—
Twenty miles up the road, Denyers said, “Your most vulnerable point will be after the shot, before you’ve gotten rid of the rifle. You’ve got to be really careful about driving—you can’t even afford to be rear-ended. I’m worried that you have to drive too far before you get rid of the gun.”
“Let’s stick with the plan. I’m good with it. Nothing will ever be perfect,” Thorne said.
“I’m just sayin’….”
“I know what you’re saying. But I took the driving courses just like everybody else. Nobody’s gonna hit me.”
“Gotta signal lane changes….”
“Earl…”
—
They got to Denyers’s house, parked in the garage, let the door come back down before either of them got out.
They went to bed early, popping some sleeping pills to drag themselves under—Thorne was looking at a twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-hour day—and got up at five in the morning. They both popped amphetamines to kill the sleep aids, and by six o’clock, they were on the road.
They left Denyers’s car in a camera-free parking garage, exited the garage in a nondescript four-year-old Toyota soccer-mom van with perfectly good plates registered to a nonexistent person. Denyers carried that person’s ID with him, and the insurance certificate in the door pocket went to the same name and address. The Fender guitar case was in the back.
—
“What are you going to do with the money?” Denyers asked Thorne. They’d both get twenty-five-million-dollar paydays from Royce if they pulled off the hit.
“Hide it,” Thorne said.
“Hard to do now,” Denyers said. “The IRS looks at everything.”
“Lots of ways to do it, though. Here’s one: you take the twenty-five and go to, say, Nigeria, and you introduce yourself to the guy who approves foreign businesses, give him a little taste of the money. Then you set up a business that, say, trades in oil futures. That’s big in Lagos. I set up Thorne Trading, make a mil the first year, two mil the second, four mil the third, and so on, pay my U.S. taxes, and when Royce’s money is nice and squeaky clean, I come home.”
“That’s a lot of years in Lagos,” Denyers said.
“Give me some credit, Earl. I’m not going to actually live there,” Thorne said. “I’ll rent a place somewhere secure and safe and obscure. Switzerland. Lichtenstein.”
Denyers said, “Huh.”
“What are you going to do with yours?”
“My old man is almost eighty, and he’s in bad health,” Denyers said. “My mother’s dead. I inherit it all. Right now, his estate’s worth maybe a mil, but he’s pissed away more money in his life than I’ll ever see, even with Royce’s payday. When he croaks, I’ll open the safe-deposit box and find a nice round twenty-five mil inside, in gold coins. Old gold coins. The bank and I will report it to the IRS, the feds will take their pound of flesh, and I’ll wind up with something like seventeen million free and clear, taxes paid, including the value of his actual estate.”
“That sounds like an excellent plan, as long as your old man doesn’t hang on until he’s a hundred and one, or something,” Thorne said.
“He won’t. I can guarantee it,” Denyers said.
“Wow,” Thorne said flatly. “That’s cold, man.”
—
At ten o’clock, they were parked in a rapidly filling lot outside the Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey, one of the largest shopping malls in the state. They had a two-hour wait, which they would spend in the van, mostly in the back.
Denyers had brought along a large mirror and a theatrical makeup kit. The beards didn’t have to be perfect, but both of them had experience with disguises. Getting the beards right took a half hour; they’d throw the makeup kit in a Dumpster on the way to the shooting platform.
At eleven-thirty, Denyers said, “Let’s go.”
“Give it a few more minutes,” Thorne said. “Stick to the plan.”
They did, and Denyers then said, “I don’t know….I’m getting scared again.”
“It’s now or never, Earl.”
Denyers sat staring past the front seat for ten seconds, then fifteen, feeling himself sweat. Then he shook it off and said, “Fuck it, let’s go.” And, “This beard itches like poison ivy.”
As they crossed the bluff that overlooked the Hudson River, the whole of Manhattan seemed to open in front of them.
“There it is,” Thorne said, looking across the river. “Looks like a dream, doesn’t it?”
“Or the beginning of a nightmare,” Denyers said. They pulled into the parking garage, got a ticket. “Get your guitar.”
Cade woke early, a few minutes after seven o’clock. He’d been up past midnight, and all during the night, ideas and pieces of ideas had been clicking through his half-awake brain. How to find Thorne? He seemed to have disappeared. Probably traveling under false names, Cade thought, with good credit cards under those names. He’d know how to break up his trail if he thought it was necessary.
Cade’s subconscious had kicked out another idea overnight: if Thorne was planning to shoot the president, then…where would the president be over the next few days?
Harmon was sleeping as silently as if he were dead. He’d told Cade that he’d taught himself never to snore—there were places in his past where a snore would have been a real bad idea—but he was easy to wake. Moving as quietly as he could, Cade opened his laptop.
He typed “President’s schedule” into Google.
To his surprise, the president’s schedule immediately popped up, the first item in the search, from www.whitehouse.gov. He clicked on “President’s Schedule,” found an hour-by-hour listing for the next few days, and muttered, “Ah, shit.”
Harmon asked, “What happened?” He sounded wide awake.
“I’m a dumb-ass, we’re all dumb-asses,” Cade said. “The president’s daily schedule is on the Net, hour by hour. Guess what? He’s going to New York City today, and he’ll be out in the open three or four times.”
Harmon sat up. “Where?”
“He’s giving a speech at eleven at the Sheraton New York—”
“Hotels—security’s always tight.”
“Then he’s at some museum at one—”
“That’ll be tight, too.”
“And he’s going to a Yankees game at four….”
“Yankee Stadium?” Harmon said. “Crap. Lots of time out in the open, and Thorne could get lost there. It’d be chaos, thousands of people stampeding out of the place….”
“Here’s the really bad part,” Cade said. “Tomorrow the president flies to London. He’ll be gone for a week. So…”
Harmon got up and said, “Time to get moving.”
“To where?”
“To New York. My army pal is going to talk to the chief of staff this morning. I’ll give him the latest, but it’s still gonna take a while for them to get up to speed. Best thing to do is go to New York and face-to-face with Secret Service guys, try to warn them….”
Harmon pulled on his pants and hurried down the hall. He would have banged on Shay and Cruz’s door, but X was barking before he raised his knuckle, so he went and woke Twist.
Twist said, “I don’t know what we can realistically do there….”
“Create a ruckus,” Harmon said. “The Secret Service can’t ignore that. They can arrest us, but they can’t ignore us if we’re face to face.”
As they cleaned up and got dressed, Harmon suggested to Cade that he stay in Washington: “We’ll want you on the Net full-time, and the fastest place is right here. In the car, you’re down to using the iPad, and it’s too slow.”
So Cade stayed in Washington. Cruz and Harmon took one truck; Twist, Shay, and X the other. Shay took the iPad.
“Four-hour trip,” Cade told them before they left. “That’s if nothing happens to slow you down.”
—
They had to stop once for gas, at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, Man
hattan almost in sight. While Twist and Harmon handled the gas, Shay and Cruz scrambled into the Burger King for burgers, fries, and soft drinks.
Shay ran a bag of food to Harmon’s truck, and Harmon waved everybody together. “We’re making good time. I updated Chet Landy, but I haven’t heard anything back….Did you get Barin?”
Shay said: “We called, but he isn’t picking up—I’ve left, like, four messages.”
“Yeah, not good enough. Look, somebody’s gonna wind up in jail tonight, and I’m thinking it should be me. If nothing happens, they’ll give me a psych exam and put me on a list, and I’ll be out. I’ve been in worse places than a federal lockup. When we get to the stadium, we’ll work it until we’re sure we’ve spotted a Secret Service agent. I’ll make the approach; you guys watch. If I give you a big head shake, that means they’ve taken me for a kook. We’ll work on a plan B as we drive….”
They got back in the trucks and were moving, Harmon’s vehicle in the lead, when he suddenly swerved to the side and stopped.
“What happened?” Shay asked as Twist swerved in behind him.
Harmon got out of the truck and jogged back to them, a cell phone in his hand, his face white, trailed by Cruz.
Twist rolled the window down and asked, “What?”
“I got Cade on the line. I asked him to get the address of the museum, in case we want to take a look at it.” He shook his head, pressed the speaker button. “We’re all here.”
Cade said, “I already told Harmon part of it, but I’m the dumb-ass again. I saw that the president was going to a museum, but I’d never heard of it. I just looked at the address. Then I decided to look at a satellite view…and hell, I’m sorry, but it turns out the museum is an aircraft carrier. It’s called the Intrepid. It sits on the Hudson River, and the only place to give a speech would be standing on the flight deck. There are about a million windows looking down on it….”
Harmon blurted: “It’s not the stadium. It’s the carrier.” He looked at his watch. “In an hour and fifteen minutes.”
“Ah, shit,” Twist said. “We gotta go.”
They all turned back to their vehicles, and Harmon shouted, “Same plan: I’ll talk to the Secret Service at the carrier, make the first approach, but it’s gotta be in a hurry! If they bust me, and nothing happens, go to the stadium!”
Twist got back behind the wheel, ran his hands through his hair, and said, “I don’t believe this. I really don’t.”
Harmon was already wheeling out of the rest stop, and they lost him in a minute or so in the heavy traffic.
“Gotta go faster,” Shay said.
“If I go faster, we’ll pile up somewhere, and that won’t help.”
Shay got on the iPad and found the fastest route to the museum, straight north and then through the Lincoln Tunnel, which ran under the Hudson River and emerged in Manhattan only a few blocks from the Intrepid. She gave directions to Twist as he maneuvered through the growing traffic approaching the river.
Next she called up a satellite view of the Intrepid. The ship stuck out into the Hudson like a pier; the satellite view had apparently been taken in the winter, because there were no leaves on the trees.
She looked at it for a few minutes, then asked Twist for their cold cell phone. “I need to call Cade.”
Twist handed her the phone and said, “This is worse than I-5. Okay, not worse than the 5, but worse than the 405. Okay, not worse than the 405, but worse— Oh, screw it….”
Shay got on the phone and called Cade.
“Yeah?”
“When we did the numbers on the distance that Thorne was shooting at the ranch, at the target, it was like twenty-two hundred yards, right?”
“I can check, hang on….Yeah. If Harmon’s stride was right on, it’d be twenty-two seventeen.”
“Go to Google Earth and use their tape measure and see where a twenty-two-hundred-yard shot would be coming from.”
“Two or three minutes,” Cade said. “Call me back.”
—
Shay hung up and called Harmon on the walkie-talkie: “Where are you guys?”
“Coming up on the Lincoln Tunnel. Traffic is a goddamn nightmare.”
She told him about the question she had for Cade, and Harmon said, “I should have thought of that earlier, dammit.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Shay said.
She was looking at her watch, giving Cade the full three minutes, but he called back before she had a chance to call him.
“Okay, first of all, if he was rehearsing this shot at the ranch, then it’s not coming from the New York side. It’s coming from across the river in New Jersey. I’m liking the town of Weehawken.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. The shot’s so long that if it were coming from the New York side, the shooter would have to be all the way up by Central Park, that far away. There’s just no sight line that long from the New York side: you’d have to shoot through buildings.”
“I don’t know where Central Park is,” Shay said.
Twist: “A long way. Cade’s right, a mile-long shot in Manhattan doesn’t make sense.”
“Something else,” Cade said. “If the shot comes from that side, from New Jersey, it’ll take forever for the Secret Service to get there from Manhattan. Even if they call some Jersey cops, the shooter will probably be long gone.”
“How do you know it’s this Weehawken place?” Shay asked.
“Because there’s pictures on the museum’s website that show other high-profile speeches, so I can see where the president will probably be standing. The only place you can see that speaker’s stand from the Jersey side would be from Weehawken. There are three buildings at about the right distance, and high enough to shoot at the deck. But one has big windows, facing in just the right direction, at exactly twenty-two hundred and seventeen yards.”
“Which one is it? You have an address?”
“No address, but I’ll get one. What I have is a screen grab of my numbers on top of a map. You on the iPad?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sending you that shot…now.”
Twist said, “You need to call Harmon and tell him exactly what you just told us. The shooter’s gonna be on this side of the river.”
“Doing that right now,” Cade said, and clicked off.
Shay said to Twist, “We’ve got to get off this road. We need to stay on this side of the river.”
“Give me a route,” Twist said.
Harmon called a minute later: “We’re locked into the tunnel approach. We can’t turn around here. You gotta get there, you gotta hurry. Hurry, hurry….”
The approach to the building that would act as a shooting platform was intricate. There was almost no place you could go in an urban area in the United States where you wouldn’t be caught by a video camera. Almost.
Denyers had left his own car in a parking garage without cameras, and they’d exited in the Toyota minivan—no exchange to be seen there. They’d driven the common-as-dirt van to New Jersey, gotten bearded up in the shopping mall lot, and, from there, driven to another camera-free automated parking lot, where they would trade the van for a Toyota Corolla, which Thorne would drive to Florida after the shot.
They were now both in full disguise and wearing thin flesh-colored rubber gloves. The gloves were hot but necessary.
After the shot, Thorne would drop Denyers a half mile from the parking lot with the van. Denyers would walk there, down several residential streets without visible cameras, still wearing his disguise. He’d then drive the van back to Washington, where it would eventually be sterilized and dropped in a very bad neighborhood, the doors unlocked, the keys on the front seat.
Thorne would continue on, change plates in a camera-free car wash, dump the rifle and the old plates in the ocean, then drive straight through to Jacksonville, where the car would be sterilized and abandoned, the doors unlocked, the keys on the front seat….
They both were conf
ident that the trail could not be traced—and if by some wild chance it were, it would end with some doper who’d seen the chance for a free car.
—
The building that would be the shooting platform had an automatic door on the underground parking garage. Denyers produced a remote control and clicked it once. The door began to open.
The building was supposed to be a medical complex, but the doctors had gotten it eighty percent built and then run out of money. Now they were all suing each other—and the building was largely deserted.
“You’re sure there’s nobody here but the guard,” Thorne said as he pulled forward into the garage. The door folded shut behind them.
“I’m sure.”
“And he’ll be behind his desk in the lobby.”
“Most likely. Could be running a check on another floor; he’s supposed to do that from time to time. But we set off the alarm just now when the garage door opened. I expect it’ll take him about a minute to get down to the parking level,” Denyers said. “Get the guitar. And put on your ball cap, just in case.”
Thorne put on his hat and got out and popped the side door on the van, and at that moment, they heard a door open and a guard came through. He was a tall, affable-looking black man wearing a gray uniform and a New York Giants baseball hat.
He smiled and said, “Who’re you guys?”
Thorne came around the van and said, “We’re here to kill the president.”
The guard’s smile faltered. “What?”
Thorne lifted his hand, which had a pistol in it, and shot him twice in the heart.
They dragged him into the stairwell, leaving behind a thin track of blood, took his keys, and stuffed the body under the bottom flight of stairs, out of sight unless you looked for it.
That done, they climbed the stairs to the lobby. “Hope you’re right about the elevators being turned on,” Thorne said. “I don’t want to be running up and down twelve floors.”
“Elevator key should be on that ring, too….”
They came out in the lobby a few seconds later, heard music, then saw movement behind what was to have been a nice reception desk but right now was several slabs of raw plywood.
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