Each carried a gym bag.
Vlad’s bag contained the mortar firing tube and two rounds.
Ivan would drive the dark green van with a roll-back sunroof, the vehicle bought for this mission months before by someone he’d never met, the van left in the garage for his expert use only.
Lenny would spot for the shooter and give the order to fire as soon as the target stepped into range.
Separately that morning they’d walked the streets surrounding the school and knew exactly what route they’d take immediately after firing the round.
They rode these streets only once now.
And then they circled Prospect Park, marking time before the rendezvous.
PS 107
1:42 P.M.
Check this school, it’s like a huge fucking mansion…
Nothing like the public dump in Bed-Stuy, that place was a shit hole. Bars on windows. Razor wire topping off the school yard fence. Steel-plate doors. Like a fucking prison.
His mother was so right never to send her sons there.
Claiborne Smith circled the block, walking past PS 107 several times.
He knew this neighborhood, the site was so close to the Ansonia Court condos, hardly a cunt’s hair between up here and down there to the cobblestone yard, where dickhead got what was coming to him.
And now it was just about as quiet around this neighborhood as it was then in the middle of the night.
Only comfortable people lived here. Parents out working, no homeless drifters sleeping on sidewalks, no panhandlers, no pushers. Kids all in school.
Anything unusual here, he’d spot it. He learned these streets, going up and down every block; he knew this place cold.
One thing did look bad this time…no cops. A big man on his way and not a single blue uniform in sight. But then maybe that figured.
They wanted Cecil King dead, so they weren’t going to protect him, were they?
No fucking way, dog.
That’s Claiborne Smith’s job…I will win everyone’s gratitude. This is now my purpose in life. The senator, he’ll get me the justice I need. No more stealing from Claiborne, I’ll be protected.
He circled the block twice before walking up the front steps of PS 107 and entering the building.
1:44 P.M.
Patrolmen William Patrick Magee and Antonio Francesco Dente pulled up at the front entrance of PS 107.
They were not pleased.
They had planned on taking an hour’s nap after lunch, polishing off their take-out yellowfin tuna sushi with the tempura vegetable mix while parked in their favorite midday spot right behind the parks department maintenance center up in Prospect Park, in that half-hidden vale where the greenhouses once stood.
Their regular afternoon hideaway, where all the parkies knew them and left them in peace.
“Senator coon shows up,” patrolman Dente said. “Then we wait a car’s length behind them. Two lengths in back when they leave. And then down to the Methodist church on Seventh Avenue. That’s it.”
“Jesus, that raw tuna, Tony, it’s giving me gas now. He don’t show on time, I’m going in the school and using the toilet.”
“Open the window. And you got to eat the wasabi, that’s what counteracts the gas.”
“What wasabi?”
“That green horseradish stuff.”
“Makes my eyes water. Can’t see where the fuck I’m driving.”
“We’re not going anywhere for at least another half hour. Lookit, there’s some left here. Hold your breath and swallow, it’ll stop the gas.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“Yeah, right, you Wops know all about Jap food.”
Patrolman Magee held his breath and swallowed a large dollop of the green horseradish.
“Jesus Christ, my nose, my eyes, I can’t see for shit.”
“Blow your nose, Billy, this stuff clears up your sinuses.”
“You said it was for gas.”
1:46 P.M.
While patrolman Billy Magee was blowing his nose, Claiborne Smith stood by the window in the office of Marie Toner, the clerk at PS 107.
Her room was just off the vestibule.
Ms. Toner was a large woman, freckled, auburn-haired, blessed with a broad, friendly smile and a helpful air.
“There are my partners,” Claiborne said to her, nodding at the police cruiser stationed out front near the foot of the main entry steps.
“How long have you been doing this?” she said.
“Way back. I started doing advance protection for the senator on his first campaign for district attorney. Wherever he goes? The next stop, I’m his number-one man in the door. I watch the door. And I watch out for him coming and going.”
“These threats on his life must make your job even tougher.”
“Toughest ever.”
“That’s a lot of trust he puts in you.”
“Totally. It’s all about total trust, absolutely. Between me and the senator. I’m his man.”
1:49 P.M.
Igor Zanonovich was feeling high on the inevitable tension before a hit, that hormonal fuel pumping every artist on the brink of public performance.
He felt relieved to get away from the safe apartment in Brighton Beach. The place was one room short for five people, claustrophobic, especially with the television going most of the time.
For their last job in America, Zanonovich wore his favorite jacket, a Harris Tweed number, heather-toned windowpane pattern, smart looking, even distinguished.
No one would ever dream this tall man of aristocratic bearing, with his more-than-passing resemblance to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was carrying under his highland hunter’s jacket a Colt Trooper MK 111 .357 magnum and four hand grenades attached to his belt, three on his right side, one on his left. It took more than patrician looks and a haughty bearing to murder so many on two continents so successfully.
If he was forced to use any of his weaponry, the mission would be a failure, but it might win them a few minutes’ lead, and spare them arrest and exposure.
Three of Zanonovich’s grenades were standard US Army issue, packed with plastic-coated barbed shafts primed for wide diffusion—flechettes—people disablers, not property destroyers.
The fourth grenade was a reserve fitted with a thread coupling and drag ignition for his personal use.
On himself.
Should all hope evaporate.
Zanonovich was feeling satisfied as they drove up from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and straight ahead on Prospect Avenue back into Park Slope, confident that violence, other than a single perfectly aimed mortar round, could be avoided.
The weather was better than they expected, the temperature a few degrees above freezing, a southwesterly breeze, and partly sunny.
Visibility and road surface conditions seemed excellent everywhere.
Plans could proceed without any last-minute revision.
1:51 P.M.
Zanonovich and the Chechens arrived at Fourteenth Street, continued for a block along Eighth Avenue past a solitary police car with two patrolmen parked by the front entrance to Public School 107.
“That’s it,” Zanonovich said to his driver. “Confirmed. Cops are here. So he’s coming. We’re blessed.”
His driver, Ben, a taciturn type, shrugged. He seemed to take good fortune for granted, the luck of the entitled chosen. They turned left at the corner and, for the next two minutes, drove slowly around the neighboring block, observant, silent, satisfied with the situation—no other police in evidence, only one cruiser, two patrolmen—before heading up to their position for the hit.
1:53 P.M.
Oh no, not those two idiots…
When Flo saw who the patrolmen were, she didn’t dare repeat her thoughts to Cecil King or Frank Murphy.
From the front window on the passenger side of Senator-elect Cecil King’s car, she peered at Magee and Dente in the police vehicle parked by the fro
nt entrance of Public School 107.
Jerks.
The same pair of dummies who’d arrested her tenant for armed robbery, a felony crime for which the innocent Annie Agron bore no guilt, a charge of ludicrous proportions hatched in the addled imaginations of a couple of incompetent cops, fired up by the paranoid fantasies of an infirm, elderly woman, charges dismissed the second time around on rearraignment.
The police cruiser preceding Cecil King’s car pulled up to the curb about fifteen feet on the far side of the school’s front steps.
The senator-elect’s car stopped alongside patrolmen Magee and Dente’s vehicle. Flo motioned to them to reverse and give Cecil King’s car about fifteen feet of space behind the cruiser.
The driver, Magee, didn’t seem to understand.
Flo jerked her thumb back in an unmistakable motion, and patrolman Magee buried his face in a handkerchief.
“What’s going on?” Frank Murphy said.
“The driver looks like he’s having an allergy attack.”
Frank lowered his window and shouted, “Move the car back.”
Patrolman Dente exited the vehicle and patrolman Magee did the same.
Frank Murphy shook his head. “Hell they gonna do, push it?”
The patrolmen were switching seats.
Cecil King waited patiently. “There’s no rush,” he said. “We’re not late. Give them all the time they need.”
They needed only a few seconds to reverse their car.
1:54 P.M.
“It’s the senator,” Claiborne Smith said. “That’s my man out there. Right on the button.”
“This is so exciting.” School clerk Marie Toner was genuinely elated. “It’s the first time we’ve had a senator here. Maybe he could get us the budget for a new library. They closed the old one years ago.”
“I got to run, thanks for everything. Got to watch on my man.”
My man…
Way to go, dog, this it, he’s mine now. Just lay it all out for him, he’ll understand.
And I’ll thank him again for his autograph.
He’ll remember Claiborne Smith.
Claiborne opened the front door of PS 107 and stood at the top of the entrance steps, a broad smile on his face.
Fuck, yeah, he remembers me, look at that, they all do…They’re grateful.
1:55 P.M.
“Christ, it’s him!”
Flo shouted at their driver, “Go, go, go! Down, Senator, get down!”
As Claiborne Smith began descending the front steps, Frank Murphy pushed Cecil King to the floor of the car and threw his body over him.
Their car accelerated.
1:55:03 P.M.
“Black guy’s on the steps,” Lenny said, and jabbed Vlad’s right leg.
Vlad poked his head up out of the green van’s open sunroof, raised the mortar tube, and from immediately below the corner of Fourteenth Street he fired diagonally across Eighth Avenue.
Barely a second later, the front steps of Public School 107 erupted in a geyser of flame, brownstone, glass, twisted iron fencing…
…and the body parts of Claiborne Smith.
His severed head smashed into the front windshield of patrolmen Magee and Dente’s squad car as chunks of brownstone pelted the back end of Cecil King’s vehicle and the roof of the lead police cruiser, both speeding away from the blast.
The school clerk’s office window exploded inward, spraying her room with glass shards.
But Marie Toner was out in the vestibule, lying on the floor where she’d fainted.
The school’s fire-alarm bells were ringing.
Ringing.
Ringing…
1:55:12 P.M.
Bozye moy, vot blin!
Zanonovich swore as the Mercedes sped up Fourteenth Street towards Prospect Park West, the green van moving directly behind them unhindered.
My God, this sucks…
“Hvala bogu,” the driver, Ben, said. “Work’s over, Paul, thank God.”
“Faster, pussycat!” Lenny was laughing back in the van. “Kill, kill!”
The Mercedes led the green van to the rented garage nearby and parked around the corner. Seconds later, all five men were in the Mercedes and heading toward the Belt Parkway and Sheepshead Bay.
“Great day for fishing,” Ivan said, and smiled.
Mission accomplished.
Or so they thought.
1:55:17 P.M.
“Jesus, Tony! I can’t see shit! Fuck happened?”
The shattered windshield of patrolmen Magee and Dente’s squad car bent inward under the weight of a dark object impaled on the splintered glass directly in front of Officer Dente’s face.
“Everything blew up,” Dente said. “Busted windshield, we’re fucked here.”
He opened the door and slid out behind it in a crouch, his service weapon drawn.
“Magee, they’re all gone. It’s just us.”
“Fuck hit us?”
Officer Dente rose cautiously and examined the dark, round object in the windshield.
“His head. It’s a fucking black guy’s head.”
“Jesus, no, they got him? I’m calling in. Just us?”
Dente didn’t reply.
He stood transfixed by the severed head spiked on a vertebra bone in the windshield, the dead man’s mouth twisted, drooling blood and bits of tongue, eyes frozen open and staring heavenward, as if in wonder at a sunny sky on a November day in New York.
1:55:30 P.M.
“Same guy? You’re sure?”
Cecil King sounded amazed. He and his police protectors were still alive.
“Same guy,” said Flo. “Same guy who killed his brother just blew himself up trying to kill you. And us. Claiborne Smith.”
As they sped toward the King family apartment, Flo called in an all-services disaster alert.
Police and fire department emergency vehicles and hospital ambulances began converging at once on Public School 107.
The mayor raced out of his office and left city hall in a helicopter.
“How’d the Double-A find him?” Flo said. “They don’t work like this. We’ve got no record they use cutouts and dupes.”
“They’re Aryans,” Cecil King said. He raised his hands and pounded his knees, punishing himself for missing details, for not seeing obvious explanations. “That’s what they call themselves. Aryans. They needed a black man to get close to me. And they found a black man, some stooge, a pathological killer who doesn’t know or care—”
“Then why didn’t he do it this morning? He was right on top of us.” Flo’s question went unanswered.
After a few seconds of silence, Cecil said, “Listen, I still got that church group that’s coming up this afternoon.”
“We can’t, Senator, we don’t have the manpower—”
“Have to. I got to show myself. Otherwise, these bastards win.”
2:41 P.M.
The water in Sheepshead Bay was unseasonably calm as the chartered fishing boat motored out of the bay toward Rockaway Inlet.
The five fishermen were out for whatever fish were running, they didn’t much care.
Vlad was at the wheel.
Zanonovich said, “We dump at Plum Beach. That’ll be to port about thirty meters from shore. Where the current gets swift.”
They rounded the beach point just out of sight of the bay.
Lenny began emptying the contents of their gym bags into the water.
A mortar tube. A mortar round.
Four hand grenades.
Rifle and scope.
Five pistols and ammunition.
“We’re clean,” Lenny shouted when he finished dumping all their weapons into the inlet current. “Let’s go fishing.”
The Chechens laughed, delighted to be out on the ocean, their real work finished, a holiday begun.
And no sooner had Ivan and Lenny cast their lines off stern and started trolling, Ivan landed a fat sea bass. He whooped. “Must be a good two kilos a
t least.”
Zanonovich was less than thrilled. He was prone to seasickness. He turned on the radio for the three o’clock news.
The first voice he heard was the mayor of New York City speaking direct from the scene…“The suspect was a suicide bomber. Explosives experts are still combing the debris. But I’m pleased to report our police forensics team here have positively identified the bomber, the only person killed. He was Claiborne Smith, a wanted murderer, undeniably linked to the recent appalling death of the musical genius, Mr. Ballz Busta. And that was right near here, too. But the truly great tragedy, the whole horrific irony in all this is that Smith was Busta’s brother. It’s unbelievable, but this man, this complete failure, a welfare cheat, this monster who killed his own brother just like Cain slew Abel, was about to assassinate Senator-elect Cecil King…He was prevented from doing so, I’m totally gratified and incredibly proud to say that he was stopped by the quick actions of our police officers on the scene. Patrolman Billy Magee and patrolman Tony Dente are here with me now. Congratulations, both you men did a magnificent job, and I really mean it, the people of New York, the whole city, the whole state, the King family…we’re all entirely in your debt. We had the right men in the right place at the right time. And now we’ve closed these cases, we’ve put evil out of business around here for good, and it’s all to your credit.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
Again the Chechens laughed. “Hey, Paul, what’s wrong? Ocean too much for you?”
Zanonovich was hanging over the side of the boat, vomiting violently.
“Paul, you’re shameful, you really are.”
“Won’t be taking you fishing again.”
“Stop coughing, tovarich, you’re scaring off the fucking fish.”
“Don’t worry, Paul, if nothing else, when your dick is useless, you can always get your gun up. And shoot some fish.”
His comrades in arms hooted at his plight.
Zanonovich dropped to his knees, grasping the boat’s starboard gunwale as if clinging to an altar rail in desperate prayer. Bits of vomit dripped from his lips and down his chin, but he seemed oblivious to his pathetic appearance, so uncharacteristic of the aristocratic bearing he otherwise worked hard to uphold in front of these peasants, these dumb serfs who just screwed up what could have been the glorious finale to a crusade of triumph across America, God’s work impeccably performed nineteen faultless times.
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