Brian dropped his cell into his pocket as he arrived at the battered pay phone. He lifted the receiver and heard a dial tone. It had to be one of the last working pay phones in all of Manhattan. Maybe the world.
He quickly dialed.
“Nine one one. What’s your emergency?” asked a female operator.
“I just saw a guy with a gun in his hand in Riverside Park. A tall black guy in a black goose down jacket. He’s getting into a Mercedes on Riverside Drive. Plate number 347-WRT. He’s near the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Hurry.”
“Do you want to leave your name?” the operator wanted to know.
Brian thought about the dealer again, the sheer horrendous size of him.
“Not in any way, shape, or frickin’ form, ma’am,” Brian Bennett said before he hung up the phone with a sharp clang and continued running.
Chapter 64
At seven that night, I was in the company Impala with Seamus, scanning the empty, dark streets around my building, looking for Brian.
I was starting to get nervous. Actually, if you wanted to get truly technical, I was on the brink of a massive panic attack.
The tires squealed as we came off 89th onto Amsterdam Avenue with some speed. We zipped past a Thai restaurant, a pizza parlor, a dive bar.
“Wait—maybe he went into that bar back there, Seamus,” I said. “Do you think we should stop?”
“No, I don’t,” Seamus said calmly. “He’s sixteen. He’s just walking around. It’s going to be fine. We’ll find him, Michael. Soon.”
“Why do kids do this, Father?” I said. “Drive their parents so sick with worry?”
“I remember when you were young,” Seamus said. “Your parents beamed as you shined your shoes and whistled as you made your way back and forth from choir to altar boy practice. You never worried anyone to death with all your wild hooligan carryings-on.”
“It was a different time back then,” I said in my defense. “Everything wasn’t so nuts.”
“Right you are,” Seamus said. “In the seventies and eighties, this city was a moral paradise. If you recall, Michael, it’s only natural for a boy to gravitate toward shenanigans. Why, it was only yesterday your father and I were out looking for you! When ya went to—what was it called?—Laser something in Central Park, and blind my eyes if we weren’t in his squad car then as well!”
“Laser Zeppelin,” I said, laughing. “At the Hayden Planetarium. Give me a break, Seamus. That was…educational!”
I remembered it vaguely. It was a laser light show across the dome of a huge dark room where the immortal Zep was blasted at an unbelievable volume. Teens would tailgate, sipping tequila and beer in the park outside every Friday night, and my friends and I would go join the festivities, trying to get girls’ phone numbers. As I strolled down memory lane, I suddenly remembered my own father, murder in his eyes, by a park bench when I came back from upchucking in the bushes.
“Not fair, Seamus,” I said as I continued cruising down Amsterdam, my head on a swivel. “How dare you bring up, at a time like this, the fact that I, too, was sixteen once.”
We did another circuit around the apartment and onto Riverside Drive, and I spotted blue and red spinning lights somewhere in the high eighties. As I zoomed up, I could see that cops had cuffed a big figure in a goose down jacket and were putting him up over the hood of a Mercedes. Thank God it wasn’t Brian, I thought, driving past.
Then, a minute later, there he was. On the corner of 96th, waiting to cross at the light.
“Hey, Dad. Hey, Seamus,” he said casually as I screeched up in front of him.
“Get your butt in this car now!”
I twisted around toward the back as he sat, and I looked deep into his eyes.
“One chance. What are you on?” I said.
He gaped at me.
“Nothing, Dad, I swear. I went out for a walk. My phone died. I must have lost track of time. Jeez.”
“Better your phone than you, you idiot,” I said. “You’re up to something. Your brother is sick with whatever it is. What the hell is going on in my house? I want answers.”
“It was nothing. I went to the library, and I met my friend. We just started walking and talking.”
“Which friend?”
“Rob from the football team. He came down to the city from Westchester, and we were just chilling. He just hopped in a cab the second you showed up.”
I squinted at him.
“Brian, people lie to me all day. I need to get it at home, too?”
“I swear, Dad. Please. Call him if you don’t believe me.”
“And listen to what? What you told him to say? No, thanks.”
“Leave it for now,” Seamus whispered, leaning over toward me. “Remember the lasers, Michael.”
I rolled my eyes as I ripped the tranny into drive and hit the gas.
Seamus was right. And not for the first time.
Chapter 65
President Buckland heard the trill of the Sikorsky VH-60N White Hawk’s rotor lower in pitch as the two Secret Service agents on the midnight shift softly closed the Rose Garden doors behind him.
As he cleaned his shoes on the mat and walked down the warm carpeted corridor, he thought about the Secret Service and the two young full-dress marines who had just popped the double doors of Marine One for him. Thought about all the Americans out there in the cold and dark, around the world, manning their posts.
In the beginning, it had been difficult to accept all the fuss and ceremony of the job, but then he realized it wasn’t about him. The fact that spit-shined marines would greet him with a salute at three o’clock in the cold morning was just a small symbol of the extraordinary lengths they would go to to protect their country. The dedication and full commitment of America’s first responders never failed to humble and inspire him.
He made a right at the end of the corridor and found the basement stairs. His chief of staff had texted during his late meeting at Langley that Buckland’s presence was requested in the White House kitchen.
Which could mean only one thing.
Some trick his wife was pulling, of course. Forty-three years of age, and she still loved tricks and pranks. Even here in the White House. Upstairs in their personal quarters, she would hide on him from time to time, like an overgrown three-year-old.
As he approached the kitchen, he looked around for Danny, the workaholic head chef. Even at 3:00 a.m., he probably wasn’t too far away, waiting for the president and his wife’s little “moment” to be over so he could have his kitchen back.
The kitchen was dark but for one pendant light shining down on his wife, who was sitting at one of the stainless steel prep counters, smiling and beautiful in her robe and slippers.
He watched as she quickly slipped her rosary beads back into her pocket. She had always been a woman of faith, but ever since he’d gotten the big job, she’d become even more so. He prayed from time to time, but it was a constant with her.
He sat beside her and kicked off his shoes.
“And what the heck is this, now?” Buckland said to his wife. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“Don’t tell me you forgot,” she said.
“Forgot what?”
“Our anniversary.”
“That’s in June!” Buckland said, throwing up his hands.
“Not that one,” she said. “The other one, silly.” She pushed over the covered silver tray beside her.
He took off the cover and his mouth fell open as he saw the two Klondike bars on the tray.
“Oh. That one,” he said, laughing.
He remembered it like it was yesterday. He had prepared a special dinner for the two of them—loin lamb chops and garlic mashed potatoes—on a plastic table on the balcony of his crummy first apartment, near his first post in Tucson. The balcony overlooked the parking lot of a Goodwill store, but it had looked like the Champs-Élysées seen from the window of the nicest hotel in Paris when she sat down across from h
im, done up in the little black dress she’d worn for the occasion.
Dessert, which they had only gotten around to the morning after, had been two Klondike bars melted to mush on the kitchen counter.
Buckland smiled. How long ago had that been? He suddenly thought about all of it, the summers and Christmases and dozens of birthdays, first together and then with their kids. All that fun and joy. The fullness of the life they had had because they had somehow found each other.
People talked about his heroic accomplishments, but no one knew that every one of them had been because of her. She was the one who had fulfilled his potential. He had simply been lucky enough to have found someone to be a hero for.
“I was going to use this as a way to beg you not to go to New York,” his wife said, “but that would be useless. In fact, selfish. Our country needs you to go. The world does. Putin is a wolf. It’s time he learns what a sheepdog is all about. Somebody has to do it, and it’s you.”
She took his hand and led him through the darkened kitchen toward the elevator.
“But wait. What about the Klondike bars?” he said.
“Tomorrow morning, Mr. President. We have to do this right, remember?”
Chapter 66
The bright white rectangle of the TV screen lit up in the darkness and then the video was rolling.
The footage opened up on the long gray carpet of a downward-sloping New York City cross street near the United Nations in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, east of Madison Avenue. The Midtown South side street was unnaturally clear of traffic and parked cars, and there were steel pedestrian barriers, as one would see at a parade, completely lining the curbs in both directions.
By the gold tinge to the light and the short sleeves and summer dresses of the handful of pedestrians behind the barriers, it appeared to be a summer evening. At the top of Madison Avenue in the distance, through the suffused light, appeared the silhouette of a uniformed cop with his arms folded, his back to the street.
Then the vehicles came over the rise.
A blue-and-white marked NYPD cop car came first, its flashing and blinking lights barely perceptible in the twilight. It moved by quickly—forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour. It was followed by an equally rapidly moving black Chevy Suburban, then a blue-and-white marked NYPD SUV, and then an NYPD tow truck. Behind the tow truck came another black speeding Suburban SUV, and then another, and then another.
“How many bloody cars are there again?” the British assassin’s wife said as they watched in the dark of the old office.
“Altogether, fifty-four,” the assassin said. “Shh. Watch.”
There was a break in the motorcade for nearly a minute and then a rumble began. Seconds later, in a phalanx of blinking red and blue, there were NYPD motorcycle cops, half a dozen in a loose V, followed by more and more cop cars and vans and SUVs.
Finally, a full four minutes into the video, down the slope came what everyone was waiting for. Pedestrians at the curb began lofting phones and waving plastic American flags as what was referred to as the Beast—the first of two massive presidential Cadillac limousines—barreled over the rise.
The assassin hit the Pause button on the remote.
“Right there. You see?” the assassin said, pointing behind the barrier, to the right of the limo. “It happens right there.”
“Oh…I see. That’s brilliant! You’ve outdone yourself. I can picture it now. Out of nowhere like that. When it happens, it’s just gonna be…”
“Bedlam,” the assassin agreed.
He got off the couch and went to the small washroom and clicked on the light and began scrubbing out the oil beneath his fingernails with Lava soap and a brush.
They were at the rented workshop in Brooklyn, and they’d just finished all the final adjustments on the dump truck. Everything was ready. Everything was in place. Disguises. Equipment. Distances. Now vehicles. Done, done, done, and done.
“And the route is confirmed?” his wife said at his back.
“Our contact is in the Secret Service, love,” he said, glancing at his fingernails and switching the brush to his other hand. “They know before the president himself does.”
“It can’t be stopped, then. It’s done. We’ve done it.”
The British assassin rinsed his hands and smiled at his reflection, then came back into the room. He finished the Gatorade he’d been drinking and bank-shot the bottle into the wastebasket along the old office’s brick wall.
“The toy soldier has been wound, doll. Now it’s just a matter of pushing the button.”
In the glow of the paused screen image, the assassin’s wife pulled off her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She lay back on the couch, staring at him with her feline-gray eyes.
As he watched her slip out of her jeans, the British assassin imagined the new Italian Racing Red Jag XFR-S he was going to buy when the final payment came. The rumble of its five-hundred-plus horsepower under his palm. The way it would drift on the hairpins above the Mediterranean.
“Then what are you waiting for?” his wife said in the glow. “Push away.”
Chapter 67
It was Saturday, and down on the field, a bunch of thin dudes in baby-blue uniforms milled around another crew of skinny guys wearing all-white uniforms.
The crowd around me suddenly roared as a light-blue guy with girlie hair booted the ball with a loud champagne-cork-popping sound. The spinning ball made a surprisingly sharp curve through the air as it streaked for the top right corner of the goal. Then the crowd groaned as the ball banged off the goal’s top bar and spun out-of-bounds.
As I watched the slo-mo replay of the corner kick up on the massive Jumbotron above Yankee Stadium’s center-field wall, I couldn’t decide which was more surprising: that I was actually at a professional soccer game or that the soccer game was sacrilegiously occurring down on the hallowed outfield grass of my beloved Bronx Bombers.
“Gee, get out of here. There wasn’t a goal made?” I said sarcastically to Arturo, beside me.
We were standing in the cold of the open terrace-level seating, just below the stadium’s upper deck on the third base side. Around us, a crowd of about thirty thousand surrounded the improvised soccer field, set up foul pole to foul pole in the baseball stadium’s outfield.
“Tell me, is there ever a goal in soccer?” I said. “Or is zip-zip the point? Is it, like, a Zen thing?”
“Soccer no longer exists, Mike,” Arturo said as he lifted his binoculars. “It’s called football now, and it’s the world’s sport, so get into it.”
“Oh, I do, Arturo,” I said, lifting my own binocs. “But only when it’s played properly, on Sundays by men with upper body strength who wear helmets.”
I was on my way home from another fruitless day of not finding the assassin the night before when Arturo had called me. Arturo, a soccer fan, had heard on the radio about the Saturday exhibition match between the new New York City Football Club and a team from England called Leeds United.
Leeds United, as it turned out, was a team from northern England.
Precisely where our shooter was supposed to be from.
Coming here this afternoon with Arturo to look for him was a long shot, I knew. Under normal circumstances, I’d say there was probably no chance in hell that a public enemy number one on the run would do something as nuts as pop by and cheer on his home team.
But then again, this was no normal crook.
I’d been studying up on these warrior sniper types, and the thing about them was, although they were extremely precise and patient, they truly had no problem with risk. Things like grenades without pins, tightropes with no nets, and jumping out of perfectly good aircraft were for some reason incredibly alluring to them. Risk was how they got their rocks off.
Also a plus point—probably the only one—was that the CIA had actually dug up another, slightly better photo of the Brit, standing in the crowd at some Middle Eastern market. He was wearing aviator sunglasses, but the shape
of his nose and ears and jaw were clear. Better than that, the smug frown on his face and the way he held himself, with a kind of shoulders-back, arrogant swagger, were quite distinctive.
I studied the photo for the thousandth time, the features, the demeanor and carriage. Then I lifted my binoculars and went back to scanning the crowd. If he was here, we could find him.
Maybe.
I panned over the sea of baby blue. Though the mostly male crowd jumped up and down a lot and did weird chants as they drank beer, they struck me as, rather than violent Euro hooligans, clean-cut fellows who had probably played soccer in high school and college. Good-natured enough. Well, except for the idiots who insisted on constantly blowing those stupid head-splitting vuvuzela horns that sounded like bees buzzing.
After another minute of not finding the needle in the haystack, an air horn went off near us at an eardrum-perforating volume as another baby-blue guy failed to kick the ball into the goal.
“Take me out to a real ball game,” I sang under my breath as I put my Nikon binocs back up on my eyes.
I saw it a nanosecond later. I aimed the glasses down on the main level almost directly by first base and kept them there.
“No,” I said, spinning the target into focus. “No.”
“What is it, Mike?”
“C’mon,” I said as I jogged up the stairs for the concourse. “Hurry up!”
Chapter 68
The British assassin smiled at the curvy brunette waitress with big black-rimmed eyes as she stopped before him with a tray filled with bottles of Budweiser and champagne in flutes.
He was going to grab a few lagers, but then his wife elbowed him, and he thought again. A second later, another chesty serving wench brought caviar and hot dogs. This one was a no-brainer. He liberally sprinkled beluga onto two franks.
“Welcome to America,” he said to his wife after a surprisingly tasty bite.
They were in luxury suite 321 on Yankee Stadium’s private level, and it actually fit its ridiculous billing. It had leather seats and couches, flat screens everywhere, a pine-scented private loo. The suite even had a heated balcony overlooking the field, which was coming in quite handy now, this far into November.
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