As he lay there, he recalled a particularly nasty blind he'd been in in Syria six months prior. In a downtown section of a small city he'd already forgotten the name of, he had lain in the deep interior recesses of a shattered shopping mall. For three days, in the stench of an open sewer, from a hole in the structure's wall, he watched the sepia desert light on the mall's ruined plaza as the government forces drove their dirt-caked, chirping, clanking Russian T-80 tanks around, playing cat and mouse with the jihadi rebels who had hired him.

On the third morning, as one of the tank's 125mm rounds punched yet another hole in the already chewed-up building's northern end, he finally laid eyes on his target with his hunting scope. The Russian tank adviser's name was Alexandrov, and through the blackened, jagged stumps of some palm trees beyond the plaza, he could see him sitting in a white Ford pickup truck, coordinating maneuvers from just under two thousand yards away.

Even through the 10x Unertl scope of the KSVK Russian anti-materiel rifle, his target was not very big. No matter. He calculated calmly, made his clicks on the scope for distance and wind. Then he resighted the reticle and calmly let loose with a ma.s.sive 12.7mm round.

He would have missed by a hair if Alexandrov hadn't leaned forward at the exact right moment. Had he been about to open the truck's glove compartment? the British a.s.sa.s.sin wondered, not for the first time. Was he moving to answer his phone on the dash? To tie his shoe?

The British a.s.sa.s.sin tsked. He would never know, and for a man of precision such as himself, to never know stung.

Oh well. Enough strolling down memory lane. Back to work, he thought as he pushed himself up off the platform and climbed down the scaffold.

He walked to the window, where his hunting scope was already set up on its tripod, and parted the curtains.

There was a blur in the eyepiece as he tilted and panned and zoomed the scope over the city buildings and cell sites and water towers. When he was done, a sidewalk-level doorway was directly centered in the viewfinder.

The door was a much-scuffed black steel one outlined by blocks of pale dressed granite, set in a building wall of dull red brick. Lacking a handle or k.n.o.b, it looked like the back egress door one might see at a theater.

The British a.s.sa.s.sin smiled again as his mind made the obvious a.s.sociations.

Presidents and theaters and a.s.sa.s.sins, oh my! he thought.

Chapter 59.

At five minutes after four o'clock, Mary Catherine put on the water for the ziti and then took out the mix for the cupcakes that Bridget and Fiona needed for their cla.s.s trip bake sale fund-raiser. A Blake Shelton song came on the country-western station as she was getting out the eggs, and she turned it up and began humming along as she stood at the island cracking the eggs into a mixing bowl.

From the dining room, Eddie Bennett watched all this in his peripheral vision as he pretended to do his homework.

"How is it going in there, Eddie?" Mary Catherine called out as she chucked the eggsh.e.l.ls into the can behind her without looking.

"Never better," Eddie lied.

Eddie had been relegated to the dining room table, under Mary Catherine's watchful eye, until further notice because he'd come home with another C in math.

Quite unfairly, in his opinion. To his thinking, a C was actually more than acceptable because, as everyone knew, math was idiotic and pointless. What the heck was algebra for, anyway? Would he one day find himself pinned in a car wreck, struggling for his life, and at the last second save himself by remembering that x = 7 + y (5r)? The answer to that one was no. Numbers and equations were inherently evil, as was his cruel and unusual imprisonment here at the table of pain.

No doubt about it, instead of doing extra math problems, what he really needed at this juncture was the iPad that Mary Catherine had hidden on him. Or, more specifically, he needed what was on the tablet. The utterly amazing and cool Zombie Highway Squish, his new favorite video game.

That's why when the whir of Mary Catherine's mixer started up a minute later, he made his move. Tiptoeing into the living room as stealthily as the ninja he one day hoped to become, he quickly searched all of Mary Catherine's favorite hiding spots for banned items. On top of the bookshelf, under the couch, behind Dad's chair.

"What are you up to now, you little sneak?" Brian said around the yellow highlighter jutting from his mouth as he sat on the couch, squinting at some paperback Shakespeare. "Aren't you supposed to be doing your homework?"

"Looking for my, eh, workbook," Eddie said innocently.

Now where would she hide it? Eddie thought. He snapped his fingers. Precisely. The last place it was allowed to be. In the boys' room!

He hurried into their darkened room and had just peeked in the closet when he saw the sheets hanging loose at the side of Marvin's bunk.

Eddie went over immediately and lifted the mattress.

And just stood there staring.

And staring.

At the gun sitting there on the box spring.

It was a subcompact. A small, semiauto black metal pistol with a light-green crosshatched synthetic rubber side panel on the grip.

Eddie, who may have played very realistic first-person-shooter video games at a friend's house, didn't have to read the P-32 KEL-TEC stamped into the scuffed black steel of the pistol's barrel to know that it was real. He even knew at a glance that it was loaded-by the little metal comma of the magazine sticking out at the bottom of the grip.

What he didn't know was what it was doing there. Nor did he care. His young brain was too mesmerized by the sight of the sleek L-shaped hunk of dark metal that lay there, practically glowing with coolness.

He suddenly longed to feel it in his hand. Just once. Just for a second.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" Brian said, suddenly at his back.

Eddie, spasming as if he'd been Tasered, dropped the mattress.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I was looking for the iPad. I swear!" he said, backing up with his hands raised.

Brian went to the bed and lifted the mattress and then removed the gun, mindful of the trigger. He stared at it with a furious look on his face.

"I can't believe this. He'd bring this here? Here! Into our room?" Brian said in outrage. He quickly left the room with the gun.

"Hey, where are you going, Brian? Dinner won't be long," Eddie heard Mary Catherine call from the kitchen.

"To the library. Be back quick. Promise," Brian said.

"Oh, no," Eddie whispered to himself as he heard the apartment door slam shut with a loud bang.

"What did I do now?"

Chapter 60.

"h.e.l.lo. Do you sell Barretts?" I said into the phone.

"The .50-caliber sniper rifle?" asked the dealer at Harry's Guns for the Good Guys, of Dublin, Pennsylvania, the seventeenth gun dealer I had spoken to in the last hour.

"Yes," I said.

"Is this a joke?" he said.

"No," I said.

"You are aware that the rifle you're talking about costs in excess of ten thousand dollars?" he said. "I also believe the going rate of each round is four or five bucks."

"Yes, I heard it's expensive. Do you have one?"

"Money's no object, huh? Lucky you," the guy on the phone said. "Well, no, I don't have the gun in stock per se. But what we can do is have you order it online and then purchase it through me. See, they won't just ship it to your house unless you have a federal firearms dealer's license. You have to have it shipped to my store so we can do the background paperwork and whatnot. Provided you don't live in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut, which all have a ban on large-caliber sniper rifles."

Too bad no one told the guy who had almost blown away President Buckland from the MetLife Building, I thought.

"Wow, that's interesting," I said to the dealer. Then I asked him what I really wanted to know. "Have you actually bought any Barretts for anyone recently?"

"Don't I wish," he said with a sigh. "Dealers get a tidy cut of the Barrett's price for their trouble."

A moment later, I racked the phone after another dead end and rubbed my eyes and stared up into the dusty ceiling of our task force's new work s.p.a.ce at the FBI's midtown building at 56th Street. The first office had been drab, but this one was even more so: a small windowless cell in one of the subbas.e.m.e.nts. It had a striking resemblance to a boiler room.

Was it because we were working with the CIA now that we had to be in some secure bombproof location? I kept wondering. Would we be issued shoe phones?

This new tack in our search for the shooter-talking to gun dealers-had come from our suspect turned partner CIA soldier, Matthew Leroux. He said if he was in town to take somebody out, he'd buy all his hardware locally, if possible. It wouldn't be that difficult, he said, if you had the proper fake ID.

That was just the thing with the task before us. We had to find a guy whose name we didn't know. A guy who was most likely moving around a lot, paying in cash, and using fake IDs.

And find him discreetly, too. We were told by the Secret Service that in no way could we use the media in our manhunt. It would make Buckland look weak. As if dead looked strong.

No bones about it, even with the spy agency's help, the case was still in bang-your-head-against-the-wall mode. We'd reinterviewed all the MetLife Building people. Did another forensic sweep through the blind and the MetLife Building's roof. I'd even put out feelers to every former cop and detective I knew in Jersey and upstate New York and Long Island for anything, any oddball incidents that might give us a lead, especially incidents involving people with British accents.

After another minute of brooding, I sat back up straight and picked up my clipboard and dialed the number for the next gun dealer, a store called Benny's Gun Coliseum, located in an upstate town with the unlikely name of b.u.t.ternuts, New York.

"Yeah, hi. Do you sell Barretts?" I said.

Chapter 61.

"Look, everyone. It's five o'clock, also known as vitamin C time," said Paul Ernenwein as he came over with two red Solo cups of water and those little orange-flavored packets.

I don't know if it was due to his FBI training, but Paul, I had learned, was very particular in his workday habits. Coffee precisely at nine and then eleven. Lunch at one. Another coffee at three. Vitamin C packet time at five. In a red Solo cup. We had been spending a lot of time together.

"Paul, tell me. How does the CIA even know it's the Brit?" I said, flicking at the terribly vague photo stuck to the whiteboard beside our desks. "And don't say you can tell me but then you'd have to kill me, because at this point, I'd say okay, just to figure out anything at all about what's going on with all this puzzle palace stuff."

"I don't know, Mike," Paul said. "We just have to trust them, remember?"

"Trust them. Sure," I said. "But they're leaving something out."

"A lot of somethings, more likely," said Paul as he ripped open and then poured out his packet into his cup. "But think about it. These spooks have been asked to do some real questionable stuff since nine eleven. Stuff that might make a new administration go 'Egads! What's this?' and start looking for goats to scape."

"So they're covering their a.s.s?" I said.

Paul nodded as he lifted his Solo cup. "They pretty much have to," he said as my personal phone rang.

"Hey, Mike. Sorry to bother you," Mary Catherine said.

"No bother, Mary Catherine. What is it?"

"It's Brian, Mike. He said he was heading to the library, but he didn't come back. I texted him and tried to Find My Friends him, but his phone is off or something."

"Do any of the kids know where he is?"

"Eddie seems to know something. He seems nervous. I'll keep working on him. Do you think you could swing by? I'm actually getting a little nervous myself. Also, Marvin hasn't come home yet, either."

"Same old story, huh?" I said, shaking my head.

More mysteries, I thought. When it rained, it poured.

"On my way," I said.

Chapter 62.

A cold wind blew in Brian Bennett's face as he sat on a stone wall in the now dark Riverside Park, near the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

He was facing west, and down through the leafless trees, he watched the streaming red lights on the West Side Highway. There were some blinking red lights out on the black plain of the Hudson itself, he noticed. Some big ship, a tanker or something, looming out there on all that water, just chilling.

Chilling was the word, he thought, tightening the drawstrings on his hoodie before thrusting his hands back into his coat pockets. He checked his phone again. Nothing. What was up with this joker? he thought. He had said to be there in twenty a whole hour ago.

Brian sighed as he noticed he had 7 percent battery left. "Just great," he mumbled as he glanced over his shoulder, up the empty stairs toward the monument.

After finding the gun, he'd walked around in a panic, trying for the life of him to figure out what to do. He wanted to tell his dad, of course, but what would happen then? Would Dad have to arrest Marvin?

All the while thinking that any second, a cop would notice the suspicious look on his face and ask to search his backpack. Then, as he was about to head into the Starbucks on Broadway to warm up, it dawned on him.

How to end this whole crazy thing once and for all.

"Hey," said a voice from behind him.

Brian turned up to the dark figure standing at the top of the monument stairs. Then he swallowed as Big Flicka, Marvin's crazy drug-dealing tormentor, started slowly walking down.