If he didn't sleep with his girls, a dead bolt lock on his door, and a fully loaded Armsel Striker street sweeper semiauto shotgun on his bedside table, he might have actually been scared.

"Hey, ghosts, I'm back. Miss me?" he said to the shadows as he headed to the butler's pantry to get the girls their dinner.

He was coming back into the kitchen when his knee exploded.

He didn't feel it at first-it happened so fast. He was just walking toward the drawer to get the can opener, and then he was collapsed on the yellow pine floor with a b.l.o.o.d.y ragged hole in the knee of his slacks.

"Pavel, h.e.l.lo down there," said a voice.

Starting to hyperventilate at the growing pain, Pavel looked up at a distinctly unghostly-looking blue-eyed man who stepped out of the shadows with a smoking suppressed H & K Mark 23 in his right hand.

"You don't know me, Pavel, but my name is Matthew," he said.

The sniper smiled as he squatted, getting down on his level.

"And I have a couple questions for you today."

Chapter 34.

"And the plot thickens," said Paul Ernenwein as we stood by the nurses' desk at the second-floor ICU unit of Montefiore Hospital, in the Norwood section of the Bronx.

Pavel had been admitted at a little after two in the morning. A cab had come to his place, and the surveil team had followed it and Pavel to the emergency room.

He had some broken ribs and electrical burns on certain sensitive parts of him, and someone had put a .45 clean through his right kneecap. Apparently, he'd been worked over by someone who knew what they were doing. Who that someone was we didn't know, but we were very interested in finding out.

"We're obviously getting some promising results in the Pavel-seems-to-be-a-player hypothesis," I said. "Who do you think tuned him up?"

"All three of the Pep Boys, by the looks of him," said Paul, pointing at the console's screen, which showed a bruised Pavel covered in cords, sleeping.

"The Russians? The Kremlin?" I said.

"You'd think, right?" said Paul. "But why leave him alive?"

"What does the house look like?" I said.

"Clean. Too clean. He's got dogs. Plus there's no sign of entry. Someone picked the locks, it seems. There was water all over the kitchen floor. Either Pavel decided to do some bobbing for apples after he kneecapped himself, or he was waterboarded."

"You think it was the president's shooter? Pavel was a middleman, and something got screwed up and the shooter needed to find out some information the hard way?"

"That's a good theory," Paul said. "We should use it."

"You want me to go say hi?" I said.

"Can't," said Paul. "He's got some internal bleeding. Doctors said we need to wait until the morning."

"Maybe this works to our advantage," I said. "If he spilled the borscht about something during his little inquisition, he might be in big trouble, right? We could offer him some sanctuary."

Paul Ernenwein looked at the screen.

"Good night, Pavel. Sleep well. We'll more than likely flip you in the morning," he said.

Chapter 35.

At eleven fifteen that evening, Sophie, wearing a large camping backpack, walked east down East 20th Street, past the Gramercy Park neighborhood's charming Italianate and Greek Revival town houses.

She sighed as she pa.s.sed the awning of the famous Players club, which had been founded by Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes. Astors had lived in the famous neighborhood. Steinbeck, Thomas Edison, even Julia Roberts.

Though she lived in SoHo, she sometimes fantasized about moving onto the famously attractive historic block, with its exclusive, mysterious private park.

Too bad she wasn't here to house hunt. Her pick was already out as she got to the Irving Place entrance to the park. A moment later, its famous cast-iron gate briefly shrieked, and she was in.

She walked alongside snow-covered benches and hedges to the statue of Edwin Booth in the two-acre park's center. Walking past it, she panned her eyes left and right along the small park's straight and winding paths. But it was too cold and too late for anyone else to be there.

Good.

She cast a quick glance at the Gramercy Park Hotel, straight in front of her. Then she walked back to the statue and casually dropped the ma.s.sive backpack she was carrying at its feet. She quickly zipped open the bag, making sure the flap was pulled all the way back. She scanned it. Everything looked good. Wired tight.

A moment later, sans backpack, she exited through the Irving Place gate and continued east down 20th, picking up her pace.

"It's in place. Are you?" she said into her Bluetooth.

Chapter 36.

"Just a sec," said Matthew up in the windy darkness above her, looking down at the park and the city lights.

The building he was on top of was a block behind her, on 19th, just in off Park Avenue South. It was a twelve-story prewar office building, uninhabited, with a sidewalk shed and black mesh wrapped around its edifice due to a major rehab.

His setup was pretty sweet. There was a brick structure atop the roof that housed the elevator equipment, and he was on top of that, belly down on the tar paper behind a tent made up of several sheets of the black construction cladding.

The rifle he lay beside was one of his favorites, a precision XM24 SWS with a long suppressor and five .300 Winchester mags in its detachable box magazine. Up on its bipod, it was pointed across the park on his target at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Suite 809, to be exact.

It had taken Matthew a long, busy, and messy two hours to persuade Pavel to tell him where he could locate the man he was looking for. No one knew the a.s.sa.s.sin's real name. Not even Pavel. The a.s.sa.s.sin was a hard old b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd been around forever and whom they called the Brit. A true mercenary, he worked for the highest bidder.

And tonight, his long career was going to come to its inevitable end, Matthew thought, leaning into his rifle's fixed cheek piece.

Matthew blinked as he looked through the S & B nightscope. It was already dialed in on 809's floor-to-ceiling window, in off the corner of 21st and Lex. Beyond the curtain of the big window, the end of a low, dark leather couch and the edge of a huge, modern splatter painting on the wall were visible.

It was a joke of a shot, really. A little over two hundred yards on a slight left-to-right, four-story downward angle. He could have almost hit it with a pistol at that range, but it was windy. A steady ten-mile-an-hour wind was blowing out of the northwest; he needed the pop of the XM24 to compensate.

The setup was straightforward. Get him to come to the window with a distraction, then blow out the first visible, vital part of him with a .300 Winchester's supersonic boat tail.

Matthew wasn't the biggest fan of distractions. They worked far less often than people thought, and were just as likely to make your quarry alert as to trick them. But then again, everybody let their guard down sometimes.

"Okay, talk to me. On your call," said Sophie in his ear.

Matthew took some breaths, then closed his eyes, just listening, trying to still himself. After thirty seconds, he felt himself become one with the building beneath him. He felt the rush of the cold wind on his cheek, listened to the high shriek of a bus somewhere in the darkness below, a car horn.

He opened his right eye and dead-centered the reticle on the window.

"Ready. Hit it now," he said.

Chapter 37.

The Brit came awake to a pulsing flash of light on the wall of his hotel bedroom. There was a low boom, then light was shaking the room as a rattle of firecrackers went off close by.

"What in the world? Fireworks? Is it some Yank holiday?" his wife said, already sitting up and looking toward the pulsing window. "Maybe it's the anniversary of that horrid little park. It's coming from that direction. Look."

The a.s.sa.s.sin checked his Rolex on the bedside table.

"Maybe," he said as another skyrocket popped softly outside the window, shivering the walls of the suite's living room with a pale-green light.

"Oh, it's pretty," said his wife, who was still quite tipsy from all the wine they'd had that evening at the Four Seasons. "Let's see if we can get a better look from the living room. Maybe the hotel is doing it. Call down and see what it is."

"Just go back to sleep," the Brit said. "You know the amount of work we have to do."

"You and your work. Please, for once, would you let us have a little fun?"

"Fine."

The Brit got up and walked out the bedroom door. Two more rockets burst in the air as he crossed to the kitchenette's dark quartz island, where he'd left his phone.

Then two more exploded right at eye level, a yellow one and then another green. He smiled. He loved fireworks. Who didn't? It would be lovely to hug his wife and watch them. Enjoy one of those rare happenstances that entirely make a trip.

He found the concierge's number on his phone and thumbed it as he walked toward the window, the dark room glowing strangely in the billowing colored smoke and streaks of light.

Chapter 38.

In the cold air rush, Matthew lay breathing evenly, watching the window through the nightscope.

There were other people now at the hotel windows, some of them taking pictures as Sophie's pack of skyrockets continued to streak at a slow and regular interval straight up from beside the park's central statue.

He could feel his heartbeat thump as he watched 809's floor-to-ceiling window kill zone. The curtain. The end of the couch. The painting.

"C'mon," he whispered. "Come to Papa."

"That's the last one. Any sign?" said Sophie as a big rocket burst into a yellow-and-red flower.

In its afterglow, Matthew watched, waiting, finger on the trigger.

No, d.a.m.n it. Nothing, he thought. It wasn't going to happen.

"Tell me you have something," said Sophie.

"Negative."

"Maybe he's dead asleep or something," she said. "What do we do?"

"We go back to the drawing board," he said, packing up.

Matthew was about to turn to go down the ladder when the round hit him. It caught him about four inches below his brain stem, just above the center of his shoulder blades. Its impact knocked him flat, facedown, as if somebody had yanked out his ankles from underneath him.

He came to a skidding stop halfway off the elevator housing, and he just let himself topple the rest of the way into s.p.a.ce, just in time to get missed by the next suppressed shot that blasted brick bits and tar paper between his boots.

He smashed hard into the roof, bashing the s.h.i.t out of his elbows and the top of his head and his ribs as he landed on the XM24 in the clunky kit bag. Knowing he was safe, he pulled his backplate out.

The indent in it! He shook his shirt and caught the big and still-hot mushroomed bullet that had been meant for his heart and just stared at it.

The b.a.s.t.a.r.d must have run up to the hotel's roof, which was level with Matthew's perch.

"Hey, I'm in the car. Are you coming?"

Fear hit him almost as hard as the bullet. He imagined himself running down the twelve flights of stairs just in time to see the p.r.i.c.k lighting up Sophie.

But he calmed himself and calculated quickly. What would he do if he knew he was being ambushed? Attack or hold position? Hold position, definitely. The Brit might have spotted him, the sly b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but he didn't know what kind of operation he was up against. No way would he run from cover.

"Matthew, are you okay?"

"Fine," he said after a few labored breaths.