by Thomas Perry
There were dozens of these places, many of them founded in the 1860s, when the racetrack opened. Now and then he would see the shiny brown thoroughbred horses far up the incline near the stables.
His memory was his road map. He remembered the frigid winter night when he had driven along this road looking for the farm. That night the big trees along this stretch had been bare, black silhouettes, skeletal against the white snow and ice. Today the big trees—possibly the ones that had grown up to replace the old ones—were thick with bright green leaves that had been washed by last night’s summer rain, so they shone in the sunlight. The fences of piled stones along the road looked about the same.
Saratoga Springs was founded in the 1690s, and the stones were the ones that farmers’ plows turned up. The farmers carried them to the edge of their land and piled them up, artifacts of their small victories over the wild land’s resistance.
When he saw the horse farm, he immediately recognized it from that night all those years ago. He remembered being worried that the ground would be so frozen that he wouldn’t be able to bury the fragmentary remains of Arthur Fieldston. Most of the land had been frozen rock-hard, but he’d found the big manure pile up there not far from the stables. The manure was much warmer than the ground was, some fresh from the horses and the rest producing its own heat as it composted.
Today he saw no horses—the farm was as deserted as the scene of a plague.
33
“Ms. Waring?”
“Yes?”
“This is Agent McGuinn, FBI. I’ve been asked to let you know that we have a temporary glitch on the Balacontano matter.”
“What is it?”
“Mr. Balacontano has been kept under remote surveillance, so that he and his associates would not be aware that he was being watched, and so that any of the people who may have been waiting for his release could be intercepted and arrested before they got close to him. The problem is that the elderly man who was being followed and protected was not the right one.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Mario Silva. He’s a cousin of the subject.”
“How did that happen?”
“When the subject was released, a large contingent of relatives and associates were waiting to greet him—men, women, and children. They surrounded him, patted him on the back, shook his hand, and hugged him. The subject and his cousin are both short, around five feet six, so the view of them was sometimes blocked by taller associates. The cousin had arrived wearing a raincoat and a hat. At one point, people slipped an overcoat and hat onto the subject, and at the same moment the cousin shrugged his off, and it seems to have disappeared into a baby carriage. The associates hustled the cousin into a limousine and drove off, while the subject left with Mario Silva’s family.”
“You’ve been briefed on who the subject is?”
“Well, yes, ma’am. His name is Carlo Balacontano. He was a Mafia boss.”
“Yes. He’s the boss of the biggest New York Mafia crime family.”
“He was? Interesting.”
“Not was. He is. When he was in prison, he had stand-in bosses on the outside watching the businesses—meaning the prostitution, extortion, drug sales, money laundering, kidnapping, and so on. But he still makes all the tough decisions, such as who should be killed. Now that he’s out, I would say that would make him one of the twenty or thirty most powerful men in America.”
The man sounded sick. “I see. We have several addresses for him. I’m forwarding them to Organized Crime right now.”
“Send it to me personally. Elizabeth Waring.”
“I will. Thank you for letting me know. Good-bye.” He sounded as though he was embarrassed and in a hurry to escape this conversation.
She hung up the phone and walked out of her office and down the hall to the deputy assistant’s office. The receptionist saw her and immediately called Holstra, who came to the door of his inner office. “Come in, Elizabeth,” he said.
Elizabeth stepped in, and he shut the door. She said, “The FBI got faked out. They’ve been conducting the surveillance we requested on Balacontano’s cousin.”
“A double?”
She shrugged. “Close enough, apparently.”
Holstra shuffled through some papers and held one up. “I see a notation here that his attorney, Mr. Herren, has filed a lawsuit to demand a new trial to clear him of the crime he’s been convicted of. That means they’ll be in touch.”
Elizabeth said, “I can clear your mind of worry about the lawsuit. Carlo Balacontano is now free. He’s a man who has committed hundreds of felonies and continues to every day. He is, conservatively, a multibillionaire. Now he doesn’t care whether people think he’s innocent or guilty. The potential appeal was just a way to get important legal talent interested. If the parole had been denied, he would have pursued the lawsuit. Now that he’s free, he’ll forget it. He’d be a fool to let federal prosecutors have another crack at him.”
“What are you thinking of doing?”
“As of a few seconds ago, we have a list of his addresses. I’ll get people started on checking those. But if he gave the authorities the addresses of the places where he actually intends to stay, he would be the first crime boss to do that.”
“That sounds troublesome.”
“Much less troublesome than finding him a few months from now will be. And right now his family is in a fight with the Scarpi family, which may keep him in or near New York, where he can command his forces.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” he said. “This is the convict you’ve always said hadn’t done the crime he was in for.”
“He’s innocent of that murder, yes. But he’s not innocent of murder. He got into that mess in the first place because he thought it was a great idea to hire a first-rate killer to do some murders, and then hire some third-rate killers to ambush him instead of just paying him.”
“I’ll bet he’s smarter than that now,” said the deputy assistant.
“I’m pretty sure he is,” she said.
34
Michael Schaeffer rented a suite in a good hotel in Lake George, only twenty-seven miles from the farm outside Saratoga Springs. Each morning and each evening after dark he would pass the farm on the highway. In the morning he looked for cars, farm vehicles, and people. In the evening he looked for lights.
On the third morning he parked his car in the woods at the edge of a nearby farm’s fallow field a distance back from the road and then walked to visit Balacontano’s farm. He had not seen any horses on the farm, and his nose told him no animals had been living there for a long time. He supposed that Carl Bala’s horse business had been an expensive operation, one that must have involved fixing races.
Clearly Bala’s stand-in dons hadn’t sold the place. It still had the same sign at the gate, which had been repainted to keep it bright. Carl Bala hadn’t needed any money in a federal prison, and a large parcel of land in a famous place was one of the few things that almost always gained more value the less the owner did to it.
It occurred to Schaeffer that there might have been other, secret reasons for Bala to keep it. The farm was big, at least a thousand acres. Bala had nothing to do with burying Arthur Fieldston’s head and hands, but he might have buried almost anything else on the property. Or he may have kept the land because he hoped that someday, evidence would be found there that would exonerate him.
Schaeffer walked along the fence at the edge of the pasture to reach the house. He walked around the building searching for signs of an alarm system or surveillance cameras, but found none. Professional criminals, as a rule, didn’t like alarm systems because a false alarm gave police probable cause to enter without a warrant, and surveillance cameras were most likely to record their owners doing something illegal. And Balacontano had last visited here years before cheap, modern alarms became available.
&nbs
p; Schaeffer got into the kitchen by sliding the cover of a large dog door upward with his fingertips so that it opened from the bottom, lying on his side and reaching up to turn the small knob that unlocked the deadbolt, feeling to find another bolt that went into the floor, and then turning the inner knob. He supposed that in the old days the main security device had been the dog.
When he was inside, he opened the big Sub-Zero refrigerator and saw that the shelves were empty except for an open box of baking soda to keep the air inside smelling fresh. To him this meant that the current caretakers were not the live-in variety, and confirmed his belief that the place was not yet staffed with Bala’s soldiers.
He wandered through the rooms. There was a collection of horse-themed table lamps, a glass case full of ribbons that his horses had won, and a wall of nineteenth-century prints with jockeys riding or standing and holding the reins of horses with backs that looked too long for a real horse.
The detail most important to Schaeffer was that all this clutter had been dusted, so somebody must have been hired for janitorial duty. He would need to be ready to meet them or sneak out if he saw them coming.
He searched drawers and cabinets for weapons, cell phones, hidden cameras, or any kind of defensive or communication system other than the telephones on some of the tables and counters.
He kept moving, trying to memorize the whole house. He was briefly tempted to sabotage a few of the locks and latches so that he could get in and out easily, but knew it was best to change only one that was unlikely to be noticed. If too many were tampered with, then someone doing even the most cursory check would find something. He chose one of the windows in the basement and unscrewed the latch without removing it, so it looked the same but would fall off if he tugged the window from the outside.
It was only a couple of hours later that he heard the sound of a car coming up the farm road toward the house. He looked out the front window and saw the white van of a cleaning crew. He went out the kitchen door as they approached, and hurried to the stables to watch. The crew consisted of four women who arrived with their own mops, brooms, and buckets of supplies, including an arsenal of commercial-grade cleaners. From time to time, he would see one or two of them washing windows or polishing furniture. Whenever one of them opened a door, he would hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner or a floor polisher from inside.
The four women from the cleaning service were a very encouraging sight to Schaeffer. Their presence might mean that the house was about to be occupied. They worked a very long day, roughly a double shift, and in the evening he still saw lighted windows in bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. When they finished and drove off, he entered the house again. He saw that they had put sheets and pillowcases on the beds, and soap, towels, toilet paper, and facial tissues in the bathrooms.
Late at night, he walked to the farm where he had parked his car in the woods, drove it to Balacontano’s horse farm and up to a large barn that held trucks, tractors, lawn mowers, and trailers. He opened the big barn door and drove the car inside, parked it among the other vehicles, covered it with a tarp, and then set some old paint cans on the roof and hood. He closed the door, climbed up into the loft, and slept until dawn.
Late in the morning, a pair of men arrived in a big black SUV with tinted windows. They drove to the gate and up the road to the house, then kept going the rest of the way up to the stable, got out, and began a walking inspection of the whole property. They went to the barn where grain and hay used to be stored when the horses were still on the farm, and then to the barn where Schaeffer was hiding. Schaeffer watched them enter, take short-barreled assault rifles out from under their coats, and walk around surveying the machines, but they showed no curiosity about what they were or whether they were as they should be. He decided the men were just looking for the presence of strangers or signs that any had been there recently. When they stepped out, covering their short rifles with their coats on their way to the next building, his theory seemed confirmed. Schaeffer waited a few minutes and then crawled to the closed hatch to the loft, put his eye to the crack where it met its frame, and watched.
They were checking the property to make sure it was safe and ready for Carlo Balacontano. When they had finished with the outbuildings and the general survey of the farm through binoculars, they got back in their black SUV and drove around the perimeter of the outer fence and then to the house. They parked with the front wheels aimed down the farm road toward the distant highway.
They opened the hatchback of the SUV, took out a pair of suitcases and a large, heavy cooler, and carried them up on the porch and into the house. Schaeffer sat in the loft of the barn and watched them work. These two were scouts sent ahead to verify that the house was clean and in good repair, and that nobody had gotten to the farm first or posed a hazard. The next stage would be to call New York City or wherever Bala was and report that the farm was ready.
He could tell the Balacontano family had a pretty effective strategy. When the next SUV got to the area, maybe to the city of Saratoga Springs, someone would call the cell phone of one of the two men who had secured the farm. If nobody answered, it would mean that the two scouts were dead and the house was no longer secure.
Schaeffer prepared to wait, and the place he had picked was ideal. It was a spot where he and the two advance men wouldn’t meet but from where he could easily see the house. He had the tactical advantage of altitude, and his space was one that the two men had already searched and found safe. He waited until after dark to retrieve from his car trunk the AR-15 rifle and three loaded magazines, a .45 semiautomatic pistol and two spare magazines for that, and some protein bars and water left over from his long drive to Saratoga.
The next morning, another large black SUV appeared at the far end of the long farm road. Schaeffer saw a man get out of the passenger seat, take the spike out of the hasp at the latch, move the gate out of the way, watch the SUV drive past him, and then close the gate again. He climbed back into his seat for the ride up the hill to the house.
Schaeffer climbed down the ladder from the loft, walked briskly to the rear of the house, knelt to open the basement window, and then put his legs in, turned, and lowered himself into the basement. He pulled his weapons inside, closed the window, replaced the latch, and climbed the stairs to the kitchen. He walked through the kitchen to the dining room cradling his loaded AR-15 rifle. He stepped into the living room and then stopped near the front window to look out and be sure everyone was in place.
The new black SUV was climbing the gradual incline toward the house. The two advance men who had come to secure the house were standing on the front porch, now wearing the suits they had worn the day before instead of just shirts and pants. He knew they had neckties on too, because the one on the right hadn’t properly tugged down the back of his collar, leaving a thin line of green silk showing beneath it.
Schaeffer had decided that he could not begin until the car came to a stop. If the two advance men did not remain where they stood, the car would wheel around and roar off. He studied the sight, making final decisions about the order of his shots and the ways he would need to move as it happened.
As the car moved closer and tilted upward slightly on the road’s last incline, he could see the sun light the two men in the front seats, but got only a shadowy view of the important man in the back seat.
The car stopped fifteen feet from the front steps, and Schaeffer fired through the living-room window at the men standing on the front porch, placing a rifle bullet through the back of the head of the man on the left, then the one on the right.
As they fell out of the way, Schaeffer adjusted his aim a degree to the left and fired through the car’s windshield into the driver’s head, then moved his aim ten degrees to the left as the man in the passenger seat swung his door open. Schaeffer fired three rapid shots before he saw that the first shot had gone through the man’s temple.
Schaeffer le
aned the AR-15 against the wall. The silence of the big farm returned, but this time it was more profound. His six rapid shots had scared off most of the birds and left the others still and voiceless, so the only sounds were the faint breeze moving through the leaves of the trees that shaded the house and a slow tick as the hot engine of the SUV cooled down.
He waited. The man alone in the back seat had not moved. Schaeffer wondered whether his rifle shot into one of the men in front had gone through and hit the one in back. The world remained still, as though holding its breath.
Then the lock of the left rear door clicked, a shoe kicked it open wide, and a crouching man dashed out, running hard.
Schaeffer walked out the door onto the porch, sidestepped past the bodies of the two scouts, then jumped off the porch and ran.
Schaeffer was surprised that Carl Bala could run so fast after all of those years in prison, but he supposed that Elizabeth Waring had been right. The forced regime of plain food and daily exercise had kept him fit.
Bala set off across a vast green pasture, a level expanse of grass surrounded by white wooden-rail fences. After a hundred yards, Bala craned his neck to look over his shoulder.
What he saw was Michael Schaeffer, running steadily at a fast lope directly toward him. Instantly Bala seemed to feel the weight of regret at slowing his pace long enough to look back. He turned his face forward and ran as hard as he could to make up the lost time. Soon the extra effort began to tire him, and his steps slowed. He wasn’t running straight anymore. He was weaving, pumping his arms too hard, and Schaeffer could see his back rising and falling with his labored breaths.
Schaeffer maintained the same speed, not following Bala’s meandering path, but focusing on his back and heading straight for it. Every step brought Schaeffer closer to Bala’s back, and he was gaining fast.
Bala began to have trouble lifting his knees high enough. Soon his left toe scraped the ground, and he sprawled on the grass. He pushed himself up with his arms and set off again, but Schaeffer caught up. He gave Bala a push and watched him fall again.