I let out the breath. No one. Just a bare concrete floor. The shooter was gone.
I listened. There was no sound of running farther down the concrete stairwell. The shooter must have entered the floor just beneath, I thought with a nod.
I took out my phone with my free hand and thumbed Return Call.
“Mike, what happened?” Fabretti said.
“Shooter in the MetLife Building on the second to top floor,” I said as I began to take the stairs down two at a time. “He’s six feet tall. Black coveralls. Wearing a ski mask. He’s armed and highly dangerous. He just killed a cop. I repeat: just killed a cop. I’m on the roof coming down after him. Seal off the MetLife Building lobby and send EMTs up to the roof for the pilot.”
“The pilot? What? Aren’t you in a helicopter?” Fabretti said.
“MetLife Building!” I hollered, and dropped the phone back into my jacket pocket as I pulled open the door at the bottom of the stairwell, carefully staying well to the left side of it. I waited and waited, then glanced in through the doorway behind my gun.
Over the Glock’s sights, I scanned a long, empty, fluorescent-lit industrial corridor with some unmarked doors on each side. Behind the doors on the right, there was the sound of machinery clacking and humming. There was a strong smell in the warm air. It smelled like a garage, like motor oil.
It’s where the elevators are, I thought. The motors for the massive building’s elevators.
I stood there, staring down the bright, empty industrial hall as my heart continued doing roadwork in my chest. I thought about Greg, dead on the roof, and about the Dallas cop Oswald killed after shooting Kennedy.
I was still thinking about all that and just about to take my first step into the hall anyway when a gun and arm appeared like a magic trick around the right corner of the corridor’s far end.
The gun started going off, and the concrete of the stairwell wall beside my head started exploding. There were three shots, then four, then five, and concrete grit dusting my face and concrete dust stinging my eyes as I ducked and dropped back and kicked the door shut again.
A small piece of cement must have cut my face because when I touched my cheek, I saw blood on my finger. I coughed and crawled back some more as two more shots ripped jagged holes through the fire door.
“Shots fired!” I screamed into my phone. “I’m up on the floor where the elevators are. Second from the top. Get SWAT up here now!”
Chapter 9
Mona Garcia, a twenty-eight-year-old recently naturalized immigrant from Belize, was in maintenance elevator number two and had just opened the door to the thirty-third floor when she heard the overhead thump.
She looked up as the ceiling hatch of the elevator car shrieked open. A man was standing there on top of the car. A man in black with a black ski mask and nice blue eyes.
Those blue eyes were the last thing she ever saw as two Federal Hi-Shok hollow-point .45-caliber bullets entered the top of her forehead.
The assassin dropped down into the car through the hatch and glanced into the hall behind his Springfield Range Officer M1911. Seeing that it was empty, he placed the RO down on the pebbled steel floor of the elevator and quickly unclipped the climbing harness from the ropes he had rigged in the elevator shaft two days before.
The ropes were his emergency escape route, which he’d just used after slipping into the shaft through a gap beside the elevator machinery up on forty-nine.
He glanced at his watch.
He had at most three minutes to get out of the building before it was completely sealed.
He dragged the cleaning woman’s body by the ankles out into the empty maintenance hall and stepped back into the elevator. Then he hit the button for the basement as he reached for the zipper of the coveralls.
“Help you, Officer?” said a maintenance man, a skinny, pale, blond young white guy standing out in the hall with two other Spanish-speaking cleaning ladies, as the elevator opened in the basement. He was gaping wide-eyed at the Springfield the assassin held openly by his leg.
“Listen up,” the assassin said with a cop command voice from beneath the brim of the NYPD ESU ball cap he was now wearing. It went with the rest of the convincing NYPD tactical uniform that he’d hidden beneath the coveralls. “We got shots fired up on the street. A cop just got shot, and the perp ran into one of the train tunnels. You got access to the Grand Central Terminal train tunnel from the basement here? I need to get to the tunnels.”
“Yeah, I think so,” the kid said, blinking and nodding rapidly. “Through the boiler room there’s an old access door.”
The assassin already knew that. It was how he had entered the building two days before.
The young maintenance guy unclipped the radio at his belt.
“You want me to call the building manager?”
“No. No time. Show me now. There’s no time to waste,” the assassin said, grabbing the guy’s elbow and urging him along.
Chapter 10
East 50th next to the Waldorf Astoria, where the president was staying, was completely blocked off when I arrived there on foot with antiterror FBI head honcho Paul Ernenwein at around five thirty that evening.
It had begun to snow again a little, and through the swirling bits and gloom, I saw more cops per square inch in the street and on the sidewalk around the famous block-size art deco hotel than on Saint Patrick’s Day. Unfortunately, a lot of news vans were parked three deep on Park Avenue as well, I noticed. We’d kept details to a minimum so far, but the helicopter crash and the shootings of Greg and the cleaning lady were already being broadcast fast and frantically out there in connection with the president’s arrival.
Paul and I had just come from working the three different crime scenes at the MetLife Building: the sniper’s nest; the crash scene on the roof, where Greg had been shot; and the freight elevator, where the shooter had killed the cleaning lady. We were still putting interviews and details together and combing for evidence, but the basic depressing bottom line so far was that we didn’t know who the shooter was or, more important, where the hell he was.
Paul had gotten a call from one of his bosses saying that we should head over to the Waldorf to give the head presidential protective agent a personal briefing, so we’d decided to walk the five Park Avenue blocks. You could actually see the silhouette of the crashed helicopter still on the roof from the street, I noticed when I looked up. Figuring out how they were going to get it down from there was thankfully someone else’s job.
After we credentialed our way past two checkpoints, we walked through the 50th Street entrance of the hotel’s top-shelf premier section, called the Towers of the Waldorf. Its lobby was amazing, an Old New York, gleaming, opulent jewel box of creamy marble and paneling and gilt moldings. I’d never been there before in my life, but I knew that, like the Empire State Building, the Waldorf had been built in the art deco skyscraper heyday of the early thirties. I thought that at any moment, Mr. Monopoly would come around the corner in his top hat and spats.
Instead, Tom Kask, the Secret Service team head, arrived. He was a big guy—six five, maybe—well dressed and lanky, with slicked silver hair and a cold, remote look on his face. If I had to judge a book by its cover, I’d say he looked like a big dumb jock bully.
“So you’re the cop who lost him?” Kask said, looking down at me as he arrived.
“No,” Paul said calmly as he showed him some of the crime scene photos from his phone. “He’s the cop who found the guy with the Barrett fifty cal that you jackwads missed. Mike here is the guy who probably saved the president’s life, and even your career, Tom, if you think about it.”
There were a bunch of factors to explain why his guys hadn’t seen the shooter, the incredible distance being the most glaring, but it didn’t matter. They, the glorious Secret Service, had screwed up royally, and a lowly NYPD cop had done their job for them.
“Sorry. That came out wrong,” the big bastard Kask said, not looking very so
rry at all. “It’s that kind of day, you know.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It did come out wrong,” Paul said, continuing to give him hell with his Southie Boston accent.
I was beginning to like Paul. He’d been totally hands-on in helping the PD and FBI response teams at the crime scenes—not exactly a common occurrence for an FBI boss. Not bad for a Red Sox fan, either, I thought.
“Anyway, Tom, we’re still smack-dab in the middle of this,” Paul said, putting his phone back into his pocket. “Anything else?”
“Actually, yeah,” Kask said. “Follow me. He wants to see you. Well, him, actually.”
“Who, me?” I said. “Who wants to see me?”
“The president. Who else?” said Kask.
Chapter 11
With that, Kask led me around a corner of the incredible lobby.
We walked past two more Secret Service presidential detail agents and an impeccably dressed desk clerk into a waiting elevator. The doors closed, and the button for 29 lit up by itself somehow, and we started to ascend.
Kask ignored me and began checking his phone while I did my best not to gape at the impressive surroundings. I’d been in elevators for work before, just never a lacquered, bird’s-eye mahogany–paneled one that was inlaid with art deco sunbursts and chevrons.
The elevator doors opened onto a small Oriental-carpeted foyer where four tall spit-shined Secret Service agents stood at attention. Between them was a set of bright-white double doors with the words WALDORF PRESIDENTIAL SUITE written in gold script.
Before I could ask someone to pinch me, I watched as Kask opened the door without knocking, and I saw President Buckland for the first time.
Beyond another small foyer, the president was sitting in a little living room on a love seat with his hands behind his head. His eyes were closed, and he was nodding as an aide read him something. Then he opened his eyes and saw me and stood up and smiled.
“Thanks, Tom,” the president said to Kask, who immediately left. “Detective Bennett, I believe I owe you a thank-you,” he said, offering his hand.
I stood there for a second, staring at his hand, stunned by it all.
“Yep,” I got out as I finally shook his hand. “I mean, no, of course not. No, sir. Are you kidding me? I’m just glad that you’re okay. I’m just glad to help.”
“Oh, thank you so much, Officer,” the First Lady said as she came out of another room. “The whole thing must have been terrifying.”
She was Snow White classically pretty, with her dark hair and pale skin. She had on a cream-colored pantsuit but was wearing slippers, I noticed, and I found myself amazed again that all this was actually happening. That I was standing in the Waldorf’s presidential suite enjoying a chat with the commander in chief and his wife.
I’ll never forget this, I thought.
I couldn’t wait to tell the kids and Mary Catherine.
“Officer, Alicia? Really? It’s Detective. Detective Michael Bennett,” President Buckland said, rolling his eyes. “You think you’d remember the name of the man who just saved your beloved husband’s bacon. I mean, did you even vote for me?”
“You’ll never know, Jeremy, will you?” the First Lady said, winking at me before she headed back toward the other room. “Thanks again, Detective Bennett.”
“So, Detective,” said the president.
“Please call me Mike, Mr. President.”
“If you call me Jerry.”
“Okay, Jerry,” I said, finally at ease. I definitely liked this president’s style.
“So, Mike, I wanted to talk to you to get your firsthand opinion. I hear advisers say things that they themselves were told, and on and on like a game of telephone, so I wanted to talk to you. You saw this guy, right? In your opinion, this guy was the real deal? He was going to kill me?”
I nodded. “I was in the blind. Looked through the scope myself, sir—I mean, Jerry. It was dialed in right on you. He’d been there a couple of days, it seems. Not to mention the way he killed my partner. It was a hell of a pistol shot. My partner never had a chance. Then he got away with rappelling equipment in the elevator shaft. That’s about as professional a killer as I’ve ever encountered.”
“Mr. President,” said his aide from across the room. “This just in off the AP wire.”
The president turned.
“The Russians have made it clear that they had nothing to do with any threat against the president. They find the suggestion insulting, the bastards.”
The president’s demeanor changed for a second. He looked down at the table we were standing beside. The emotion was there for a moment—raw hurt, slightly afraid. When he looked back at me, it was gone, and he was smiling.
“I’ll let you go, Mike,” the president said. “Miles to go and all that, but I’ll never forget what you did for me and for your country.”
“Mr. President,” I said.
“What happened to Jerry?” he said as Kask appeared again.
“Mr. President, I’m going to catch this guy,” I said.
Chapter 12
The assassin licked away the last of his chocolate crémeux and dropped the spoon and closed his eyes as he leaned back in the tufted banquette.
The restaurant was called Elise. It was on a cobblestoned street on the outskirts of the meatpacking district, and it served Michelin two-star French molecular deconstructive cuisine that was as absurdly good as it was expensive.
The decor was seductively dark in the dining room and bar below, with dramatic lights thrown upward onto gorgeously textured high white limestone walls. With his back to the wall in the darkness, even a man like him could relax, the assassin thought. At least for a moment.
He had just consumed a four-hundred-dollar nine-course chef’s tasting menu that pulled out all the stops: a parade of caviar and white truffle risotto and fried sweetbread piccata and herb-roasted tenderloin of wagyu. All of it arranged like museum-quality art and matched with preposterous precision with the best wines of Burgundy and the Rhône.
He had gone hungry more than once as a young child, and since then, he had never failed to treat food with its proper reverence. To eat meant more than just filling his belly. It was a communion with…something. Life? Death, perhaps? He didn’t know. He was no philosopher, but food was something just…more. It was more than simply a combination of pleasant sensual experiences.
Ecstatically stuffed and drunk, he listened to the surrounding murmur of the expensive restaurant. The plate clacks and conversation and discreet laughter. The festive rattle of the bartender somewhere off to the left, shaking ice cubes. Music to his ears.
“Can I get you anything?” his wife said. “A hot towel, perhaps? Maybe a pillow and a blanket?”
“Absolutely nothing,” the assassin said, opening his eyes with a smile. “That was…”
“Expensive,” his wife said with a frown.
“Oh, yes, it was. And well worth it,” he said, swirling his twenty-one-year-old Elijah Craig single-barrel bourbon.
He’d picked up an addiction to the American spirit three years ago on a job in Osaka, Japan, of all places. The Japanese were nuts, but he was all over their fetish for mastery. Maybe he’d been Japanese in a previous life.
“I don’t understand. The mission failed,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Sweetheart, the helicopter landed on the roof. I mean, I’m one for planning for eventualities, but I didn’t see that one coming. I come out and look up, and there’s the cavalry. You know how close I came to getting pinched?”
“All too well.”
“But I didn’t,” he said, winking as he sipped at the smooth fire of the bourbon. “If that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.”
“How about finishing the job? You know, getting paid? That helps, with the way you blow it.”
“Darling, I had him,” he said, kissing her hand. “His face was right there. We were in. He can be had. We’ll get another ch
ance. You’ll see. In the meantime, I just got an offer I can’t refuse. A quick little job here in town. You in?”
She rolled her eyes playfully at him.
“Ever the sweet-talker, I see,” she said, smiling. “Count me in, as usual.”
Chapter 13
Around midnight, I was doing what I always like to do after helicopter crashes and meeting US presidents.
I was kneeling on the floor of my apartment bathroom, pinning the family cat, Socky, to the tile floor.
The Sockster had been sick the last couple of days—some upper respiratory thing—and he wasn’t eating or hardly even drinking, so Mary Catherine and I had to, per the vet’s order, syringe-feed him. Mary Catherine was on syringe duty while I wrapped him up tight in a bath towel. I was wearing kitchen gloves as I held him down to avoid getting clawed.
With good reason, too, because Socky didn’t seem to be enjoying his force-fed meal in the slightest. In fact, he sounded a lot like a Harley at full throttle as he squirmed.
“So anyway,” I said to Mary Catherine over the ungodly howls as she slipped a paper towel bib over Socky’s head, “I’m standing there, and the door opens and there he is! Buckland’s sitting five feet away, talking with one of his advisers.”
“No!” she said, staring at me.
“Yes!” I said, nodding, still hopped-up from the day’s excitement. “If I wasn’t currently using it for lion taming, I’d show you the hand that shook the hand that shakes the world.”
Mary Catherine smiled as she tried to squirt cat vitamin water between Socky’s fangs.
“You’re not so bad yourself, Detective Bennett. You saved his life, you did.”
“Well, keep that to yourself, please. They’re actually trying to keep that under wraps for now, a full media blackout, and it’s working for once. Plus I don’t want the kids to know that I was in the helicopter crash. Not yet. They have enough to worry about.”
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