“Damn it, Hardcastle. the former Vice President of the United States muttered. Ignoring Admiral Ian Hardcastle was never an option.
Newburgh, New York
Later That Day
The sleepy little town of Newburgh, about an hour’s drive north of New York City, was the perfect place for an American terrorist base of operations. The small city of twenty thousand was easily accessible to New York City by Thruway, train, overland, or even via the nearby Hudson River, but it was much smaller and much more rural than a typical New York City bedroom community, offering lots of seclusion and privacy. Newburgh’s first-class airfield, Stewart International, had direct flights to La Guardia; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Raleigh-Durham International; Hartsfield-Atlanta; and even Toronto and Montreal, but it had fewer than a dozen arrivals and departures a day. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was just a few miles away, and the resorts and ski areas of the Catskills were just a few hours away.
Passengers liked Stewart International Airport because it was so easygoing and efficient — Henri Cazaux liked Stewart because security there was relatively lax, which made the little airport the perfect place to run a small-scale smuggling operation, or smuggle weapons into the commercial air system. Cazaux had often smuggled a fully loaded Uzi right through security in a briefcase by partially disassembling it and packing it in a candy or gift box with a gold foil wrapper — the wrapper shielded the contents from the X rays, and the guards never bothered to hand-check, especially during the early-morning rush-hour confusion of commuters on their way to New York, Boston, or Washington. The old “gun-in-the-Bible” trick worked every time. If Cazaux ever considered hijacking a plane, it would be from Stewart International.
There were a lot of other factors: the large amount of general aviation activity at the airport, with small planes taxiing and parking very close to commercial traffic, made transporting contraband onto an airliner from the aircraft parking ramp easy; the amount of wooded area and the isolation of many parts of the base from all but roving security; the number of large, isolated vacant buildings and hangars on the airport; and the relative safety and security everyone felt by having a large New York State Police, U.S. Army, and Air Force Reserve contingent stationed there at Stewart. Cazaux used that complacency to his advantage many times. He once dressed like a USAir baggage handler, commandeered a baggage tractor, and personally loaded several hundred pounds of contraband aboard planes parked at the gates, and was never challenged. He had done the same with an Air Force Reserve military cargo plane, posing as a crew chief on a C-5A Galaxy transport. Cazaux stole whole pallets of weapons and equipment right off the back of the giant transports with a forklift, and was never challenged or questioned.
More importantly, the little city was quiet and peaceful — it was a good jumping-off point to just about anyplace in the world, but it was also a good place to lay low and think and plan. That’s why when Henri Cazaux safely made it out of Albuquerque, he booked a flight — not a direct flight, but a circuitous route to Chicago to Cleveland to Pittsburgh — and then on to his base of U.S. operations in Newburgh. He needed to get the roar of the destruction he had caused in California, the smell of gunpowder and blood and burning civilization, all out of his head for a while.
There were two other reasons for Henri Cazaux to come to Newburgh, of course. It was a convenient place to meet with his logistics officer, a private Wall Street trader named Harold Lake. When a face-to-face meeting was needed, Lake could be in Newburgh in an hour and a half, and banking transactions begun by Lake in a satellite brokerage house in Newburgh at noon would be on the books and in the system by close of business. Cazaux felt too trapped, too surrounded in New York City itself — Newburgh was more to his liking, large enough to allow him to blend into with the citizens but small and isolated enough to remain anonymous.
The second reason was Madame Rocci, M.M. Her real name, he knew, was Jo Ann Vega. The “M.M.” stood for Minister of Metaphysics — it sounded like a phony show, title or something out of a 1940s B-grade movie, but it was not. She was, and had been for several years, the psychic for the world’s most dangerous criminal.
For all of Henri Cazaux’s intelligence, military training, life experience, toughness, and survival instinct, his one foible, his one departure from clear, perfectly objective analytical thought, was in the realm of astrology — but of course Cazaux would not consider astrology a “weird” science. An astrologer in Denmark whom he visited while in high school told him he would be a great military man — he decided to go into the military based on the woman’s advice. During a United Nations deployment to Africa while in the Belgian First Para, another astrologer in Zaire, a shaman, told him he would be a great leader of men, known far and wide for his deeds. Since going into business himself, he had consulted with an astrologer once or twice a year. Their predictions were uncannily accurate, he thought, and he had never made a bad move based on their words.
He had met Madame Vega three years earlier. During a rare time traveling on foot during daylight hours — tactical considerations absolutely forbade travel on roads during daylight except in an emergency — Cazaux had ducked into the back door of her tiny storefront parlor while getting out of sight of a State Police cruiser. He surprised Vega as she came out of the bathroom, but she did not challenge him or try to throw him out. She seemed to know instantly that he was on the run and being pursued. She showed no fear, and offered him instant coffee and two-day-old donuts purchased from the thrift shop down the street, the only things she had to eat in her small kitchen.
Vega was in her early fifties, with long dark kinky hair streaked with gray and with small colored beads braided in her hair near her temples, large round dark eyes, a round, pretty face, large round breasts, strong fingers and hands, a firm waist and buttocks, and slender legs. She looked gyp- syish, and said her family were Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia. Vega did not complain when Cazaux checked the house, the exits, and looked for evidence that she had a boyfriend, roommate, children, or husband living with her. She said she knew that he was afraid, that he was in danger, but that he would eventually prevail, and she would help any way she could.
All he wanted to do was hide and sleep. She showed him a hiding place in the attic, which he accepted — after finding at least three ways to escape — and rested. When he awoke, she was waiting for him. While he slept, she had done a complete astrological analysis on him. He was interested but skeptical — until she started to speak about the life of Henri Cazaux. She predicted his birthdate within a week, his time of birth within two hours, and his country of birth exactly — he was born at a hospital in the Netherlands, although raised in Belgium: she guessed all this.
Being Henri Cazaux, and cautious, he realized Vega could have researched his past — Cazaux was beginning to get a reputation in America equal to the one he had in Europe, although at the time he was not well known outside federal law-enforcement circles. But it would have taken a lot of work and a lot of time, far more than what a neardestitute storefront swami in Newburgh, New York, could ever do. No, she had learned about him simply from looking at the man, then reading her astrological books and putting the terrifying, mystifying pieces together. She talked about his military past, his fearlessness, his lack of regard for others. She talked about his brutal success, his drive for perfection, his intensity. She knew he had once been married, but had no children despite his desire to have them. But that was only the beginning — of what she had to say, and of the astounding accuracy of her predictions: