People talked about his heroic accomplishments, but no one knew that every one of them had been because of her. She was the one who had fulfilled his potential. He had simply been lucky enough to have found someone to be a hero for.
"I was going to use this as a way to beg you not to go to New York," his wife said, "but that would be useless. In fact, selfish. Our country needs you to go. The world does. Putin is a wolf. It"s time he learns what a sheepdog is all about. Somebody has to do it, and it"s you."
She took his hand and led him through the darkened kitchen toward the elevator.
"But wait. What about the Klondike bars?" he said.
"Tomorrow morning, Mr. President. We have to do this right, remember?"
Chapter 66.
The bright white rectangle of the TV screen lit up in the darkness and then the video was rolling.
The footage opened up on the long gray carpet of a downward-sloping New York City cross street near the United Nations in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, east of Madison Avenue. The Midtown South side street was unnaturally clear of traffic and parked cars, and there were steel pedestrian barriers, as one would see at a parade, completely lining the curbs in both directions.
By the gold tinge to the light and the short sleeves and summer dresses of the handful of pedestrians behind the barriers, it appeared to be a summer evening. At the top of Madison Avenue in the distance, through the suffused light, appeared the silhouette of a uniformed cop with his arms folded, his back to the street.
Then the vehicles came over the rise.
A blue-and-white marked NYPD cop car came first, its flashing and blinking lights barely perceptible in the twilight. It moved by quickly-forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour. It was followed by an equally rapidly moving black Chevy Suburban, then a blue-and-white marked NYPD SUV, and then an NYPD tow truck. Behind the tow truck came another black speeding Suburban SUV, and then another, and then another.
"How many b.l.o.o.d.y cars are there again?" the British a.s.sa.s.sin"s wife said as they watched in the dark of the old office.
"Altogether, fifty-four," the a.s.sa.s.sin said. "Shh. Watch."
There was a break in the motorcade for nearly a minute and then a rumble began. Seconds later, in a phalanx of blinking red and blue, there were NYPD motorcycle cops, half a dozen in a loose V, followed by more and more cop cars and vans and SUVs.
Finally, a full four minutes into the video, down the slope came what everyone was waiting for. Pedestrians at the curb began lofting phones and waving plastic American flags as what was referred to as the Beast-the first of two ma.s.sive presidential Cadillac limousines-barreled over the rise.
The a.s.sa.s.sin hit the Pause b.u.t.ton on the remote.
"Right there. You see?" the a.s.sa.s.sin said, pointing behind the barrier, to the right of the limo. "It happens right there."
"Oh...I see. That"s brilliant! You"ve outdone yourself. I can picture it now. Out of nowhere like that. When it happens, it"s just gonna be..."
"Bedlam," the a.s.sa.s.sin agreed.
He got off the couch and went to the small washroom and clicked on the light and began scrubbing out the oil beneath his fingernails with Lava soap and a brush.
They were at the rented workshop in Brooklyn, and they"d just finished all the final adjustments on the dump truck. Everything was ready. Everything was in place. Disguises. Equipment. Distances. Now vehicles. Done, done, done, and done.
"And the route is confirmed?" his wife said at his back.
"Our contact is in the Secret Service, love," he said, glancing at his fingernails and switching the brush to his other hand. "They know before the president himself does."
"It can"t be stopped, then. It"s done. We"ve done it."
The British a.s.sa.s.sin rinsed his hands and smiled at his reflection, then came back into the room. He finished the Gatorade he"d been drinking and bank-shot the bottle into the wastebasket along the old office"s brick wall.
"The toy soldier has been wound, doll. Now it"s just a matter of pushing the b.u.t.ton."
In the glow of the paused screen image, the a.s.sa.s.sin"s wife pulled off her shirt. She wasn"t wearing a bra. She lay back on the couch, staring at him with her feline-gray eyes.
As he watched her slip out of her jeans, the British a.s.sa.s.sin imagined the new Italian Racing Red Jag XFR-S he was going to buy when the final payment came. The rumble of its five-hundred-plus horsepower under his palm. The way it would drift on the hairpins above the Mediterranean.
"Then what are you waiting for?" his wife said in the glow. "Push away."
Chapter 67.
It was Sat.u.r.day, and down on the field, a bunch of thin dudes in baby-blue uniforms milled around another crew of skinny guys wearing all-white uniforms.
The crowd around me suddenly roared as a light-blue guy with girlie hair booted the ball with a loud champagne-cork-popping sound. The spinning ball made a surprisingly sharp curve through the air as it streaked for the top right corner of the goal. Then the crowd groaned as the ball banged off the goal"s top bar and spun out-of-bounds.
As I watched the slo-mo replay of the corner kick up on the ma.s.sive Jumbotron above Yankee Stadium"s center-field wall, I couldn"t decide which was more surprising: that I was actually at a professional soccer game or that the soccer game was sacrilegiously occurring down on the hallowed outfield gra.s.s of my beloved Bronx Bombers.
"Gee, get out of here. There wasn"t a goal made?" I said sarcastically to Arturo, beside me.
We were standing in the cold of the open terrace-level seating, just below the stadium"s upper deck on the third base side. Around us, a crowd of about thirty thousand surrounded the improvised soccer field, set up foul pole to foul pole in the baseball stadium"s outfield.
"Tell me, is there ever a goal in soccer?" I said. "Or is zip-zip the point? Is it, like, a Zen thing?"
"Soccer no longer exists, Mike," Arturo said as he lifted his binoculars. "It"s called football now, and it"s the world"s sport, so get into it."
"Oh, I do, Arturo," I said, lifting my own binocs. "But only when it"s played properly, on Sundays by men with upper body strength who wear helmets."
I was on my way home from another fruitless day of not finding the a.s.sa.s.sin the night before when Arturo had called me. Arturo, a soccer fan, had heard on the radio about the Sat.u.r.day exhibition match between the new New York City Football Club and a team from England called Leeds United.
Leeds United, as it turned out, was a team from northern England.
Precisely where our shooter was supposed to be from.
Coming here this afternoon with Arturo to look for him was a long shot, I knew. Under normal circ.u.mstances, I"d say there was probably no chance in h.e.l.l that a public enemy number one on the run would do something as nuts as pop by and cheer on his home team.
But then again, this was no normal crook.
I"d been studying up on these warrior sniper types, and the thing about them was, although they were extremely precise and patient, they truly had no problem with risk. Things like grenades without pins, tightropes with no nets, and jumping out of perfectly good aircraft were for some reason incredibly alluring to them. Risk was how they got their rocks off.
Also a plus point-probably the only one-was that the CIA had actually dug up another, slightly better photo of the Brit, standing in the crowd at some Middle Eastern market. He was wearing aviator sungla.s.ses, but the shape of his nose and ears and jaw were clear. Better than that, the smug frown on his face and the way he held himself, with a kind of shoulders-back, arrogant swagger, were quite distinctive.
I studied the photo for the thousandth time, the features, the demeanor and carriage. Then I lifted my binoculars and went back to scanning the crowd. If he was here, we could find him.
Maybe.
I panned over the sea of baby blue. Though the mostly male crowd jumped up and down a lot and did weird chants as they drank beer, they struck me as, rather than violent Euro hooligans, clean-cut fellows who had probably played soccer in high school and college. Good-natured enough. Well, except for the idiots who insisted on constantly blowing those stupid head-splitting vuvuzela horns that sounded like bees buzzing.
After another minute of not finding the needle in the haystack, an air horn went off near us at an eardrum-perforating volume as another baby-blue guy failed to kick the ball into the goal.
"Take me out to a real ball game," I sang under my breath as I put my Nikon binocs back up on my eyes.
I saw it a nanosecond later. I aimed the gla.s.ses down on the main level almost directly by first base and kept them there.
"No," I said, spinning the target into focus. "No."
"What is it, Mike?"
"C"mon," I said as I jogged up the stairs for the concourse. "Hurry up!"
Chapter 68.
The British a.s.sa.s.sin smiled at the curvy brunette waitress with big black-rimmed eyes as she stopped before him with a tray filled with bottles of Budweiser and champagne in flutes.
He was going to grab a few lagers, but then his wife elbowed him, and he thought again. A second later, another chesty serving wench brought caviar and hot dogs. This one was a no-brainer. He liberally sprinkled beluga onto two franks.
"Welcome to America," he said to his wife after a surprisingly tasty bite.
They were in luxury suite 321 on Yankee Stadium"s private level, and it actually fit its ridiculous billing. It had leather seats and couches, flat screens everywhere, a pine-scented private loo. The suite even had a heated balcony overlooking the field, which was coming in quite handy now, this far into November.
Leeds United"s American debut was a true to-do of the old school, so it was filled with posh expat Brits, and even richer real Brits from the other side of the pond, in the Northern Territories.
There were obnoxious Brit big oil crooks and obnoxious Brit big media crooks and obnoxious Brit too-big-to-fail central banking crooks who lent them other people"s money. Coming in, they"d almost knocked down a former Brit supermodel famous for getting busted snorting heroin on the prime minister"s plane. There was even an old rock star from the early eighties drunk off his a.s.s in one corner, slurring into the ear of a b.i.t.c.hy Brit magazine publisher who talked on the news shows from time to time.
It was the wife"s idea, of course. An old friend of hers from boarding school had married a Leeds boy who"d stepped in it and was actually a minor owner of Leeds United. So here they were. His wife was all about status, social networking, moving up the ladder. He couldn"t care less. Whatever she wanted. He was no dummy. As it turned out, "Happy wife, happy life" applied even to hired killers.
Besides, he was in a fairly good disguise, having dyed his hair silver gray to go along with his fake goatee. With some artfully placed stage makeup, he easily looked ten years older than his thirty-nine years.
They had done their homework. They could squeeze in a quick drink or two now that everything was set up. Especially for the one and only Leeds United.
Then the lady of the private suite came by and grabbed his wife, and he stepped out onto the field balcony, from which he saw that Leeds U was inexplicably still tied up with the American hacks. He had to say, the stadium was impressive. The vastness of it, the scope, and yet everything clean and crisp and polished, no expense spared. He looked out at the white scalloped frieze that rimmed the top of the venue, down the bowl of the terraced seating that increased in price the closer you got to the field.
Something Ancient Rome about it. All the different cla.s.ses in separated seating. Senators and knights in the front row, sweaty plebes and slaves back in the bleachers. Come one and all to cheer the b.l.o.o.d.y circus.
"We might be sc.u.m, but we never run! Leeds, Leeds, Leeds!" said the wife"s friend"s boorish a.s.s of a hubby, Terry Rich Jerk, as he came out onto the terrace in his smart tailored jacket and posh jeans.
"You know, I haven"t been this pumped up since me and the boys sent a manhole cover through a pub window in Millwall," he said, reeking of Scotch as he clapped the British a.s.sa.s.sin on the back.
He was referring, as so many others liked to do, to the legendary brawl between Leeds and Millwall fans in 2007. Only problem was that Terry, like so many others, hadn"t been there, the a.s.sa.s.sin knew.
As one of the top head breakers in the Leeds service crew-the gang of hooligans who had supported Leeds U since the midnineties-he never missed a game when he wasn"t abroad.
There"d been no manhole covers through pub windows that day, but he and a few chums had set a chip van alight when things started getting interesting. Come to think of it, he"d actually broken a K-9 cop"s arm with a length of black pipe when her evil b.l.o.o.d.y dog bit his friend.
The British a.s.sa.s.sin smiled as he lifted his flute.
"The good ol" days," he said.
"Sally was saying you were in the Royal Marines, was it?"
The British a.s.sa.s.sin nodded vaguely.
Terry peered at him with his red face.
"What are you in now? Corporate security?"
"Executive protection, they call it these days," the a.s.sa.s.sin said. "Ya need an armored S-Cla.s.s? Tell Sally I know a guy."
The British a.s.sa.s.sin looked at Terry as he laughed. He was an upper VP at the Bank of England. The Bank of b.l.o.o.d.y England! Who the fat sot had had to strangle in order to finagle his way into the upper realms of finance-where the real players pulled the strings, loaning to governments and setting the currency rates as they saw fit, out of thin f.u.c.king air-was beyond him. And the whole government-approved scam run for everyone in the small exclusive club getting richer and richer 24/7/365, year in, year out, no matter if rain fell from the sky or buckets of burning lava.
"It"s s.h.i.t, New York," Terry mused as he drunkenly looked out at the crowd. "Innit? I mean, London is s.h.i.t, too, but this is worse. Now they"re playing football like it"s some kind of progress. Don"t they know b.l.o.o.d.y Liberia has football? It"s like they actually want to become a third world c.r.a.phole. Anyway, where"d you grow up? In Leeds proper?"
"Off the York Road in Seacroft. You?"
"The other side. In Bramley. You"re in Brighton now, Sally said?"
"Yep," he lied.
"Well, you"ll have to come by the place in town some Friday night and reminisce."
The place in town, the a.s.sa.s.sin knew, being a town house mansion in the Boltons in Chelsea, where the gated piles started at about twenty million quid.
"That sounds like it might be nice, Terry," he said as he gave another smile.
"Who knows? Maybe we could do a little business," Terry said with a wink. "You never know when the merc might be in the market for a new machine gun."
Chapter 69.