by John Lutz
“The only plan with a reasonable chance of getting our man is one that concentrates on what happens after the mayor is shot.”
Not what the coach wanted to hear.
47
At the plush Marimont Hotel on West Forty-eighth Street, a block south of Rockefeller Plaza, a handsome man wearing sunglasses and with a slight foreign accent paid cash for a requested suite on a high floor. He was carrying a large gray Louis Vuitton duffel bag and politely refused a bellhop’s offer to take it to his room.
The hotel was too far from the Plaza to provide opportunity for an accurate rifle shot, made even more difficult because the shooter would have to aim over shorter buildings between rifle and target. This apparent impossibility was exactly why the Night Sniper had chosen the Marimont. That and the fact that a serial killer would be highly unlikely to check into such an exclusive hotel. The mayor’s security wouldn’t consider the site a threat.
Upon entering the spacious and tastefully furnished suite, the Night Sniper placed his bag on the bed and unzipped it. He seemed to know exactly where everything was in the bag and didn’t unpack completely, only removed a pair of jeans, a dark T-shirt, and worn jogging shoes. From his pocket he withdrew a pair of flesh-colored latex gloves and slipped them on. From now on he would be extremely careful about what he touched in the suite, or he would be wearing gloves.
After changing clothes and hanging his tailored suit in the closet, he went to a window, opened it, and looked out at the tar and gravel roof of the setback in the building’s construction. There was a drop of about three feet from the window ledge to the roof. The Night Sniper sat on the ledge, swiveled his body, and stepped down onto the firm, rough surface.
He’d scouted the location carefully. It would do, but barely-which was exactly why it was ideal. After tomorrow night, his reputation as a marksman would become legendary, and fear would know no bounds. The roofs of surrounding buildings were all much lower than the outcropping on which he stood, and behind him the Marimont rose another five stories of blank brick wall. No one could peer up at him, or down. The Sniper was invisible to anyone earthbound, but there was always the possibility of a police helicopter spotting him, some observer being alert for anything suspicious even this far from Rockefeller Plaza.
He glanced at the sky uneasily, then went back to the window and hoisted himself back up into his suite.
He returned to the bag he was carrying when he checked in. He felt around in it carefully, then removed a light aluminum frame and a small tool kit. Carrying frame and tool kit, he went back out onto the outcropping roof.
It took him only a few minutes to screw four steel brackets into the roof, then fit the legs of the metal frame into them. On the frame’s top cross braces, he attached with thumbscrews two small but sturdy vises, then returned to his suite and assembled the custom target rifle.
On the roof again, he checked the sky to make sure there were no helicopters about, then went to the edge of the roof, where he’d bolted down the frame and vises. Making sure the telescoping aluminum frames were tight in their brackets, he adjusted the frame so it was slightly higher than the parapet, then fitted the rifle firmly in the vises.
With another glance at the sky, he crouched low and peered through the rifle’s telescopic sight to the corner of a distant building, adjusted the sight, and could see the plaza where the podium was being constructed for tomorrow night’s TBTC rally. He knew his bullet would have to barely miss the distant building’s corner that was almost in line with where the lectern would be, and where the mayor would stand to speak. The Night Sniper thought again that any skilled marksman would assess this as an impossible shot, and would be correct, which was why the Marimont wasn’t being factored into rally security plans.
He waited patiently, sighting through the scope, an ear attuned to any sound in the sky.
The sounds below were from Con Ed continuing lengthy repairs that entailed tearing up the sidewalk near the hotel with jackhammers. Con Ed, the city, his unknowing accomplice. He was amused by the notion.
The Sniper waited for the pounding of the jackhammers to cover the report of the rifle, then squeezed the trigger.
Carefully maintaining the position of the rifle in the vises, he unlocked the legs of the framework from its brackets affixed to the roof. Carrying rifle and framework as one inflexible piece back to the window, he returned to his suite.
Now for perhaps his biggest risk. He placed frame and rifle on the closet floor, then left the suite. The DONOTDISTURB sign was still on the door, but there was always the off chance that a maid or maintenance crew member would for some reason enter the suite and look in the closet. A slim possibility, but the Sniper knew it was such possibilities that posed the most danger. Enough of them, and the odds tilted.
Wearing his sunglasses, he elevatored to the lobby and left the hotel. He walked the three blocks to the blank brick wall he’d just shot. Standing nearby with his arms crossed, his sunglasses hooked over the neck of his T-shirt, he glanced around and above like a tourist taking in the city. It was easier than he’d anticipated to see where the soft bullet he’d fired from so far away had chipped the brick surface, six inches from the building corner it must barely clear. The rifle was shooting true, as he knew it would.
He returned to the hotel, then patiently, patiently, repeated this process three more times. Each time he removed the inflexible frame with vise-attached rifle from the roof brackets and concealed it in the closet, walked the three blocks to the corner, and observed the results of his shots. Each time he calculated trajectory, angle, and windage. The wind, of course, would be the only variable, but the weather report for tomorrow night was a virtual repeat of this evening’s. Fate was cooperating.
His last shot had struck the wall less than an inch from the building’s corner. When he returned to the hotel, the slightest adjustment of the precision scope, the precision rifle, its frame secure in its roof brackets, was all that was needed, and he could be sure.
Precision.
He felt a warmth spread in him, and a confidence. He’d figured out how to make this seemingly impossible shot. He’d make it by not making it.
Well, not exactly.
In a sense, he’d already made the shot, or at least set it up, though it had taken him four tries. Next time he wouldn’t have to sight in and aim, because that had already been done.
When he squeezed the trigger tomorrow night, he wouldn’t have to rely on the bullet going to the mayor, because the mayor would have gone to where the bullet would be.
The Night Sniper would stay with the firmly mounted and aimed rifle now; it needed only have its supporting frame affixed to the metal roof brackets to duplicate today’s shot. Until the time of the mayor’s death arrived, the Sniper would remain behind the DONOTDISTURB sign, wearing surgical gloves even while eating crustless sandwiches and drinking Evian.
While he was confident about the shot he’d make tomorrow night, it bothered him that the subway stops were being watched. It was something he hadn’t planned on. He’d been counting on his frequent manner of traveling underground and avoiding attention and capture after a shooting; his homeless clothes and backpack were in the Louis Vuitton bag. The cloth bag itself would fold and fit neatly into his backpack, along with his rifle, when he left the hotel via a side door.
He shrugged inwardly, knowing nothing other than vengeance was writ in stone. Perhaps the tight subway security necessitated a change of tactics. He had some ideas in that regard.
Placing his water bottle on the carpet, he walked to the window and looked out at the descending night and the array of lights that lay before him like a kingdom he’d sworn to destroy. His was a life unwasted. A life that meant something grand. Pride stirred deeper emotion. For a moment a yearning for his dead mother and his wronged and lost fathers rose like fire in him and he thought he might cry.
Instead he smiled, liking the way his plans were shaping up, admiring his own nimble adaptation
to his opponent’s every move.
Murder was so much like chess.
He went down to the lobby for only a few minutes to use a public phone.
48
By 7:30 PM, the area around Rockefeller Plaza was teeming with over twenty thousand people. Various speakers found their way to the podium: various rights advocates, councilmen, and other city officials spoke briefly to demonstrate their confidence and courage, some of them unconsciously slouching as if to make themselves smaller targets. One of them, a councilman from Brooklyn, actually dived to the plank floor when a nearby balloon popped; then he managed to rise and toe the floor as if he’d slipped on a protruding nail or a wrinkle in the green outdoor carpet. Not a few in the crowd had reacted the same way, so he was greeted with only sporadic boos or laughter.
The speakers appeared not only live but on four large digital TV screens raised and angled so everyone could see who was at the massed microphones. News channel trucks, local and national, were parked as near as possible to the podium, some of them with their large tower antennae raised high above the masses. Now and then someone emerged from the crowd to invade the small area roped off for the trucks, cameras, and crews, then mug or go into a wave-and-smile routine.
“They’re acting like it’s a St. Patrick’s Day rally,” Meg said to Repetto. They were standing on Forty-ninth Street with a view of the Plaza.
“They know there’s only one true target,” Repetto said. “I wonder how many of them are here hoping the mayor is shot.”
“Plenty,” Meg said. “It’s the way people’s minds work.”
“Some people, anyway.”
“You sound less cynical than I am,” Meg said.
“I am, Meg. Haven’t you noticed?” He smiled at her. “On the other hand, you seem more. . contented lately.”
She stared at him. What the hell did Repetto mean by that, with a kind of smirk she’d seen on men before?
By the time she’d decided to ask him, he was speaking into his cell phone and had moved away into the crowd.
At 8:30 one of the mayor’s aides began to introduce him. The crowd’s mood changed. Those farthest back pressed forward. Those nearest the podium massed closer to it.
The aide, a pol Repetto knew as one of those who gave the NYPD the most heat from City Hall, made a grand gesture and raised his hands high to lead the applause. The crowd roared, some riding the shoulders of others and obscuring Meg’s view. She focused on one of the wall-sized screens and saw a small, gray-haired figure in an immaculately tailored dark blue suit stride toward the podium. The crowd noise became deafening.
The mayor grinned wide and raised a hand high with his fingers in the victory sign, then made a damping, downward motion with both hands so the noise might subside enough for him to begin his speech.
It took several minutes for the crowd to become orderly enough that he might be heard.
Almost three blocks away, on the setback roof of the Marimont Hotel, the Night Sniper crouched behind the rifle set by vises in its rigid aluminum frame. The frame was mounted firmly and immovably to the blacktop and gravel roofing material and the planking beneath it. The frame, the rifle with its night scope and flash suppresser, composed a virtual one-piece unit that was as steady as the building itself.
The Sniper, peering intently through the telescopic sight, saw and heard nothing other than the figure of the mayor at the lectern and the distant roar of the crowd. He hadn’t counted on the oversize TV screens, but fortunately they didn’t block his incredibly narrow field of fire.
Motionless as the lethal creation he’d attached to the roof, he waited for the moment he knew would be his. He wanted to read the mayor’s body language, to feel, to know, that the mayor wouldn’t move suddenly and avoid his fate.
Even from this distance he could feel it; he was inside the mayor’s mind. Hunter and prey were one, and the bullet would travel the arc of connection between them as surely as if it were on tracks.
The metal frame and vises held the rifle firmly. His eye was less than an inch from the scope. The only part of the rifle he touched, ever so lightly, was the trigger.
Elated by the turnout and crowd enthusiasm, the mayor raised both hands high and then lowered them palms-out. There was something like silence from the boisterous crowd.
He placed both palms on the lectern and glanced at his notes, leaning slightly forward to be closer to the microphones:
“Citizens of New York. This night we lay claim. . ”
He lapsed into silence and looked around as if astounded, then slumped over the lectern and slid to the floor. His notes fluttered down around him like white birds in the night as the echoing report of the rifle reverberated along the avenues. Women began to scream.
Meg saw the mayor’s security rush forward. Several of them stood over the fallen mayor and desperately scanned the surrounding buildings. It was impossible to know which way to look for the source of the shot.
The aide who’d introduced the mayor was suddenly at the microphones. “Ladies and gentlemen, please stay calm. All of you, damn it! We’ve got an emergency here!”
Buffeted by the crowd, Meg saw the TV screens above the podium go blank. She tried to call Repetto on her cell phone but it was knocked from her hand. A big man in a yellow shirt elbowed her aside and she punched him in the ribs.
Be professional!
She gave up trying to retrieve the cell phone; it was probably trampled flat anyway. Instead, she began fighting her way through the crowd toward the podium, not sure what she’d do when she got there. She could hear sirens wailing in the distance now, converging on the Plaza from every direction.
Why didn’t they plan for this? It was sure to happen. They should have had an ambulance waiting nearby.
But somebody at City Hall was ahead of Meg. Men and women were frantically clearing away the lectern and chairs on the podium, creating a large, flat platform. Blue uniforms and suited security surrounded the platform, moving back the crowd, sometimes not so gently.
Lights, a loud fluttering sound, and a helicopter dropped almost straight down from the night sky. Its skids settled perfectly on the stage that had become a landing pad, and within less than a minute the mayor, already on a stretcher, was transferred to the chopper through a wide side door.
Three blocks away, the Night Sniper saw the helicopter approach from beyond the Plaza and drop between tall buildings to land on the platform. Very efficient.
He removed the frame from its brackets and scooped gravel over them so they weren’t visible from inside the hotel.
The Sniper was back in his suite before he saw the helicopter, with what surely must be the mayor’s body, rise back into the dark sky above the bright haze of the city.
He was more excited than he’d anticipated as he broke down the frame and rifle, then fitted them in his Louis Vuitton bag.
There had been a change of plans. He was sure he hadn’t been spotted outside, and with the flash suppresser, even if someone had been looking in his direction from the distant podium, they wouldn’t have seen the muzzle flash. He felt safe at the hotel, at least for a while.
He began undressing, trying to stay calm. Jesus! This is something! His fingers were trembling as he fumbled at his belt buckle.
The mayor! This is something!
He heard a high-pitched giggle and was startled until he realized it was his own.
Not good! This wasn’t like him. He had to gain control of himself, of his actions, during the rest of the evening.
He worked his legs out of his jeans, then sat on the edge of the bed to change socks. He glanced at his watch. More time had elapsed than he’d thought, but he refused to make himself hurry. Every move was deliberate and economical.
Get hold of yourself, of your emotions. Not like you. Not like you. Get hold.
Jesus, this is something!
Twenty minutes later, the Night Sniper looked nothing like the homeless wretch he usually became immediately after cl
aiming a victim. He was wearing a navy blue Armani suit with a subtle black weave, black Italian leather shoes, a white shirt with gold cuff links, and a maroon and black silk tie. His wig was neatly affixed and almost impossible to distinguish from his real hair. He was tanned, smoothly shaved, and carried the faint scent of cologne.
He took the elevator to the lobby, to make sure nothing he should know about was occurring.
Everything seemed normal, considering the news was out that the mayor had been shot. People were clustered in small knots and talking to each other, some of them standing and staring at a TV screen in the lounge. Outside, beyond the hotel’s bank of tinted glass doors, two valets stood beneath the awning talking to half a dozen teenage girls, while a third valet was trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab.
He’d managed to hail two cabs, and the girls were piling in, when the Night Sniper pressed the Up button.
As he waited for the elevator that had just descended to empty out, an attractive, midtwenties woman, escorted by an older man, glanced at him appraisingly and smiled as she walked past. He smiled back, used to being noticed by women. She glanced back at him as two businessman types stepped into the elevator, and one of them held the door so it wouldn’t close until a woman who might have been an airline attendant made it inside. Moving into the elevator, the Night Sniper saw that she not only had the sort of folded hanging bag used by flight attendants, but there was an American Airlines employee’s tag on it. She thanked the man who’d held the door, then noticed the Night Sniper paying attention to her and smiled at him. “I was checking out and remembered I left something in my room,” she said, as if he’d asked her a question. “I’m a flight attendant. Gotta get to LaGuardia. Not that there’ll be anything flying out for a while, after what just happened.”
He merely nodded, not wanting to be remembered by the woman if she was asked about him later.
“What just happened?” one of the business types asked.
“The mayor was shot while he was giving a speech.”