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  In his sleek black suit and expensively simple white shirt, Mr. Leroux certainly looked the part of the rich art dealer. And could act it as well, given the expert way he and his pretty and slim wife, Sophie, air-kissed and backslapped with all the globally loaded folks in attendance.

  As I watched them, I couldn’t help sensing how tight they seemed. The way they held hands and conferred with each other between meet and greets when no one was looking. They were attractive and sociable, but their relationship seemed quite real. They seemed like serious, committed people.

  Which was more than a little troubling, I thought, considering the two highly trained ex-spies seemed very much to be plotting to blow the president of the United States’ head off in less than a week’s time.

  I turned as my old buddy Brooklyn Kale arrived in a cocktail dress and handed me a club soda. I noticed that my head wasn’t the only one turning at the sight of my tall and lovely partner in her little black undercover dress.

  I’d actually pulled some strings and had several of my old Harlem crew buddies reassigned to the anti-assassination task force. In addition to Brooklyn, I had Arturo Lopez and Jimmy Doyle in an unmarked Chevy parked outside, across West 24th.

  With the president and now Putin due in town, and still having really no clue what was up, we definitely needed all the help we could get.

  “What are these paintings supposed to be about again?” Brooklyn said, staring up at the immense dark-toned abstract canvas in front of us.

  “‘With their never obvious inert compressions,’” I read off a pamphlet some pretty blond waif had handed me at the door, “‘Scheermesje’s latest work possesses a fragmented rawness that is at once a departure from, but also a profound echo of, his earlier work’s often gummy tactile resonances.’”

  “Oh, I’m feeling those compressions,” Brooklyn said, shaking her head. “Every time I look up at it, I want to pop a couple of Tylenol.”

  When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that Leroux and his wife were suddenly moving through the crush of people.

  “Maybe they’re heading for the bar,” Brooklyn said hopefully.

  But they weren’t.

  We stood there watching as Matthew and Sophie reached the gallery steps near the entrance and went up them and straight out the front door.

  Chapter 55

  “Arturo, Doyle. Look lively. They’re coming out,” I called into my hastily dialed phone as we made a not-so-subtle beeline after the couple through the dense crowd.

  When we finally climbed the steps and hit the street, I could see a gaggle of models oohing and aahing at one of those Mercedes six-wheeler super-SUVs that had pulled up on the cobblestones out in front. What I wasn’t seeing was the Lerouxes.

  “Where are they?” I asked Arturo.

  “Down the block. On your left,” he told me.

  Damn it! Half a block away, on the corner of Eleventh Avenue, I could see the Lerouxes already getting into a taxi. No, wait: it was only one of them. Sophie Leroux sat in the cab while Matthew closed its door and quickly jogged east across dark Eleventh Avenue.

  “What the…? Splitting up?” Brooklyn said.

  Had they made us? I wondered.

  “Arturo, you guys stay on the wife in the taxi,” I said into my phone as I hurried east with Brooklyn. “We’ll stay with the husband on foot.”

  On the other side of Eleventh Avenue, Brooklyn and I picked up the pace as we watched Leroux moving quickly along West 24th Street’s shadows and steel shutters. He was on his phone now, I saw. He definitely seemed purposeful, which was weird since the entire industrial area was completely deserted.

  Where was he going now? I wondered as I rushed to keep up. To meet his contact?

  He was about halfway to Tenth Avenue when it happened. Leroux put his phone back into his pocket. Then he hooked a sudden left off the sidewalk and dropped completely out of sight.

  No! Had he ducked into a building? An alleyway? I wondered in a panic as I started running. What now? What the hell was up with this guy? He had just suddenly disappeared.

  Brooklyn and I groaned in unison when we got to the spot where Leroux had left the block.

  Because it wasn’t a building. It was a parking lot. An empty one that ran the whole block north to 25th Street.

  Leroux was gone.

  I threw up my hands as I stared at the lonely expanse of asphalt. He must have booked the second he was out of our sight. We’d lost him.

  “You gotta be kidding me with this James Bond routine,” Brooklyn said.

  We’d broken into a jog and were halfway across the lot toward 25th when the headlights of a vehicle suddenly swung off 25th Street into the driveway of the lot.

  It was a truck, a dark new Chevy Suburban SUV with black-tinted windows. It was moving fast—too fast. I reached back and palmed the undercover Glock at the small of my back as the truck roared straight at us.

  I could feel my heart pounding hard in my chest as the vehicle came to a quick tire-barking stop a foot in front of us. Then I was moving around the side of the truck with my Glock pulled.

  “NYPD! Hands where I can see them!” I yelled as the front passenger window began to zip down.

  As the dark glass fell, I held my breath with my finger on the trigger, thinking that in a split second I would see the face of ex-SEAL turned assassin Matthew Leroux, and a lot of lead would start flying.

  But I was wrong.

  It wasn’t Leroux.

  Instead, a dark-haired boyish man was sitting there. He was wearing a nice pin-striped suit with a two-tone banker’s collar, minus the power tie. Like a Wall Streeter out for fun after work. There was a stupid smile on his face.

  “Hey, Mike. How’s it going?” he said.

  I didn’t recognize him. Then I did. It was Mark Evrard, the State Department’s expert and adviser on Russia from the restaurant meeting with Secret Service SAC Margaret Foley.

  What the…?

  “It’s fine, Mike,” he said. “You can put away the gun. Honestly. We’re all friends here. I can explain everything.”

  Still in shock, I looked in at the driver beside him, a mean-looking, stocky middle-aged guy with thick forearms and hands.

  “Mike, who the hell are these jerks?” Brooklyn said, still training her own Glock at the truck.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Who are you jerks?”

  “Mike, we didn’t mean to spook you like that. I think it’s time we should talk,” Evrard said. “High time, in fact.”

  “About what?” I said as I finally holstered my gun.

  Instead of answering, Evrard climbed out of the truck and opened the back door.

  That’s when the real shocker of the night happened. Actually, there were two of them.

  My redheaded buddy Paul Ernenwein was sitting in the back of the truck.

  And beside him, sitting there calm as a picnic in the park, was none other than Matthew Leroux.

  “You got me, Officer. I give up. Don’t shoot,” the blond ex–Navy SEAL said, smiling as he held up his empty hands.

  Chapter 56

  “Hey, my apologies again, Mike,” Mark Evrard said. “I know we caught you off guard.”

  We were heading downtown now, through the meatpacking district, the tires of the Suburban changing pitch as we crossed at the cobbled intersections.

  Doyle and Arturo had picked up Brooklyn, and it was just Paul and me riding along with Leroux and Evrard and the driver. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. But I was dying to find out.

  “Like I was saying to Paul, it seems like we’ve gotten our lines crossed here, Mike,” Evrard said smoothly, turning from his front passenger seat.

  I stared at him. There was something smug about him that I couldn’t put my finger on that really drove me nuts. The strong cologne he wore reminded me of the big-bucks crowd back at the gallery.

  “That’s why I wanted to finally meet up,” the slick bastard said, nodding at me. “To bring some clarity.
Lay out what we’re doing before we trip each other up. First of all, know that everything I’m going to reveal is top secret, okay? It stays in this truck.”

  “Is this guy for real, Paul?” I said to Ernenwein, sitting beside me.

  “I was at dinner when my boss called and told me to meet up with him,” Ernenwein said with a shrug. “He checks out, Mike. Believe it or not.”

  “Top secret?” I said, still mighty pissed at Evrard, or whoever the hell he was, and his stupid spy versus spy head games. “So, I guess this means you’re not in State Department protective security, huh? Let me take a wild guess. You’re CIA?”

  “Technically, I’m a retired CIA officer turned rehired contractor currently working out of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center,” Evrard said, smoothing his lapel. “But it’s all semantics these days, Mike. For example, last year I worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with the Department of Defense’s National Reconnaissance Office, doing the same exact stuff. It doesn’t matter whose budget my paycheck comes out of. We’re all the good guys here. We’re all on the same team.”

  “And you?” I said over at Leroux, on the other side of Paul. “You CIA, too? I mean when you’re not selling Picassos or murdering Hamilton Heights drug dealers.”

  Leroux winked at me with a cold blue eye. There was an unsettling palpable stillness to him as he sat there, the tension of something fast unnaturally at rest.

  “What can I say, Mike?” he said with a slight Western cowboy twang in his voice. “Murderers like me? We gotta stay busy.”

  “Enough, Matt,” Evrard said as he took a folder out from somewhere up front and handed it to me. “You’re mistaken, Detective,” he continued. “That wasn’t murder up in Hamilton Heights. Rafael Arruda’s termination was an action authorized at the highest level.”

  Inside the folder was a document printed on thick stationery with an embossed presidential insignia at the top.

  There was some legalese gobbledygook after the heading, but at the bottom I read:

  Mr. Rafael Arruda poses a current and ongoing threat to the United States and therefore meets the legal criteria for lethal action pursuant to the Presidential Finding.

  It ended with the previous president’s signature in bright-blue ink.

  “The president is whacking out ecstasy dealers without a trial now? On American soil, no less?” I said as Evrard took the folder back. “Does CNN know about this?”

  “Ecstasy wasn’t the only thing Arruda had his hands in,” Matthew Leroux said calmly as he looked out the window. “For the last few months, after a hard day’s teach at Columbia, that slime spent his nights online lending his chemical expertise to an offshoot of ISIS in their quest to develop sarin gas. The members of his drug crew were actually trained by Islamic militants overseas.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Just bullshit. Arruda was a jihadist?!”

  “No,” said Evrard. “Just a worthless scumbag who didn’t give a shit who paid him a lot of money for his weapon-of-mass-destruction recipes.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said as we rolled. “Let’s say I believe you. You’re CIA. And Arruda was an enemy combatant in the global war on terror. How does that explain you guys surveilling the president’s UN route in midtown? Is the prez staying up late Skyping with the bad guys as well? Does he, too, now somehow meet the legal criteria for lethal action pursuant to the ‘Presidential Finding’? Is it time to pull his plug, too?”

  Leroux laughed at that. Hard. I’d really tickled his cowboy funny bone, apparently.

  “No,” Evrard said. “Matthew was doing what’s known as countersniping surveillance. If the shooter is after the president, we need to see where he would set up in order to find him.”

  “Exactly,” Leroux said. “I’m not out to snuff Buckland. My wife and I were actually doing what you’re doing: looking for the guy who actually is. We know him. Or at least of him.”

  “What?” I said, completely stunned. “What the hell are you talking about? You know the shooter?”

  “We think so, Mike. We think it’s this man,” Evrard said as he reached out and gave me another folder.

  Chapter 57

  I flipped open the folder and looked at the photograph inside.

  It wasn’t a very good one. A blurry black-and-white blown-up still of a dark-haired white guy on a sidewalk, taken from a not-very-good surveillance video. It could have been anyone, I thought. It could have been a picture of me.

  “So you think this is the shooter I saw at the MetLife Building?” I said.

  Evrard nodded.

  “We don’t know his name,” he said. “We just call him the Brit because about all we know about him is a snatch of his northern England accent in a brief phone conversation we recorded in oh nine. We assume he’s ex–British Special Air Service, but who knows? Their Royal Marines are pretty damn good killers as well.

  “We also know that he’s one of the most sought-after work-for-hire assassins in the world. The troubling thing is, like Arruda, he doesn’t care in the slightest who he works for as long as the price is right. He’s killed for the Japanese yakuza, the North Koreans, the Taliban, ISIS.”

  “And he’s not just any old gun for hire, either,” said Leroux. “He’s an amazing shot. He took down three of our guys from a high ridge outside of a firebase in Kamdesh in oh seven. I ranged it myself after we came in to get the bodies. He scored three kills at twenty-five hundred yards. That’s one point four miles. One kill you could chalk up to luck, but three head shot hits at that distance when you account for the wind and the Coriolis effect is just insanity. Gandalf the wizard stuff. You wouldn’t think it was possible.”

  “Who hired the wizard? Was it the Russians? Do you know? Is Putin actually behind this?”

  “We’re as in the dark about that as you are,” said Evrard. “It’s either Putin or somebody who hates Putin and wants to make it look like Putin, perhaps one of the Russian oligarchs. It’s definitely somebody out of Russia. That’s where the tip came from, right, Paul? You guys got a guy at the embassy, right?”

  “Why haven’t you guys let us local law enforcement know about your information on the Brit until now?” Paul Ernenwein said.

  “It wouldn’t have helped,” Evrard said. “He uses disguises and aliases. This guy is an apex predator. You’re not going to catch him with an APB.”

  “So what?” I yelled. “He’s out to kill the fricking president. To heck with the FBI and NYPD. This photo should be on the news!”

  “Also, how do you know it’s this Brit guy?” Paul wanted to know.

  “We have access to more databases than you,” Evrard said. “Our analysts plugged in the numbers. Eighty percent it’s him. There are very few people in the world with that expertise. It’s a process of elimination.”

  I watched Evrard and Leroux exchange a quick look.

  “No, wait. I get it,” I said. “You’re not out to protect the president. You’re just hunting this guy. He’s on your hit list as well, isn’t he? Like Arruda. You didn’t tell us because you don’t want him arrested, do you? Like Arruda, you want him dead.”

  “Well, now that you mention it,” Evrard said after a beat. “He is on the Presidential Finding list as well.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I just said?” Leroux said over to me. “He killed three of our guys. Three Navy SEALs in Afghanistan. Not only that, but he trained a bunch of those savages to kill who knows how many more Americans. He’s a real scumbag, Mike. He needs to be removed from the battlefield yesterday.”

  “‘Battlefield,’” I said with a laugh of my own. I noticed that it had started to snow again as I tapped at the window. “That’s not a battlefield out there, Matt,” I said. “That’s just West Broadway.”

  “Mike, grow up, huh?” Leroux replied. “Wise up. The war is everywhere now. The enemy, too. There are no more neat little definitions and borders.”

  “I get it,” Paul finally piped up, staring at Evrard
. “You’re bringing us into it now because we were investigating Mattie over here. We were getting too close to blowing your little hunting party.”

  “Guys, come on,” Evrard said. “What difference does it make if our interests are the same or just run parallel? We’re on the same team. We thought we could take care of the Brit by now, but he’s been more elusive than we had hoped. We need your help, or should I say, we need to team up officially to nail him.”

  “Dead or alive, huh?” I said. “Only without the poster? Or the chance of a reward. Maybe we can string him up from a traffic light in Times Square. Any word on stringing people up in the Presidential Finding?”

  “Hell, Detective,” said Leroux with another laugh and wink. “We don’t need him dead necessarily. We’re so desperate, even a couple of bloodthirsty murderers like us might let you bring him in alive, just this once.”

  Chapter 58

  It was five minutes to one in the afternoon on Tuesday when the British assassin double-parked the Home Depot rental truck in front of an ugly white brick high-rise on Second Avenue near the southwest corner of East 67th.

  He could hear kids hollering and carrying on in the yard of the public school across the street as he slid the heavy rectilinear box out over the tailgate and slipped it onto a hand truck.

  “Doing a little painting, are we, sir?” one of the high-rise’s maintenance men asked in the basement as the British assassin rolled past with the box, toward the freight elevator.

  “Work, work, work,” the Brit said with a smile.

  He took the elevator to nineteen and rolled the box to the end of the hallway and took out his key. He had rented the two-bedroom on a popular apartment share website a month before, when he was in the planning stage. As he rolled the box inside, he chuckled to himself as he remembered the website’s new age mission statement: Trust. It’s what makes the world go round.

  After he cut open the box, it took twenty minutes to assemble the steel painting scaffold in the apartment’s living room. It had caster wheels for easy moving, and its plywood deck could be adjusted up to six feet. He moved the couch into the corner and then rolled the high portable platform into position across from the west-facing window.