Spa music was playing softly in the small reception area inside. The office was quite dingy, but in one wall sat a plate glass window with an open view of the Manhattan skyline across New York Bay.
“Can I help you?” said a middle-aged woman from a windowed slot in the scuffed Sheetrock wall after a couple of moments.
“Yes. I spoke to Mr. Rodriguez this morning. My name is Peters,” the British assassin said with a perfect Midwestern American accent. “Is he around?”
“He’s on the phone. If you have a seat, he’ll be more than happy to help you when he’s done.”
As he waited, he took out his phone but decided not to fiddle with it. He was trying to quit that nasty modern habit. He turned it in his hand as another atrocious spa song began. He stared out at the distant lower Manhattan skyline, the ugly new Freedom Tower standing out like a broken tooth. As he watched, two tugs appeared close offshore, pulling a bulk freighter through the Claremont Terminal Channel.
“Mr. Peters?” said Rodriguez, suddenly standing beside him. He was a heavy, very pale, bald Hispanic man with striking hazel eyes.
“Mr. Rodriguez. Thanks for meeting with me,” the British assassin said, shaking Rodriguez’s soft, gold-ringed hand.
“Thank you for waiting,” Rodriguez said, swiping away sweat from his forehead as he nodded rapidly with a little smile. “I had one of my guys bring her up this morning so you could take a look right away. If you’ll follow me.”
They went out back. Parked in front of a five-vehicle bay of garage doors was a fifty-thousand-pound tri-axle Caterpillar dump truck, blue in color. It looked far bigger than it had in the online ad, the British assassin thought, concerned. A real monster. Maybe it was too big.
He took a slow walk around it.
“How old?”
“Two thousand eleven. But it runs perfectly,” Rodriguez said. “Listen.” He nimbly climbed up and turned it over. It coughed once, and again, and then snarled to throaty, rumbling life.
“Sounds great,” the assassin said.
“You need it for a month?”
“Yes,” the assassin said. “Tell me: off the top of your head, how wide is it?”
“Did you say wide?” Rodriguez said, squinting at him.
The British assassin smiled, nodded.
“Um, standard width,” Rodriguez said with a shrug. “Eight and a half feet, same as a tractor-trailer.”
Excellent, the British assassin thought. It would be snug, but it would fit.
“Shall we start the paperwork?” asked Rodriguez hopefully.
The British assassin smiled again.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”
Chapter 46
Around two on Wednesday, Doyle called with news on the Rafael Arruda drug hit that he needed to share with me in person.
Thirty minutes later, I found him and my other protégé, Detective Lopez, in Washington Heights’ Thirty-Third Precinct’s second-floor break room.
With a grand flourish, I placed on the table, between the Styrofoam cups of wretched coffee they were nursing, the plastic bag I was holding and removed the two huge waxed paper soda cups and perfectly greasy white paper bags that I’d just brought them from Shake Shack.
“Eat, gentlemen,” I said. “And talk.”
“We’d hit a brick wall in the investigation, Mike,” Doyle said between bites of his double cheese with bacon. “No witnesses, no nothing. So we decided to go back and look at all our video that faced the street near the drug building two weeks prior. I mean, it was just hours and hours of nothing. I was thinking maybe we could market the tape as the breakthrough cure for insomnia when we saw him.”
“Who?” I said.
“This neighborhood guy,” said Arturo, smiling. “His name is Sol. Sol Badillo. But everybody calls him Jinete, which means, like, jockey in Spanish, on account of he used to be a horse trainer or something when he was younger.”
“Sol’s one of these hang-around guys you often see in an inner-city hood,” Doyle said. “Divorced, late fifties, lives with his grown daughter. He’s sort of a super’s helper, runs errands in the local stores, deals a little weed on the side. He’s in and out of the barbershop every five minutes. He patrols the block the way a beat cop does, but instead of enforcing the law, he more likely helps the friendly neighborhood crooks break it.”
“Exactly,” Arturo said. “In medieval times, this guy would be, like, the town crier or fool. He shuffles around twenty-four/seven and acts like he’s half homeless or crazy, but meanwhile, he knows everything and everyone on the block. He’s like the block’s memory. Its underground eyewitness news anchor.”
“Go on,” I said, smiling. I liked the sound of this.
“Jinete was actually one of the first guys we canvassed,” said Doyle. “Of course, he said he didn’t know anything, but then we saw him in the video. Two weeks prior to the hit, plain as day, he puts a camera in a car parked across the street from the drug building.”
“The camera was pointing right at the building?” I said.
Doyle nodded, sipping his shake.
“So you’re thinking he was working for whoever killed Arruda?” I said.
“Not thinking,” said Doyle with a wink. “We’re knowing he was involved. We spoke to Jinete again two days ago. We showed him the video, and he finally broke down and told us everything.”
“So who hired him?” I said excitedly.
Doyle took a printout from a folder. It was a blown-up photocopy of a driver’s license. Some blond guy on it. Matthew Leroux, it said, with an address in SoHo.
“Jinete said this guy, Leroux, gave him money to rent a car and the camera and five grand.”
“The guy gave Jinete his name?”
“No,” Arturo said. “Jinete said Leroux called himself Bill. He said he was a slick guy. Spoke fluent Spanish. They met several times. But like I said, Jinete is no fool. He likes to know who the hell he’s working with, so he actually had his daughter secretly follow the guy after one of their meetings. She followed him all the way back to Chelsea.”
“Chelsea,” I said. “I thought the address on the license was in SoHo.”
“Chelsea is where this guy, Leroux, has an art gallery,” said Arturo, wide-eyed. “He must have gotten bored perusing the canvases, so he decided to up and slaughter a drug gang.”
I looked at the photo, a tingle beginning in my stomach. This was good. Damn good. We were finally getting a break.
“Did you speak to Leroux?”
“No, we wanted to talk to you first, of course, Mr. National Security,” Arturo said.
“We do good or what, Mike?” said Doyle, smiling.
“No,” I said, taking out my phone to call Paul Ernenwein. “You did amazing.”
Chapter 47
A reporter was doing a cutaway to get the United Nations in the background when Matthew and Sophie came up the steps on Ralph Bunche Park onto East 43rd.
It was morning, just after rush hour, on Thursday, and the pair was on the hunt.
They didn’t look like it, of course.
Idly wandering around on the sidewalk in front of the flag-draped United Nations Plaza on First Avenue, clutching maps and a zoom lens Nikon, they looked like a young, stylish, maybe European couple touring the Big Apple for the first time.
As they walked west on 43rd, a street cleaner came down the street, churning a cloud of dust onto a rack of Citi Bikes before it made a U-turn. In the distant haze to the west, the green copper cathedral-like roof of Grand Central Terminal could be made out, and above it, the lip of the MetLife Building, where their target had set up his blind.
This morning’s question was, where would he set up his next one? Matthew thought, frustrated.
After their first attempt at taking out the British sniper had failed, it was all about outthinking the assassin now. And outmaneuvering him.
They needed to find this bastard, Matthew thought.
Find him and put him down once and fo
r all.
Sophie bought a half-pint of blueberries and some almonds and dates from a fruit seller on the corner of Second Avenue. They crossed the street and stopped and stood, chewing, beside a pay phone kiosk, silently watching the passing pedestrians and traffic on the avenue.
“Okay. What are the motorcade routes again?” Matthew said after he finished his nuts and berries.
“All right,” Sophie said. “From the Waldorf to the UN, you have four avenue blocks and seven cross streets. Because of the length of the motorcade, they hate making turns, so usually they cordon off Fiftieth or Forty-Eighth and take it all the way to blocked-off First Avenue and down several blocks south to the UN’s entrance.”
“That’s the most direct route, but they have to have alternatives,” Matthew said.
“They could do Park to Forty-Sixth to First, but that’s about it. They have several dozen vehicles, Matthew, and they need to get crosstown as quickly as possible.”
“It’ll be Fiftieth, Forty-Eighth, or Forty-Sixth, then, where the next attack will come,” Matthew said, nodding. “That’s where the motorcade is most vulnerable. Where it can be boxed in.”
“Do you still think it’ll be an attack on the motorcade itself?”
“Yes. He’s tried the long shot. It didn’t work out. He’ll want to be closer this time. Point-blank range, maybe, or ambush with the use of some sort of explosives. He needs to change tactics. That’s what I would do.”
“You’re right,” said Sophie. “He’s got everyone thinking long-range shot now, so it’s time to switch up the script. Go for an up-close, in-your-face surprise. But how? The president’s car is impenetrable.”
“So we’re told,” said Matthew, looking at her bleakly. “Remember that they said the Titanic was unsinkable. We need to expect the unexpected.”
“What do you mean?”
“Call it a hunch, Sophie. Intuition. I know this guy. He’s a perfectionist. Winning is everything to him. War inspires artistry, and this guy truly thinks he’s Michelangelo. If he can’t do this with pizzazz, he won’t do it at all.”
“But from where, Matthew?” Sophie said, looking up at the millions of windows. “Where will it come from?”
Matthew smiled and put his arm around his wife’s waist and kissed her.
“That’s what we’re here for, baby. We’re the dream team. We’re the hunters who hunt hunters. We’ll find him.”
“I don’t know, Matthew. Maybe we’re in too far this time.”
“We take it the whole way, babe,” Matthew said. “Just like we decided in the beginning. We have to find this fool. We have no choice.”
But what if he finds us first? Sophie thought, but didn’t say.
Chapter 48
My just-popped can of Diet Coke hissed along with the old radiator in the corner of the small, dark room as Paul Ernenwein and I sat in a too-warm, windowless, secure comm room in a nondescript FBI building on East 56th.
We were on the fourth floor, just down the hall from Paul’s office, sitting on metal folding chairs and watching a flat screen.
On it was a live feed of a blond couple walking west up East 43rd Street.
The two were an attractive pair: a weather-beaten blond guy in his late thirties and his pretty platinum-blond wife, probably five years younger. The guy reminded me of that laid-back dude on the HGTV show Fixer Upper, only he had a ridiculously muscular Olympic gymnast’s body, a slim waist with broad shoulders, and huge forearms and hands.
The couple was being videotaped with a zoom lens from over a block away by one of Paul’s guys in a state-of-the-art surveillance car that looked like a taxi minivan. The van and feds had been on them since I’d sent in the lead the afternoon before. They were also up on their house and cell phones.
“Despite the tourist getup, they look like professionals, don’t they, Paul?” I said. “Just the way they move, heads up, relaxed yet alert. Also the way they keep a lot of space between themselves, almost as if they don’t want to reveal to anyone watching if they’re actually together or not.”
“They’re operators, all right,” Paul said, nodding. “Who leaves their primary cell phone at home in the middle of the day? That’s tradecraft.”
“As was the superslick way Matthew hired Jinete in Hamilton Heights,” I said. “Intelligence service asset recruitment one oh one.”
“Though they’re trying to appear to be tourists,” Paul said, “watch how even as they look up at buildings, they don’t stumble or bump into people. You can tell they’re familiar with the area. These guys are analyzing, fact-finding. They’re in mission mode.”
“You think they’re scoping out the motorcade route?”
“Could be. Mike, you saw the shooter. Could this guy be him?”
I stared at Matthew Leroux as he walked with his wife.
“Maybe,” I said after a bit. “Same athleticism. Same build.”
I’d already read through the extensive info folders Paul and his team had put together on Matthew and Sophie Leroux from the fed databases.
It turned out they weren’t your regular art gallery owners.
In fact, they were both ex-CIA.
They’d met in 2005 in Iraq, where Matthew, a former Navy SEAL turned Special Operations Group team leader, and Sophie, a CIA analyst, both cycled into the Joint Special Operations Command.
What they had worked on together there was classified, but Paul had spoken to some people at State and speculated that they had both been ground zero in the insurgent terrorist-hunting business. For four years, they had worked side by side, gathering intel and finding and fixating and terminating jihadi bomb makers in and around Falluja and Mosul.
When Matthew was a SEAL, he’d actually earned the Distinguished Service Cross, one medal below the Congressional Medal of Honor, for almost single-handedly suppressing a truck bomb attack on a forward operating base in Bagram.
He and Sophie had married in ’07 and had put in their papers at the same time in 2011, when she had gotten pregnant with their now four-year-old daughter, Victoria. Matthew was a hick from rural Indiana, so it was Sophie who was wearing the pants in their somewhat successful art gallery biz. Sophie was a born-and-bred Manhattanite with a father who had apparently been a famous gallery owner.
They didn’t seem like assassins, but then again, we had every indication that they had been involved in the hit in Hamilton Heights.
And now they looked like they were casing the streets between the Waldorf and the UN, where the president would be driving around in less than a week’s time. It was concerning, not to mention scary as hell.
“Is this even possible, Paul?” I said as I watched them. “This can’t be what it looks like. Two former distinguished and dedicated patriots now working for some unknown enemy actually setting up our own president?”
I watched the good-looking couple on the screen as they took another picture.
“It seems weird to me, too, Mike, but anything is possible,” Paul said. “Maybe they’ve got money problems or a drug habit, if you consider how wackadoo the art world can be. Or maybe they picked up a crazy ideology. Couples do go nuts sometimes, and these guys were deep in the shit over there in Iraq. For years, all they did was eat, drink, hunt and kill people, and sleep. These people are definitely persons of interest.”
Chapter 49
At a minute before five o’clock that evening, I found myself at Riverbank State Park in Harlem, listening to Katy Perry sing about fireworks from the cranked-up ice rink speakers over my head.
“Dad, what do you think of my moves?” said my son Ricky, excited as he wobbled past, almost falling three times.
“They’re persistent, son. Real persistent,” I said, wondering if I should fetch him a bike helmet from the van.
A moment later, Fiona and Julia and Jane sailed past on their skates quite gracefully, their elbows locked as they sang along with Katy at the top of their lungs. I joined them for a few bars from the sidelines, until for some
reason they told me to stop.
“What’s the problem?” I called after them with mock concern. “Wrong pitch? No, wait. It’s my key, right? Where are you going? Wait, I can go higher.”
The annual skate-athon fund-raiser for my kids’ school, Holy Name, was officially under way. As an official rinkside lap counter, I was freezing, but it could have been worse, I knew. Instead of my kids, it could have actually been me out there, falling and scraping and clunking against the boards over the Zamboni-freshened ice.
Though I was dog-tired from our all-day surveillance, I couldn’t pass up the chance to spend some time with the kids. I’d been working too much lately on the joint task force. Way too much, if you considered how little there was to show for it.
And the fund-raiser really couldn’t have been for a better cause. Catholic schools were truly hurting due to low enrollment, closing all over New York as they were all over the country. The thought of Holy Name actually closing was too depressing to even think about. Everybody at the school and the parish was like family to us.
Speaking of the saints, I busted Mary Catherine, beside me, staring at me as I put down my clipboard and lifted my not-so-hot cocoa. I smiled at her warily as Katy died out and the All-American Rejects started up.
“What?” I said as she continued to stare without saying anything.
“Nothing,” she finally said, with a small grin. “It’s just nice to see you like this.”
“See me like how?” I said. “Dry and on solid ground instead of out there, sitting on the ice with a wet, red, sore frozen butt?”
“No, that actually might be cute,” she said with a wink. “I meant happy, relaxed, and, as a bonus, actually here.”
“I’m here, all right. Mike Bennett in the frostbitten flesh,” I said, blowing on my hands. “Too bad we can’t say the same for Brian and Marvin. Where are those two? It can’t take that long to get here from Fordham. They should be here by now.”
I saw Mary Catherine wince with worry as I said this. I knew she was already quite attached to our new houseguest and considered him to be family. Besides, she was no dummy. Like me, she knew full well there was something up with Marvin. Something that for all intents and purposes seemed to be heading from bad to worse.