The green-lacquered van wove through the busy infield. The driver steered around flying machines, mechanicians, autos, trucks, wheelbarrows, and bicycles. Crammed in the back of the van, so tightly they had to stand, were a dozen of Rod Sweets’s fighters. Dressed in suits and derbies, they were a clear cut above the usual pug uglies in order to ensure the smooth flow of opium and morphine to doctors and pharmacists. They stood in tense silence, hoping their outfits would help them disappear into the crush of paying spectators when the clouting was over. No one wanted to tangle with Van Dorns, but the money Harry Frost had paid in advance was too rich to refuse. They would take their lumps. Some of them would get collared. But those who escaped back to Brooklyn intact wouldn’t have to work for months.

Harry Frost stood with them, watching Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue Farman biplane through a peephole drilled in the side. He felt strangely calm. His plan would work.

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin was tearing up the sky, fighting to set a speed record for biplanes on an oval course marked by pylons fifteen hundred yards apart. The course was three miles. To beat the record, he had to circle twenty laps in less than an hour, and he was cutting the corners tightly by banking with great skill. But unbeknownst to the Englishman, every high-speed turn he hurled the sturdy Farman into could be his last. When the Jonas boys’ aluminum anchor failed under the terrific forces, the sabotaged wire tension stay would rip from the wing it counterbraced, and the wing would break. At that fatal moment, every eye in the grandstand and every eye in the infield would fly to the falling machine.

Frost had seen them fall. From five hundred feet, it took a remarkably long time to hit the ground. In that time, no one, not even the Van Dorns, would see his fighters emerge from the van. Once out, it would be too late to stop them. They would slash a swath like a football wedge, and he would charge through the cleared space straight at Josephine.

ISAAC BELL WAS ADMIRING how sharply Eddison-Sydney-Martin cut the corners when, thirty minutes into the speed record attempt, a wing came off. It seemed like an illusion. The engine kept roaring, and the biplane kept racing. The broken wing separated into two parts, the top and bottom planes, which remained loosely attached to each other by wire braces. The rest of the airship hurtled past them on a steep downward trajectory.