by Ted Dekker
His exposure to this noisy, confusing city was interfering with his focus. He blinked and shut out the thought.
“Closer,” he said, angling for the man who was now taking questions from an ABC correspondent. Kelly followed, pulling out a notebook.
Carl slipped between a heavyset reporter and a woman in a purple blouse, eyes fixed on the man. They were behind and to the right of the Iranian defense minister and the camera that captured the interview.
It took little effort to work his way to the front of the other journalists who were yielding space to ABC for the moment. Carl stopped ten feet from Feroz.
This was his prey. From his right, the scent of a flowery perfume. From his left, the smell of the asphalt and pollution and cooking meat. Feroz himself had practically doused himself in a spicy cologne laced with nutmeg.
Carl stepped from the circle, eyes fixed on the man’s dark hair and gently working jaw. Assim’s jaw was sharp and pitted, from acne, perhaps. His voice was low and gravelly. His dark, purposeful eyes cut through the crowd.
“. . . not rest until we have peace. How can one man stand against so many? Now the whole world will unite and bring peace where there has been no peace for centuries.”
An interesting voice. Carl wouldn’t risk detection, despite the strong urge to pass closer to this man in his perfectly tailored suit.
Carl turned back and eyed Kelly. She stared at him, emotionless. He started to face Feroz again, saw that the camera was panning, and thought better of being caught in a full shot in the proximity of the target. Their appearances and identities would be changed immediately after the assassination, but his instinct warned him off.
A thin sheen of sweat covered Kelly’s face. She wasn’t comfortable with his admittedly unorthodox approach in this surveillance mission. They’d come to walk the perimeter, not enter the hotel. They hadn’t expected to see the target, let alone make such a bold approach in the event that they did.
Carl guided her toward the Waldorf’s revolving entry doors.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.
“I wanted to know who he is.”
She didn’t respond.
I want to know him so that I can know myself. I am a killer. Who and how I kill define me.
They waited in line fifteen minutes before security would allow them to enter the hotel. It seemed that only a limited number of people were allowed inside at any given time. They walked up marble steps and entered a large atrium with towering pillars. Exotic floral arrangements that stood twice the height of a man blossomed in huge urns every seven paces.
Carl stopped below the arches that opened to the lobby and allowed the room to soak in. Magnificent. The old walls and ceiling were inspiring.
He scanned the room, detected no threat, and walked out to the center. Being taped by the hotel security cameras was actually to his benefit. The typical assassin would never be so bold. He faced the ceiling, where he knew the cameras hid, and examined the intricate designs etched into the wood.
Here was a building with a history. Unlike him.
Carl turned, refreshed by a sense of destiny. He was going to find himself here, in New York. The ceiling seemed to be staring down at him like a proud father. Rotating to his right like a camera on a wire. And in the center, him, staring up, lost to the world.
Are you my mother?
A hand touched his elbow. “We should go.”
Carl lowered his head. She was right. They’d come inside to see the reception hall on the tenth floor, where Assim Feroz would die this very night.
But a single sign made that impossible. A white placard etched in black calligraphy that read “No Press Above Lobby Floor.” Two guards stood at each elevator and beside the stairwell to enforce the restriction.
Carl walked toward an archway that led to specialty shops, the first of which he could see at the hall’s end. “Should we go shopping?”
Kelly walked abreast and talked quietly. “Are you feeling all right?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. There were fewer people back here. “I’m feeling what I choose to feel.”
“You seem a bit erratic.”
“Because I’m making erratic choices. If it’s any comfort, I can assure you that every one of these guards has been trained to pick out the calm, cool behavior of a potential assassin. It’s better to play the part of an awed foreign correspondent, don’t you think?”
“It just feels . . . odd. The way you’re acting.”
“I don’t feel odd. This building fascinates me.”
“And that’s not odd? When was the last time you were fascinated by anything?”
Carl gave her a shallow grin. “I’m fascinated by you.”
Her face went red, and try as she might, she couldn’t hide a grin. It was the first time he’d ever seen her so embarrassed, and strangely enough it thrilled him.
They walked by a shop window displaying gold and silver jewelry, something that held no fascination for him at the moment. The next store looked as if it sold dolls and stuffed animals. Toys. More fascinating.
“We should get back to the hotel,” Kelly said.
“I agree.”
A tall, dark-skinned man in a black suit stepped from the toy shop and faced them, eyes skittering along the hall. Secret Service.
A boy half Carl’s height walked out after him, holding his purchase: a pair of compact binoculars. Polaroid XLVs—Carl knew of them. From where he couldn’t remember, but he knew the binoculars. Perhaps he’d owned a pair himself when he was younger.
The boy turned blue eyes toward Carl and stopped. For a moment they exchanged stares.
“You’re from the Ukraine?” he asked in a small but confident voice.
Carl wasn’t sure how to respond. He should acknowledge the guess, but something about this boy struck a reverberating chord deep inside him.
“Yes,” Kelly said.
“That’s good. I hope you support our president’s position on Israel.” Had he seen this boy before? No, he didn’t think so. As far as he knew, he hadn’t really known any boys before. At least none he could remember.
The sound of feet clacking down the hall reached him. Seven, maybe eight pair, he thought absently.
The Secret Service agent stepped around the boy, shielding him from Carl and Kelly. “Your father’s coming, Jamie.”
Jamie.
They came around the corner, five agents and a lean, blond-headed man whom Carl immediately recognized as the president of the United States, Robert Stenton.
The boy was his son. Jamie.
The boy’s guard put a hand on his shoulder and eased him forward, toward his father, who beamed at the sight of his son.
“What did you get?” the president asked, stopping twenty yards away.
Jamie hurried to his father and held up the binoculars.
Secret Service agents circled father and son like hens gathering chicks. Carl and Kelly had been scanned by every one of them, including the two responsible for the president’s back.
Robert Stenton took the binoculars and held them up. “Fantastic!” He peered through them, past Carl, down the hall. “Perfect choice,” the president said.
Then he put his arm around his son’s shoulders and walked back the way he’d come. The entourage disappeared around the corner, trailed by Jamie’s dark-skinned agent, who turned and cast one last look at them before following.
Carl stared after them, mesmerized by the interaction between father and son. What was it about them that confused him?
He smiled at the guard, dipped his head, and turned around. “We should go,” he said.
“Yes. We should.”
16
Robert Stenton glanced at David Abraham, who was watching him like a hawk. For the first time the president was beginning to understand his mentor’s distress. Accepting Samuel’s vision might require any ordinary person to jump through mind-blowing mental hoops, but there was a resounding ring of authenticity to
everything David had just said.
One of his aides handed him a phone. “Ed Carter is on the line for you, Mr. President.”
Robert took the cell phone. “Thank you.” He walked to the window overlooking Manhattan and spoke softly to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Thank you for stepping out of your meeting, Ed.”
“Of course, sir.”
“I have a very simple question, Ed, and I want a simple answer. Is there an agency plan to deal with Assim Feroz? And when I say plan, I mean of any sort, technically sanctioned or not.”
That question caught him off guard, Robert thought. Carter hesitated, then spoke plainly. “Not to my knowledge, no. We discussed this—”
“I know what we discussed. Now I’m being sure. I assume the bulletin that went out an hour ago was brought to your attention?”
“Yes.”
“Does the subject match anything you have?”
“We’re still running the comparison against our database, but nothing on the list of priors matches. If this guy’s an assassin, he’s never been spotted.”
“Regardless, we have reason to believe there may be a threat to the Iranian defense minister’s life. Do you know how badly this could go if he were killed on American soil during this summit?”
“I couldn’t agree more. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“There is no right place or right time. I thought I made that clear.”
“A figure of speech. The security surrounding the minister’s schedule would be difficult to penetrate.”
“Unless there was an inside operation,” Robert said. “But you’re telling me that there isn’t.”
“That’s correct. None whatsoever.”
“If anything happens to Assim Feroz while he’s in our country, you’ll answer, Ed. I assume you understand that.”
“I don’t think we have a problem, sir.”
“Please make sure of it.”
He hung up and faced David. “I don’t know what else we can do at this point.”
“Nothing. You have to prevent him from killing Feroz, but you can’t pick him up. Not yet.”
“So you’ve said.” David’s explanation had taken a full fifteen minutes, laying out details that explained far more than Samuel’s vision. What David revealed was tantamount to conspiracy. Their discussion still made his head hurt.
It was no wonder David Abraham had been wringing his hands for the last month.
“Are you absolutely sure the person you saw was him?”
“Yes,” David said. “I could never mistake that face, trust me.”
The president took a deep breath and set the cell phone on the lamp stand. “I have to be honest, David. I’m having a hard time buying into all of this. It’s a stretch.”
“It’s only a stretch for a mind that hasn’t been where mine’s been.”
“Well, if you’re right about all of this, you’ve taken immeasurable risks and overstepped your place. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Let’s pray I made the right decision, then,” David said. “I’m sure you understand why I’ve said nothing about this before now.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“Only time will tell. You can decide then whether to burn me at the stake or build a statue of me.”
17
Manhattan offered a dozen possible sites from which Carl could kill Assim Feroz while he dined on the Waldorf-Astoria’s tenth floor, but after only short consideration, he’d agreed that shooting from a hotel room would best facilitate the objective. There were numerous advantages to the protection offered by a room, chief among them silence and isolation. The room would absorb much of the sound, critical because a sound suppressor would affect the bullet’s path and therefore would not be used.
There were as many disadvantages, perhaps the greatest being that most hotel rooms weren’t conveniently positioned to offer a shot into the Waldorf. As far as Carl could see, there were only seven possible rooms, four of which were aligned vertically in the hotel in which he now prepared himself.
Seven hotel rooms, seven different shots, seven escape routes. But of these seven, only one was available—the one he now occupied. Regardless, it was an excellent choice. An obvious choice. Obvious because it was far too obvious to be taken seriously by even well-trained security personnel.
Carl sat cross-legged on the bed, staring at the round oak table next to the window. His rifle rested on its bipod, pointed at the pulled curtain less than a foot beyond the muzzle. He would wait until the three-minute mark to pull the curtain and prepare the window for the shot. He kept his eyes on the rifle and his mind in his tunnel.
Strange and wonderful and frightening emotions swam in the blackness beyond the pinprick of light that was his mission, but he held them all at bay easily enough. He didn’t have to control fear, because there was none. He hadn’t expected any. Instead, there was excitement, an emotion that could easily affect his pulse and by extension his accuracy.
And there was some empathy, an emotion he’d expected even less than fear. He was about to send a bullet toward a man who had done nothing to harm him. Kelly had told him what a danger this man was to the world, but none of her words mattered. Carl was simply a killer who would kill whomever she told him to kill. He needed no other motivation to please her.
Yet now, just a few minutes from doing precisely that, he was aware of this strange empathy lingering beyond his tunnel. He dismissed it and kept his mind on the light ahead.
Carl stared at the barrel of his rifle, allowing peripheral elements to stream into his vision without distraction. A four-inch LED monitor on the table captured the high-bandwidth video images transmitted from a small camera he’d positioned under the room’s front door, peering into the hall. In the event his location was compromised, he would see any approach in enough time to make a quick exit into the adjoining room.
The room was warm. He’d turned off the air conditioner when he first entered in order to equalize the pressure between this room and the air outside. A part of him wished he could turn the heat up to better simulate his pit when it was hot.
He missed his pit.
But he’d left the safe world of that pit to fulfill his purpose. As soon as he’d reached the light at the end of this tunnel, he would be allowed to return to Hungary.
The light. That circle of white now beckoned him. Excitement tried to enter his tunnel again, but he deflected it without conscious thought and stared at the light.
He would kill the Iranian defense minister while the man ate his dinner on the tenth floor of the Waldorf, and he would do it with a bullet that came from the tenth floor of the Crowne Plaza on Broadway, roughly twelve hundred yards away. It would be a two-shot kill.
His first bullet would leave the hotel room Kelly had reserved for him, cross over one of the busiest streets in Manhattan, and travel down Forty-ninth Street for five blocks before crashing into a thick window. The bullet’s soft, hollow point would allow the projectile to spread at first impact and blow the window inward.
His second bullet would follow on the heels of the first, free to fly unobstructed through the broken window, through an open doorway, and into a second room, where Assim Feroz would be seated.
The second shot had to be fired within two seconds of the first so that it would reach the target before the sound created by the exploding window elicited any reaction.
The strings that Kalman had pulled to give Carl a line of sight into the kill zone could have been pulled only by very influential people. Being sure that Feroz was seated at one of three tables facing the doors, for example. Making sure the doors were open. The drapes pulled. But none of that concerned Carl.
His task was to place the bullet in the target’s chest at 9:45 p.m.
Kelly’s soft voice spoke through his radio headset. “Four minutes.” The frequency was scrambled on both ends, allowing them untraceable communication.
“Fo
ur minutes,” he repeated.
He didn’t need a spotter at this range, so Kelly coordinated the mission from the Dragon in Chinatown. Her contact inside the Waldorf had two tasks. The first was to raise the blinds on the window. The second was to make sure the double doors that led into the dining room were opened at 9:45 p.m., a far more difficult task in this security- rich environment than in any other. The server was being paid $100,000 in U.S. currency, a good payday, Kelly said.
A thousand men could hit a target at twelve hundred yards. But very few could shoot a bullet into a window, chamber a second cartridge even as the glass fell, acquire a target seated next to twenty other dignitaries through a narrow doorway, and place a bullet in the target’s chest in the space of two seconds.
This was the light at the end of Carl’s tunnel.
“Three minutes.”
Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds by the clock on the table.
“Three minutes,” he repeated.
Carl waited a beat. He unfolded his legs and stood. The only emotion that now threatened him was excitement, and he blocked it out forcefully.
He stepped up to the window, pulled the heavy curtains a foot to each side. A sea of lights filled his view. Times Square was two blocks south, Central Park a half mile north. A hundred feet below him, heavy traffic ran along Broadway, refusing to sleep just as the brochure Carl had studied claimed.
Two minutes and thirty-five seconds.
He lifted a black cutting tool from the table, pressed five suction cups against the glass, and ran the glass cutter’s diamond bit in a two-inch circle. Three full turns and a gentle tug. The glass popped softly.
He set the glass cutout on the table and lowered the bit so that it rested on the window’s outer pane.
A soft gust of air blew through the two-inch opening as he pulled the second circle of glass free. No wind in Manhattan, as forecasted. Wind had been Carl’s greatest concern during the planning, but no more.
One minute and thirty-two seconds.
He eased into the chair, took the rifle gently in his hands, leaned over the table, and aligned the barrel with the hole. The weapon’s smooth, cool barrel and familiar trigger brought him comfort, and he accepted it.