Speedboat North-Brother Frisk
"Better hold on to something." Red Fidelity 4
Segreti cut the throttle to neutral. He guided the Ferretti speedboat towards the sunset blazing through Manhattan’s towers. The long wood-finished bow cut through the glimmering East River. A pair of white yachts were already berthed at the private club, sprawling along the slip like fattened whales.
“I see them,” Ram said, his cowboy hat shielding his eyes from the slash of sunlight. He looked like an oil mogul, hat and white leather boots and a big brass buckle to go with his pinstripe suit.
Chlebek, sitting in the wraparound seats behind, and wearing big wraparound shades, checked her watch. “We’re right on the dot, sir.”
“No more sirs tonight,” Segreti said, nudging the boat between the yachts. “It’s showtime.”
Two figures waited on a pier extended between the yachts. Belmont, preppy sleek in a fitted blazer with a bright knife of pocket square, plaid slacks, suede shoes. Beside him the POI, a broad-shouldered white man with a casual flop of blond hair that he drew back from falling over his aviators. He wore a purple polo shirt, floppy collar up, with black jeans and indigo sneakers. Money masquerading as something sloppy.
Segreti pulled alongside. Chlebek was ready with a stay line. She had practically begged Segreti to come, paranoid the boys weren’t going to let her leave her desk, fenced in among a tower of computers and screens. The bumpy ride had made her queasy, but Segreti hadn’t heard her utter a complaint. Miriam Chlebek, the oldest of the team, forty-seven going on thirty, determined to be in the action while she was still nimble, her big Polish curves belying a dancer’s fluidity. Her linen jacket and pants were an ode to red, daring anyone to ignore her, but her Puma sneakers were white and her cropped hair wasn’t naturally black.
“You must be the man I’ve heard so much about,” said the blond POI.
“You must be the guy I just messaged ten grand to,” Segreti said.
The blond swiped his phone and smiled at what he saw. “Yes, yes I am.” As Chlebek steadied the boat, he extended an open hand. “Robert Tremain. Bobby.”
Segreti shook his hand. “Verdi. Come aboard.”
“Tight fit,” Tremain said, Belmont following him on.
“This is built for speed,” Segreti said. He and Chlebek had leveraged the joint task force with NYPD to get the cops to unlock their toys taken off the hands of a busted cocaine lord. It had cost Segreti political capital and Chlebek the indignity of agreeing to dinner out with a precinct captain.
“Better hold on to something,” Segreti added as Chlebek wound in the lines. Before she had quite finished, he wheeled the nose around and gunned it.
The speedboat gathered speed as lower Manhattan receded to the left and Brooklyn awaited them far to the right. The mirrors atop the Chrysler building blazed red behind the dark, brooding façade of the United Nations. By the time they reached the narrow blade of Roosevelt Island he was hitting sixty knots, bouncing hard and turning the calm river waters into a punching bag.
Segreti wasn’t a happy man, but, at this moment, he felt rapturous. He was with his team and an unsuspecting perp, headed for a breakthrough, the city lights winking on, transforming it into something heady and dangerous—a city that felt like his. All with pounding water, cold spray, and the pulsing resistance of the powerboat’s wheel in his hands.
The river forked and he kept to the east, seventy knots along Randalls Island, rounding the tip of Queens. Rikers Island appeared around the corner, a depressing hulk in the twilight, but Segreti kept his aim straight. The lower Bronx sprawled ahead, but he couldn’t see the two little islands, always overlooked in this corner of the river and now hidden in dusk. North Brother Island and South Brother Island, closing in on South, the smaller. Once a city dump, now a nature conservatory. The notorious of the pair was North Brother, with its quarantine hospital history. Smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis; after the war, junkies—a city dump of another kind. Since the sixties, though, these islets had hosted nothing but herons and egrets.
Until tonight.
He cut speed as the northern isle hove into view. Before them winked overlapping lines of bobbing boat lights.
“That’s a lot of company!” Ram shouted, barely audible over the roaring engines.
Beyond the armada, the island’s ruins were illuminated in red and yellow spotlights. A rotted gantry served as a demonic gateway. Beyond it rose a brick chimney, part of some long-lost industrial building, aglow.
He slowed the Ferretti to a crawl, the motor easing into a purr. They mixed in with the flotilla, a random selection of skiffs, aluminum fishing boats, jet boats, and a trio of yachts, one oligarch-sized, sitting furthest out. As Segreti approached, they could see a chopper lift off from the superyacht’s roof and head for the island.
A white boat bobbed by a shifting puzzle of pontoons. Its marking was clear: NY Park Police.
“These people have a permit?” Ram marveled.
“They even got the cops here to manage traffic,” Segreti said, noting the makeshift queue the boats were forming by the pontoon pier. “Bobby, guy like you doesn’t need to wait in line, does he?”
“Not likely,” Tremain said.
Segreti accelerated toward the police boat. As they closed in, they could hear a policeman on a loudspeaker. “One at a time! One at a time!”
He shot in front of an incoming aluminum boat, his wake nearly toppling it, and hit the police vessel with a wall of spray. The loudspeaker bombarded them with protests.
“We’ve got a five-million-dollar boat,” Segreti said. “Let them shout.”
Tremain laughed. “The security on land will be a little different. No electronics, remember?”
Belmont asked, “How do we get back?”
Tremain nodded at the police boat. “One of us waits and they give us a call.”
“Svetah stays,” Segreti said, meaning Ram, who had adopted the Sanskrit word for ‘white’. “Everybody else, out. Now.”
Belmont jumped onto the makeshift pier of floating pontoons, the big floating square angling beneath him. Tremain and Chlebek handed Ram their cell phones and followed.
“Check out that yacht,” Segreti told Ram, eyeing the giant.
He handed over his phone and jumped onto the pontoon, one of a dozen hollow aluminum cylinders held together by cables that led to the gantry. He and Ram exchanged nods. Behind the Ferretti, he saw the aluminum boat that he had nearly capsized now making its unsteady way to the end of the pontoon pier. Whoever was arriving in that leaky thing, they weren’t important.
Segreti followed the others to shore. Men in black T-shirts and baseball caps formed a waiting committee. “No phones, no tablets, no Apple watches, no wearables, no electronics!” None of the men had long blond hair.
There was a gathering line of people waiting to get past the T-shirts, some of whom held lockboxes.
“Put your gear in here! Call your boat driver from the pier!”
T-shirts were frisking everyone.
Segreti joined the line. The T-shirts didn’t have the crisp bearing of military, but they didn’t look like rent-a-cops either. They waved electromagnetic wands and patted people down with efficiency. One of them held a rifle-like jammer, the kind that had brought down Ram’s drone this morning. Mercs?
A T-shirt halted Chlebek, his wand squealing. He said something and she unbuttoned her jacket. “You want to see my boobs or my Glock?”
The T-shirt thumbed her to go ahead with a grin.
She wasn’t the only one.
“Looks like everybody’s packing,” Segreti said.
“That bother you?” Tremain asked.
A Glock 19M was holstered under Segreti’s left arm beneath his black leather jacket, and a Sig P365 was tethered to his ankle.
Behind the T-shirts was another welcoming committee, this one composed of young women holding trays laden with cocktails and open bottles of beer. People were here to do business, and to party, but it would take only one fragile ego fueled by Dutch courage to turn the island into an instant bloodbath.
“It’s a free country,” Segreti said. “Let’s get a drink.”
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