“Mr. President, please be reasonable. We can’t go back to New York. Not now. It’s just not safe. We haven’t tracked down the shooter, who, by all evidence, is a world-class sniper. These guys are wizards, sir. The amount of exposure they need is almost nothing. You need to back down.”
“No, it’s Russia that has to back down,” President Buckland said. “This situation we’re facing, John, it’s bigger than all of us. We have to show unity right now, not fear. Besides, even if it all goes to shit—and it won’t, since you guys are the best—there are worse things than me being dead. Far worse. Like Russia taking over Western Europe.”
“I strongly, strongly advise you not to go back to New York right now.”
“I hear what you’re saying. I’m listening. I really am,” the president said as he watched his wife kill a couple more clays and share a high five with their son.
“But I’m going to New York,” the president said as he opened the door.
Chapter 23
The beat-up white work van pulled into the empty parking lot of the Kohl’s in the Caesar’s Bay shopping center in the South Brooklyn neighborhood of Bath Beach at 3:47 in the morning.
Immediately, it rolled to the lot’s waterside guardrail beside the closed shopping center and stopped and stood idling. Beyond the guardrail, far off on the dark-gray water, were the yellow running lights of a ship. A large ship that had just sailed in off the New York–New Jersey bight into Lower Bay.
In the van’s passenger seat, Matthew Leroux lifted the three-thousand-dollar FLIR Scout II thermal camera from his lap and thumbed the zoom. After some more pans and zooms in the black-and-white display of the infrared camera, he finally read MV Vestervig off the ship’s starboard side.
“Is it her?” asked Leroux’s wife, Sophie.
“It’s her,” Matthew said.
The container ship MV Vestervig flew under the Panamanian flag and was owned by a Japanese shipping concern. It was a hefty Panamax-class vessel that had a capacity of forty-five hundred containers and was now heading inbound for the Port Newark–Elizabeth marine terminal, he knew. Having done nothing but go over the job for the last three weeks, he knew all about it.
“Isn’t it ahead of schedule?”
Matthew checked his Rolex.
“A little,” he said.
“How long do you figure?” she asked.
Leroux put down the camera and looked out at the tiny lights on the water. He scanned up the bay to the right and bit his lip. Containers averaged about twenty-five knots, he knew. Plus you had to time this right. Couldn’t be too early. Not a lot of wiggle room in this one.
“Give it twelve minutes on the button,” he said.
“From here?”
“From here,” he said, putting down the camera and climbing into the back of the van.
He’d just slipped into all the gear and rechecked the kit bag when his wife’s iPhone alarm started ding-a-linging.
“Ready?” she said.
“Hit it.”
She zipped the van out of the lot and got them up on the ramp for the Belt Parkway west. Leroux held on to the back of her seat, looking out the windshield as they drove. The dark water on their left. The lights of Staten Island on the other side. There wasn’t a car on the road.
Another mile up, they took exit 3 on almost two wheels to West 278 and then got in the lane for the lower level of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Half a minute later, they were under the upper deck, girders steadily going by on the right beyond the low concrete divider wall.
They passed the first of the suspension bridge’s two seventy-story towers, and then Sophie slowed and stopped the van midspan, and he jumped out with the bag and the ropes. A car went by on his left a minute after Sophie drove off. He didn’t even glance at it. In his coveralls and reflective vest and bridge worker’s hard hat, he knew he was wallpaper.
Twenty paces up from where he’d been dropped off, he found the premarked girder, set up his six-millimeter accessory cord anchor around it, and then clicked onto the two hundred feet of climbing rope and chucked the rope over the side. Under the sodium light beside the bridge’s guardrail, he knelt on the concrete and looped and clipped the rope into his rappelling harness’s maillon and tightened the lock. Then he climbed out over the rusted guardrail and leaned back out into the wind and space.
Chapter 24
On the outside of the bridge, Matthew descended a few feet out of sight of the roadway and waited, dangling there twenty stories over the dark water. When he tilted his head back, he could see the lights of Manhattan sparkling against the cold night.
It arrived less than a minute later. He looked down, and rolling beneath him was the mighty arc of the MV Vestervig’s bow, followed by the orderly rows of colored containers stacked up from its hold like hundreds and hundreds of giant Legos.
The swush of the massive ship pushing through the water drowned out the whistle of rope through the maillon as he lowered himself in a slow, controlled rappel.
He stopped himself when he was ten feet above the top row of containers and stared at the wheelhouse coming at him. The container tops sliding by beneath his boots looked like the cars of several slow-moving trains. He lowered himself some more, and when he was five feet above the plain of rolling container steel, he let go with his brake hand and landed on his side on one of the container tops with a hollow thud.
He lay there for a full minute, listening for some outcry. The ship had a twenty-three-member crew, but only two navigation officers and an engineer worked the night shift. But there was nothing. Just the wind and the rhythmic slap of the water off the ship’s moving hull. Good, he thought as he took his map out of the bag and clicked on his flashlight.
Even with the exact bay row and tier on his ship map, it took him five minutes to find it, a battered blue Maersk box on the top row. He snipped through its high-security bolt seal with the cutters he’d brought, creaked open the container’s swinging door, and stepped inside and swung it closed behind him.
“My, my, my,” he said as he passed his flashlight over what was inside.
It was a car. But not just any car. A sleek, museum-grade ’67 Lamborghini Miura, cherry red with a mustard leather interior. It was worth well over a million dollars.
“Stop your drooling and get to work,” he mumbled to himself as he opened the supercar’s door and pulled the latch for the hood. Under it, instead of the engine, there was a spare tire and the battery. Leroux reached into the bag and brought out the device.
It was a sheet of plastic explosive along with a small radio-controlled detonator and a microphone. After activating its transmitter, he reached in under the hood on the driver’s side and sealed the device up against the chassis, just to the right of the left front wheel well. Then he wiped engine grease all over it until it was hidden.
After he was finished, he tested the device’s signal, then closed the hood and the car’s door and smiled. Now, unbeknownst to the owner, the occupants in the car could be heard—or, better yet, killed—at any moment.
He checked his watch.
“Okay, time to go.”
He came back out of the container and resealed it with an identical high-security bolt seal from his bag.
When he climbed back on top of the container’s roof, he could see that the ship was already in the tight Kill Van Kull waterway that separated Bayonne, New Jersey, from Staten Island’s north shore.
Some industrial tanks went by along the right shore of the shipping channel. Then he passed a smaller container ship, called a feeder, sitting at a dock before he saw the Bayonne Bridge.
With only one hundred and fifty feet of clearance from the bridge to the waterline, the huge MV Vestervig’s radio and radar antennas would clear it by only twenty feet. He spotted the rope ladder hanging down off the bridge a minute later, and he walked over the tops of the containers and caught it and quickly scurried up to the bridge deck.
He had to wait a few minutes, hangi
ng from the bridge’s guardrail, after the ship was gone before Sophie arrived.
“How’d it go?” she said after he collapsed in a ball of sweat onto the floor of the van’s rear.
“Swimmingly, darling. Just swimmingly.”
Chapter 25
The next morning at twenty minutes before nine, I was sitting and staring at a Norman Rockwell print.
It was one of my favorites. The one of the big state trooper seated beside the cute little runaway kid at the diner. I loved all the incredible colors and details. The deep blue of the trooper’s uniform, the focal point red of the bandanna tied to a stick under the kid’s shiny chrome diner stool. I thought it was a heck of a painting, but then again, I suppose you could accuse me of being a little biased in the cops and kids department.
The print hung on the office wall of Chief of Detectives Fabretti, who had texted me for a meeting on my way in to One Police Plaza. Beside the print on a whiteboard were crime scene photos. One was of the MetLife Building’s roof, another of the assassin’s blind that we’d found under its rim. Beneath them was a shot of the huge Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle we’d been unable to trace or find even one print on.
I hoped the chief wasn’t looking for an update on things, because there was none. It was pretty frustrating. We were no closer to finding the president’s shooter than on day one.
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, I know. I’ll call you back,” Fabretti said into his cell as he came in and loudly dumped the bunch of binders he was carrying onto the smooth glass top of his desk.
“The fricking president is making another visit to the UN. Can you believe this?” he said as he dropped himself into his tufted leather office chair. “That was Paul Ernenwein. He just got off the phone with the Secret Service. Does Buckland have a death wish? I mean, some in the press like to say he’s like the new JFK. You think he wants to end up like him?”
“When is he coming back?” I said.
“Two weeks. They said he has a big meeting with ambassadors from a bunch of the former Eastern Bloc countries and some NATO ones. They said he’s trying to put the full-court press on Russia. Really up the pressure.”
“He’s upping the pressure, all right,” I said, shaking my head.
“You said it,” Fabretti said. “My blood pressure alone. Just having to work with those Secret Service prima donnas again after all they did to try and throw us under the bus is an outrage.”
“I’m with you there,” I said. “Anything else, Chief?”
“Well, now that you ask,” said Fabretti as he took a sheet of paper out of one of his binders.
Chapter 26
In the last daylight of my long day, I stepped out of my unmarked into the parking lot of a big, ugly, yellow concrete building in Brooklyn. It was the last, most southern building in the South Brooklyn marine terminal, a massive industrial wilderness of rusting chain-link and corrugated sheet metal just south of the Gowanus Canal.
Icy wind off the bay roared in my stinging ears as I crossed the parking lot. I looked up at the looming silhouettes of a couple of massive dock cranes at the adjacent facility, where imported cars were processed and put onto freight trains.
This must be the old Brooklyn, I thought, turning up the collar of my coat. There wasn’t a hipster in sight.
The inside of the building was even more depressing than the outside, if that was possible. It was a meat distribution center—basically, a giant refrigerator stacked with row after endless row of cardboard cases of frozen meat. Beyond a smudged window by the front door, workers in hooded winter coats piloted forklifts and pallet lifts between the rows, like lost souls doing penance in a frozen hell.
I found Pavel Levkov upstairs in a cozy, warm glass office overlooking the interior tundra of the warehouse. He was a medium-size bald man in his fifties, with gray eyes and a weight lifter’s build. He didn’t offer me a seat.
I’d actually been looking for him all day. He was a hard man to find. He had a list of cash businesses as long as my arm: a bunch of gas stations in Newark, a slummy motel in Coney Island, a garbage-hauling outfit out in Staten Island.
Though Levkov didn’t have a record, he was linked to the Russian mob in New York. He was also linked to the informant who’d told the FBI about the MetLife shooter.
Apparently, the FBI’s informant had split town yesterday, out of the blue, but not before telling his wife that if something happened to him, we should talk to Pavel Levkov.
So here I was.
“NYPD? What the fuck is this about?” Levkov said after I showed him my shield.
“How do you do, Mr. Levkov? My name’s Detective Bennett, and I’d like to ask you a few questions. Actually, just one. Who put the hit out on the president? Was it you?”
The Russian immediately started laughing. I’d really hit his funny bone. He crossed his arms as he creaked his bulk back in his old wooden office chair, giggling.
“Yeah, it was me. You’ve found me out, Detective. Welcome to Dr. Evil’s lair,” Levkov said with a theatrical wave of his meaty hand.
He sat forward then, leaning on his desk with his elbows. “I’m just a businessman, Detective. Look at this place. Do I look like I’m getting rich to you? Look at my car in the lot, some piece of shit Jeep Cherokee with a bad transmission. How many times do I have to tell you people? I pay my taxes and pursue the American dream. That’s it.”
“We have reason to believe that’s not just it. Maybe you didn’t set it up, but I know you know something. I need the shooter. He killed a cop. We’re not gonna stop looking for him. You choose to stand between us and him, you’re going to find your little grimy empire coming down around your ears. You need to give me something. If not the shooter, then a name that gets me off your ass and on theirs. Think hard. I’m actually trying to help you.”
“You’re crazy, Detective. I voted for Buckland. I don’t know who put my name in this, but you need to arrest them because they’re pulling your chain.”
“Okay, Levkov. Let’s do it the stupid way. Get up and put your hands behind your back.”
“What? Why?”
I took out the subpoena that I had been handed by Chief Fabretti for the over three thousand dollars in unpaid parking tickets the Russian had racked up.
“Well, Pavel, sometimes the American dream includes paying your parking tickets.”
Chapter 27
“So how do you like the madhouse so far?” Brian Bennett said as he huffed and puffed next to Marvin Peters; they were jogging in Riverside Park after school. “You don’t have to answer that. It’s only for a few weeks, right?”
“Madhouse?” Marvin said as they ran. “You don’t know how lucky you are, man. Your dad, and Father Seamus, and Miss Mary Catherine, and all your brothers and sisters. Not to mention this neighborhood. Heck, you livin’ the good life, believe me.”
“Yeah? Tell me that again after one of the peewees gets into your stuff or the first time you slip on a Barbie roller skate in the middle of the night.”
Marvin just smiled.
They were coming out of the icy trail by the Riverside Drive sidewalk at 86th when Marvin spotted him. Hardly believing his eyes, Marvin slowed to a stop. It really was him, Big Flicka himself, just standing there by his big double-parked silver Mercedes, smiling.
“Hey, what gives, Marv? Getting soft on me?” said Brian.
Marvin didn’t answer. All he could do was stare out at the street beyond the snow-filled park at the big, lanky, fifty-year-old black man in the black thousand-dollar Canada Goose down jacket.
As Flicka gave him a wave, Marvin remembered a snatch from some old stupid eighties song, “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.” Only here in real life, it was like Flicka had just come out of Marvin’s nightmare, and Marvin only wanted him to go back.
“Marvin, Marvin, you were a friend of mine,” Flicka sang soulfully. He had a nice voice. Ghetto legend had it that he actually did some backups on a couple of tracks in the nineties before he g
ot caught for a body. “Marvin, it is you, isn’t it?” Flicka said. “I thought it was, and I was right. Look at you, son. It’s been too long.”
How had the bastard found him here in Manhattan? Marvin thought. He must have spotted him at school and followed him here.
“Come here, boy,” Flicka said, tilting his head to one side playfully. “What, you’re not even going to say hi?”
Marvin didn’t want to go but did as he was told. Because Flicka was effing crazy. Full-bore, hockey mask, chain saw crazy. You didn’t know what Flicka would do until he was doing it.
“Tell your white boy to keep going his merry ol’ way or I’ll clip you right here,” said Flicka, still smiling like he was posing for a selfie. “I’ll do you just like I did yo’ cousin, and the white boy, too. You know I will.”
“Hey, Brian. You keep on going,” Marvin said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Maybe we should just head home, Marvin,” Brian said.
“I won’t be long,” Marvin said.
“Okay,” Brian said. “You’re sure?”
Marvin nodded.
“Yeah, keep going, white boy,” his cousin’s killer said as he opened the passenger door of the Merc. “You don’t want any piece of this punk ass’s sorry problems. Not any piece at all.”
Chapter 28
Saturday morning, Matthew went into the famous Strand Bookstore on Broadway, down from Union Square Park, while Sophie got her hair done nearby.
He was deep in the stacks, flipping through a coffee-table book about depictions of pain in Renaissance art, when a big guy in a hooded wool toggle coat and Clark Kent glasses jostled him in the narrow aisle.
“You and your girlie art books,” Mark Evrard said under his tobacco breath.
“Yeah, well,” Matthew said, cocking an eyebrow at Evrard’s Brooks Brothers fall weekend ensemble, “at least I don’t dress like one.”