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 ant.i.terror 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 Vladimir Putin himself might be involved in this a.s.sa.s.sination 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 Putin 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.

Chapter 3.

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 a.s.sist.

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 Na.s.sau 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 Na.s.sau 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 a.s.sist. His name was Greg something Polish that I didn't quite catch. Definitely not Brady. He was a slim, c.o.c.ky, 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 jacka.s.s, 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 c.u.mmerbund 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 a.s.sembling. Even from a couple thousand feet, I could make out the military armorplated 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 pa.s.senger 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.

G.o.d bless America, I prayed silently to myself as the huge aircraft gently touched down on the runway below.

Please.

Chapter 4.

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 sidewalls and the front were made of plywood that was spray-painted black on the outside to fit in with the industrial roof s.p.a.ce'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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 p.i.s.sing into Gatorade bottles for the last two days.

The United Nations building.

Technically, the iconic gla.s.s skysc.r.a.per was called the United Nations Secretariat Building. In his scope, the sparkling rectangle of blue gla.s.s was so sharp-edged it looked two-dimensional, like a shiny forty-story gla.s.s playing card stuck into First Avenue.

He zoomed and tilted lower again and framed in his kill zone.

The bookends were the edge of the Secretariat building's concrete sidewalk guard shack on the left and an apartment building on 43rd Street on the right. The in-between target zone was a segment of the UN building's iron-gated circular driveway and reflecting pool. He centered the scope over the fence just to the right of the building's front door entrance, where the VIP cars stopped.

The target zone had already been ranged in with a PEQ laser sight at a little under thirteen hundred yards away. The bullet path would be a descending one on a slight diagonal, right to left, approximately one cross street block in width. Because of the diagonal, the kill gap was tiny, a thin slot between a residential building on the corner of Second Avenue and 43rd and the north edge of an old prewar building called the Tudor Tower that was on the cross street directly across First Avenue in front of the UN.

Threading that needle would have been bad enough, but adding to things was a jutting roof structure on the UN's Permanent Mission of India building between Third and Second on the north side of 43rd Street. By his calculations, his descending bullet would have to clear it by less than half a foot on its way downrange to the target.

Another X factor was some small American flags on a lamppost at the dead end of 43rd and First Avenue that the bullet had a chance to deflect off. But the worst of all was the sculpture in the pool in front of the UN building itself. The d.a.m.n sculpture drove him nuts. It was called Single Form, an abstract, ugly twenty-one-foot piece of bronze that looked like a giant dog tag that could potentially be between him and the presidential limo.

If all went well, he would have maybe three seconds to get the shot off as the president went from the armored car to the front entrance of the building. Three seconds to gauge and sight and squeeze. Three seconds to hit a hole in one from atop a five-hundred-foot cliff thirteen football fields away.

He took his eye off the scope and checked on the electric blanket wrapped around the barrel of the long dark rifle resting on its bipod beside him.

Some guns are quite beautiful, but his world-famous thirty-pound Barrett M107 mounted with Zeiss 6 24 x 72 scope was about as elegant as a bulldozer. It was almost five feet long with the suppressor. Even its ammo was huge and clunky. The ten .50-caliber BMG API (armor-piercing incendiary) rounds loaded into its detachable box magazine were each over five inches in length and weighed over a quarter of a pound.

But what it lacked in form, it made up for in function, and then some. The Barrett was technically known as an anti-materiel rifle. With confirmed kills at over twenty-five hundred yards, it could shoot through one inch of armor plate or a foot of concrete.

Some might think that a Barrett loaded with APIs was a bit overkill, and that, say, a .300 Winchester Magnum or .338 Lapua round fired from a lighter rifle would have been adequate. And it might have been, but for the cold weather conditions. Because even with the warming blanket, he would be firing from essentially a cold bore, which sometimes reduced the range considerably.

Besides, this wasn't some match event. He was only going to get one shot if he was lucky, and he had to maximize every possibility that he would kill what he hit.

There were two, maybe three other people in the world who would even think of attempting the incredible shot. But he wasn't attempting it. He was going to do it.

He would kill the president not because he was the best shot in all the world, he knew.

He would kill the president because he was the best shot who had ever been.

The a.s.sa.s.sin removed the electric blanket and clacked back on the Barrett's bolt slide, jacking the first huge .50 BMG into the chamber.

The bullet would be put in a museum when all was said and done, he realized as he glanced at the long gun. Maybe even the Smithsonian.

He pictured visiting it one day with a grandchild, seeing it there like a relic or a moon rock in some crowded gallery.

He was a very visual thinker and he smiled as the image of a huge mushroomed .50 mounted in a shadow box lingered in his mind.

It warmed him to think that the work of his precious hands would be preserved forever and ever under thick panes of alarmed gla.s.s.

Chapter 5.

We arrived in Manhattan five minutes in front of the motorcade.

It was incredible how fast the limos and SUVs moved through Queens, somewhere between seventy and eighty miles an hour. Well, I guess not that incredible, since they had every highway and byway blocked off and the entire road to themselves.

They were supposed to have taken the Van Wyck to the Long Island Expressway to the Midtown Tunnel, but at the last second, they had changed their mind about the tunnel for some reason, and now they were due to come into Manhattan over the 59th Street Bridge in a minute or two.

We were pointing west in a low thousand-foot hover somewhere over Yorkville just to the west of the bridge, waiting on them. In the helicopter, I sat to the pilot's right, and on my right was the east side of Manhattan's endless wilderness of buildings and windows. Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, the green mat of Central Park ahead.

Due to the helicopter's vibration, a high-powered spotting scope was pretty much useless, so I was using just a pair of 10-power binoculars to scan the windows and rooftops. It was a beautifully clear day, hardly any clouds in the cold blue sky.

I had my gloves off, and I blew on my hands from time to time to warm them. The pilot's heater blew on the upper half of me, but beneath the metal footrests, it must have been open in places because my feet and lower half were freezing.

"What's the range on the inner perimeter around the UN again?" I said as I stared down at the congested Monopoly board of buildings.

"A thousand yards," said Greg, the sniper, over the chopper's interphone.

Three thousand feet, I thought, looking down. The UN was to our left, between 42nd and 43rd Streets on First Avenue. Cross street blocks were each two hundred fifty feet, I knew. So that meant what? The interior scan perimeter was twelve blocks north and south from around 30th to 54th Street, and then west to Lexington.

How many windows in that area had a vantage on the sidewalk in front of the UN? I thought, looking at grid after building grid of them. Too many to count, let alone watch. Plus a sniper would be far back in a room, probably up on some platform, and would need only a slit of an opening.

"Wait. I see something," I suddenly said, scanning over by Park Avenue. "Go over to Park by the MetLife Building."

"Where?" said the pilot.

"The MetLife Building," I said, pointing to the left. "That big fifty-story headstone-looking thing on Park Avenue."

"Are you crazy? That's too far out," said Greg.

"I don't care. I saw something, some movement," I said as we flew closer.

"Where?"

"Underneath the rim of the roof, that black area beside the sign where the satellite dishes and equipment are."

After another minute, I heard Greg, the sniper, laugh.

"What's the power on your gla.s.ses?"

"Ten," I said.

"Here. Use mine, supercop. They're a sixteen," he said, shoving his binocs at me. "We can call off the air strike. I think we're good."

Just as I looked, something dropped out from underneath the rim of the ma.s.sive office building and unfurled.

Greg continued cracking up as I saw the red tail feathers and realized I was looking at a hawk.