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  In front of the now glassless window was a decorative Asian bamboo folding partition, and above it was the valance of a curtain covering the top of the window. In between the two was his blind’s offset shooting slit. He could shoot down through the slit without being spotted from the outside.

  The British assassin thought that with its highly varnished walnut stock and blue steel barrel, the L39A1 Enfield English sniper rifle up on the small tripod before him was a glorious Stradivarius of a gun. It was loaded with ten soft point .303 British rounds, a favored cartridge of choice for many deer hunters because of its high twist rate and excellent penetration.

  The locked and loaded bolt-action rifle had been fitted with what was simply the finest high-precision riflescope in all the world, a German-made Schmidt & Bender PM II.

  He didn’t know if it was an intentional nod to the bloody medieval history of the fatherland or something, but to him, the intricate mill marks along the S & B’s reticle gave it the distinct look of an elaborate Gothic cross.

  The red intersection of that cross was dead-centered now on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of 67th and Lexington.

  To the left of the reticle was the Armory’s rear doorway.

  And to the right was the just-arrived limousine of the president of the United States of America.

  To be precise, the scope was zeroed in sixty-nine inches up above the corner, just a skosh under Buckland’s six one height. The protective agent would come out and open the limo door and allow the president onto the curb first, the British assassin knew.

  The moment Buckland stepped from the street onto the sidewalk would be exactly when he was going to drop him with a head shot. One shot center mass, just above Buckland’s left ear, would shear the entire top of his head clean off.

  The greatest assassination in the history of the world, after all, deserved nothing less than a one-shot clean kill.

  The preparation was over. The windage determined. The elevation adjustments calculated.

  As he lay there, certainty came to him. As if it had all been recorded already in the history books.

  The sniper who wouldn’t quit, they would call him. The ultimate professional. The greatest shot who ever lived.

  Chapter 95

  Low above Park Avenue Armory in the trembling helicopter, Leroux and I frantically did a systematic visual search of the surrounding windows and rooftops.

  The president’s limo was there below us on the southwest corner of Lex. We had word that the president was still inside it. They had cordoned off 67th between Park and Lex, and the bullet- and bombproof vehicle had been determined to be the safest place for him until the situation on the street was better put under control.

  It was the strangest thing. I don’t know if the attack on the motorcade had been tweeted or something, but there were now about a couple hundred people on the side street and avenue sidewalks near the limo.

  Most of them seemed to be students from Hunter College, located not far from the Armory. Were they trying to get selfies? I wondered. Just bizarre. Thank God a bunch of uniformed cops from the Nineteenth Precinct, halfway down 67th, had arrived to deal with it, but it was still quite a volatile, kinetic scene.

  I swung my spotting scope down to the street toward a sudden surge in the crowd surrounding the limo. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. The cops were trying to arrest some dreadlocked white boy who had gotten too close to the limo.

  Now was no time for a sit-in. Where the hell were the rest of the Secret Service people to take care of this circus? I wondered. It was becoming a riot down there.

  Just as I wondered it, I caught something in the edge of my scope, down there on the street. On the northwest corner of Lex, opposite the president’s limo, among the crush of students, there was a tall preppy guy in an overcoat standing beside the pillar of the Hunter College building.

  It was Matthew Leroux’s CIA boss, Mark Evrard.

  “Matt, three o’clock, on the corner. Is that Evrard? That’s your boss, right?”

  “Yeah. It is,” Leroux said, looking down through his own scope. “That’s weird. I thought he said he was heading back down to DC.”

  I had a strange feeling right then, staring down at Evrard. He just looked wrong. Out of place. Foreboding. Everything was moving around him, but he was as still as the post he stood beside.

  Then something in the back of my mind shifted and knocked against something else.

  This was really no time to be checking my phone, but I checked it anyway. I opened the message from Doyle that had been sent sometime in the last ten crazy minutes.

  Mike, we did it!!! The link to Levkov!!! Here’s a video still of the SUV off a camera at the nearest gas station in Yonkers. Witness has already ID’d. These are the guys who dumped Levkov’s body.

  I tapped the photo and nodded my exploding head.

  I looked down at the corner, then at the photo, then down at the corner again.

  In the photo was Evrard.

  Mark Evrard with that goon of a driver I had met the night I followed Leroux from the gallery. I didn’t know why, but it was Evrard. Evrard was behind the whole thing. The man behind the curtain. Evrard had hired the assassin.

  But he was here now. Why? The attempt at the motorcade had failed.

  Because here and now was here and now, I realized.

  The assassin’s intent was to get the president to the Armory all along. We had no time. It was about to happen.

  “They’re about to bring the president out,” the pilot called back to us.

  “No!” I screamed. “No! Tell them not to! Tell them to leave him in the car!”

  “What’s the matter? What’s going on?” said Leroux anxiously, still focused on the limo.

  “It’s Evrard. He killed Levkov! He’s the one behind everything!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “This is the photo of the guys who killed Levkov,” I said, showing Leroux my phone.

  “You mean…”

  “Yes,” I said. “He set you up. He set all of us up.”

  I pointed my spotting scope at the street. Down on the corner, Evrard was looking east down 67th, then looking up. He glanced at the presidential limo as he took out his cell, checking something. Then he looked back east, back up.

  “Matt, watch Evrard! He’s looking up. East up Sixty-Seventh. He keeps looking up!”

  Leroux lifted the Secret Service radio.

  “This is air cover one. We have a problem on the outside of the vehicle. Do you copy? Keep Bronco in the vehicle. Copy.”

  We listened to the radio. There was nothing. There was just static. White noise.

  “Hey, can you get them?” Leroux yelled up to the pilot.

  “No, it’s not working,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “They’re jamming the signal or something!” I cried as I looked frantically up 67th Street with the spotting scope. “They’re going to kill him now!”

  “I see it! I see it!” I said a second later. “That white building! Farthest window on the right, two floors down! See how the other windows in the building have a sun glare on them? But that one doesn’t have any. He must have taken out the glass!”

  I zeroed in tighter with my scope’s zoom. Instead of shades or blinds in the window, there was some kind of Chinese screen and a little curtain. Between them were what looked like the aluminum legs of a ladder or a painter’s scaffold.

  That’s when I remembered the sniper’s blind in the MetLife Building. The shooter had been up high, near the ceiling of the space, far back to get a down shot angle on the street.

  When I took my eye off the scope, I saw Leroux pounding on the shoulder of the pilot.

  “Down! Down! Put me on the roof of the Armory!”

  Chapter 96

  Because of the raised structures on the Armory’s roof, the helicopter could only get us to about ten feet above it.

  We had to hang off the sides and jump, and I went first. It was farther down
than I’d anticipated, and I landed off balance and went over onto the rough tar paper, the breath knocked out of me.

  I was standing, looking up, waiting for Leroux to follow when his sniper rifle fell out of the chopper’s side door and clattered to the rooftop beside me.

  What the hell? I thought, looking down at it. Then I looked up again and saw Leroux himself drop sideways out of the helicopter, crashing hard onto the roof.

  “I’m shot,” he said as he clutched himself with both bloody hands above his groin.

  What?! I thought. It was unbelievable. Impossible. Just like that?!

  “I saw the muzzle flash,” he gasped as blood began to pool out onto the tar paper beneath him. “It was from the window, the one you spotted.”

  “Medic! Help!” I yelled up at the chopper.

  “No time,” Leroux said as I knelt to help him. He took one of his blood-covered hands off his wound and pointed toward the huge sniper rifle.

  “If you don’t get help, you’re gonna die, Matt.”

  “No, the president is. You have to save the president,” he said.

  “But—”

  “There’s no buts!” he screamed, his face clotted with pain. “Get over to that corner of the roof and drop that son of a bitch! Shoot the bastard!”

  I ran across the roof with the rifle. At the corner of the crazy old building was an actual battlement like you’d see on the top of a rook chess piece. I set the huge rifle into the battlement’s chest-high indentation and looked up through the scope.

  Even at this lower angle, I still couldn’t see the shooter in the window. Just the crazy Chinese screen, the little curtain, the ladder in the gap between them. There was no target!

  I glanced down to the street as a roar came from the crowd. It was the president’s limo. One of the Secret Service agents was at its rear, opening the door.

  “No! Get back!” I screamed. But I knew it was fruitless. He couldn’t hear me over the crowd and chopper rotor wash.

  There was no more time.

  Do or die.

  I looked back up at the glassless window two blocks to the east and I knelt as I put the rifle to my shoulder.

  Chapter 97

  In one oiled, pistonlike motion, the British assassin cleared the brass casing of the bullet with which he’d just gutshot the cop out of the chopper and reclosed the Enfield rifle’s blue steel bolt.

  He’d been alternating his aim from the limo to the chopper from the moment it arrived. He didn’t know how the sniper team had spotted him, but they had. When he had looked back up from the limo a moment before, the two-man team had both of their scopes on him.

  Reorienting on his target, he watched in the scope as the other cop scurried and ducked behind one of the Armory roof’s battlements a split second before the British assassin was going to blow his brains out.

  Smart man, he thought. Run for your life.

  When he looked back down at the limo, there was a Secret Service agent at its rear, ready to open the door. Buckland was coming out.

  There still was a chance.

  The British assassin adjusted the Enfield a millimeter down as the president stood up from behind the limo door and stepped onto the sidewalk.

  He sucked in his breath, held it.

  Just as he slipped the center of the Gothic cross reticle onto Buckland’s head, he saw the muzzle flash from the Armory’s roof.

  The .408 CheyTac round traveling at thirty-five hundred feet per second came in at him just under his own rifle. As it struck home, it cut a perfectly circular groove through the bones of the ring and pinkie fingers of his left hand, holding the Enfield’s stock.

  Then it bored a perfect quarter-size hole through the center of his chest cavity and blew his spine and heart and much of his back out across the wall behind him.

  Epilogue

  Chapter 98

  A week later, Old Glory snapped in the wind along with the coattails of the honor guard, standing out on the grass as the marching band played the national anthem.

  When it was established that we had, in fact, somehow managed to still keep our flag waving o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave, at least for the time being, there was much hooting and cries of “Let’s go! Let’s go!” from the field and the stands.

  We were at Fordham Prep’s famous homecoming Turkey Bowl game against Xavier, and Mary Catherine and Seamus and all my kids and I went nuts as Brian and Marvin took the field with the rest of the Rams for the kickoff.

  “Well, they made it, the two knuckleheads, despite all their own efforts to the contrary,” Seamus said.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to even think about what could have happened to them once I had gotten to the bottom of the saga of Marvin and Brian and the drug dealer. Sometimes, if you’re wise and like to sleep at night, as a parent you say, “All’s well that ends well,” and leave it at that.

  Which is exactly what I did say as I handed Seamus and Mary Catherine brimming plastic cups.

  After I clicked cups with two of my twelve favorite people in the world, I took a long, much-deserved sip out in the cold air as Fordham booted the ball high and long for the kickoff.

  Marvin, of course, being the biggest and yet somehow fastest kid on the field, made the first tackle, sending a Xavier kid into a sideline tuba player.

  I patted Marvin’s uncle, in front of us, on the back.

  “Tuba players, be warned,” I said, smiling. “We expect nothing less than the Bronx’s version of Bo Jackson.”

  Mr. Peters, who was almost as big as his nephew, gave out a bellowing laugh. The sweet old man had finally made it up from North Carolina to stay with Big Marv, who had moved out of the Bennett abode amid many teary good-byes and hugs two days before. We were all going to miss the big galoot.

  “And remember, Mr. Peters, he’s to play basketball at Manhattan College,” Seamus said, patting the man’s huge shoulder. “Not Manhattanville. Just plain old normal, Catholic, meat-and-potatoes Manhattan. In Riverdale. Don’t forget, now.”

  Chapter 99

  I was heading down the bleachers for the next round when I got the text from my good buddy Paul Ernenwein.

  How’s it hangin, Miss Oakley? it said.

  Rootin tootin, I texted back, laughing at our little inside joke.

  There had been a lot of hoopla about the shot that had dropped the assassin. Especially the fact that he had been shot through the hand holding his rifle before he’d been killed. World-famous snipers had weighed in with glowing reviews of the shot’s professionalism, which suggested years and years of training. The Post even did a detailed mock-up of it. Where the chopper was. Where I was. Where Matthew Leroux was. A dotted line showing the trajectory of the bullet up 67th Street.

  I had to struggle to stifle my laughter every time I looked at the 100 percent wrong mock-up or read one of these lauding reviews.

  Because the whole thing, the famous world-class shot, was actually a complete accident.

  Before I was able to adjust my aim, the big awkward CheyTac rifle had slipped from where I’d placed it between the crenellations. Grabbing at it to keep it from falling, I’d hit the damn thing’s hair trigger.

  Call it dumb blind luck. The hand of God. But I had nothing to do with shooting the Brit through his hand holding the rifle.

  Since I knew hoopla to be far more trouble than it’s worth, I had actually insisted that Leroux had done it. After the shot, Matthew Joseph Leroux died right there on the roof as we were trying to get him back into the chopper. Crediting him was the least I could do for his poor family after all the sacrifices he had made for us.

  The Brit’s real name, it turned out, was Andy Heathton. The FBI had sent a photo of the body to British intelligence, who had finally been able to ID the shooter. The thirty-nine-year-old professional killer had been born and raised in Leeds, England, and had been taught how to shoot by the British Royal Marines at age twenty-one. Apparently, he had spent the next several years of
his life as a mercenary, killing folks all over the world.

  His wife, Holly Heathton, thirty-three, who was thought to be responsible for the remote-controlled dump truck that had rammed the motorcade, was caught by customs out at JFK, trying to leave the country the night of the attempted assassination.

  You hear? Paul texted me a second later.

  About what? I texted back.

  “About the Times article,” Paul said from behind me.

  I turned and stared at the redheaded fed.

  “No,” I said. “But something tells me I’m about to find out about it.”

  “C’mon,” Paul said, patting me on the shoulder as he pocketed his phone. “Let’s walk and talk.”

  Chapter 100

  “We arrested Secret Service SAC Margaret Foley late last night,” Paul said as we walked down a breezy drive past Fordham’s beautiful old stone buildings.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yep. We got up on a phone we found in the shed of her house in Silver Spring. There were hundreds of calls between her and Mark Evrard. Photos on there as well. Startling ones.”

  “Of an intimate nature?” I said.

  “The most highly intimate. She’d been sleeping with him for years, apparently. They met down at the pile after nine eleven.”

  “Love among the wreckage,” I said. “Romantic.”

  “She finally broke last night,” Paul said. “She had given Evrard the president’s route and itinerary, which he then passed along to the assassin through back channels. They’d been planning this for over a year.”

  “She happen to mention why she and Evrard wanted to off their own country’s leader? Nothing new on Netflix?”

  “She said it was about Buckland’s call to slice the federal budget to the bone and do a thorough audit of all the books, including Homeland Security. She said she had misappropriated a few dollars here and there over the years and didn’t want to wind up on the unemployment line or in jail.”