He just had to see the b.l.o.o.d.y game, didn't he? Idiot. Now this was it. The place of his death, he thought, staring up at the gray sky. This rooftop on some crumbling wasteland of a filthy Bronx block that was the color of burned charcoal.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. It really wasn't. It just wasn't...fair.

He peeked out over the rim of the roof to his right as a train went by on the rusted elevated track far below on River Avenue. Then he shot a quick glance farther right, up over the elevator housing, where some ugly cell site antennas were mounted. He peeked out again at the back of the building and saw that the thin fiber-optic cabling and electrical cords of the antennas dropped straight down, all the way to the concrete alley.

It was possible that if he hung down off the building's rim with his hands, he could hang, swing, and jump and just be able to grab the cables. Possible. The question was, would they hold his weight? Would his one hundred and seventy pounds rip the cables free from wherever they were attached on the antennas? He pictured himself falling to his death, trailing the antennas.

Then he paused.

He closed his eyes, envisioning himself actually doing it.

Edging over. Jumping. Grabbing the cables.

There was no more time. He had no other choice.

He got up and tucked the Glock into his waistband.

Then he straddled the terra-cotta rim of the building and hung down off the back of it, with his belly against the brick.

The sensation of hanging out there in the breeze, being held by only his palms, was a very, very bad one. It didn't improve an iota as he began to move. Right hand first, then left hand, then right.

When he ran out of room where the roof edge met the wall of the elevator house, he commenced swinging his legs to his left and back to build up some momentum. When he did it the third time, as he swung to the right, he pushed sideways with all his might off the rim.

And let go.

He'd never felt his adrenaline spike higher as he free-fell in midair, with dirty old bricks sc.r.a.ping at the tip of his nose. There was air and air and then his hands were in the vinelike cl.u.s.ter of black plastic cables. His fingers were squeezing and his palms were burning as the vinyl cables sizzled through them. He gasped as a cable tie took the skin clean off his entire right pinkie, but he didn't let go.

He was able to hook his right boot down into the cable cl.u.s.ter, and he was suddenly slowing.

And then, a miraculous second later, he was no longer falling at all.

The now swinging cable made a creaking sound under his weight.

He began laughing uncontrollably as he descended hand over b.l.o.o.d.y hand down the length of the building like the world's largest, happiest monkey.

He scrambled down toward the alleyway and whatever else was going to happen next.

Chapter 73.

I heard Leroux moaning as I finally arrived on the roof of the north building with three uniforms.

"Where is he?" I said, hurrying around the corner of the elevator housing.

"He's gone!" Leroux said, crazed, bent out over the edge, looking north and then west.

"Gone? How?" I said. "Where?"

He continued to stare out at the buildings.

"The cables there! Look!" he said, pointing at some cell site tower cables hanging down the back of the building, behind the elevator house.

"That's impossible," I said. "He's dead, then." I looked down at the shadowed alley far beneath. "The cables are too far off this edge. Spider-Man couldn't do it!"

"Well, he did it. We need to get someone down there now. What's that low building there, between us and the train track?"

"Stan's Sports Bar. Don't worry. If he's down there, we got him," I said as an NYPD Aviation Bell helicopter came in low from the south. "We're surrounding the block. He's not-"

I wasn't able to finish the sentence because the boom boom boom of a gun started below, to the west by the River Avenue side of the sports bar. I couldn't see what was happening because of the elevated track. The initial shots were followed by two more and then there was the high shriek of tire rubber.

It took us just over two minutes to fly down the stairs and come out onto River Avenue, under the giant rusting jungle gym of the elevated track. This close to the stadium, the whole low block was sports bars and souvenir shops. Everything red, white, and blue, with Budweiser signs and Yankees billboards everywhere.

We came upon Arturo first. He was across from the front entrance of the bar, down on his b.u.t.t in the gutter, surrounded by half a dozen people. As I ran up, I saw that he was clutching an ap.r.o.n to his blood-soaked leg.

"Forget me. Help Sophie! Over there!" he said, pointing farther north, where three people were kneeling beside someone propped up on one of the elevated track's steel legs.

Leroux ran over and knelt by his wife. A second later, he had her down on the asphalt and was doing chest compressions on her. When her head lolled to the side, I could see blood, stark and wet, in the white blond of her hair.

I knelt down and helped Arturo shimmy over and sit back against the tire of a parked car. He looked pale. Too pale. A train clattered past overhead.

Job one was keeping him from going into shock. I held down his hand when he tried to lift the ap.r.o.n to look at his leg.

"Talk to me, brother. What happened?"

Arturo took a breath. "Just as we were running up to surround the block like you said, he comes out the front door of Stan's here."

"The Brit?"

He nodded.

"He walks out almost right into us with the Glock in his hand. Sophie, who was a little bit ahead of me, got the drop on him before he spotted us. She put her gun to his head, got him on his knees. I'm coming up behind him with the cuffs and then pop pop pop behind us. It was some b.i.t.c.h in a car shooting from the open driver's window."

"What kind of car was it?" I said, motioning to one of the cops behind me to call it in.

"A silver Ford. A Focus or something. Maybe a rental. It went south down River," Arturo said. "It was some kind of submachine gun or something, Mike. After I took one in the leg, I was able to drop down behind the pillar, but Sophie got caught out. She tried to run, but the b.i.t.c.h just lit her up."

I patted his back as he started crying.

"It was so brutal. So messed up," he said.

"Hang in there, pal. They're coming. It's going to be fine."

I looked over at Leroux, ten feet away on the street, pressing against his wife in the El's tattered shadow.

"They're coming," I said.

Chapter 74.

Eleven o'clock that night, I found a parking spot on the corner in front of my West End Avenue building. After I shut the engine, I sat for a moment and looked out through the windshield at the traffic and buildings and the stoplight down on 96th swaying in the cold wind. Just as I was about to push open the door, I tensed up and smacked at the steering wheel with the palm of my hand half a dozen times as hard as I could.

I guess you could say I was a tad frustrated.

I'd just left the Bronx's Montefiore Hospital's intensive care unit, where Sophie Leroux was in a coma. She'd been shot four times in the lower abdomen, and they had to take out half of her pancreas. There had been complications with the surgery, and she'd lost a ton of blood and was now clinging to life by a thread.

The look on Matthew Leroux's face when I left was terrible to behold. Having lost my own wife, Maeve, to cancer, I actually knew how it felt to helplessly watch a person you deeply love hover between life and death. How the inconsolable pain of it buries you to the point where the thought of your own death is actually a hope and a comfort.

I felt incredibly bad for the both of them. Since 9/11, so many heroes in the military and intelligence services, like the Lerouxes, were out there on the front lines taking the hits for all of us. And did anyone even notice anymore? Or care?

Speaking of hopelessness, we hadn't found the Brit. I'd gone back to the stadium to the luxury booth, where we had spotted him. But the man who had rented it, some British banker by the name of David Chester, had left. I traced him to the Carlyle hotel and then out to Teterboro Airport, only to find he had just taken off for London in his private jet.

Dear holy Pete, did it p.i.s.s me off that some rich English jackwad actually knew the a.s.sa.s.sin!

Matthew Leroux's boss, Evrard, said he was putting pressure on the State Department, which was putting pressure on the Brits to talk to Chester and figure out who the a.s.sa.s.sin was. But I knew what a load of hooey that was. If Chester had the kind of connections that a transatlantic private jet suggested, there was no way he would ever admit to knowing or consorting with an a.s.sa.s.sin. None. His lawyers would drag their a.s.ses on this like there was no tomorrow. While for Sophie Leroux, there actually might not be one.

I couldn't believe this a.s.sa.s.sin had slipped away from me for the second time. He'd reached out and almost killed another one of us, and we still were no closer to finding him.

I was staring out at the lonely street when there was a knock on the pa.s.senger window.

I smiled as I turned to see that it was Mary Catherine. I reached over and opened the door.

"Where are you off to on this cold bitter night?" I said as she sat next to me and closed the door. "Back to Ireland? I wouldn't blame you, you know. Heck, maybe I'll go with you. It's getting dangerous around here."

"I saw the car. When you didn't get out, I got worried," she said.

I squeezed her hand.

"Rough day?" she said.

"Yep. Situation normal there," I said. "How about upstairs? About the same? How's Brian's grounding going?"

"About what you'd expect. The surly level is even higher than usual. I think he's got his headphones actually Krazy Glued to his ears now. But he's home, at least. No more mysterious late-night library runs."

"Thank G.o.d for small mercies," I said as I reached over her and opened the car door and slid out after her.

"Did you eat?" she said as we headed for the front door of the building.

"I thought about it."

"Well, you're in luck," she said with a smile. "I made fried chicken."

"You don't understand precisely how good that sounds right now," I said. "Have you eaten already?"

"No," she said. "I was waiting for you."

She'd wait for me forever, I realized as I watched her walk ahead of me to the door.

Are you actually going to make her? asked a voice in my head.

Part Four

Nowhere to Hide

Chapter 75.

Noon two days later found me on Queens Boulevard, staring up at a building that was twelve tall stories of ugly.

It was a dirty beige brick seventies-style residential high-rise that looked pretty much exactly like a giant cardboard box with windows. There were lots and lots of windows. Eighty-four of them, to be exact. I'd counted them with my spotting scope three times already, looking for a rifle barrel.

Vladimir Putin had finally come to New York for the UN summit, and Paul and I and the rest of our task force were following him around. He'd just come in from Kennedy and his first stop was here on Queens Boulevard, in Kew Gardens, Queens, of all places. There was a restaurant of a long-lost cousin of his or something, and he'd just gone in with his brutish personal security detail for some backslaps and vodka shots.

It had fallen on us to stand watch and make sure that he didn't get any of the nonvodka kind of shots to his head. Which was ironic, since we still didn't know if he was behind the ongoing stalking of our own president by the still-missing a.s.sa.s.sin, the Brit.

"Paul, I gotta say, this international relations s.h.i.t is truly p.i.s.sing me off," I said as we sat in an FBI van parked in the greasy alleyway between the Russian restaurant and a run-down funeral home. "I mean, here we are, busting our horns protecting this jackwad from getting taken out, when what we probably should be doing is slapping cuffs on him for trying to take out President Buckland. I mean, how the h.e.l.l does this make even the slightest bit of common sense?"

"Mike, please. Where've you been?" Paul said from behind me, where he was sitting with some of the FBI's Hostage Rescue commando guys, who'd recently been a.s.signed to our detail. "Do you honestly believe that the bigwigs above us who run these things would deign to use something as common as common sense in making decisions? Our elite leaders, of course, use only Ivy League sense, which has had all the seedy lowborn common sense bred out of it for years now."

"Honestly, Paul. You ask me, the whole thing-Putin being here, all of it-is a distraction, a head fake," I said. "He wants to be as close to Buckland as possible if something goes down. 'But, Officer, how could I be responsible? I was right beside him. It wasn't me.'"

"Well, we can't let that happen, then, can we?" Paul said. "We bag the Brit beforehand, Putin loses."

"If it even is Putin," I said with an exasperated sigh. "Do you really think it is? That it is actually Putin, and this is all some Deep Blue chess move he's making that only Garry Kasparov could figure out?"

"I don't know," Paul said. "As usual, we have lots of questions but, unfortunately also as usual, no answers."

"I'm getting sick of those."

"The questions or the fact that there are no answers?" Paul said.