A young woman stood up from behind the plywood, looked at them, and asked, “Where’s Damien?”
“Who’re you?” Denyers asked.
“His girlfriend. Dr. Robles said it’d be okay if I visited him….”
Thorne shot her twice in the heart, and as she toppled to the floor, Denyers said, “Goddammit. Hope nobody’s expecting her somewhere.”
Thorne looked at his watch. “We’re shooting in twenty minutes. No one expecting her would worry if she’s only twenty minutes late.” He nodded at two partly eaten chicken sandwiches. “Besides, they were only halfway through lunch, so she wasn’t going anyplace right away.”
They dragged her body behind the desk and covered her with a leaning sheet of plywood, and Thorne said, “I’m going up. If somebody else shows—”
“I got it,” Denyers said. He took a pistol out of his pocket, put it on the desk, and took the security guard’s chair. Just another rent-a-cop. With an itchy beard.
—
Thorne disappeared into an elevator with all his gear.
The guard and his girlfriend had a radio tuned to some easy-listening rap. Now there was a category, Denyers thought, and he pulled the radio over with his gloved hands and looked for something different. He eventually landed on an NPR station playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, a big hit in Denyers’s preferred genre.
A little night music: the perfect background accompaniment for a presidential assassination.
—
Twelve stories up, Thorne looked down the hall, walked to his right. Nothing was finished. The floors were rough concrete, the drywall was unpainted, there were no toilets attached to the plumbing. Two doors down, he stepped into one of the roughed-in rooms, no walls at all, just aluminum framing threaded with white plastic tubing and wiring that led to bare, switchless electrical boxes.
Everything smelled like damp concrete and plaster.
He had the guitar case, with the gun and scope, and a duffel bag, containing the gun’s bipod, an adjustable stock support, the computer, and a yoga mat. He stepped over to a window, which opened horizontally and only about six inches. Two inches was enough.
When it was open, he took the rifle out of its case, handling it as though it were the crown jewels. The scope was firmly attached to the weapon, metal on metal, and it had been heavily padded in its travels since the last sighting-in. Still, even the slightest movement between the gun and the scope would cause a missed shot.
He attached the rifle to the bipod, and the stock to the stock support, and moved them to the window, placing the muzzle of the gun about an inch behind the open window.
He cranked the stock support up—the deck of the Intrepid was slightly below him—until he had a rough aim point. He stuck the computer cable into a USB port on the rifle’s stock, carefully turned on the scope, and brought the computer up.
A single click and he was looking at what the scope was seeing, but on the computer screen. What he could see, at a sharp angle, was a portion of the Intrepid’s flight deck. Even with the naked eye, he could see the bright colors of dozens and probably hundreds of people gathered on the deck. He could also see an American flag, which hung limply from its flagstaff. No wind drift to worry about. Perfect.
But the rifle was set up too high—he reached over and slowly screwed the stock support even higher, which brought the gun’s muzzle down, and then slowly moved the muzzle to the left until he was focused on a woman who was sitting in a chair on the speaker’s stand, talking to a man standing next to her. She was wearing one of those red-orange dresses that political women favored, and it made an excellent setup target.
When everything was perfect, he slowly adjusted the scope’s magnification until all he could see was the red dress and about three or four feet on either side of the woman. Then he screwed the stock support a bit lower, which raised the muzzle, until he could focus on the teleprompter the president would be using.
From Thorne’s perspective, the president would be standing slightly to the left of the teleprompter, and he moved the rifle stock a tiny fraction of an inch until it was aimed through the space where the president would be standing.
He took a cold cell phone from his pocket and called Denyers, who answered on another cold phone. “Let’s go to Denny’s and get a cheeseburger,” Thorne said, which meant that he was set.
“Sounds good to me—see you in fifteen,” Denyers said: the coast was clear.
He checked the sight again on the computer screen: a luminescent green cross hovered just to the left of the teleprompter. Still locked on.
To fire the rifle, he had to pull the trigger, then key Command-F. The computer would signal the rifle to fire when the selected target was exactly positioned.
Far across the river, and down below, he could see people in masses, clumping in front of the speaker’s stand, and a couple of dignitaries hurrying to their chairs on the stand. He looked at his watch: one o’clock.
The president was on his way….
Cruz spent most of his time looking stoically out through the windshield, giving occasional traffic alerts: “Driver two cars up is merging left” or “There’s a biker up ahead moving between lanes.”
Harmon, on the other hand, seemed to Cruz to be freaking out, jamming the big SUV into the smallest cracks in the traffic, moving slow drivers over by leaning on the horn, ignoring the multitude of upraised fingers and shaken fists. And he was sweating—the first time Cruz had seen that.
Nothing Harmon could do, though. By the time they got into the tunnel itself, it was eighteen minutes to one o’clock. Once in the tunnel, the traffic smoothed out and the phone reception got better.
They didn’t have an iPad, like Shay and Twist, and were relying on Cade to get them through traffic.
“When you come out of the tunnel, you will actually have gone too far; you’ll have to go back west to get to the river, and then north,” Cade said. “I don’t see anything definitive on traffic, but I’ve had a New York radio station up, and they say things are starting to clog up because of the presidential motorcade.”
“How far is it from where we come out of the tunnel to the Intrepid?” Harmon asked.
“About…nine blocks. But three of those are the long New York east-west blocks, and six of them are the short north-south blocks….”
“Faster to run or faster to drive?”
“Run, I think. Though it depends on where you bail out of the car,” Cade said. “But traffic…Actually, I can’t tell you from here. It’s confusing, but I’d bet you could run it faster if there’s any traffic at all.”
—
Harmon pulled the gun out of his cargo pocket and said to Cruz, “If the New York cops catch you with this gun, they’ll put you in prison. First chance you get, find a Dumpster or a sewer and throw it in. Sewer would be better. Wipe it first.” He shoved the gun at him.
“What are you doing?” Cruz asked.
“I’ve seen these motorcades before. They create a first-class clusterfuck, and there’ll be cops everywhere. If we stop rolling, I’m going to run for it. You gotta get over here in the driver’s seat—do not take your sweet time.”
Harmon was talking so fast that Cruz had a hard time keeping up. Cruz said, “Man, you gotta slow down, you’re gonna have a stroke.”
“We’re talking about the president,” Harmon said. “The president…”
The traffic in the tunnel ground to a stop. They couldn’t see movement ahead of them, and Harmon said sharply, “Now!”
“What?”
Harmon yanked his door open and shouted, “Run!” and then Cruz realized what he was doing and yanked his own door open, and they both ran around the truck, nearly colliding at the back bumper. The car behind them honked once, and then they were back inside. Fifteen seconds later, they began moving again.
When they could see daylight up ahead, Harmon got on the phone again with Cade, who said, “Take the exit heading north, go north.”
&n
bsp; Cruz spotted the exit, and after a couple more slowdowns, they were back in the light, out of the tunnel, but the streets were jammed with traffic. Harmon said, “I’m running. Don’t forget to ditch the gun. Take the phone, stay in touch with Cade. I’m running.”
They were a block north when they slowed again, and Harmon popped the door and was gone.
—
The idea of an assassination scared Harmon to death. He’d fought in wars in a number of countries where assassination was simply the way politics was done, and he wouldn’t have wanted to live in any of those places.
So he sprinted toward the Hudson. He was both large and fast. He could run five miles in thirty-five minutes wearing boots and carrying a pack and a gun, and now he was wearing running shoes and carrying nothing at all.
But he wasn’t running on a track; he was running on sidewalks and in the street, in traffic.
He made the turn onto the West Side Highway, and the sidewalk traffic suddenly got heavier. He dodged around a guy in a wheelchair and nearly bowled over an old lady and her dog. She screamed at him, and a fat man in a black T-shirt, walking the opposite direction, put out an arm and shouted, “Slow down, a-hole,” but Harmon blew past him.
Up ahead, the traffic on the West Side Highway was being diverted to the east, the highway blocked off. Harmon could see people moving off the sidewalk and into the street as they got closer to the Intrepid.
No sirens yet, and the motorcade usually arrived with screaming sirens all around.
About the time he thought he’d manage to get close to the ship, he found a thick rank of people stretching across the highway—and found himself up against a waist-high mesh fence with cops every six feet.
The closest one was a heavyset young guy. Beyond him, and a little back from the line, was an older guy with what looked like a buck sergeant’s stripes—in the army, anyway. He was the only cop around who looked like he might have some rank.
Harmon pushed and shoved his way through the crowd, ignoring the complaints and curses as he plowed toward the sergeant, saying, “Gotta get to the cop, gotta get to the police.”
He shouted at the sergeant, “Hey, Sergeant! Sergeant!”
The younger cop turned toward him and said, “Get back there! Get back!”
Harmon: “I need that sergeant! Sergeant!”
The sergeant heard him and stepped over. “What’s the problem?”
“I gotta talk to the Secret Service and I gotta talk to them right now.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I gotta talk to them!” Harmon shouted. “Right now…Listen, just get me to a guy. Just get me one….”
The sergeant turned and looked over his shoulder and said, “I’ll see if I can find somebody to talk to you. But I need you to calm down.”
Harmon looked at him, then at the fence, and suddenly went over it, a half vault. The young cop and the sergeant both grabbed him, and he pulled them away from the fence, the sergeant saying, “Hey! Hey!” and more cops heading toward them. Harmon turned to the sergeant and said, “In about six minutes—”
The sergeant was twisting Harmon’s arm around behind him and shouting to somebody else, “Cuff him!” and Harmon pushed back and said, “In about six minutes, a crazy former SEAL named Thorne is gonna try to shoot the president. You hear that? In six minutes, he’s gonna try to shoot the president….”
One of the cops clamped a handcuff on Harmon’s left wrist, then bent the right arm back: Harmon didn’t fight it, just kept chanting at the sergeant, “Gonna try to kill the president. I need the Secret Service.”
With two cops holding Harmon now, the sergeant wiped his face on his sleeve, pulled off Harmon’s mirrored aviators, and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Man, I’m a former Delta guy. Another guy I know, a guy named Thorne, is set up to shoot the president using a computer-assisted sniper rifle. You don’t have to believe me, but you have to get me to a Secret Service guy. Then you can put me in jail or whatever you have to do, but right now, get me to the Secret Service.”
The sergeant looked at him for a moment, then said to the cops, “Bring him this way.”
“Gotta hurry, gotta hurry,” Harmon said.
They took him to a glassed-in cube that might normally have been a ticket station, where a lounging cop was keeping an eye on another man, who sat on a plastic chair with his hands cuffed behind him. The other man was unkempt, long hair gelled almost straight up, steel rings piercing his nose, cheek, lips, and ears.
They pushed Harmon into a chair, and the sergeant said, “I’ll see if I can find somebody.”
“Hurry!”
The sergeant walked away. Harmon looked at the lounging cop and asked, “What time is it?”
The cop looked at his cell phone, then looked back at Harmon. Not talking.
Harmon said, “Please.”
The cop looked at his cell phone again. “Twelve-fifty-six.”
And then they heard the sirens.
“Oh, shit,” Harmon said.
He started to stand up, but the cop pulled a Taser from his holster and said, “You stand, you get a billion volts in the neck.”
—
Thirty seconds later, the sergeant came back through the door towing an apple-cheeked guy in a gray suit, with a bug in one ear. He looked like he was about fourteen.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
Harmon opened his mouth, then said to himself, Calm down. He took a breath, and said, as evenly as he could, watching the crowd churning through the glass opposite him—the president was walking toward the elevators that would take him to the ship’s deck—“My name is Dallas Harmon. Until a couple of weeks ago, I was a security officer with Singular Corp. That’s the company that has been in all the trouble on the West Coast for doing human experimentation. I won’t tell you about all of that, but I will tell you that Senator Dash was on their board of directors, and when the top people at the company thought they were getting in trouble, they killed her.”
“Senator Dash committed suicide…,” the agent said.
“No, she didn’t. She was murdered. There’s an FBI agent named Brian Barin who is working the case out of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, and more agents from the Phoenix office are now digging up bodies at Senator Dash’s ranch in New Mexico.”
The agent, who’d been leaning against the doorframe like he had more important places to be, suddenly straightened up and stared very seriously at Harmon. “Barin…All right, I’ll call him, then. But what about the president?”
“I don’t have time to explain how it connects, but I can tell you that there’s a former SEAL out there named Thorne who’s equipped with a computer-assisted sniper rifle, and he’s planning to shoot the president. Right now. He’s another former security officer from Singular, and he’s been convinced that if he makes the shot, he’ll be covered by the people who take over for the president.” Harmon took a breath. “Now, all you have to do is delay the speech while you check me out. Talk to your lead guy out here, and don’t let the president get up on that speaker’s stand.”
The young agent did the same thing that the sergeant had, squinting at the very fit, sweating man and something about him was convincing: the agent lifted his hand to his mouth and said, “We may have a situation here.”
He listened to his earbud for a moment, then lifted his hand again. “We have a guy here—”
Just then, a band began blaring in the background: “Hail to the Chief.”
“He’s going up on the stand!” Harmon shouted at the agent. “He’s going up! You gotta stop him, stop him!”
The Secret Service man took a step toward the door, his hand still at his coat sleeve, and Harmon bellowed, “Run, dummy, run! Run!”
The agent, still talking, ran out of the cube. The cop watching Harmon had gone wide-eyed, and Harmon decided to take a chance and sprinted after the Secret Service man.
He’d gone ten steps when the Taser hit him in
the back of the neck and he went down….
New Jersey, the part of it they saw, toward the end, was a jungle of concrete, beat-up buildings, and billboards, swarming with cars. There were just as many cars in Southern California, but the California highways seemed more orderly, more planned, while the Jersey roads looked like they’d been designed by somebody’s otherwise unemployable nephew.
Shay and Twist were fighting their way north, parallel to the Hudson River but well west of it.
“We’re not going to get there in time to do any good,” Twist said, giving in to despair. “We’re way late, we screwed this up….”
“We’re not supposed to be doing this at all,” Shay said. “Why doesn’t goddamn Barin call us back?”
“GET OUT OF THE WAY!” Twist shouted at a slow-moving car that had them trapped. From the back, X barked once, and again. Then Twist said, “Hang on,” and he passed the slow car on the shoulder, and suddenly, as though that single move were the key to everything, the traffic seemed to part in front of them and they were moving fast.
They didn’t have to slow down again before they got to Weehawken, and then they were over the bluff and coming down toward the river and a series of tall buildings that stood along the waterfront.
“Eight minutes to one,” Shay said. “Go left, go left….”
Cade called: “Harmon just bailed out of the truck and he’s running to the Intrepid. There’s a chance he’ll get there in time to talk to somebody. Cruz is going to find a place to park, if there is such a thing.”
“We’re coming to the building, I think. We’re a block away,” Shay told him.
“Careful…”
—
They turned a last corner and saw the building—but the driveway that would lead around to the left, to the front of the building, was blocked by yellow metal barrels hooked together with chains.
That drive was empty except for a demolition pile of pink insulation and broken plasterboard; newly installed windows on the back of the building still had labels on them. “It’s an empty building,” Shay said.
Twist: “What better place to shoot from? No witnesses around…”
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