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  Brian didn’t wait to see what he was reaching for. He just bolted, made the hall corner, saw the outside emergency exit door, and hit its push bar at a run.

  Out in the cold, he ran across the dead hard grass of the football field behind the school in his black dress shoes faster than he ever had in cleats. A moment later, the emergency siren blaring in the distance behind him was interrupted by a flat, hard firecrackerlike pop.

  He started zigzagging then, past the twenty, the ten, and then into and out of the end zone, not breaking his sprinting and dodging until he hit the stand of trees on the other side of the field’s chest-high fence.

  Past the trees, he came upon the busy four-lane road of Southern Boulevard. With no time to look, he ran right out into traffic. He almost got hit, first by a brown Mustang, then by a white Euro delivery van. Then he was on the other side, running alongside a tall hedge.

  The hedge ended suddenly and opened onto a parking lot with a sign beside its driveway that said THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN. There had to be a cop or something, he thought as he saw a guard booth.

  Please, God. Please help me, he prayed as he ran. I don’t want to die.

  Chapter 83

  Twenty feet up the park road, past the empty guard booth, Brian Bennett spotted a long set of cement steps on his left-hand side and pounded up them with everything he had.

  The worn concrete treads flew past under his shoes. In twos, sometimes threes. He hardly felt them. He could feel only one thing. The massive power of his sixteen-year desire to live, boosting adrenaline into his bloodstream like nitro into a funny car’s engine.

  He topped the steps without breaking stride and hit a path that skirted the base of a vast grass hill. He looked about frantically. The empty path. The empty hill. Dead gray trees. The dead gray sky. No cops. No security. Nobody at all. It was like the entire park was abandoned, the entire Bronx, the entire planet.

  It was just him and Big Flicka now, he thought as sweat began to sting his eyes. He and his own personal psycho killer, left all alone in this calming urban nature oasis to play the deadliest game of tag in world history.

  The botanical garden’s famous and immense domed greenhouse appeared as the path crested a rise. He’d been to the garden a few times with his family when he was a kid, but he’d never looked at the greenhouse before. It looked Victorian and somehow futuristic at the same time. Like something out of an H. G. Wells novel.

  Twenty flat-out running seconds later, he reached it and ripped open its door.

  And stopped and stood blinking.

  The building was even weirder inside than out, an Alice in Wonderland indoor forest world of stone paths meandering in multiple directions among green grass and bushes and trees and wildflowers. You could smell the sweetness of the flowers in the suddenly warm air. As the door clicked behind him, he waited to hear bird chirps or maybe crickets. Instead, it was dead silent.

  Outside inside upside down, he thought as he hurried left down an interior woodland path.

  “Hello? Is there anybody here? Hello? Help!” he called.

  Another twenty yards down the path, beyond a huge weeping willow, he pulled a French door. This even curiouser room of the enclosed English garden had an actual pond on its other side, with lily pads and a bronze fountain gurgling in its center.

  “Please, someone! Hello? Is there anyone here?” he yelled up at the glass ceiling as he began to jog.

  Odd structures began to appear in the underbrush beyond the pond as he kept going. It was a wicker world New York City. A wicker St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a wicker Grand Central Terminal, little wicker skaters holding hands on an ice rink before a towering wicker 30 Rock.

  Around a little bend in the path, beyond this frivolous insanity, he spotted another door, marked EXIT.

  “Hey! What are you doing here? The garden’s closed today. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  Brian shot a look up to his left. There was a little white-bearded man in maintenance blues atop a high ladder. There was a set of Christmas lights in his little hands, a bunch of twist ties between his little white teeth. He was in the process of stringing the lights around the trunk of an enormous palm tree.

  Garden gnome, Brian thought, opening his mouth to ask for help.

  Then a pistol cracked behind him, and he was past the ladder and out the exit door in a panicked bolt, running and zigzagging again in the cold.

  Chapter 84

  Less than a minute later, Brian crashed through a thick hedge that put him outside the botanical garden, back onto Southern Boulevard. Its four lanes were empty this time as he ran across them and ducked behind a parked car, gasping and gulping for breath.

  Not fair, he thought, down on his knees, dripping sweat, his hands shaking. His hands were actually bleeding now, he could see, scratched all to hell from tearing a hole for himself through the hedge.

  Where were the cops? he thought, wiping blood on his khakis. On strike? Would no one help him? Did everyone actually want Flicka to kill him?

  He swiped his drenched face with his shirtsleeve and desperately looked around. Down at the bottom of the little descending grass embankment, something caught his eye. It was a gleam, a thin flash of light off metal, coming through the underbrush. And then Brian jumped up as he remembered.

  Crashing through the bushes at the incline’s bottom a split second later, Brian looked south down the long straight lines of the train tracks and raised third rail. He could see it was only a hundred or so yards down the tracks to the platform of the Fordham Road Metro-North station.

  Having used the train plenty of times, he knew that the long open-air platform abutted the fence for the Fordham campus. He also knew that there was actually a hole in its fence that all the Fordham Prep kids used to avoid going all the way around to the campus’s main gate.

  Brian sprinted over the trestles and had just pulled himself up onto the Westchester-bound concrete platform when he saw that the train was coming in at its far end. It had slowed to a stop by the time he was about to cut through the hole in the fence.

  That’s when he remembered. The Metro-North trains had conductors. They could call the cops!

  When he hopped through the opening doors of the train car and moved left down the car’s aisle, he saw that the seats were more than half empty. He passed a middle-aged white woman. Then an old Hispanic-looking man.

  Since both were glued to their phones, they were completely and utterly oblivious to the apparition that walked past. The world’s most panicked Catholic school white boy, dripping sweat and blood like a lost young medieval saint sent running through the countryside after being visited with the stigmata.

  He was all the way down the car, about to head into the next, when he heard the woman scream.

  Brian turned.

  And froze.

  Flicka, sweat dripping off his terrible face, stepped into the car in his big black parka.

  The huge dude had to actually duck a little to clear the opening. Brian’s eyes darted immediately to the gun the big man held. It was a little silver-and-black semiauto.

  This was it, Brian thought as he helplessly watched the gun rise toward him in slo-mo. He’d tried with all his might for it not to be it, but he had failed. He was going to die now. He couldn’t believe it. After all that.

  He glanced around helplessly. A sunset on an ad placard promising cheap flights to Miami. An abandoned newspaper on a pleather seat.

  He wiped at his nose with the back of his bloody hand.

  Before he even graduated from high school, he was actually going to violently die on some stupid damned commuter train.

  Chapter 85

  Just as he thought this, from beyond the still-open train door to Flicka’s right, there was a sound and movement.

  Brian watched, immobilized, as Marvin bounded into the car, already off his feet, Superman-style, as if shot out of a cannon. He hit Big Flicka high, blindsiding him, actually taking him off his big feet sid
eways and crunching him against the opposite, closed door of the train.

  Brian shook off his shock and ran forward as Marvin straddled Big Flicka and started pounding him, screaming and screeching like a wild animal as he clubbed the drug dealer again and again in the face.

  Brian spotted the pistol on the scuffed train floor beside them, and he kicked it out of the door of the train, and then gloriously joined in on the beating of Big Flicka, kicking at the guy’s long legs, his stomach, the side of his head. More passengers arrived out of nowhere, yelling and screaming as the three gasped and growled as they fought for their lives there on the dirty train floor.

  Then suddenly, after he didn’t know how long—a minute, an hour—a big uniformed cop was pulling Brian from the back, up onto his feet, and he was outside on the platform getting handcuffed.

  A second later, Marvin was handcuffed beside him, and they both watched as Big Flicka was dragged out.

  Brian couldn’t believe the state of him. There was blood pouring out of his broken nose and out of a huge gash on the side of his head, which was swelled up like a pumpkin.

  He was out cold, or maybe dead, hopefully, Brian thought as he realized he was crying.

  He wasn’t the only one, he saw, as he turned to Marvin. Big Marv was flat out bawling on the platform next to him, just helplessly weeping. Brian leaned over and nudged him with his cuffed hands.

  “It’s over, Marvin. It’s okay, dude. It’s over. We got him. You saved me, man. You saved me.”

  That’s when it really hit Brian. When he looked at the number of cops around them. The crowd of commuters standing outside the stopped train. The EMTs rattling a stretcher over the platform’s cement.

  How close they had come to not making it.

  “No, man,” Marvin said in an almost whisper through his weeping. “You did it. You saved me, bro. It was you.”

  Chapter 86

  Yellow and white sparks pinwheeled off the Black Hawk helicopter’s windshield glass as we ascended out of the shadow of the Chrysler Building, into the bright, late morning sunlight above the canyons of midtown Manhattan.

  From my perch on a none-too-comfortable bench in the rear of the FBI’s big black military-style helicopter, I stared out a side door window at midtown Manhattan’s east side. Next to me was CIA sniper Matthew Leroux, and we, along with another helicopter team that was now hovering over the East River near the UN, had been assigned countersniper air cover for Buckland’s motorcade.

  I had tried to beg off being Leroux’s spotter several times as we rolled into the city behind the motorcade in the MRAP. I’d cited my lack of qualifications, that it had been years since I’d held a spotting scope.

  Leroux had ended the discussion at the 59th Street heliport, where the FBI Black Hawks were waiting, by holding up some fingers.

  “How many you see, Mike?” he had said.

  “Two,” I told him.

  “Then by the powers vested in me by the gods of war, I here now dub you officially qualified,” he had said. “Stop worrying. I got you covered. It’s just like riding a bike.”

  Some bike, I thought, feeling the hard, high turbine thrum of the five-ton military aircraft through my back and butt and shoe soles.

  Leroux was busy kneeling on the deck of the cabin, putting the final touches on some bulky piece of military hardware called a gyroscopic shooting platform. It was a gun bench, an extremely expensive, high-tech, rotating adjustable gun sling that was underhung with the same pill-shaped gyroscopic motors that Hollywood steady cams use to counter vibration.

  But instead of a camera chocked into the gyroscopic mount, there was a huge bolt-action sniper rifle called a CheyTac M300 Intervention. Leroux had explained to me that the long, futuristic-looking steel and carbon fiber gun could actually shoot sub–minute of angle. Sub–minute of angle precision basically meant the big rifle could consistently put bullet after bullet into a circle the size of a human head at preposterous distances.

  And what a bullet it shot. Leroux had said its .408 CheyTac round, though smaller and lighter than a .50 BMG, could easily drop personnel targets at two miles. That kind of range in narrow Manhattan was actually very comforting. It meant we were providing air cover from the East River to the Hudson at any given point.

  Leroux had been throwing around tons of superassassin lingo from the moment I’d decided to be his spotter. He spoke of yaw and linear air drag and spin rates and ballistic coefficients. Speed and altitude and angular motion of the aircraft. Slant distances.

  Since it was all pretty much Greek to me, I just nodded along. He was Jordan Spieth getting his game face on. I was just his caddy.

  Actually, as we were strapping into the aircraft twenty minutes before, at the heliport, I’d learned that we’d caught somewhat of a break in the case.

  Doyle, who was working the Pavel Levkov murder, had sent me a text. He said a witness from one of the houses near the drop site in Yonkers had come forward. The witness had said he saw our departed Russian friend dumped by two men in a large black SUV. Apparently, the witness even got a partial on the plate that Doyle was frantically trying to run down.

  Since we already knew that Levkov was the liaison who had hired the Brit, a line on whoever had killed him would point us directly to whoever the hell was behind all this.

  At long last, it looked like we might finally have a substantial lead.

  I looked down at the city below, the red and blue bubbling police lights of the presidential motorcade already starting to form over by the Waldorf.

  I just hoped it wasn’t too little too late.

  Chapter 87

  After Matthew Leroux finished the final touches of the gyroscopic rig, he stood and checked both of our safety harnesses.

  Wow, was this guy a pro, I thought as I watched him triple-check everything. A truly topflight operator. Whatever else he was, Leroux was a good guy to have in a foxhole, I thought. Especially one that was hovering at five hundred feet.

  Then I realized why he had checked our safety harnesses.

  “Opening the doors,” Leroux called over the intercom headset.

  Holy moly. Is that such a great idea? I wanted to ask as my eyes went wide.

  I didn’t get a chance. The bass hum of the craft’s turboshaft engine suddenly became molar-loosening as Leroux rolled open the doors on both sides of the Black Hawk’s cabin. My stomach did a little rolling as well as I suddenly looked out at the sharp edges of stone and glass buildings down there in the open air below my shoe tips.

  With the brisk wind ripping in through the now open door, I could see we were at a low hover over Bryant Park, where the famous NYC library was. On the ground way down below, I could see lucky people safely and obliviously walking to and fro in front of the marble lions.

  It’s hard to describe how peculiar it felt to be sitting there with the aircraft’s doors open. The enclosed cabin, which a second before had felt sort of safe, like being inside a car or something, now made me feel like we were sitting in a kid’s hastily built clubhouse, precariously perched on the tip of the Empire State Building.

  “Give us a three sixty, Cap,” Leroux called smoothly up to the pilot as he hunkered down on his little hunter’s chair beside the other open door and placed an eye to the CheyTac’s scope.

  There was a subtle change in the whine of the rotors, and we started slowly rotating counterclockwise. Manhattan began to pan across my spotting scope, the east side replaced by Central Park replaced by the bright—even in the daytime—glow of Times Square off the high-rise hotels.

  When it had just about done a full turn, the chopper suddenly did a heart attack–inducing tilt sideways, to the left, snapping my harness line taut.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” the pilot said calmly as he tilted us back level. “Those darn wind gusts. Thank goodness this baby has good drink holders.”

  When I looked over at Leroux to see if he had maybe fallen out, I saw that he was sitting as before, completely still and relaxed. Th
e calm, slightly concerned expression on his face as he sat at the door’s edge, above the tips of the skyscrapers, was that of a mailman sorting letters or a carpenter screwing up some Sheetrock. What did this guy have for blood? I wondered. Freon?

  He turned and looked at me and grinned.

  “Feel that wind, Mike? Don’t you love it? That’s game temperature, baby.”

  “Oh, yeah. Nothing like it in the world,” I lied as my saliva evaporated.

  To take my mind off my terror, I glanced at my phone and saw that it was eleven thirty.

  I glanced down, over the building tops, at the bubbling roof lights by the Waldorf again.

  We were thirty minutes away from President Buckland’s ride to the United Nations.

  Thirty minutes away from seeing what in the loving green world of God would happen next.

  Chapter 88

  In the middle of blocked-off Park Avenue, in front of the Waldorf Astoria, the assassin’s wife held up her phone, snapping pictures along with the rest of the fifty or so looky-loos.

  She could already see, past the pedestrian barrier set up along the median, a large portion of the motorcade formed and waiting along blocked-off East 50th. She could actually see the rear of one of the two presidential limousines between two SUVs.

  In front of the limo, there was a thick, white cloth tent stretched from the Waldorf’s 50th Street side entrance awning halfway into the street. The tent was to conceal President Buckland’s entry into the vehicle, she knew.

  As she watched, several business-suited men—undercover cops, or maybe Secret Service agents—came out from around the tent and began milling about. There were more than usual, which was saying something. She’d heard on the radio that they’d even brought in some military-style MRAPs to bolster this visit.

  She stifled a laugh. What would be next? An M1 Abrams tank? An aircraft carrier? All because they were afraid of one measly little man.