For Emmett and Debbie O’Lunney
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Epub ISBN: 9781473505483
Version 1.0
Published by Century 2016
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Copyright © James Patterson, 2016
Excerpt from Woman of God copyright © James Patterson 2016
Cover design: www.designbysim.com
Cover images: Arcangel
James Patterson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and descriptions of events are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century
Century
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781780892726
THERE WERE SNOWDRIFTS at the curbs and snow-buried benches in the parks and snowcaps on the street signs and fire hydrants and on the newel posts for the subway entrances. There were four inches so far, and they were thinking maybe ten when all was said and done.
Four inches was laughable somewhere like Maine, but in Manhattan on a dark early November evening, it cancels plans and sends people indoors.
The two black-clad figures on the BMW R 1200 RT sport motorcycle that rolled slowly north up Amsterdam Avenue near 135th Street not only knew that; they had planned on it. They’d been waiting on the cold snowy conditions for the last month.
The Beemer’s engine thrummed steadily as the City College of New York campus appeared on their right. First the big, ugly, modern, box store–like classroom buildings. Then the older, original, Harry Potter–like Gothic ones.
The driver did controlled swerves from time to time, careful not to get a pile of road salt under the motorcycle’s studded snow tires. An experienced winter biker, he knew that even with the studs, salt was slicker than ice.
He and the rider behind him were dressed identically in the latest in cold weather riding gear. Gore-Tex Tourmaster electric jackets and riding pants over EDZ thermals, Windstopper gloves and neck warmers. Black glossy Scorpion snow helmets with the tinted no-fog visors firmly down.
Every ounce of gear was specific to the mission. They had even specifically selected the heavy BMW for its low center of gravity, which aided in stability and traction.
Then finally there it was, two blocks ahead.
The corner of West 141st Street.
The driver had been over what was going to happen next so many times that he could have drawn the scene west down 141st Street with his eyes closed. The old, once-stately five- and six-story prewar apartment houses on either side of the narrow, descending, one-way side street. The ancient shoe repair place on the left, the Caribbean hair salon on the right. Both business entrances sunk down a flight of steps below the sloping sidewalk, as on a lot of Hamilton Heights’ quirky up and down streets.
They’d played it through time and time again, until it was boring. Over and over, slowly. Listing everything that could possibly go wrong. Because it wasn’t just surprise. It was surprise plus doing. Doing lots and lots of stuff you’d already preplanned while the other guy sat there going “Wait, what is this?” for that split second you needed to get the hammer down on him.
Suddenly the rider said in their two-way Bluetooth helmet radio, “Hold up! The car isn’t there. Shit! There must be something wrong. Maybe we should abort.”
They’d planted a remote camera in a car across from the 141st Street target; the rider was monitoring it via smartphone.
“Calm down. It’s okay. They’re just late because of the snow,” the driver said as he drifted the bike over and stopped at the left-hand curb half a block from 141st’s corner. “We’re not aborting. We just have to wait a second. This is going to happen. Right now. I can feel it. Keep watching and tell me the second you see it.”
As he waited, the BMW’s driver closed his eyes and ran through the scenario yet again. Amsterdam was the highest point in the neighborhood, and the path down 141st to the target was like going down steps: the first long slope off Amsterdam to the flat of Hamilton, and then another down slope to the flat of Broadway. The target building was on the final down slope of 141st between Broadway and Riverside Drive, midblock south side, on the left.
The abandoned apartment building had two wings, with the entrance between them way back off the street, through a canyonlike corridor. That was why it was so formidable. The target could see anything and anyone coming well before the front door could be reached. Two police raids had been tried over the past two years, and the place was always clean by the time they got inside.
The softest point, they’d discovered from their extensive recon, was right around now, when one of the grandmas usually brought the crew home cooking. The three guys on lobby duty would come out and give abuela lots of showy love on the sidewalk in exchange for aluminum pans of stewed pork and eggplant, as the fourth guy hung back by the propped-open front door.
One thing the driver liked was that they were above the target. That they would swoop down on it. There was an instinctual power to being above that truly thrilled him. He also liked the surprisingly smooth, graceful sucker punch speed of the Beemer, throttle open downhill. They would be in theater right quick. Speed and surprise from above were two excellent angles of advantage.
They certainly needed every advantage they could get, since there were seven in the well-armed drug crew. They had two AK-47s in the cook apartment in case of emergency, and they all carried straight blowback Glock 18 machine pistols in 9mm caliber.
The damn Glock 18s bothered him. They were excellent for close combat. No bulky stocks or long barrels to bang against corners or stair banisters. And they were looking at the closest of combat in the crumbling prewar building’s coffin-wide hallways and slot-canyon-of-death stairwells.
Worse, the Glock 18s indicated tactical intelligence. And that kind of intelligence made him think that no matter how much they’d planned it, there might be something they’d missed.
But that was part of it, too. It was actually better to assume you missed something so as to keep your eyes open.
He glanced forward, up Amsterdam, at the snow drifting in the cones of the streetlights. Bits blowing this way and that, shifting and reshifting in the gusts.
No need for cocky in this line of work. You had to know that even great plans had a funky habit of changing on you.
“I see it! It’s there,” said the rider, suddenly pounding on the driver’s back. “The car—the Chevy. It’s pulling up out in front. Go! Go! Go!”
The spinning tires of the BMW threw up a fat rope of slush as the driver ripped back on the throttle. Then he let off on the brake, and they were hitting the corner and going straight down.
THE COOKING LAB was in the east wing of the building, on the third floor. It was in a type of apartment known as a junior four, a one-bedroom with a formal dining room off the living room. The dining room was usually separated with French doors, but since the cooking lab was set up there, they’d taken off the doors and Sheetrocked the doorway.
In the lab, just to the right of the kitchen door, was a barrel of sodium hydroxide, a big white fifty-gallon industrial drum of the stuff, plastered with bloodred DANGER: HAZARDOUS MATERIALS diamonds. In front of the drums were two lab tables where two HCL generators were going full tilt.
The generators were chemistry industry standard, a bubbling, dripping, steaming mousetrap setup of hot plates and beakers and rubber tubing and inverted funnels. The HCL rig was for turning solids into liquids and liquids into evaporated gases that were separated and condensed back down into newer, much more lucrative solids.
Hustling busily between the barrel and the lab tables and the kitchen was a tall and wiry, handsome, black-haired Hispanic man. He was the drug crew’s head, Rafael Arruda. No dummy, Rafael, he wore a super-duty gray-hooded hazmat suit with full respirator, two pairs of sea-green rubber medical gloves over his hands, and plastic nurse booties over his vintage Nikes. All the seams taped nice and tight to avoid the highly caustic fumes and chemicals.
He was whipping up some MDMA, the main ingredient in the drug ecstasy. He’d already cultivated about three ounces of the drug’s blazingly white crystals in the plastic-lined collecting tin beside one of the generators. About thirty grand worth once it was cut and packed down into pills.
He’d shoot for a half pound tonight, before he pulled the plug around one or two and went home to his wife, Josefina, and his daughter, Abril, who had come home for the weekend from Georgetown, the school that he himself had attended, majoring in chemistry on some rich oil guy’s Inner City Golden Promise scholarship fund.
His promise in the field of chemistry had paid out all right. At least for him. When he wasn’t cooking drugs, he was a tenured professor and cohead of Columbia University’s under-grad chemistry department and lived in a four-million-dollar town house in Bronxville, beside white-bread bankers and plastic surgeons.
It was about seven thirty when he noticed the clogged dropping funnel in generator one. That happened from time to time with the new, iffy stuff he’d gotten from a chemical supply house in Canada. The stuff was cheaper, especially the hydro, but it was becoming more and more obvious that it was subpar with impurities, probably Chinese-made.
If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, Rafael thought as he immediately lowered the heat and replaced the inverted funnel with a fresh one. You had to pay attention.
As he arrived at the kitchen sink with the dirty funnel, Dvorák’s Symphony no. 9 in E Minor, known as the New World Symphony, began playing in his headphones. He loved this one, the slow oboes and clarinets and bassoons, sad and yet somehow strangely uplifting. Salsa was his favorite, but way back since high school, it was nothing but calming classical while he worked.
He was lifting the bottle brush from the depths of the original prewar porcelain kitchen sink when the bassoons cut out, replaced by an incoming text beep.
His family and guys knew never to bother him when he worked, so he immediately looked down at his phone on his belt.
He prided himself on his stoic calm, but he suddenly felt a chill as he read the three words down there on the screen.
BOSS COME QUICK!!!! it said.
Rafael pulled the plug on everything and tore off the hood and respirator and earbuds as he came out into the hall of the apartment and went into the count room next door. In it were two bullnecked towering Dominicans. One had a slicked ponytail and one was bald, with a thin beard, and both wore camo fatigue pants and black Under Armour under puffy silver North Face vests.
They were his crew captains, fraternal twin brothers, Emilio and Pete Lopez, with whom he had grown up. They stood staring dumbfounded at the laptop that monitored their closed-circuit security video downstairs.
“What the hell is going on?” Rafael said.
“We don’t know. Nate just radioed up from the lobby,” Emilio said, thumbing nervously at his beard. “A bike—a motorcycle or something—just wiped out into Louis on the sidewalk, and he said two dudes in helmets jumped off it and were fighting with Jaime and Jesus.”
“And now no one’s responding,” said Pete, shaking his head. “Nate won’t answer his radio or his phone.”
Nate again! Rafael thought. He was Josefina’s cousin and a pot-head total screwup, the weakest point in his armor by far. That’s it. He was going to fire him. Right after he personally kicked the living shit out of him.
“Where are they?” Rafael said, scanning the screen’s security grid. “Jaime and the rest of them. I don’t see them. They’re not in the street.”
“We don’t know,” said Pete.
“Did you scope out the front door?” Rafael said.
“Of course, bro. That’s just it. No one came in, or we would have seen them,” said Emilio.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“We know,” said Emilio, wide-eyed.
“Jackass—come in,” Rafael called down on the Motorola. “Nate, you there? Hey, jackass!”
He unkeyed the radio and listened. The rasp of static. No Nate. No nothing.
What the hell is this? he thought.
“What are you guys doing just standing there?” Rafael cried up at the towering Lopez brothers. “I sent you to that training course why? For exercise? Shit is going down now! Get out the vests and choppers now.”
“You think it’s the Romolos, maybe?” said Emilio. “Over that thing with that girl who got killed? Or is it the cops?”
That’s when it happened.
In a silent instant around them came darkness.
The lights, the monitor, all the juice—all of it was suddenly gone.
RAFAEL FELT PANIC arrive, a cold petrifying pulse of it that began in his stomach and radiated out. To his balls and knees, to his chest and brain.
“Holy shit! What is this?” cried Pete in the dark.
Rafael bashed down the welling panic and finally, with a shaking thumb, got the flashlight going on his phone. He went out of the count room to the apartment door and cracked it.
No. F me. Not good.
The hall was dark. The entire building was out. Someone had shut their whole shit down!
He almost wet himself as the gunfire suddenly started up. Thundering up the dirty worn marble staircase came the sudden deafening blasts of a Glock 18 going off in a long magazine-emptying, full-auto burst. A faint flicker of muzzle flash accompanied the sudden jackhammering, the pulsing glow of it against the cracked stairwell plaster like firelight on the upper reaches of a cave wall.
Think, Rafael thought as he quickly closed and bolted the door.
Do not panic. You are intelligent. You have a plan. Do the plan.
“Who is it? Cops?” said Emilio as Rafael came back into the count room.
“You hear any bullhorns? It ain’t the cops!” said Rafael, opening the gun closet and reaching for the second shelf. His hands passed over the tube of a flashlight until he found what he was looking for.
The night-vision goggles.
He had all kinds of shit in there. Dried food, a portable propane generator, enough ammo to outlast Judgment Day.
Now, apparently, it was here, he thought as he pulled the strap of the goggles over his head.
“You want to play blindman’s bluff in my house?” he said as he clicked on the goggles and everything was suddenly illuminated with a pale-green light. He unclipped the Kalashnikov from the wall rack.
“Then you got it, bro. Let’s do it. Come out, come out, wherever you are, you son of a bitch.”
RAFAEL SENT PETE and Emilio up and over the roof to come down the west wing while he went down the east wing stairs.
The wrapped-tight canvas AK strap cut hard into his forearm as he came silently down the quarter turns of the stairwell. He tried to remember the shooting techniques. Was he supposed to blur the target beyond the front sights? Or was that just for a pistol? Fricking impossible to remember all the training they’d had from the course two years ago. He checked the safety. It was on. He shook his head, clicking at the button.
As he came across the final stair head of the first-floor landing, he caught the scent of gun smoke. A lot of it. The tangy, almost sweet smell, rank as a gun range. He tightened his grip on the gun as he came across the landing to the final turn, his back against the abandoned apartment doors, barrel trained down through the balustrades. There was no one through the posts. No one on the final stair flight, and then he was coming down, his AK sight center-massed on the open lobby doorway.
The first thing he noticed when he peeked through it was that the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass front door of the building was ajar. A triangle of the outside sodium security light spread over the floor’s dirty mosaic tiles. Bits of snow swirling in the yellow beam, a faint layer of snow already gathering in the grout.
“Rafael!” Pete suddenly called out across the lobby from the other stairwell.
Rafael almost tripped over the bodies as he came through the west wing doorway.
There were two of them. One of them lying flat in a pool of blood on the dirty tile, the other to the right, sitting up against the wall. The chests of their motorcycle shells were wet with blood, and the tinted face masks of their motorcycle helmets were smashed to shit, just riddled with bullet holes.
“Ha-ha! That’s what you get, you fucking amateurs. That’s exactly what you get,” said Rafael as he hawked and spat on both of them. Whoever the hell they were.
He glanced at Nate, also covered in blood, by the bottom of the stairs, the Glock 18 on the tile beside him.
At least the jackass had done something right for once in his miserable life, Rafael thought.
“Rafael! Do CPR! Nate’s dying! Come on, do something!” said Pete, who was kneeling at the bottom of the stairs beside Nate.
“He’s still breathing, I think,” said Emilio, pressing his ear to Nate’s mouth as Rafael arrived.
“And so are we!” said the prone motorcycle guy behind them as he sat straight up like a monster in a horror flick.
Rafael, standing in profile to the suddenly risen figure, had just registered that the man had a suppressed automatic pistol in his hand when Pete’s bald head blew apart as if it had been dynamited. Pete’s instant death was followed quickly by ponytailed Emilio’s as the other reanimated dead body by the wall shot him with a suppressed pistol.
Rafael screamed as he swung the rifle up and then abruptly stopped screaming as a third and final suppressed .45 ACP lead slug instantly carved a brand-new orifice through his temples.
“Is it him? Is it him?” said the rider excitedly as the driver leaped up from the pool of fake blood behind his trusty suppressed Heckler & Koch Mark 23.
Instead of answering, the driver knelt and removed Rafael’s wallet, trying not to look at the hot mess that an ounce of lead makes when it’s sent traveling through a human head at the cruising speed of a 747.
“It’s him,” said the driver, calmly pocketing the target’s driver’s license and checking his watch. “Our work is done here. Time to go.”
THEY SCOOPED UP their brass, left the BMW bike out on 141st, and went out at a quick, steady pace through the back of the building, taking a garbage alley that led out onto Riverside Drive.
Three blocks south, parked alongside Riverside Park, was the preplaced getaway vehicle: a beat-up dingy white work van with the baffling and meaningless words the bowles group llc poorly hand-painted on the door.
Once inside the rear of the van, the driver finally pulled off his helmet. He was a fit-looking white guy in his late thirties with close-cropped blond hair and light-blue eyes that were striking in his otherwise easy-to-forget plain and pale face.
He scrubbed the sweat from his hair with a towel and then put his pale-denim-colored eyes to his stainless steel Rolex. It seemed like it was last week that they were up on Amsterdam, but the assassination had taken eleven minutes from start to finish. Eleven!
He looked over at the rider getting changed beside him. Then he reached around and cupped her perfect left breast. Her right one wasn’t so bad, either, he felt. She turned and smiled at him, an improbably gorgeous woman in her early thirties, petite yet athletic, with white-blond hair and large greenish-brown doe eyes. His pet name for her ever since they met was Coppertone Girl.
Coppertone Girl made a quick twisting move and then he was somehow down on his back with something hard digging into his crotch. He looked down. It was her .45!
“I’ll do it. You know I will, you pig,” she said, her green eyes cold behind the white-blond shards of her bangs.
Then she kissed him hard.
And they both started to die laughing.
It never got old, this fired-up feeling afterward. They’d walked the rope with no net, and now they were back on sweet, exhilaratingly solid ground.
They kissed again, and then he pressed in her pouty pink lower lip with his callused thumb. She bit his thumb playfully, and then he was jumping over the front seat and turning the engine over.
An hour later, they’d put all the gear and the van back at the South Bronx safe house and were showered and changed and rolling back into Manhattan in their new Volvo crossover. They actually found a parking spot right in front of their Federal-style brick town house, in SoHo on Wooster Street between Broome and Spring.
They stood holding hands on the sidewalk for a moment. Nothing but the famous chic neighborhood’s incredible beaux arts nineteenth-century cast-iron buildings in every direction. The cobblestones, Corinthian columns, and delicate wrought- iron railings dusted in the still-falling snow were like what might appear on the cover of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.
Not bad for an Indiana shit kicker, the man thought, drinking in the billion-dollar view down his block.
Not bad at all, he thought, looking at his exquisite wife, now in a candy-blue Benetton down coat, cream mini-sweaterdress, and black leather leggings.
He knocked the snow off his shoes on their doormat and keyed open their front door.
“Mommy! Daddy! You’re home!” their four-year-old daughter, Victoria, squealed, a blur of pink footie pajamas and strawberry-blond curls as she ran in from the family room, sliding on the gleaming hardwood in her Nana-made wool slippers.
“Yes! We! Are!” said the husband with equal excitement as he pretended to let his giggling daughter tackle him.
“That was a quick movie,” said Jenna, the babysitter, bringing up the rear, holding a sheet of still-raw cookies.
“We arrived late, with all the snow, so we just decided to get some dessert instead,” said the wife.
“Dessert? Wow. You guys just live on the razor’s edge, don’t you?” said their ever-sarcastic NYU film student sitter with an eye roll.
“Oh, that’s us. We’re real wild,” the husband said, laughing as he hung his car coat in the front hall closet and snitched a glob of raw oatmeal cookie dough.
“Yep, we’re complete psychos, all right,” agreed his wife as she lifted Victoria and blew a raspberry on her cheek.
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, a lone figure stood center stage in the storied culinary arena of the Bennett family kitchen.
That figure was, of course, moi, your friendly neighborhood cop, Mike Bennett, but unlike an iron chef, I found myself where I often do when I make the mistake of going near pots and pans— namely, very, very deep in the weeds.
I was doing pancakes, Mike Bennett–style. Well, I guess technically you could call it Ina Garten–style, as I had her latest cookbook open on the kitchen island in front of me. Unfortunately, things weren’t going very well. Poor Ina was covered in flour, and she had a lot of company. There was flour all over the island, on the stools, on the floor next to the egg I’d dropped. There was even flour on Socky, the cat, who was licking at the broken egg.
As I stood there sweating and whisking and wondering if cats could get salmonella poisoning, I detected a distinctive aroma. I turned to the stove, where the sausages were burning in the toohot cast-iron pan.
Dagnabbit! I thought as the next batch of toast popped. How was I supposed to put everything hot together at once? I wondered. And how come you never saw this crap happening on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives?
“Are you okay in there?” my kids’ nanny, Mary Catherine, called from the foyer, back from a walk with Jasper, our border collie. “Correction. Are you still alive in there? What’s going on?”
“The making of culinary history, Mary Catherine,” I said as I hopped over the cat and turned down the stove. “Sit tight. All is well.”
“It doesn’t sound all that well,” she said. “I’m coming in.”
“Don’t you dare. It’s your day off, remember?” I said. “Put your feet up, relax, and soak in the tranquility.”
That last remark was made with pointed irony, of course, this being the slow-motion not-so-quiet riot known as the Bennett household. As I burned down the kitchen, there was quite a din coming from the living room: the sound of buzz saws and laser beams, and the gloop-gloop-gloop of something dripping followed by a cacophony of what sounded like evil Tweety Birds laughing, all at 747-at-takeoff decibels.
The older of my ten kids were luckily still sleeping or plugged into headphones, but the younger ones, Eddie and Trent and Shawna and Fiona and Bridget and Chrissy, were sprawled out in front of the boob tube, watching some Saturday morning ’toons—mind-meltingly stupid, probably magic mushroom– inspired ones, by the sound of them, brought to my kids by the fools at the forbidden Cartoon Network.
Isn’t it hard enough trying to raise kids without edgy television execs trying to fit them for straitjackets? I thought as I made a mental note to change the parental block code again. That Eddie was worse than a safecracker when it came to unraveling the TV combo.
In between burning breakfast items, I was watching a little insanity-inspiring footage myself. I had the local CBS news site on the flour-covered iPad propped beside Queen Ina. On it, a report was scrolling that showed politicians. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. It was a story about the newly inaugurated president, Jeremy Buckland.
Surprisingly, I found myself liking Buckland. Maybe it was just a superb acting job, but he really did seem like a straight shooter. He’d been an Eagle Scout, a decorated war hero in Iraq one, a test pilot. The former governor of Pennsylvania also seemed smart and funny and deadly serious about making the country and world a safer, freer, happier place for everyone involved.
His wife was a nice, pretty, black-haired woman named Alicia, and they had four kids: three middle school–age daughters along with the true star of the show, their cute little five-year-old boy, Terrence. The kindergartner had captured the world’s loving attention by carefully imitating one of the full-dress marines at the inauguration.
I guess it was a good thing Terrence was so cute, because the news report was saying that the prez was due in town today for a series of upcoming UN meetings that were going to clog up city traffic as tight as concrete in a drainpipe.
“You’re up early,” I said as my oldest son, Brian, came in.
“Yeah, I know. I heard some old guy yelling,” he said, elbowing me as he grabbed the OJ out of the fridge.
I glanced down at my flour-covered phone as I heard my text ringtone.
“Fu—I mean, rats,” I said, looking at it, then at the tablet’s screen.
“Furry rats?” said Brian groggily, draining his glass.
I took off my apron and hung it around his neck.
“There are times in life when a man has to pass the baton to his son, Brian. I’m all out of batons, so I’m passing this spatula. Your beloved nanny is in there, and she and the other multiple members of this family are very hungry and counting on you. Feed them well, my son. Watch the toast. Don’t let it win.”
“What? Cook breakfast? Me? I, eh, I have practice.”
“Practice? You have a game at one. It’s eight.”
“Um, sleeping practice.”
“Don’t worry, kiddo,” I said as I headed into the dining room. “You have that skill down pat. Again, beware of the toast, and may the force be with you.”
“Mary Catherine,” I said as I came into the dining room waving my phone. “How can I break this gently?”
“Work? On a Saturday morning?” the blond Irish beauty said, wide-eyed as she gave me a look.
I hated that look. In addition to being my kids’ nanny, Mary Catherine was also my...girlfriend? Significant other? Like everything else in my life, I guess you could say it was complicated.
But does it have to be? I wondered, not for the first time.
“On a Saturday morning?” she repeated.
“It seems so,” I said as I closed my eyes and bowed my head solemnly.
“But we were going to go skating in the park. The kids were looking forward to it. Have all the other flatfoots in the entire city perished?”
“It’s Chief Fabretti or I’d ignore it.” I shrugged. “It’s important. Something is up, I guess.”
“When is something down in this town, I wonder?” Mary Catherine said as I slunk out of there.
A LITTLE OVER an hour later, I was in Queens, sitting in a large open room on the second floor of an ugly brown concrete-and-glass building off a service road in the south part of the small city that is JFK International Airport.
The building was the Port Authority Police Department JFK Command Center, and outside the window next to me, bursts of white exploded up into the crystal clear air from the massive airport plows working the snow from one of the airport’s four runways.
Between the runway and the PAPD building, there was what looked very much like a parking lot, but on it, instead of cars, were several small white bullet-nosed corporate jets, and from the planes came groups of mostly male passengers.
Some of them were tall and slim and wore dark business suits, and some of them were tall and bulky and wore olive-drab military fatigues. Every once in a while, one of the curious incoming passengers would enter the room I was sitting in and pass on through to one of the conference rooms at the far end, where various closed-door meetings were taking place.
The tall gentlemen were Secret Service, I knew. The guys in the suits and polished wing tips? Presidential protection agents. The guys in the drabs with the long gun bags? Secret Service CAT—counterassault team—tactical agents. From the news report I’d seen this morning, I surmised that the Secret Service people were the forward contingent prepping for the president’s imminent arrival in NYC for the General Assembly at the UN.
What I didn’t know was what I was doing here. I was working in the Major Case Squad, not Dignitary Protection. My boss, Chief of Detectives Fabretti, hadn’t said much in his text except for me to get here forthwith.
As I sat pondering the continuing mystery, I realized that I’d actually been in this building and squad room before. It was in 2001, when I’d been in the NYPD’s ESU SWAT A team. We’d been assigned to assist the NYPD’s Dignitary Protection squad to protect George W. Bush when he came to New York three days after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.
I was actually right there among the firefighters and phone guys and welders in the crowd at the pile down at Ground Zero when he gave the famous bullhorn speech.
It was a pretty unforgettable moment, the president standing on the pile of devastation, his rousing words lost after a moment in the overhead roar of the two F-16 fighter jets flying air cover around the perimeter of Manhattan.
But the fact that I was now here, back in this room, going over that dark rubble-strewn memory, wasn’t exactly boding well. What was adding to my growing worry was what I couldn’t help but notice about the Secret Service personnel. Usually, the Secret Service guys are somewhat laid-back when POTUS isn’t around, but every one of them walking past looked stressed and tense and quite concerned.
After a few more minutes, a conference room door opened, and Neil Fabretti stuck his head out and waved at me.
I thought the room would be packed, but besides Fabretti, there was only one person inside, a stocky redheaded guy sitting at an Office Depot discount conference table talking on his cell. Though he was wearing a suit, he didn’t look like one. His rusty-colored hair was military short, with sidewalls the color of a Carhartt coat.
“Mike,” Chief Fabretti said as the guy got off his mobile. “This is Paul Ernenwein, the new antiterror ASAC at the FBI’s New York office.”
“Pleased to meet you, Paul,” I said as he almost broke my hand with his meaty one.
“Here’s the story, Mike,” Ernenwein said with a Boston accent. “Right when Air Force One went wheels up, we got a credible threat that a hit is going to be attempted here in New York City.”
I almost jumped out of my shoes, then just stood there, stunned and blinking. I knew something was up, but wow. Talk about a sledgehammer to the face.
“A hit? An assassination attempt?” I said.
Ernenwein slowly nodded his large red head.
“It’s a long story, but an extremely reliable Russian mafia informant has provided credible information that a hit is going down now. And I mean right now, perhaps on POTUS’s entry into New York. It’s a long saga, but we actually think the Russian president Alexander Grekov himself might be involved in this assassination attempt.”
I tried to absorb that. It wasn’t easy with all the alarms still clanging inside my head.
“But why not abort if the president might be in danger?”
“POTUS refuses,” said Ernenwein, biting his lower lip. “Look, all we know is that Grekov is trying to start up the Cold War again. The president ran on putting a stop to it, but he needs help, and he has a meeting this morning with some of our shakier NATO allies. Any suggestion of weakness, that he has to hide on our own soil, would be disastrous. He told us to do our jobs and to protect him.”
“If it’s true that there’s a hit team already in New York, we have to find them yesterday,” Fabretti said, staring at me. “I want you as our front man in the task force with the FBI to help track them down.”
“Of course,” I said as another whining corporate jet roared in beyond the window.
I took a breath as I stared at it, trying to ramp up to speed.
A second ago, I was making pancakes, and now we were...what, back on the brink of WWIII?
This was crazier than Cartoon Network.
USUALLY, THE NYPD takes exclusive care of all air cover on presidential visits, but since such a dire threat was so imminent, it was all-hands-on-deck time, and every police aircraft and tactical team in the tristate area had been called in to assist.
When I learned about the manpower shortage, I mentioned to Fabretti that I had actually been a spotter on a sniper team when I was in the ESU. He made a call, and I found myself teamed up with a sniper from the Nassau County SWAT team whose partner was out of town. Then, twenty minutes later, I was out on the airport’s cold, windy tarmac with my overcoat collar up as a whining Nassau County PD Bell 412 helicopter touched down in front of me.
Sitting in the backseat behind the pilot was the sniper I was there to assist. His name was Greg something Polish that I didn’t quite catch. Definitely not Brady. He was a slim, cocky, thirtyish guy with a shaved head and lots of tats. He had even more lip than ink, if that was possible. I don’t know what it was, the five-alarm stress or adrenaline or if he was just a natural-born jackass, but he started being a jerk from the very second I strapped in beside the pilot.
“You’re my spotter?” Greg said in the chopper’s headphones. “Where’d you pick it up, Korea or ’Nam? And nice tie. I didn’t know this was dress formal tactical response, or I wouldn’t have left my cummerbund in my other kit bag.”
“Hi, Greg. My name’s Mike Bennett,” I said, smiling back at him where he sat in the chopper’s backseat. “I know this is last-second, for everybody to get chucked together like this. Believe it or not, I worked on a sniper team in the NYPD’s ESU for a few years and know my way around a spotting scope. I’m also pretty familiar with the area around the UN. Let’s say we get the president to where he has to go, okay?”
“Whatever,” my new charming friend, Greg, mumbled in reply.
With that, the chopper’s rotor whine rapidly increased in pitch, and we were ascending up and out over Jamaica Bay to the airport’s south. As we stilled to a hover, beyond the fishbowl canopy I could see a half dozen other hovering police helicopters in a loose string along the airport’s perimeter.
Down alongside the runway beside the Port Authority building, the presidential motorcade was assembling. Even from a couple thousand feet, I could make out the military armor– plated limo they called the Beast, which the president would ride in. There were actually two of them. In front and back of the huge Cadillac limos were over a dozen other black Suburbans that would carry other White House officials and the Secret Service CAT tactical guys. Ahead of the feds was the NYPD- provided sweep team, a highway unit car in front of an NYPD Intelligence Division command car in front of a bomb squad vehicle and a tow truck.
As we waited and hovered, huge, seemingly too-close passenger aircraft flew in and out of JFK what seemed like every five seconds. Listening to the pilot’s hectic radio sizzle, I started to get nervous. There were a lot of chefs here in this rapidly developing situation, a lot of stress and amped-up emotion. It was precisely at times like this that mistakes happened, I knew. When, say, a new air traffic controller gets ahead of himself and decides to shift a hovering PD chopper right in front of an incoming DC-10.
“There she is,” the pilot said suddenly over the headset as he pointed to the left.
And there she was.
I sat gaping at Air Force One, coming in from the east for a landing.
The sight of the iconic aircraft struck a strangely powerful emotional chord with me. Was it patriotism? A sense of hope? Of vulnerability? My memories of 9/11?
Whatever it was, I suddenly felt like I was a Boy Scout again. Like I should salute the plane or maybe recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
God bless America, I prayed silently to myself as the huge aircraft gently touched down on the runway below.
Please.
THE BLIND WAS the size of a jail cell.
It had the feel of a jail cell as well, with its concrete ceiling, the rear concrete wall, the cold concrete floor. The blind’s side-walls and the front were made of plywood that was spray-painted black on the outside to fit in with the industrial roof space’s black painted concrete. In the forward plywood wall was a hole the size of a computer monitor with a black piece of cloth duct-taped over it.
The assassin checked his watch, then pulled the curtain off and looked down into the angled eyepiece of his Swarovski ATX hunting telescope.
The first thing he noticed as he looked out on the world was the morning’s air quality. It couldn’t have been better. It was a cold twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit and bright and clear as freshly Windexed Waterford crystal. Good bombing weather, he thought. Both the wind direction and speed were perfect, a light, gentle, eight-miles-an-hour west-southwest at his back.
From his perch fifty stories up looking east, the view field in the scope offered the clearest, most incredible view of Manhattan north of the Empire State Building. One could actually make out the curvature of the earth there in the distant horizon of Queens.
He panned the scope north to south across the gray carpet of building tops, the 59th Street Bridge, the black obelisk of the Trump World Tower. He stopped when he got to the Chrysler Building; that was on his right. It was so close and vivid in the advanced optics of the four-thousand-dollar scope that it seemed like, if he wanted to, he could reach out and prick his thumb on the glistening silver needle of its spire.
He panned the scope back a skosh to the left, and then angled it slightly down and thumbed the zoom.
Then, a few moments later, there it was in glistening focus. The target. The reason he’d been pissing into Gatorade bottles for the last two days.
The United Nations building.
Technically, the iconic glass skyscraper was called the United Nations Secretariat Building. In his scope, the sparkling rectangle of blue glass was so sharp-edged it looked two-dimensional, like a shiny forty-story glass playing card stuck into First Avenue.