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“It’s just like I told you,” I said to Paul as the Russkies left. “The Brit can shoot the nose hair out of a flying mosquito at four thousand yards. This is it. When Vlad and the president are out in front of the UN, waving to the crowd, that’s when the shooting will happen.”

  Paul shook his head, then let out a breath.

  “I don’t know, Mike. Maybe these guys are on the level. They look genuinely pissed off.”

  “Which means what? They’re not involved? Putin’s not involved?”

  Paul shook his head again, then shrugged.

  “Maybe not. Maybe it’s one of the oligarchs who want to take Buckland out. Heck, maybe the oligarchs want to take Putin himself out. Every time you think you’re getting a bead on this, something new pops up that makes it impossible to say what the hell is going on.”

  “It’s like those Russian dolls. What are they called?” I said.

  “Matryoshkas,” said Paul, nodding.

  “Exactly, Paul. You nailed it. From day one, this whole case has been one big mind-screwing matryoshka. The doll within the doll within the doll.”

  Chapter 77

  The British assassin thumbed away his well-cleaned dessert plate, took out his blue pack of Gitanes, and lit one for himself and his wife off the linen-draped table’s candle.

  What a meal! he thought as he flicked ash onto his coffee saucer and blew smoke up toward the ceiling.

  There had been beef tongue carpaccio, roasted quail, risotto with shaved pecorino, smoked eel on black truffle toast, jowl of pork. Each dish perfectly cooked and washed down with bottle after bottle of 2007 François Lamarche La Grande Rue.

  He’d caught the foodie bug back when he was a teenager and worked in kitchens all over London. He’d actually been a line chef at Le Gavroche for three months, as a fill-in, and was prepping at the Fat Duck, in Bray, when he got his call from the marines.

  When this was over, first order of celebration was going to be eating their way across the continent, starting in France, he thought as he looked out the window beside him at the city lights. He glanced over at his sexy wife and pictured them cruising through Burgundy’s quiet villages in something unconscionable, like an Aston Vantage or a Bentley Continental GT, her blond hair flying as they ripped around the vineyards and hills and gravel bends.

  “Everything okay?” asked Jill, the Culinary Institute–trained chef and apartment owner as she came in to clear the plates.

  They had jumped with both feet when they saw the Asian thirtysomething’s ad on an underground dining website for a farm-to-table, cooked-to-perfection gourmet feast. They were actually seated in the glassed-in balcony of her twentieth-floor apartment in a high-rise in northern Manhattan, of all places.

  It couldn’t have worked out better. With the shooting still fresh in the news, they had to stay out of the public eye until the job was over.

  “Perfect, really,” said the assassin’s wife. “How rude of us. We forgot to ask if it is okay to smoke. It’s been ages since I actually had a postmeal smoke at the table.”

  Jill, who’d already been paid the fee of eight hundred dollars in cash, smiled.

  “Please—you’re my guests. Mi casa es su casa,” she said as she left with the plates.

  He was stubbing out the Gitane in the glass ashtray Jill had brought them when his disposable phone rang.

  “Are you this stupid?” was the first question he was asked by the client’s electronically disguised voice when he answered the phone in the bathroom.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “It’s not fine. You shot a cop and a spook. The spook’s at death’s door.”

  “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” the British assassin said. “Playing for keeps isn’t for the squeamish. Have you the final route? I’ve been waiting.”

  “I just sent it to your e-mail.”

  “I see it,” the British assassin said, looking at his smartphone. “No changes, then?”

  “No. They’re going with the original route. It’s a lock.”

  “Good, then. I’ll expect the last of it by close of business tomorrow.”

  “Close of business?” the client said. “That’s not in the contract. The second after he’s confirmed dead, the escrow will be released to you. Be it an hour later or a year. That’s the deal. Killing him. That’s the important part here. Finishing the job.”

  “No problem,” the British assassin said with a yawn as he looked at himself in the mirror.

  “So you’re good to go now, right? You don’t have to deal with Levkov anymore, do you?”

  “No, I haven’t spoken to him since I started dealing with you.”

  “Good. We can start the housecleaning on our end, then, tonight.”

  “Whatever you need to do,” said the Brit. “That’s none of my concern.”

  “Get some sleep. The weather looks good tomorrow. Crisp and clear.”

  “I like the sound of that,” the British assassin said, thumbing the cheap phone off.

  Chapter 78

  After he buzzed the Chinese food guy out, Pavel Levkov carefully arrayed his dinner of beef with broccoli, fried wontons, and egg drop soup on his cleared desk.

  He was in his office at the meat warehouse in Brooklyn now, where he’d just finished up the mountain of payroll and inventory paperwork that had piled up during his hospital stay and detention by the feds.

  He was in an electric wheelchair, his kneecapped leg in a bulky aluminum and resin brace. The rented chair was costing him a fortune since he had a high-deductible plan, but he needed it, as walking was a no-no since the pain in his knee was unlike anything he’d ever felt. The doctors had told him it had something to do with all the bones in the knee that the American bastard’s bullet had smashed to jelly.

  All in all, he was lucky, he knew. He’d paid back all his debts and was out of all of it. Though he had been kneecapped, his duty as middleman between the British assassin and the Russian mobster had been completed.

  A bullet to the knee and a couple of phone calls were actually a pretty fair price to pay to erase the massive poker debt he had with the mobster. He’d run with the devil and was still alive. That was winning, in his book. It was time to retire now, sell his businesses, get out of New York altogether. Quit while he was ahead.

  Meal over, he was dry-swallowing a Percocet when his new dog, a boxer-rottweiler mix he’d named Sweetie, began growling at the locked office door.

  Immediately, he took his fully loaded and cocked SIG Sauer P220 Match Elite .45 out of the knapsack on the side of the wheelchair. The dog began barking like mad a few seconds later, and then he smelled it. Smoke. As he watched, a wisp of it floated in under the door.

  Then, over the dog’s bark, he heard it. Out in the hallway, there was beeping from the ceiling smoke alarm.

  Somebody had set his place on fire.

  Gun in his right hand, he zipped the wheelchair over to the door and unlocked it and pulled it open. He coughed in the gray smoke that poured in as the dog shot out into the hall like a missile. Panicking, Pavel Levkov stared at the smoke, waiting to hear something. The dog barking, a struggle—anything. But even after a minute, he heard nothing.

  He’d just made it out into the hall, braced leg first, when the shadow fell over him and something smashed into his outstretched knee.

  It was an aluminum softball bat, he saw, as it smacked again, into his torso this time, sending the .45 flying away.

  “I didn’t talk, I swear,” he said in Russian. “I did everything you said.”

  “We shall see about that,” the Russian voice replied as he was lifted bodily out of the chair.

  Chapter 79

  Five the next morning, I was in Yonkers, just over the border of the Bronx. On my right was the Hudson River, and on my left were the Metro-North train tracks, and in front of me, beside an old rusted-out Ford flatbed truck, was our Russian suspect, Pavel Levkov, lying facedown in the gravel, dead.

  The Russian, who was in a leg b
race from his kneecapping, had been shot in the back of the head a couple of times. His wrists and ankles were bound in wire hangers twisted together really tight with a pair of side cutters or something. It was a neat job. There was no blood at the scene, which probably meant he’d been dumped.

  “Who found him?” said Paul as he came up along the railroad tracks with a couple of coffees.

  “Guy walking his dog,” I said. “Yonkers PD got him in a car back in the station lot. He’s a local kid. Didn’t see anyone.”

  There was a small stand of leafless trees beside the crime scene atop of which some crows were cawing up at the gray sky. I suddenly picked up a rock and chucked it at them, sending them flapping.

  “Bird lover, I see,” said Paul.

  “No. A peace and quiet one,” I said.

  “You know,” Paul said, “the old-timey houses back there and the water and trees here remind me of a sad book I once read. It’s set in the thirties or something, and it’s about an upstate New York Irish bum who’d been a ballplayer and goes back to see his family in Albany for Thanksgiving.”

  “I remember. Nicholson played him in the depressing movie.”

  “Yeah, he did. What’s the name of it?”

  “Ironweed,” I said. “Now how about our friend here. If our Russian buddy were a depressing novel, which one would he be, you think? War and Peace? Crime and Punishment?”

  Paul looked at me pensively, then snapped his fingers.

  “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” he said.

  “You’re good,” I said. “So what does this mean, Paul? Levkov was the link to the Brit. The middleman. And now he’s dead.”

  “He’s the cutout, so they cut him out.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The Brit doesn’t need him. Or, I should say, the people who hired him to hire the Brit. Even if we catch the Brit, he can only lead us back to this gentleman, and the dead tell no tales.”

  “Everything is set, then,” I said. “This thing really is going down.”

  “The fuse is lit, Mike. We need to find the bomb.”

  “How many hours till touchdown?”

  Paul checked his watch.

  “Ten,” he said.

  I shook my head as the crows came back, their caws skipping out over the gray water.

  “It’s official,” I said. “We’re going to have to make our own luck now.”

  Chapter 80

  The bright white light gradually grew larger in the dark predawn sky until suddenly Air Force One materialized above the JFK runway lights, its big jets screaming.

  I held my breath as it came in right over the Port Authority airport command center beside me. I actually didn’t let the breath out until the plane touched down safely on the tarmac.

  This was going to be one long day.

  The idling vehicle in whose front passenger seat I was sitting was a military personnel carrier called a BAE Caiman MRAP. Behind me, in the bank vault–like rear of the truck, Paul Ernenwein and a half dozen members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team were doing last-minute coordination over the radio with the Secret Service’s tactical CAT agents.

  The massive presidential motorcade was beside us, on the left. But because our bulky composite armored vehicle looked like something fresh off the battlefield, it wasn’t going to be in the motorcade itself, but always nearby. There were actually going to be two of them present for the entirety of the president’s stay in New York.

  As I glanced out at the taxiing plane through the bullet- and blast-proof windshield, I remembered what CIA sniper Matthew Leroux had said about the battlefield being everywhere now.

  He was actually with us, there in the back, dressed in the same black body armor and gear as the Hostage Rescue guys. It was a last-second thing. His wife, Sophie, was in stable condition now, thank God, and he had pulled some strings to get put onto the protection detail as a special adviser. Though obviously emotionally involved, Leroux was actually considered one of the top five snipers in the country, so the New York FBI SAC had finally reluctantly agreed.

  “Poor son of a bitch,” said Paul Ernenwein, pointing a chin to where Leroux knelt in the back, doing a meticulous equipment check. “You see the look in his eyes? Jeez.”

  “Mike!” Leroux called up to the front of the truck.

  “What is it?” I said as I arrived beside him.

  “I was wondering if you could do me a favor,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  He stared at me intently with his blue eyes.

  “Somebody told me you used to be a spotter. I want you to be mine.”

  “These other FBI guys are far better trained, Matt. I—”

  He held up a hand.

  “I’m sure they are, but I don’t know them. I know you. You’re old-school like me, Mike. I need someone beside me who knows that quit ain’t ever an option.”

  He held out the spotting scope in its case carefully, with both hands.

  “Will you do it?” he asked.

  I stared at the case, at the terrible look in his blue eyes.

  “Of course,” I said as I took the case.

  Chapter 81

  As the president’s motorcade made its long, slow loop out of JFK miles to the east, the British assassin and his wife burst out of the southeast end of Central Park at a run, caught the green, and crossed Fifth Avenue.

  They were layered up in the latest cold weather running clothes: black North Face skullcaps, Capilene shirts and pants, neon-yellow Brooks running jackets that matched their flying ASICS. Coming east in the street down 58th, past midtown’s early morning delivery and garbage trucks, they looked just like they wanted to look. Like another high-flying yuppie couple getting in their essential morning run before work.

  They arrived at Madison and crossed it and then hooked a right a block down, onto Park.

  The British assassin looked up at the MetLife Building looming now in front of them as they ran toward it. Then he forced himself to stop looking at it, and shook his head.

  No thoughts about past failures. No room for that. Not today, of all days.

  As they came across 57th Street, they could see the security already amassed around the Waldorf.

  They hooked a left, east down 56th, to Lexington, and then crossed that, and then, after another block, crossed Third. Between Third and Second Avenues, they paused for the briefest of moments to scan the dump truck.

  They had parked the monster the night before, and it was just as they had left it. Nothing awry.

  They exchanged a quick tense glance as they made the corner of Second Avenue. It was almost impossible to consider what they were about to do today. History was literally in the making, and they were the ones making it. All systems were go.

  They did their stretches out in front of the Starbucks on Second, noting their progress on their Fitbits like good yuppies. Once inside, she waited at a couch by the window while he arrived with their Venti blacks and the Times. They sat reading for twenty minutes.

  He took a breath before he folded the Metro section and placed it on the table. He stood and looked at her.

  She looked back then, leaned forward, and grabbed his hand fiercely.

  He squeezed back. Then he was back out in the cold, and a taxi was pulling up.

  “Yeah?” said the hack as the British assassin sat.

  He could see his wife through the window. His heart faltered, then fluttered. A bad feeling came over him. A premonition? Or was it just nerves?

  Maybe they didn’t have to. Maybe…

  “Yo! Where to?” said the driver.

  The Brit looked at his wife again.

  “Sixty-Ninth and Second,” he said, and then he closed his eyes and his wife was gone.

  Chapter 82

  Brian Bennett was in fourth period Latin class when he smelled the french fries.

  At the front of the classroom, Mr. Swanson (the kids called him Swansonius Maximus among themselves) was fervently trying to explain the subtl
e difference between hortatory and jussive subjunctive independent clauses. But this close to lunch, and now with the smell of the cafeteria fries wafting in through the open door, he had about as much of a chance as Carthage during the Third Punic War.

  Undeterred, Swansonius continued on, and Brian suddenly remembered the honey-nut clusters Mary Catherine always stuck in the side pocket of his knapsack. He could ask for a bathroom break and then do a quick drive-by to his locker, down the hall, around the corner, he thought. Going to your locker during classes was technically a detention offense, but he was Starvin’ Marvin.

  Speaking of which, Brian thought, turning around to glance hopefully at Marvin, in the next row. But Big Marv only looked away. Still pissed at him.

  Marvin still wasn’t talking to him after what he had pulled in the park with Big Flicka. Marvin had assured him it wasn’t over. That he didn’t know what he was doing. That Flicka wasn’t stupid. That he knew when someone had set him up, and that he would kill him if he got out on bail.

  Brian hadn’t known what to say to that, except that Marvin was the one who had started it, bringing a damn gun into their house. He raised his hand and asked to be excused.

  Five minutes later, Brian had scarfed down both honey-nut clusters from his locker and had just finished washing them down at a hall water fountain when he heard the shoe squeak down the deserted hall to his right. He tensed at first, before he looked, thinking it was the dreaded Brother Rob, the dean of discipline, about to crack him for being out of class. Then he looked up, and boy, was he wrong.

  Brian’s eyes opened to their outer limits.

  Guess Big Flicka made bail after all, came a tiny scared voice from somewhere far off inside his head.

  He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. All he knew was that the crazy-ass drug dealer he’d pulled a fast one on was marching down the middle of the hall!

  Their eyes met. Flicka’s were going wide, lighting up with recognition.

  Then he was reaching into the pocket of his big black goose down parka.