He looked at the plate again and shivered.

"Fine, baby. Be there in a shake."

Chapter 39.

The telescoping stock of the rifle gave off a satisfying job-well-done snap as the Brit, crouching in the dark on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel, collapsed it with the callused heel of his palm.

He hid the new matte-black Belgian FN FAL with its suppressor and state-of-the-art night-vision scope under his fluffy white hotel robe. Then, still in a crouch, he slipped silently off the darkened hotel roof, back through the stairwell door.

Padding quietly down the hotel's back stairs in his bare feet, he thought he very well might have hit the prankster on the roof of the building on the other side of Gramercy Park.

And with a hefty 7.62 x 51mm NATO round, he'd more than likely gotten his attention.

Who had it been? he wondered. Not the coppers. Company, then? Someone else? Definitely someone in the business, by the looks of the hardware they had. Whoever they were, they were a little sloppy. Fireworks?

Then he thought about it. Maybe not so sloppy. He had, after all, almost gone to the window.

Plus the fireworks were pretty. It was almost elegant, in a way. Like a birthday party. Only the opposite. A little light show before they cut his cake once and for all, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

When he got back to his room, he put the gun away in its case and called Pavel, who had hired him. It kicked into voice mail. Had Pavel turned on him for some reason? He pondered the implications of that.

Should he leave now? he thought as he went into the bedroom.

No. If it were company or anybody else in the game, they'd want him out on the street at night to keep it discreet. He took an OJ out of the minifridge beside the bed and cracked it and took a long sip. He nodded to himself. To heck with it. He'd check out in the morning, like a regular human being.

"Well?" said his wife when he got back into the bed. "What was it?"

The Brit thought about who would want to kill him. Then he laughed. He'd be up all night.

"I don't know," he said as he snuggled in next to his wife. He kissed her above her camisole, right where he'd just shot whoever it was who thought he could pull a fast one on him.

"Aren't we so tender all of a sudden? What was that for?"

"Love, darling," he said as he pinched her bottom. "All we need is love, right?"

"And rockets," she said after a moment, and they both began to crack up.

Chapter 40.

"Now, finish up the rest and don't screw it up," Flicka said, stabbing one of his long fingers in Marvin's face. "I know what a gram looks like in my dreams, so you think about skimming, you think again. I'll go down and get the car. You be in the lobby waiting when I come around. Don't make me text your a.s.s."

Marvin waited for Flicka to leave before he let out a tense breath and looked around at the spare room.

The table. The electronic scale. The ma.s.sive mound of rank marijuana.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" he whispered to himself.

The apartment was in Flushing, Queens, near LaGuardia Airport, with planes screaming overhead every five minutes. Flicka had taken him here three hours before and set him to work, busting down a couple of pounds of weed.

This whole thing was all over his stupid cousin. He just had to get into weed dealing with Flicka. But he messed up, stealing money or losing product, and got shot dead by Flicka. And now Marvin had to do Flicka's bidding to pay off his cousin's debt, like some sort of slave, or else his poor uncle down in North Carolina was going to get it, too, from the other guys in Flicka's crew.

Marvin had been trying to think of how to get out of the situation, but so far, he was coming up empty. What the h.e.l.l could he do?

Maybe he could ask the family living here in the weed apartment for advice, he thought, shaking his head at the insanity of it all. The apartment belonged to some Asian people, apparently. A grandma, it looked like, and a three-year-old and a baby.

As he sat busting up the last of the weed, he watched as the grandma walked obliviously past the open bedroom door and headed into the hall bathroom.

Did Flicka have a deal with them or something? Marvin thought. Was the mama-san some sort of crook? He had no clue.

Marvin finished bagging the last gram and stuffed everything into the knapsack, along with the scale. When he came out into the hallway, he almost stepped on the three-year-old who was sitting there in a diaper, eating one of those long ices in a plastic sleeve. Which would have been way weirder than it already was had the apartment not been stiflingly hot. The ice was a blue one, and the stuff was stuck to the little guy's face and neck and chest. He was just covered in it.

Marvin winced as he stepped over him and headed out the door.

"What you waiting for? I should get out and hold the door open for you?" Flicka said as Marvin hit the sidewalk. "Get in."

Flicka was in his Escalade now. What he called his company car. The inside of it smelled more like weed than a lawn mower smells like cut gra.s.s. Marvin got in and put on his seat belt and looked around for cops.

About ten silent minutes of driving through the maze of Queens later, they pulled into the parking lot of a Stop & Shop supermarket and parked.

"Go out and get me one of them carts," Flicka said with a jut of his chin.

"What?" Marvin said, staring at him.

"You deaf? Go get me one of those carts."

"One of the shopping carts?"

"What other kind of carts you see, boy?" Flicka said. "Get one and put it in the back. And flip it when you put it back there, too. I don't need it rollin' around, rippin' up my upholstery."

What the h.e.l.l now? Marvin thought.

After twenty more minutes of driving around, they pulled into a storage locker joint beside a U-Haul rental place. Flicka parked and ordered Marvin to take the shopping cart out of the back.

Marvin followed as Flicka rolled it inside the storage facility. They took an elevator up to the second floor and continued down a seemingly endless hallway lined with corrugated steel lockers.

"Two one six two. Here it is," Flicka said, undoing the lock on one of the steel shutters and rattling it up.

Inside, it was jam-packed with moving boxes and kids' furniture and bicycles and clothes. Box after box after box.

"We gotta get all this out to my sister's new place in Camden," Flicka said, handing Marvin the lock. "Fill up the ride with as much as it can hold, and then come get me. I'll be in the diner across the street."

Marvin stood there, staring at the boxes.

It's official. I'm a slave, he thought. There's no way out of this.

"Aw, don't look so sad, little Marvin. This here's what's called a character-building exercise," Flicka said, grinning. "If you get tired, don't worry. Just think of your uncle's smiling face, and everything will work out fine."

Chapter 41.

It was a little after nine o'clock at night, and Manhattan College's Draddy Gym was hot and bright and packed to the rafters.

The gym was an old seventies-era airplane-hangar-looking building that was sometimes criticized by visiting sports reporters. But when the Jaspers were playing their closest rival, Iona College, the fans' electricity in the joint could have outdone what you'd find at a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.

Over the squeaks and squeals of sneakers on hardwood blasted the arena standard "Get Ready for This," as Manhattan's band and cheerleaders and dancers and student fan section Sixth Borough went batty.

They weren't the only ones. Myself and the rest of the Bennett bunch were at the top of the bleachers at half-court going berserk as we watched my son Trent compete in the halftime high jinks.

"Go, Trent, go!" we chanted.

He was trying to put on an oversize Manhattan uniform and complete a layup while a rival little kid fan tried to get on the gear of the Gaels.

Trent was in the huge green-and-white Manhattan uniform, half a step ahead of the Iona kid, when he got tripped up by the size 13 sneakers he was wearing and fell down in a heap.

"Nooooo!" we yelled.

But then the other kid tripped as well, as Trent got up and calmly banked it in.

"Yessssss!" we yelled.

"Wahoo!" Seamus yelled, and started handing out high fives as we jumped up and down.

I turned as Mary Catherine, wearing a Manhattan College hoodie, planted one on my lips.

We stared at each other.

"You look beautiful in green and white," I said after a beat.

"I bleed green and white!" she yelled.

I was still laughing when Brian tapped me on the shoulder.

"Dad, look-it's him," my son said.

"Who?" I said.

"With Marvin. Down there," Brian said, pointing at the gym entrance. "That scary guy I was telling you about."

I looked over. There was a tall, older guy in an expensive goose down jacket talking to Marvin. The guy looked formidable both in size and att.i.tude, and Marvin looked afraid of him.

I decided to take a walk down out of the stands to see what was going on. But by the time I got to the entrance, the guy was gone.

"Hey, Marvin. There you are. You made it," I said as I stepped up. "We were getting worried. How did your, um, after-school history project go?"

"Oh, hey, Mr. Bennett," Marvin said. "Yeah, it went great."

I noticed that Marvin smelled like weed. Make that reeked. He didn't seem high, though. If anything, he looked relieved to see me.

"Marvin, who is that guy? The guy you were just talking to."

"n.o.body. An old friend from my neighborhood."

"You sure? He didn't look too friendly."

"I'm all right. Really, Mr. Bennett," Marvin said as he pa.s.sed me, heading for the stands.

I decided to let it go.

For now.

Chapter 42.

The private study down the hall from the Oval Office, where President Buckland held many of his more under-the-radar meetings, had a pale palette of cream walls and pastel high-backed chairs and yellow chintz sofas.

When the president walked in at 6:30 a.m. with his personal secretary, Maddy Holzer, his first thought was that Ellen Huxley-Laffer, his pale, Waspy national security adviser sitting on one of the yellow couches, fit right in with the decor.

"Good morning, Mr. President," Ellen said, tucking away her smartphone as she stood.

"Morning, Ellen. Hope that wasn't a Snapchat," the president joked as he sat on the couch across from her.

The president liked Ellen. Wearing an immaculate Saxon-gray blazer and skirt, the sandy-blond former captain of the Harvard Law debate team looked like a middle-aged Ralph Lauren model. But her stock soap actress looks aside, the fifty-four-year-old was about as well-rounded as one got in DC intelligence and Department of Defense circles. She was a National War College graduate and a former air attache to the French emba.s.sy, as well as a CIA case officer.

"Can I get you anything? A bagel or a m.u.f.fin?"

"No, I'm fine. So what's up, sir?" Huxley-Laffer said.