They have absolutely no idea what is about to hit them.

The smoky, bitter roasted-coffee smell of a pretzel cart hit her as she walked closer to the corner of 50th.

The scent, surprisingly strong, halted her for a moment as memories even stronger than the aroma instantly flooded in. Ever since she was a kid, that simple yet of its own essence pretzel smell was New York for her. Midtown and Times Square and yellow taxis. The gigantic Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, Broadway musicals, and Eloise at the Plaza.

How many of her dad's business trips from England had she been on back then? A dozen, perhaps? They had taken the Concorde more than a few times. How wonderfully NYC storybook it had been. How wonderfully, royally, let-them-eat-cake. For how many other little girls in the history of the world had ever had breakfast in London, lunch in New York, and then dinner in London?

But what did kiddie memories matter now? she thought, shoving them quickly down a mental dustbin. She needed to focus now, really focus, and do the final checks.

If she got this right, she'd be letting everyone eat cake again for the rest of her life.

Chapter 89.

The business-suited cops behind the barriers began getting into their armored vehicles as she arrived on the northeast corner. She watched as the NYPD tow truck that would be the tip of the motorcade arrived at the 50th Street barrier and was let through.

She swallowed as she felt a b.u.t.terfly swirl of tension begin to corkscrew in her stomach.

Now. She gripped her iPhone, turned it in her hand. It was happening right now.

"Don't you just love Buckland?" said a voice close by as she was about to leave.

She turned to her left, a little startled. A boyish man, tall, handsome, and preppy in a Brooks Brothers overcoat, stood there on the corner beside her, his arms crossed, smiling.

She looked at him, warily checking his hands, trying to place his American accent. Chicago, maybe.

A cop? she thought. No. Too well dressed. Too...prissy. But who knew? She expected the feds to have agents in the crowd. They were all on high alert now. Just how many agents she didn't know. It unnerved her, though, that they were perhaps being called in from as far away as the Midwest.

Was it the look on her face? she wondered quickly. Did she appear too keyed up? Too off in some way? Was her cover blown?

"He's awesome," she finally said, giving him her dumb-blonde act along with her best American accent.

"I know, right?" the guy said, gesturing at the motorcade with a little fist pump. "He's bringing our country back, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me."

This fool was actually just being patriotic, she realized. He was just as he appeared: some overgrown American frat boy finance type with a ma.s.sive preponderance of bone between his ears. He was just flirting with her.

"I'm Jimmy, by the way," the man said, giving her his Division I quarterback smile. "I'm supposed to be at my trading desk across the street, but what the h.e.l.l, I slipped out. Be a fool to miss all this."

"You said it," she said, winking as she turned on her heel. "So long, now."

It was nothing. The guy was nothing, she told herself as she hit the opposite corner of Park and waded into the business lunch crowd of pedestrians heading north. Just an average yokel. She was just being paranoid.

Seven blocks north, on the north side of East 57th, she pulled open the door of a bank. Instead of going inside the bank itself, she did a right face and crossed the empty vestibule of its ATM lobby. On the other side of the machine, she did another right face and stopped by the sill of a window that faced south back down Park, toward the Waldorf.

For five minutes, she searched the pa.s.sing pedestrian crowd for the Chicago hot dog. But there was no one. No one on the sidewalk. No surveillance car. No one. She was clean.

She lifted her phone as its text vibration went off.

It was from her husband. Two words.

Start it.

"Yes, love," she said in the empty vestibule as she brought up the new app.

Timing was of the essence here, she thought as she took in and let out a long breath.

Perfect timing.

Chapter 90.

Because of its heavy armor plating, capable of repelling high-powered rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the rear seat of the presidential Cadillac limo, known as the Beast, is smaller than one would think.

President Buckland thought it was even smaller than usual as he sat directly across from the governor of New York's pushy wife, Janet Haber.

"I loved your wife's shoes at the inauguration ceremony, Mr. President. Were they Louboutins? Zanottis?" she asked as Buckland signed the third of the seven inaugural invites she had brought with her.

"I don't actually know, Janet," Buckland said, smiling. "I'll have her send you a note."

Right away, too, Buckland thought. It's not like I'm in the midst of some of the testiest international relations in world history or anything.

Buckland glanced over at the woman's husband, the smug Governor Martin Haber himself, sitting beside her. His big legs crossed. His long, haughty face glued to his smartphone.

He was feeling right at home in Cadillac One, wasn't he? Buckland thought. He was an even bigger jerk than the wife, it seemed. But Haber had, after all, helped them win New York for the first time since Reagan. This UN General a.s.sembly appearance at the president's side was the least-and hopefully last thing-they could do for him.

There were actually six people in the vehicle in total. Beside President Buckland was his adviser, Ellen Huxley-Laffer, with the Habers facing them. Beyond the Habers, in the front seat, past the open gla.s.s part.i.tion, was his driver, Secret Service vet Vince Kellett, along with Secret Service ASAC Luke Foldager.

The Secret Service head, John Levitin, had wanted to come to New York as well, but Buckland wouldn't let him. The entire group of tireless agents had enough pressure on this stress-filled important trip without having their famously meticulous big boss busting their chops.

"We're right on schedule, Mr. President. We'll be rolling in five," Foldager called out as Buckland signed the last invite. He looked up as Vince gave him a wink in the rearview.

Though they were great at hiding it 99 percent of the time, today the agents' faces revealed their stress, their hope, their doubt, the president noted. Most of them had kids. Saw where the country was at. A crossroads. Maybe the most important one in its history. They knew how big the stakes here were.

Please, G.o.d, help me to not let them down, Buckland prayed.

He was putting away his pen when he felt the index card in his inside jacket pocket. He pulled it out. On the card, there was a marker drawing of an Evel Knievellooking guy on a USA motorcycle jumping a bald eagle, with the following message.

Dear Dad, You're my hero. Putin is a zero. Ha-ha. Love, your son, Terrence Buckland laughed.

"What is it?" Huxley-Laffer said.

He showed her the card.

Huxley-Laffer chuckled. "What am I doing here? You already have an excellent adviser, sir."

I hope the rest of the world agrees with you, Terrence, Buckland thought, tapping the card against the bulletproof window as the car began to roll.

Chapter 91.

At exactly 11:50 a.m., a thirty-two-year-old UPS driver named Howard Navarro was standing on the street at the back of his brown box truck, double-parked on the avenue side of the southeast corner of 72nd and Lexington Avenue.

Loading packages on his hand truck, he suddenly heard a shriek of air brakes and jumped back as a ma.s.sive, grumbling blue dump truck pa.s.sed by on his right so close that it knocked his pa.s.senger side mirror askew.

"You stupid frickin' meathead! Are you kidding me?" said Navarro as he hurried forward toward the dump truck, stopped now at the red light.

Navarro squinted as he noticed right away that there was something off about the driver. Up there behind the closed window, the guy just sat there, expressionless and unmoving. It was some strange-looking black dude with dreads and aviator sungla.s.ses under a light-blue hard hat.

"Yo. What are you, stoned?" Navarro said as he banged on the guy's door. "I'm talking to you!"

As if in response, the truck pulled immediately forward through the intersection, almost running over Navarro's feet, as the light turned green.

Lexington Avenue rolled by smoothly outside the truck's windshield. Taxis went past on both sides. Parked cars and city buses. Pedestrians on the sidewalk. A Gristedes on the left. A Sbarro on the right.

Buildings got noticeably nicer as the truck, picking up a little speed now, arrived at the midsixties. Sidewalk awnings began to appear on apartment houses, as well as flags and doormen outside hotels.

The dump truck had been getting a bunch of green lights at each of the cross streets, but on 60th, it went through a yellow. A block later, at 59th, it rolled on through a just-turned red, almost clipping a guy in surgical scrubs by the corner, talking on his phone.

"Whoopsie," the a.s.sa.s.sin's wife said in the vestibule of the bank, where she was piloting the remote-controlled dump truck with her smartphone.

Far in the distance on her screen, she could see the flashing lights of the president's motorcade pa.s.sing right to left through the Lexington Avenue intersection at 52nd Street.

"s.h.i.t! s.h.i.t! s.h.i.t!" she mumbled. Was she too late?

With a swipe of her thumb, she steered the truck into the center lane and dropped the hammer. In a blur, 58th Street went by, then 57th, 56th, 55th. On her screen, she read the remote speedometer. The ma.s.sive truck, in its top gear now, was hurtling at an incredible seventy-three miles an hour.

It was all about math now. Math and physics, she thought as she blasted the truck through the wooden sawhorse detour at 54th Street like a runaway freight train.

Two blocks and closing.

She swallowed, her thumb down on the accelerator.

This was going to be very close.

On her screen, at the intersection of 52nd and Lexington she could now clearly see the rapidly closing white sides of the ma.s.sive city sanitation trucks that were being used to protect the intersections along the entire motorcade's route.

But instead of T-boning a sanitation truck, she flicked the control with her thumb again, and the blue dump truck suddenly lurched and moved hard left.

Straight toward the front doors of 599 Lexington Avenue, on the corner of 53rd Street.

Five ninety-nine Lexington was one of those ma.s.sive midtown office buildings that are practically a whole block wide, and because of this, they have lobbies that pa.s.s through the full length of the building. Five ninety-nine Lex's lobby was unique, as it actually crossed the block in a diagonal, from the southeast corner of 53rd and Lex to a quarter block east of 52nd and Lex.

Directly out in front of the building's entrance, the h.e.l.l-bent-for-leather speeding dump truck bounced up like it was about to do a wheelie as it smashed up off the high curb. Then, as it bucked down on the sidewalk, its twenty-five tons of rolling steel ripped through a sidewalk Citi Bike rack like it was tissue paper and burst through 599 Lexington's doors and gla.s.s wall with a breathtaking eardrum-crushing smash of pulverized gla.s.s.

Sparks and an unG.o.dly grinding sound roared from its steel dump bed sides as it rode the interior lobby's left-hand marble wall. It ate the lobby's security desk in a splintering explosion of mahogany, then continued its hurtle down the marble interior concourse.

Pouring off plumes of smoke and dust behind it like a square steel meteor, the ma.s.sive truck rocketed toward the presidential motorcade, which could clearly be seen now, pa.s.sing obliviously by on the side street, through the gla.s.s wall just beyond the lobby's far end.

Chapter 92.

The governor of New York's smartphone, as well as his wife, Janet, flew forward into President Buckland's lap as the presidential limo screeched to a sudden dead stop.

Buckland, in shock, looked down at the governor's wife, whom he now suddenly held in his arms, and then looked forward, out through the limo's windshield, trying to believe what he was seeing.

A moment before, there had been a terrible sound off to the left, like metal ripping. Then a ma.s.sive blue dump truck had emerged, impossibly, out of the side of a gla.s.s office building on the left and punched through the pedestrian sidewalk barriers, smashing a direct hit into the dummy limo directly ahead of them.

The hurtling truck had T-boned the dummy limo center ma.s.s and flipped it up and over, onto its side, and sent it spinning up onto the south sidewalk. The truck's momentum had carried it straight through the opposite sidewalk's barrier, and it now sat embedded in the front of a restaurant.

Through the rising dust, Buckland could see that the cab of the truck was in flames. One of the steel walls of the dump truck's bed had become detached and was quivering back and forth like a just-used diving board. As he watched, the tailgate it was attached to ripped free and fell into the street with a hollow clang.

"Move! Back!" screamed Secret Service agent Luke Foldager to the driver as he somehow leaped through the open driver's part.i.tion and into the rear of the limo and pulled the governor's wife out of Buckland's lap.

"Are you hurt, sir?" Foldager said.

A high-pitched metallic radio twirping was coming from the dashboard as the limo began reversing, its tires squealing.

"Is Bronco injured?" Agent Kellett yelled from the front seat, not waiting for an answer.

"Hotel Seven, we have contact! We have contact! Fifty-Second between Lex and Third!" Kellett hollered into his radio. "Do you hear me?!"

"I'm fine. I'm fine," Buckland said.

"That's a negative. Bronco is secure," Foldager said to Kellett.

There was more radio chatter, and then horns and sirens were honking outside in the street. The blasting and bleating were head-splitting. Like the heralding of the end of the world.

Buckland turned in his seat and could see that they were reversing the entire convoy. Through the blur and motion, he could also see people on the street and sidewalk standing frozen in sheer panic. People everywhere with hands to their mouths, standing as still as model people in a train layout.