Yeah, well last I heard everyone thought Sean Russell was the assassin and he was going to blow everyone up in Detroit. Now it’s somebody else and he’s going to do his dirty work here.”
“Russell was nothing more than a distraction to keep us occupied while the real assassin got on with it.”
“Look,” said Jane, “we’ve been over this a hundred times. The voice on the telephone Foxworth tapped isn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination. He’s real.”
“All right,” said Hennessy. “So now that we’re here, what do we do to catch him?”
“Try and think like he does,” said Barry. He dropped down on a bench in front of the Heinz exhibit, a white, slightly pointed dome that looked just like the hat Harpo wore in all the Marx Brothers films with a giant, floodlit 57 standing above the entranceway.
Jane glanced through the glass doorway. Inside there was a tall, bright blue column in the center of the exhibit, covered with entwined figures and golden vines. Halfway up the column was a giant glass saucer with water spilling over the edges, and on top of the column was a golden nude woman crouched like a monkey holding up a crystal sphere with one hand, while the other arm crossed discreetly over her private area. Jane wasn’t quite sure what it all had to do with pickles and ketchup. She sat down beside Barry on the bench and lit a cigarette. Hennessy stalked back and forth in front of them, his hands jammed into his jacket pockets. All around them the remaining people at the fair seemed to be moving toward the perimeter of the Lagoon of Nations.
“Think like a professional murderer,” said the detective, lighting a cigarette of his own. “Shouldn’t be too difficult for a homicide dick.”
“The king and queen will be surrounded by police,” said Jane. “Secret Service, New York State troopers, New York City police.”
“Plus a dozen or so from Special Branch,” Barry added.
“Shooters on the rooftops, don’t forget,” said Hennessy.
“What about crowds?” Jane asked. “They’re not shutting down the fair for the visit, are they?”
Hennessy shook his head. “Nah. They’re just going to cordon off the areas the king and queen will be going to for a few hours, cops every twenty feet or so.”
“That’s good for the killer,” said Barry.
Hennessy looked skeptical. “You think he’s going to shoot from the crowd?”
“No, but when he does shoot the crowds are going to panic. The cordons won’t hold them back. It’ll give him cover.”
“How long between the shots being fired to the gates all being sealed?”
“No more than a minute or two,” said Hennessy. “It’s just like when the president opened the fair in April. Radio cars at all the exits and observers everywhere with army field telephones.” He grimaced. “Like I said, Aunt Fannie’s fanny.” He paused. “Russell may have been nothing but a distraction but he sure put the fear of God in everyone. I heard they even have minesweepers out in the harbor in case someone tries to blow up the ship they’re using to come across from New Jersey.” He made a snorting sound. “Like no one would notice New York Harbor being mined.”
“Don’t be so sure.” Jane laughed. “No one noticed the krauts sabotaging all those freight cars full of dynamite on Black Tom Island on the Jersey side during the war. I was sixteen years old. Woke me up out of a dead sleep ten miles away, broke windows on Park Avenue.”
“This guy’s not going to be using a freight car full of dynamite.”
“We’ve been assuming he’s going to use a rifle,” said Barry. “Perhaps he has some other weapon in mind.”
“Like what?” Hennessy asked. “Can’t be a pistol, not if he figures on getting away with it. Explosives are probably out as well.”
“Why?” Jane asked. She nodded toward Barry, seated on the bench beside her. “Tom here actually saw Russell’s bomb factory.”
The Scotland Yard man was shaking his head. “I agree with the detective,” he said. “It leaves too much to chance. According to the newspaper articles the king and queen have rarely been on schedule. A minute or two early or late and the bomb goes off without doing any harm to them.”
“Not to mention the fact that we’ve got a whole squad of guys to take care of that kind of thing,” Hennessy put in.
Jane pulled out the guide book she’d bought at a booth just inside the main gate. She flipped it open, turning to the map, squinting at it closely. She looked up, comparing the view and the map, pointing across Constitution Mall and Rainbow Avenue. “French pavilion, Brazil pavilion. Both high enough and close enough. The All Electric Farm is out because even the silo isn’t as tall as the side wall of the Brazil building.” She turned slightly, pointing to the right of the mall. “You might have a shot from the top of the Heinz building here, but people would see you from a mile off.”
“Nothing else?” asked Hennessy.
“There’s a building in the Gardens on Parade exhibit, but it’s awfully close and they’re sure to have it covered. The only other thing I can see is maybe one of the houses in the Town of Tomorrow.”
“What exactly is that?” Barry asked.
“Just what it says,” Jane answered. She looked down at the book. “Fifteen model homes of varying styles and materials. They’ve got a brick house, a redwood house, plywood, glass, Celotex—whatever that is—even a motor home.”
She shrugged. “Some of them have got two stories. Maybe he found an attic to hide in. I did a photo feature for Life about it. The houses are ready to move into.”
“What about the range?” asked Barry.
“You’d have to pace it off, I guess, but some of the closer ones are within two hundred yards, easy.”
“That has to be it,” said Hennessy. “He hides out in one of the houses overnight, seals himself in or something so a search won’t find him, takes his shot, then slips into the crowd and walks away.”
“Let’s go and look,” said Jane, getting up from the bench.
“Or tell Foxworth,” said Hennessy. “That’s what we should do.”
“I don’t really think Assistant Director Foxworth is really very interested in any theories about our second assassin,” said Barry, rising from the bench himself. “Director Hoover has done everything he can to limit his participation in events thus far, and I think Foxworth has seen the wisdom of his master’s ways.”
Hennessy moaned. “For Christ’s sake, Jane! You mean to say we have to run this bastard to ground ourselves?”
“Let’s go and take a look at these houses,” Jane answered. “Then we can decide.”
They headed up the mall, following the crowds to the Lagoon of Nations, reaching the immense pool just as the 9:00 show was about to begin. Without warning the two main fountains in the center of the lagoon dropped away to nothing and the lights snapped out.
“What’s this?” asked Barry.
“Watch,” Hennessy answered, grinning. “It’s a pip, believe me.”
There was a brief moment of silence, the recorded bell sounded in the tower of the Pennsylvania exhibit, and then, as suddenly as darkness had fallen across the lagoon, its waters suddenly began to glow, brighter and brighter. A dense mist began to rise from the surface of the still water and then, abruptly, a hissing cloud of bright blue steam roared up from nozzles around the edges of the pool, forcing people away from the guardrails before they were soaked.
The fountains in the center of the lagoon began to rise again, climbing higher and higher, the wall of mist around the entire pool now changing colors as spotlights played across the suspended curtain of droplets, first rose, then amber, then blue. Music began to swell, great powerful gusts of strings and blaring, triumphant horns, the sound seeming to come from within the lagoon itself. As the music became louder, the fountains rose with it. Then, twin pillars of flame roared up a hundred feet and more, drawing a collective gasp from the assembled crowd. A dozen hidden searchlights made an arching roof of brilliant beams overhead as the music climbed even higher and the blazing tongues of flame rose into the sky again. Then the fireworks began.
As the recorded ringing of the bell boomed out overhead Bone released his restraining hands from the edge of the culvert and the flatboat rushed silently forward in the current, guided by the tiller arm. A quick check confirmed that the walkways on both sides of the river were empty. Everyone was gathered around the lagoon.
The boat reached the floodway entrance and slid into the narrow opening. Once again Bone ducked low and lifted a hand to stop the flatboat, waiting for the exact moment when the music began to swell and the curtain of mist began to rise at the edges of the lagoon. He counted off the seconds in his head, listening to the music and waiting for the loud gasp from the crowd announcing the first flaring of the massive gas jets. As the flames roared upward into the sky Bone released the boat and simultaneously twisted the key in the outboard’s ignition. Seconds later he slipped out through the lagoon opening of the floodway and headed for the other side.
According to the information Bone had gathered the lagoon show used more than a thousand water nozzles capable of throwing twenty tons of water into the air at any given moment, four hundred gas jets, sixty searchlights, 350 noiseless fireworks cannons and three million watts of brilliant light. A live band played in the concert hall, the music broadcast to the crowd around the lagoon from huge, theater-style speakers that poked up just above the surface of the water. The show was controlled by three technicians from inside the United States Building at the far end of the Court of Peace, all three men seated at a vast console like an organ’s, fitted out with the dozens of switches and buttons controlling the water nozzles, the fireworks and the gas jets. The whole extravaganza, fireworks included, lasted for exactly six minutes.
Right from the start John Bone had realized that getting his equipment to his chosen lie would be the most difficult challenge confronting him. The necessary apparatus was large, cumbersome and impossible to explain away. Bringing it to the lie could not be accomplished during the daylight hours. Bone also quickly came to the conclusion that coming in by water was far and away the safest and most expedient path to the lie and his best escape route as well.
During daylight, the paths along the meandering course of the river were filled with strolling visitors to the fair, and the grassy, lightly sloping banks on either side were a favorite picnicking spot, but during the evening hours, especially after dusk, the walkways were virtually empty. The lagoon was a different story. The four-hundred-foot-wide, eight-hundred-foot-long basin was one of the fair’s focal points and there were always groups of people leaning on the guardrails or sitting on the benches, resting or waiting for friends.
Leo Hamner regularly made his rounds along the water course, and just as regularly he must have crossed the lagoon, but Bone wanted no one to remember his passage—too much depended on his remaining invisible. Ironically, he came to the conclusion that the only time to cross the lagoon was when the most people were focusing their attention on it. For the six-minute duration of the show the fine nozzles around the edge of the basin effectively screened the surface of the water, and the spurting fountains, floodlights, gas jets and pyrotechnics saw to it that everyone’s eyes were looking upward for that brief space of time.
With the hood of the raincape tight across his neck and forehead, Bone crouched in the bottom of the boat, his legs curled around the duffel bag, his hand gripping the tiller of the electric outboard as he piloted it across the lagoon, trying to keep an equal distance between the curtains of spray around the perimeter and the potential disaster of the boat being silhouetted against the gas jets and the colored sprays of water.
According to his calculations, at full throttle it would take the little motor three minutes to run the length of the lake, but Bone knew it could easily take another minute or even two at the half throttle necessary for the last part of the traverse. Although fewer people watched the show from the wide span across the river at the western edge of the lagoon, there would be some, and he had to guide the flatboat into the egress floodway on the first try. If he missed he would be seen, and if he was seen he would be remembered, or worse, reported to one of the fifty or so policemen who patrolled the grounds.
Still counting the seconds off in his head, Bone looked up briefly and was startled to see how close he was to the west-side floodway. He twisted the tiller handle sharply, cutting almost all the power, sliced through the misty curtain at almost the precise spot he’d aimed for and vanished into the darkness under the bridge. Less than ninety seconds later the thundering music reached its crescendo, timed to the blazing firework canopy high above.
Then everything vanished in a single instant, the twinkling sparks of the fireworks winking out, the music falling silent, the roaring water from the fountains crashing down, all twenty tons of it slamming into the lagoon like a massive ocean breaker crashing against a cliff. Strangely, the sudden silence and the darkness was the most dramatic moment of the show, and for a few seconds the crowd around the lagoon stood in stunned amazement and then burst into wild applause.
As the people began to clap, Jane Todd felt a hand drop down onto the shoulder of her jacket. She turned to find herself staring at a dark-faced Sam Foxworth. Behind him was a quartet of clean-shaven, earnest-looking young men in dark, expensive hats and dark, expensive suits, and behind them was a pair of bulky, wide-shouldered men with harder faces and cheaper suits. The two larger men stepped forward.
“Michael,” said Hennessy, grinning coldly. “Come to arrest me, have you?”
“You know this guy?” Jane asked.
“Michael Murphy,” Hennessy explained. “Head of the commissioner’s Confidential Squad. Time was, we were pals.”
“You’ve been suspended pending an investigation,” said Murphy.
“Investigation of what?”
“Who’s to say?” Murphy shrugged. “I was just told to bring you along.” He poked a thumb in the direction of his burly companion. “Billy’s here to lend a hand if you get edgy.”
“Not edgy,” said Hennessy. “Just a little disappointed.”
“I do as I’m told,” said Murphy. “Are you coming along?”
“Sure,” said Hennessy. He turned to Barry. “My best to your lady friend,” he said and went off with the two New York City detectives without a backward glance.
“Speaking of your lady friend, where is she?” Foxworth asked Barry.
“Who?”
“Miss Connelly.”
“I have no idea.”
“Miss Todd? Do you know where she is?”
She nodded at Barry. “Like he says.”
Foxworth turned to one of his men. “Is there a jail here?”
“There’s a lockup in the administration building.”
“Put them in it,” said Foxworth.
“What are you charging us with?” asked Jane.
“You’re not under arrest,” said Foxworth. “I’m taking you into protective custody. If I think of something to charge you with later, I’ll let you know.”