In addition to all this, Alex brings powered, 22,000-rpm, gyro-stabilized Kenyon Spotter binoculars for the daylight segment and a pair of NATO-spec low-light binoculars for the night. He also stashes a second Valentine One in the GTC's door pocket. "Radar detectors are illegal in Virginia, so this is just in case the other one gets confiscated," he explains. Did I mention that Alex is thorough?
"I've never used this much equipment before," I say. "Aren't you worried about becoming overreliant on technology?"
"I consider this the bare minimum of equipment necessary to do this job," Alex replies. (Keep in mind that this is coming from a guy who has dual Raytheon thermal-imaging displays installed in his own last-generation BMW M5.) "But, to answer your question, yes, you can get too comfortable relying on your electronics. I got a ticket that way once."
I ask him how fast he was going.
"158 miles per hour."
At 10:43 a.m. on a Friday morning, I hand a box to the clerk at a FedEx Kinko's in Greenwich Village, then sprint to the Bentley waiting outside. Alex, the native New Yorker, will drive the first leg. In the back seat lies our own competing package, destined for the same address: The Nikki Beach Club, One Ocean Drive. On the plain brown envelope I've scrawled the name and slogan of our delivery firm, Total Brilliant Shipping--"Total BS: Let us grab your package!"
FedEx can tell you that your package will arrive by noon; what they can't tell you is how early it might show up. Eight a.m.? Nine? They can't say. So we don't know, exactly, what time we need to beat. What we do know is that we have a lot of miles between us and Miami Beach. But we've got a Bentley convertible, we're wearing tuxes, it's November, and we've got the top down. Hit it.
Exiting the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, there's really not a lot for me to do as co-driver. The gyroscope is powered up and emitting a high-pitched hum, but traffic is so thick that the binoculars are useless. I'd play with the GPS units mounted to the dash, but neither of them can get a signal through the GTC's windshield, which apparently has some sort of coating that thwarts both satellite reception and our tollbooth EZ-Pass. "This is why I always test equipment and do a recon run," Alex says. "There's always something that doesn't work."
At 12:26 p.m., we receive a text message from Alex's friend J. F. Musial, who's agreed to monitor the tracking of our FedEx box. "Package picked up, on way to sorting facility." Already? Uh-oh.
I'd say we should speed up, but traffic still renders that an impossibility, and besides, the truckers are chattering on the CB about lots of cops in the area--both marked and unmarked.
Unfortunately, at 3:00 p.m., about four hours into our trip, we're going nowhere. We've hit an hour-long D.C. traffic jam, and we're crawling. Our average speed thus far: 54 mph. According to Alex's calculations, we're forty-five minutes behind schedule.
As night falls and the road opens up, I slide behind the wheel for my first shift. It requires a remapping of my mental ECU to drive faster than 80 mph in the dark. Every set of taillights, every overpass and on-ramp is suspicious. Alex eggs me on while surveying the road ahead with the low-light binoculars. "Ramp clear . . . median clear . . . How fast are you going, ninety-five? Step it up a little." After Alex successfully uses the binoculars to root out two different cops hiding beneath overpasses, I become emboldened enough in our method to set the cruise control on 90 mph and run at least that fast at all times. Meanwhile, at 8:57 p.m., J. F. checks in. "Package at Newark Airport." The FedEx machine continues to grind away. ...next page >>