by Dalton Fury
“Like make a citizen’s arrest?” Barnes asked with more than a trace of sarcasm.
Raynor ignored him. “Digger, keep Todd in your pocket and stay as close to POTUS as you can. Head on a swivel. Recce teams stay mobile…”
He turned, looking away from the memorial site, down the streets—Liberty Street ran east to west across the south end of the plaza. West Street and Greenwich Street framed it on either side running north and south. To the north, there was a clear line of sight running up Greenwich Street, but the area where the motorcade would be unloading was blocked by the newest addition to the New York skyline, the latest building with the address One World Trade Center, also called Freedom Tower. There were other possible vectors to the south, east, and west.
“Start walking,” he finished. “Check balconies and rooftops. I don’t care if you bump into NYPD on their way out. Check them again and keep checking until POTUS gets back in Stagecoach and drives away.”
“How far out?” asked one of the recce operators.
“Until you get wet,” Slapshot said with a laugh. “There’s water about a klick in every direction.”
Raynor knew that from his earlier map reconnaissance, but for some reason, the comment struck him.
One kilometer.
In Athens, Shiner had made a shot from that distance. In Baltimore, if they had read the scene correctly, he had been preparing to take a 1,200-plus-meter shot.
He took out his phone and opened the Google Earth app. As Slapshot had indicated, it was almost exactly one kilometer to Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Past that point, the next solid ground was Governors Island, another kilometer beyond.
He wouldn’t have put it past Shiner to attempt a shot at that distance. The seven longest confirmed sniper kills were all in excess of 2,000 meters. But he would also need elevation just to be able to see his target, and there were no structures on Governors Island high enough to give Shiner a view of the 9/11 Memorial.
Brooklyn was closer, just 1,800 meters away, on the far side of the East River, but when Raynor turned in that direction, looking east down Liberty Street, he saw the much closer high-rise buildings of the financial district.
To the west, down Liberty Street, there was open sky as far as his eye could see. According to Google Earth, the Hudson River was only five hundred meters away, but another kilometer and a half past that, barely visible on the horizon, was Jersey City and the forty-two-story-tall steel-and-glass structure at 30 Hudson Street, informally known as the Goldman Sachs Tower.
Two kilometers.
If Shiner was there, if he planned to take that shot, it would be one for the record books. But it was more than just a literal long shot. It was far more likely that Kearney was right, and that the real threat would come from somewhere a lot closer.
Sending a team across the river to check it out would almost certainly be an exercise in futility, and, worse, a dangerous misallocation of manpower.
He put his phone away and addressed the group. “We’ve got two hours. Get to it.”
Slapshot waited for the operators to disperse before speaking his mind. “Okay, boss. I know that look. What are you thinking?”
“Let’s take a walk.”
SIXTEEN
It took less than ten minutes for Raynor and Slapshot to walk to the World Financial Center ferry terminal in Battery Park City. From the pier, they had an unobstructed view of 30 Hudson Street. The tower, the tallest building in New Jersey, was perched on the water’s edge, making it appear even taller in contrast with the other buildings on the skyline.
After boarding the ferry, Raynor moved to the bow and discreetly brought out a Leupold M151 spotting scope and zoomed in on the slightly tapered upper floors of the tower.
He scanned along the edge of the rooftop, noting the positions of the raised suspension structures that held the window-cleaning scaffolds. There was no movement on the roof, no sign of any windows removed, no sign that anyone was there at all, but if Shiner was there, he would be in the prone, camouflaged. All but invisible. There was only one way to really know if he was there.
The ferry ride took just eight minutes, and delivered them to the Paulus Hook terminal in Jersey City, practically on the doorstep of the Goldman Sachs Tower. The building was a destination for several of the passengers debarking, and the two operators moved along with the flow. Once inside the spacious glassed-in reception area, Slapshot approached the closest receptionist and held open his wallet to reveal his cover creds. “Federal agents, ma’am. We need to speak to your head of maintenance.”
He continued displaying the card for another second or two, just long enough for the receptionist to see it without really seeing it. Raynor wished that he’d brought Hawk along. She had a gift for getting strangers to go along with whatever it was she needed them to do. Slapshot’s approach was equal parts intimidation, charisma, and bullshit.
“Uh, sure,” the woman said, reaching for her telephone. “I’ll give him a call.”
“Thanks.” Slapshot flashed a Cheshire cat grin. “Say … I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone come through here wearing an eye patch.”
The woman blinked at him. “Seriously?”
Slapshot turned to Raynor and raised one eyebrow in a “told you so” expression.
* * *
They rode up to the top floor in an express elevator, then moved to the fire stairs for the final ascent to the rooftop. Reaching the roof wasn’t as easy as it looked.
“How often do you get on the roof?” Kolt asked.
“Every day, buddy,” the building engineer said with pride.
“C’mon, really, level with me,” Kolt said. “Every day?”
“Well, okay, two, three times a week max,” the engineer sheepishly said, “but the job doesn’t require more than that, honestly.”
As the engineer opened the last door, both operators readied themselves for the possibility of an immediate hostile confrontation, but the space beyond was deserted.
The rooftop itself was sheltered on all sides by a high wall, part of the tower’s ecofriendly design, but a steep metal staircase afforded access to the catwalk that ran along the outer perimeter. Raynor let Slapshot take the lead, advancing up the steps, cautiously, ready to duck back down at the first sign of trouble, but the catwalk, like the rest of the roof, was empty. The only thing moving was the air, rushing past in a stiff ten-mile-an-hour breeze. He stared out across the Hudson at the distant spire of Freedom Tower.
After clearing the corners, Slapshot came over to stand beside him. “Well, now we know one more place he isn’t,” he said, almost shouting to be heard over the wind. “What now? Ready to head back?”
Raynor checked his watch. It had taken them about forty minutes to get this far. POTUS would be arriving in just over an hour. Plenty of time for them to make it back to Ground Zero.
Plenty of time for a lot of things to happen.
“What if he’s waiting till the last minute?” Raynor said, thinking aloud. “This is key terrain.”
“What if we’re just chasing our tail?” Slapshot retorted. “You’re giving this guy too much credit. It’s not just the distance. A shot like that … It would be like threading a needle one-handed. Blindfolded.”
Slapshot wasn’t wrong. Trying to isolate a single human-sized target from a distance of nearly a mile and a half would be just the first impossible task Shiner would have to accomplish.
“I’m not saying he can make the shot,” Raynor said. “But I think he’s just arrogant enough to try it.”
Slapshot’s reply was a noncommittal grunt.
* * *
After the curious question from the federal agents, the receptionist kept a lookout for anyone sporting an eye patch, but she did not give even a second look to the man with dark glasses and white guide cane, holding the arm of the young man who walked beside him, mostly because she recognized them both from their visits earlier in the week. Even the enormous artis
t’s portfolio dangling from a strap slung over the young man’s shoulder failed to catch her attention. Most business executives favored electronic media for their presentations, but there were still a few who liked to go old school with butcher paper and printed charts on poster board. Had she been paying attention, she might have noticed that the young man seemed especially agitated, but even this she might have dismissed as the consequence of too much caffeine or Adderall.
The pair moved toward the elevators, out of sight and out of mind. Later, she would not even remember having seen them at all.
* * *
Lyle “Lizard” Dooley was jittery. Miric could feel the nervous energy radiating off the young man as they rode up in the elevator. As they exited from the car, Miric squeezed Dooley’s elbow hard and steered him away from the other departing passengers.
“Get control of yourself,” he hissed.
“I know,” Dooley replied, his tone harsh and loud enough to draw attention their way.
Behind his dark glasses, Miric was obliged to ignore the stares. He was supposed to be blind, after all. Nevertheless, he held the young man there for several more seconds until the hallway was empty.
He had spent the last three weeks pretending to be blind. There was no telling how much information the authorities had been able to glean from the Baltimore rooftop, but the one thing he was certain of was that they would still be looking for a one-eyed man, so he had become a man with no eyes at all. He and Dooley had returned to Michigan, but only long enough to establish an alibi that would explain the young man’s sudden departure and then his subsequent absence. From there, they had gone to a safe house in Rockville, Maryland, set up by Miric’s partners in the Turkish intelligence agency, and waited for another opportunity to present itself.
The New York visit was far from ideal, but with each passing day, the risk to the endgame increased. There were many other pieces in place that were already in jeopardy. If he waited much longer, the entire strategy would collapse.
So it had to be New York.
“I got it,” Dooley said. His voice was lower, but he was still shaking in nervous anticipation of what they were about to do.
Miric shared some of the other man’s apprehension. Although the plan was his, it was a considerable deviation from his normal method of operation. There were too many variables that he could not control, too many things that could go wrong.
And it had been a while since he had killed someone up close.
“Good,” he said, letting go of the young man’s arm. “Just as we practiced.”
They continued down the corridor, then turned and headed down an adjacent hallway, following the well-rehearsed route to an east-facing suite that was presently occupied by the marketing department of an investment bank.
As they approached, Miric abandoned the pretense of groping his way forward like a blind man. He even folded up his white cane and stuffed it into a pocket. He reached the double glass Herculite doors a few steps ahead of Dooley, threw them open, and strode inside.
The female receptionist looked up, smiling as she recognized him from his earlier visits. Miric took the Taurus semiauto from his jacket pocket and shot her through the eye.
Mehmet had once asked him why he always targeted the eyes of his victims. It had nothing to do with his own disability and everything to do with the fact that the eye was a reference point that he could easily find, even from long distances. But he also remembered the stories his grandmother had told him as a child, stories about the power of the evil eye. When he looked through his scope or down the iron sights of a rifle, he invariably found himself staring into the target’s left eye.
Some childish, deeply superstitious part of him believed that if that person died while looking back at him, even from several hundred meters away, their death would forever haunt him.
The report was shockingly loud in the close confines.
With his left hand, Miric removed his dark glasses. His right continued to hold the pistol out before him, aimed at the doorway behind the reception counter. The woman was still seated but was now slumped over her desk, facedown.
He knew that every move he and Lizard had made since entering the building had been recorded and would be reviewed extensively in the hours and days to come. In fact, he was counting on it. His only concession to preserving his identity was a pair of thin black gloves to avoid leaving fingerprint evidence.
A man in shirtsleeves appeared behind the dead woman. “Delores, was that a—”
Miric pulled the trigger a second time. The man collapsed in a disjointed heap behind Delores in her chair.
Dooley was still at the entrance, trying to thread a heavy chain through decorative pull handles on the glass doors. Although the doors opened out, the chain would hold them together, preventing anyone from entering, especially once Dooley secured the links with a padlock. The young man had correctly pointed out that the chain would also make it harder for them to leave when they were finished, but Miric assured him they would not be leaving by that door.
The young man was fumbling with the links, his nervousness evidently robbing him of dexterity.
“Hurry!” Miric hissed, and then returned his attention forward to the door leading deeper into the office suite. He stepped over the body in the doorway and saw three more people—two women and a man, standing in the hallway beyond, paralyzed with fear or perhaps disbelief.
It took him just two seconds to kill them all. The last one to die, the woman farthest from him, managed to turn away in a futile attempt to flee, and his first shot at her missed completely. His second hit her squarely between the shoulder blades.
A door at the end of the hall burst open and an overweight man in an expensive suit charged out, brandishing a small J-frame revolver. With shaking hands, he stabbed the pistol in Miric’s direction, but before he could pull the trigger, a .40-caliber round from the Taurus put him down.
Miric had always heard that everyone in America carried a gun and so was not surprised by the appearance of the man with the revolver. He waited a few seconds to see if anyone else would rush out to meet him. The hallway remained still. The only movement was from the whorls of smoke drifting in the air around him.
“Got it!” Dooley shouted from behind him.
“Wait!” Miric said. He advanced cautiously down the hallway to the first door, which was on his left. The dead woman lay in a heap in the doorway. The office beyond appeared to be empty. Miric watched and listened for a moment, then moved on.
In the next office, he found a man hiding under a desk, sobbing, praying perhaps. Miric killed him and kept going, moving relentlessly toward the office at the end of the hallway. There was no one else in the suite, which came as a relief to Miric. From their earlier scouting missions, he had estimated that the number of people in the suite at any given time might be as high as twenty.
As he pushed into the large office, he stooped over and retrieved the unfired revolver that lay beside the dead executive. If all went according to plan, he would have no need of an additional weapon, and it might even complicate the situation, but if experience had taught him anything, it was that sometimes the best-laid plans went awry.
The room beyond was enormous, easily three times as large as the other offices, but its most commanding feature was the view. The entire back wall was made of glass, and looked out across the Hudson River toward Lower Manhattan.
“Lizard!” he shouted. “Come.”
He did not wait for the young man to catch up, but immediately went to work clearing an area in front of the large window. When Dooley finally arrived, his face betrayed his horror at the carnage Miric had left in his wake. Miric struggled to conceal his disgust at the other man’s weakness. “Quickly. Set up the rifle.”
Dooley knelt and opened the portfolio, revealing the partially disassembled Remington 700, and another of his firearms, a Mossberg 500 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, modified with a tactical pistol grip and a fourteen-inch
barrel. He handed the latter to Miric, then began putting the rifle together.
With the shotgun held at a low ready position, Miric moved closer to the windows, close enough to reach out and touch them. He pointed the barrel of the shotgun at the windowpane, aiming low, slightly above floor level, then looked away and pulled the trigger.
The noise of the blast made the pistol’s report seem like a toy by comparison. If the earlier shooting had not already gotten the attention of the tenants in neighboring suites, the shotgun definitely would, but that could not be helped. The police would respond quickly to 911 calls, but because they were in New Jersey, separated from the New York financial district by the Hudson River, the Secret Service would not be alerted to the active shooter situation. Not right away, at least. Miric would only need a few minutes. The chain around the door pulls would buy them the time they needed to complete their mission.
He looked down to see the effect of the first load of double-aught buckshot. There was a ragged hole, almost as big as his fist, in the three-eighths-inch safety glass. He pumped the action on the shotgun, shifted his aim a little to the left, and fired again, repeating the process, macerating the glass until half the pane was gone. He used the smoking barrel to clear away the last few hanging fragments then turned back to Dooley.
The rifle was still in pieces.
“We don’t have time for this,” Miric hissed, thrusting the shotgun at him. “Take it. And get out of the way.”
Dooley’s cheeks flushed red but he took the weapon and moved aside. Miric knelt and, with practiced efficiency, reassembled the rifle. He unfolded the bipod legs and set the weapon up on the floor directly in front of the smashed-out window.
He got down behind the rifle and peered through the scope, shifting and tilting the weapon until he located his reference points. He worked his way down by degrees until he found the target area.
Two kilometers away, flashing lights heralded the impending arrival of the target.
He let out a sigh of relief. The motorcade was just arriving. The timing was perfect.