He put his hands to his own mouth, wondering suddenly if this was it. If he would die now. His mind cleared of everything except how much he missed his wife.

"Where to now? Back to the hotel?" Buckland said as he heard the governor's wife start weeping.

"Negative. The situation is too volatile, sir," Foldager said as the limo did a hard sliding lurch to the left and pinned it up Lexington. "We are going to go to our fallback, Sanctuary One."

"Sanctuary One?" asked Huxley-Laffer.

"Park Avenue Armory, ma'am. That's our fallback position. You'll all be safe there until we get this thing sussed out."

Chapter 93.

Thirty seconds before the impact, we had heard a blast of sudden screaming chatter on the radio.

From the Black Hawk hovering over 57th and Lex, we had actually witnessed the whole scene unfold. The blue dump truck crashing through the barrier on 54th and then hurtling down Lex toward the 52nd Street motorcade route like a bat out of h.e.l.l.

Once the dump truck had swerved at 53rd and entered the building, I thought the driver was ditching it, that it was over. But when I saw the truck exit the other side of the block-wide building on 52nd and smash through the sidewalk barrier into the first limo, my hands went to my mouth, and all I could hear was someone on the radio crying "No! No! No!"

The next long minute reminded me of 9/11-that same helpless, terrifying feeling of how something impossible can be happening right before my very eyes-as smoke and dust billowed up out of the narrow slot of the Manhattan street.

An absolute chaos of radio chatter and people screaming followed. When it subsided a little, we got the word. It had been the dummy limo!

Leroux, beside me, gave me a painful high five. Buckland was fine!

We were immediately a.s.signed to provide air cover as Buckland was transferred to Park Avenue Armory, at 67th Street, the predesignated secure area.

We zipped up and then tilted down over the MetLife Building just in time to see the presidential limo come out in reverse from beside the Waldorf and haul a.s.s north up Park Avenue.

It was a truly terrifying sight. The limo had only two SUVs flanking it. At every cross street, it seemed like some new threat would suddenly emerge-another truck, or who knew what the h.e.l.l else.

"They're going to take Bronco in through the back southwest corner of Sixty-Seven and Lex," Leroux told me as we came to a still hover over the ma.s.sive castlelike building that was Park Avenue Armory.

I vaguely remembered that the old redbrick building was used for art shows and events now, but it had in the Civil War era been a barracks that housed horses and soldiers.

"Look sharp, Mike. I got seven to eleven. You take from one to five," Leroux said to me as he got on his spotting scope. "Remember, anything up to two thousand yards."

Under the hard flutter of the rotors, I stared down at the limo, then out at the Upper East Side's daunting number of surrounding buildings. The rooftops and terraces and window after window after window.

Chapter 94.

Five hundred eleven yards and one hundred forty feet above the corner on 67th Avenue, the British a.s.sa.s.sin lay p.r.o.ne on his elevated shooting platform, breathing calmly, stilling himself.

He'd removed the gla.s.s of the living room window, and he was happy for the cold air that blew in and cooled the sweat on his brow.

In front of the now gla.s.sless window was a decorative Asian bamboo folding part.i.tion, and above it was the valance of a curtain covering the top of the window. In between the two was his blind's offset shooting slit. He could shoot down through the slit without being spotted from the outside.

The British a.s.sa.s.sin thought that with its highly varnished walnut stock and blue steel barrel, the L39A1 Enfield English sniper rifle up on the small tripod before him was a glorious Stradivarius of a gun. It was loaded with ten soft point .303 British rounds, a favored cartridge of choice for many deer hunters because of its high twist rate and excellent penetration.

The locked and loaded bolt-action rifle had been fitted with what was simply the finest high-precision riflescope in all the world, a German-made Schmidt & Bender PM II.

He didn't know if it was an intentional nod to the b.l.o.o.d.y medieval history of the fatherland or something, but to him, the intricate mill marks along the S & B's reticle gave it the distinct look of an elaborate Gothic cross.

The red intersection of that cross was dead-centered now on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of 67th and Lexington.

To the left of the reticle was the Armory's rear doorway.

And to the right was the just-arrived limousine of the president of the United States of America.

To be precise, the scope was zeroed in sixty-nine inches up above the corner, just a skosh under Buckland's six one height. The protective agent would come out and open the limo door and allow the president onto the curb first, the British a.s.sa.s.sin knew.

The moment Buckland stepped from the street onto the sidewalk would be exactly when he was going to drop him with a head shot. One shot center ma.s.s, just above Buckland's left ear, would shear the entire top of his head clean off.

The greatest a.s.sa.s.sination in the history of the world, after all, deserved nothing less than a one-shot clean kill.

The preparation was over. The windage determined. The elevation adjustments calculated.

As he lay there, certainty came to him. As if it had all been recorded already in the history books.

The sniper who wouldn't quit, they would call him. The ultimate professional. The greatest shot who ever lived.

Chapter 95.

Low above Park Avenue Armory in the trembling helicopter, Leroux and I frantically did a systematic visual search of the surrounding windows and rooftops.

The president's limo was there below us on the southwest corner of Lex. We had word that the president was still inside it. They had cordoned off 67th between Park and Lex, and the bullet- and bombproof vehicle had been determined to be the safest place for him until the situation on the street was better put under control.

It was the strangest thing. I don't know if the attack on the motorcade had been tweeted or something, but there were now about a couple hundred people on the side street and avenue sidewalks near the limo.

Most of them seemed to be students from Hunter College, located not far from the Armory. Were they trying to get selfies? I wondered. Just bizarre. Thank G.o.d a bunch of uniformed cops from the Nineteenth Precinct, halfway down 67th, had arrived to deal with it, but it was still quite a volatile, kinetic scene.

I swung my spotting scope down to the street toward a sudden surge in the crowd surrounding the limo. You've got to be kidding me, I thought. The cops were trying to arrest some dreadlocked white boy who had gotten too close to the limo.

Now was no time for a sit-in. Where the h.e.l.l were the rest of the Secret Service people to take care of this circus? I wondered. It was becoming a riot down there.

Just as I wondered it, I caught something in the edge of my scope, down there on the street. On the northwest corner of Lex, opposite the president's limo, among the crush of students, there was a tall preppy guy in an overcoat standing beside the pillar of the Hunter College building.

It was Matthew Leroux's CIA boss, Mark Evrard.

"Matt, three o'clock, on the corner. Is that Evrard? That's your boss, right?"

"Yeah. It is," Leroux said, looking down through his own scope. "That's weird. I thought he said he was heading back down to DC."

I had a strange feeling right then, staring down at Evrard. He just looked wrong. Out of place. Foreboding. Everything was moving around him, but he was as still as the post he stood beside.

Then something in the back of my mind shifted and knocked against something else.

This was really no time to be checking my phone, but I checked it anyway. I opened the message from Doyle that had been sent sometime in the last ten crazy minutes.

Mike, we did it!!! The link to Levkov!!! Here's a video still of the SUV off a camera at the nearest gas station in Yonkers. Witness has already ID'd. These are the guys who dumped Levkov's body.

I tapped the photo and nodded my exploding head.

I looked down at the corner, then at the photo, then down at the corner again.

In the photo was Evrard.

Mark Evrard with that goon of a driver I had met the night I followed Leroux from the gallery. I didn't know why, but it was Evrard. Evrard was behind the whole thing. The man behind the curtain. Evrard had hired the a.s.sa.s.sin.

But he was here now. Why? The attempt at the motorcade had failed.

Because here and now was here and now, I realized.

The a.s.sa.s.sin's intent was to get the president to the Armory all along. We had no time. It was about to happen.

"They're about to bring the president out," the pilot called back to us.

"No!" I screamed. "No! Tell them not to! Tell them to leave him in the car!"

"What's the matter? What's going on?" said Leroux anxiously, still focused on the limo.

"It's Evrard. He killed Levkov! He's the one behind everything!"

"Are you sure?"

"This is the photo of the guys who killed Levkov," I said, showing Leroux my phone.

"You mean..."

"Yes," I said. "He set you up. He set all of us up."

I pointed my spotting scope at the street. Down on the corner, Evrard was looking east down 67th, then looking up. He glanced at the presidential limo as he took out his cell, checking something. Then he looked back east, back up.

"Matt, watch Evrard! He's looking up. East up Sixty-Seventh. He keeps looking up!"

Leroux lifted the Secret Service radio.

"This is air cover one. We have a problem on the outside of the vehicle. Do you copy? Keep Bronco in the vehicle. Copy."

We listened to the radio. There was nothing. There was just static. White noise.

"Hey, can you get them?" Leroux yelled up to the pilot.

"No, it's not working," he said. "Nothing."

"They're jamming the signal or something!" I cried as I looked frantically up 67th Street with the spotting scope. "They're going to kill him now!"

"I see it! I see it!" I said a second later. "That white building! Farthest window on the right, two floors down! See how the other windows in the building have a sun glare on them? But that one doesn't have any. He must have taken out the gla.s.s!"

I zeroed in tighter with my scope's zoom. Instead of shades or blinds in the window, there was some kind of Chinese screen and a little curtain. Between them were what looked like the aluminum legs of a ladder or a painter's scaffold.

That's when I remembered the sniper's blind in the MetLife Building. The shooter had been up high, near the ceiling of the s.p.a.ce, far back to get a down shot angle on the street.

When I took my eye off the scope, I saw Leroux pounding on the shoulder of the pilot.

"Down! Down! Put me on the roof of the Armory!"

Chapter 96.

Because of the raised structures on the Armory's roof, the helicopter could only get us to about ten feet above it.

We had to hang off the sides and jump, and I went first. It was farther down than I'd antic.i.p.ated, and I landed off balance and went over onto the rough tar paper, the breath knocked out of me.

I was standing, looking up, waiting for Leroux to follow when his sniper rifle fell out of the chopper's side door and clattered to the rooftop beside me.

What the h.e.l.l? I thought, looking down at it. Then I looked up again and saw Leroux himself drop sideways out of the helicopter, crashing hard onto the roof.

"I'm shot," he said as he clutched himself with both b.l.o.o.d.y hands above his groin.

What?! I thought. It was unbelievable. Impossible. Just like that?!

"I saw the muzzle flash," he gasped as blood began to pool out onto the tar paper beneath him. "It was from the window, the one you spotted."

"Medic! Help!" I yelled up at the chopper.

"No time," Leroux said as I knelt to help him. He took one of his blood-covered hands off his wound and pointed toward the huge sniper rifle.