"He's the cutout, so they cut him out."

"Meaning?"

"The Brit doesn't need him. Or, I should say, the people who hired him to hire the Brit. Even if we catch the Brit, he can only lead us back to this gentleman, and the dead tell no tales."

"Everything is set, then," I said. "This thing really is going down."

"The fuse is lit, Mike. We need to find the bomb."

"How many hours till touchdown?"

Paul checked his watch.

"Ten," he said.

I shook my head as the crows came back, their caws skipping out over the gray water.

"It's official," I said. "We're going to have to make our own luck now."

Chapter 80.

The bright white light gradually grew larger in the dark predawn sky until suddenly Air Force One materialized above the JFK runway lights, its big jets screaming.

I held my breath as it came in right over the Port Authority airport command center beside me. I actually didn't let the breath out until the plane touched down safely on the tarmac.

This was going to be one long day.

The idling vehicle in whose front pa.s.senger seat I was sitting was a military personnel carrier called a BAE Caiman MRAP. Behind me, in the bank vaultlike rear of the truck, Paul Ernenwein and a half dozen members of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team were doing last-minute coordination over the radio with the Secret Service's tactical CAT agents.

The ma.s.sive presidential motorcade was beside us, on the left. But because our bulky composite armored vehicle looked like something fresh off the battlefield, it wasn't going to be in the motorcade itself, but always nearby. There were actually going to be two of them present for the entirety of the president's stay in New York.

As I glanced out at the taxiing plane through the bullet- and blast-proof windshield, I remembered what CIA sniper Matthew Leroux had said about the battlefield being everywhere now.

He was actually with us, there in the back, dressed in the same black body armor and gear as the Hostage Rescue guys. It was a last-second thing. His wife, Sophie, was in stable condition now, thank G.o.d, and he had pulled some strings to get put onto the protection detail as a special adviser. Though obviously emotionally involved, Leroux was actually considered one of the top five snipers in the country, so the New York FBI SAC had finally reluctantly agreed.

"Poor son of a b.i.t.c.h," said Paul Ernenwein, pointing a chin to where Leroux knelt in the back, doing a meticulous equipment check. "You see the look in his eyes? Jeez."

"Mike!" Leroux called up to the front of the truck.

"What is it?" I said as I arrived beside him.

"I was wondering if you could do me a favor," he said.

"What's up?"

He stared at me intently with his blue eyes.

"Somebody told me you used to be a spotter. I want you to be mine."

"These other FBI guys are far better trained, Matt. I-"

He held up a hand.

"I'm sure they are, but I don't know them. I know you. You're old-school like me, Mike. I need someone beside me who knows that quit ain't ever an option."

He held out the spotting scope in its case carefully, with both hands.

"Will you do it?" he asked.

I stared at the case, at the terrible look in his blue eyes.

"Of course," I said as I took the case.

Chapter 81.

As the president's motorcade made its long, slow loop out of JFK miles to the east, the British a.s.sa.s.sin and his wife burst out of the southeast end of Central Park at a run, caught the green, and crossed Fifth Avenue.

They were layered up in the latest cold weather running clothes: black North Face skullcaps, Capilene shirts and pants, neon-yellow Brooks running jackets that matched their flying ASICS. Coming east in the street down 58th, past midtown's early morning delivery and garbage trucks, they looked just like they wanted to look. Like another high-flying yuppie couple getting in their essential morning run before work.

They arrived at Madison and crossed it and then hooked a right a block down, onto Park.

The British a.s.sa.s.sin looked up at the MetLife Building looming now in front of them as they ran toward it. Then he forced himself to stop looking at it, and shook his head.

No thoughts about past failures. No room for that. Not today, of all days.

As they came across 57th Street, they could see the security already ama.s.sed around the Waldorf.

They hooked a left, east down 56th, to Lexington, and then crossed that, and then, after another block, crossed Third. Between Third and Second Avenues, they paused for the briefest of moments to scan the dump truck.

They had parked the monster the night before, and it was just as they had left it. Nothing awry.

They exchanged a quick tense glance as they made the corner of Second Avenue. It was almost impossible to consider what they were about to do today. History was literally in the making, and they were the ones making it. All systems were go.

They did their stretches out in front of the Starbucks on Second, noting their progress on their Fitbits like good yuppies. Once inside, she waited at a couch by the window while he arrived with their Venti blacks and the Times. They sat reading for twenty minutes.

He took a breath before he folded the Metro section and placed it on the table. He stood and looked at her.

She looked back then, leaned forward, and grabbed his hand fiercely.

He squeezed back. Then he was back out in the cold, and a taxi was pulling up.

"Yeah?" said the hack as the British a.s.sa.s.sin sat.

He could see his wife through the window. His heart faltered, then fluttered. A bad feeling came over him. A premonition? Or was it just nerves?

Maybe they didn't have to. Maybe...

"Yo! Where to?" said the driver.

The Brit looked at his wife again.

"Sixty-Ninth and Second," he said, and then he closed his eyes and his wife was gone.

Chapter 82.

Brian Bennett was in fourth period Latin cla.s.s when he smelled the french fries.

At the front of the cla.s.sroom, Mr. Swanson (the kids called him Swansonius Maximus among themselves) was fervently trying to explain the subtle difference between hortatory and jussive subjunctive independent clauses. But this close to lunch, and now with the smell of the cafeteria fries wafting in through the open door, he had about as much of a chance as Carthage during the Third Punic War.

Undeterred, Swansonius continued on, and Brian suddenly remembered the honey-nut cl.u.s.ters Mary Catherine always stuck in the side pocket of his knapsack. He could ask for a bathroom break and then do a quick drive-by to his locker, down the hall, around the corner, he thought. Going to your locker during cla.s.ses was technically a detention offense, but he was Starvin' Marvin.

Speaking of which, Brian thought, turning around to glance hopefully at Marvin, in the next row. But Big Marv only looked away. Still p.i.s.sed at him.

Marvin still wasn't talking to him after what he had pulled in the park with Big Flicka. Marvin had a.s.sured him it wasn't over. That he didn't know what he was doing. That Flicka wasn't stupid. That he knew when someone had set him up, and that he would kill him if he got out on bail.

Brian hadn't known what to say to that, except that Marvin was the one who had started it, bringing a d.a.m.n gun into their house. He raised his hand and asked to be excused.

Five minutes later, Brian had scarfed down both honey-nut cl.u.s.ters from his locker and had just finished washing them down at a hall water fountain when he heard the shoe squeak down the deserted hall to his right. He tensed at first, before he looked, thinking it was the dreaded Brother Rob, the dean of discipline, about to crack him for being out of cla.s.s. Then he looked up, and boy, was he wrong.

Brian's eyes opened to their outer limits.

Guess Big Flicka made bail after all, came a tiny scared voice from somewhere far off inside his head.

He didn't know how. He didn't know why. All he knew was that the crazy-a.s.s drug dealer he'd pulled a fast one on was marching down the middle of the hall!

Their eyes met. Flicka's were going wide, lighting up with recognition.

Then he was reaching into the pocket of his big black goose down parka.

Brian didn't wait to see what he was reaching for. He just bolted, made the hall corner, saw the outside emergency exit door, and hit its push bar at a run.

Out in the cold, he ran across the dead hard gra.s.s of the football field behind the school in his black dress shoes faster than he ever had in cleats. A moment later, the emergency siren blaring in the distance behind him was interrupted by a flat, hard firecrackerlike pop.

He started zigzagging then, past the twenty, the ten, and then into and out of the end zone, not breaking his sprinting and dodging until he hit the stand of trees on the other side of the field's chest-high fence.

Past the trees, he came upon the busy four-lane road of Southern Boulevard. With no time to look, he ran right out into traffic. He almost got hit, first by a brown Mustang, then by a white Euro delivery van. Then he was on the other side, running alongside a tall hedge.

The hedge ended suddenly and opened onto a parking lot with a sign beside its driveway that said THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN. There had to be a cop or something, he thought as he saw a guard booth.

Please, G.o.d. Please help me, he prayed as he ran. I don't want to die.

Chapter 83.

Twenty feet up the park road, past the empty guard booth, Brian Bennett spotted a long set of cement steps on his left-hand side and pounded up them with everything he had.

The worn concrete treads flew past under his shoes. In twos, sometimes threes. He hardly felt them. He could feel only one thing. The ma.s.sive power of his sixteen-year desire to live, boosting adrenaline into his bloodstream like nitro into a funny car's engine.

He topped the steps without breaking stride and hit a path that skirted the base of a vast gra.s.s hill. He looked about frantically. The empty path. The empty hill. Dead gray trees. The dead gray sky. No cops. No security. n.o.body at all. It was like the entire park was abandoned, the entire Bronx, the entire planet.

It was just him and Big Flicka now, he thought as sweat began to sting his eyes. He and his own personal psycho killer, left all alone in this calming urban nature oasis to play the deadliest game of tag in world history.

The botanical garden's famous and immense domed greenhouse appeared as the path crested a rise. He'd been to the garden a few times with his family when he was a kid, but he'd never looked at the greenhouse before. It looked Victorian and somehow futuristic at the same time. Like something out of an H. G. Wells novel.

Twenty flat-out running seconds later, he reached it and ripped open its door.

And stopped and stood blinking.

The building was even weirder inside than out, an Alice in Wonderland indoor forest world of stone paths meandering in multiple directions among green gra.s.s and bushes and trees and wildflowers. You could smell the sweetness of the flowers in the suddenly warm air. As the door clicked behind him, he waited to hear bird chirps or maybe crickets. Instead, it was dead silent.

Outside inside upside down, he thought as he hurried left down an interior woodland path.

"h.e.l.lo? Is there anybody here? h.e.l.lo? Help!" he called.

Another twenty yards down the path, beyond a huge weeping willow, he pulled a French door. This even curiouser room of the enclosed English garden had an actual pond on its other side, with lily pads and a bronze fountain gurgling in its center.

"Please, someone! h.e.l.lo? Is there anyone here?" he yelled up at the gla.s.s ceiling as he began to jog.

Odd structures began to appear in the underbrush beyond the pond as he kept going. It was a wicker world New York City. A wicker St. Patrick's Cathedral, a wicker Grand Central Terminal, little wicker skaters holding hands on an ice rink before a towering wicker 30 Rock.

Around a little bend in the path, beyond this frivolous insanity, he spotted another door, marked EXIT.

"Hey! What are you doing here? The garden's closed today. You're not supposed to be in here."

Brian shot a look up to his left. There was a little white-bearded man in maintenance blues atop a high ladder. There was a set of Christmas lights in his little hands, a bunch of twist ties between his little white teeth. He was in the process of stringing the lights around the trunk of an enormous palm tree.