"If you don't get help, you're gonna die, Matt."

"No, the president is. You have to save the president," he said.

"But-"

"There's no buts!" he screamed, his face clotted with pain. "Get over to that corner of the roof and drop that son of a b.i.t.c.h! Shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

I ran across the roof with the rifle. At the corner of the crazy old building was an actual battlement like you'd see on the top of a rook chess piece. I set the huge rifle into the battlement's chest-high indentation and looked up through the scope.

Even at this lower angle, I still couldn't see the shooter in the window. Just the crazy Chinese screen, the little curtain, the ladder in the gap between them. There was no target!

I glanced down to the street as a roar came from the crowd. It was the president's limo. One of the Secret Service agents was at its rear, opening the door.

"No! Get back!" I screamed. But I knew it was fruitless. He couldn't hear me over the crowd and chopper rotor wash.

There was no more time.

Do or die.

I looked back up at the gla.s.sless window two blocks to the east and I knelt as I put the rifle to my shoulder.

Chapter 97.

In one oiled, pistonlike motion, the British a.s.sa.s.sin cleared the bra.s.s casing of the bullet with which he'd just gutshot the cop out of the chopper and reclosed the Enfield rifle's blue steel bolt.

He'd been alternating his aim from the limo to the chopper from the moment it arrived. He didn't know how the sniper team had spotted him, but they had. When he had looked back up from the limo a moment before, the two-man team had both of their scopes on him.

Reorienting on his target, he watched in the scope as the other cop scurried and ducked behind one of the Armory roof's battlements a split second before the British a.s.sa.s.sin was going to blow his brains out.

Smart man, he thought. Run for your life.

When he looked back down at the limo, there was a Secret Service agent at its rear, ready to open the door. Buckland was coming out.

There still was a chance.

The British a.s.sa.s.sin adjusted the Enfield a millimeter down as the president stood up from behind the limo door and stepped onto the sidewalk.

He sucked in his breath, held it.

Just as he slipped the center of the Gothic cross reticle onto Buckland's head, he saw the muzzle flash from the Armory's roof.

The .408 CheyTac round traveling at thirty-five hundred feet per second came in at him just under his own rifle. As it struck home, it cut a perfectly circular groove through the bones of the ring and pinkie fingers of his left hand, holding the Enfield's stock.

Then it bored a perfect quarter-size hole through the center of his chest cavity and blew his spine and heart and much of his back out across the wall behind him.

Epilogue.

Chapter 98.

A week later, Old Glory snapped in the wind along with the coattails of the honor guard, standing out on the gra.s.s as the marching band played the national anthem.

When it was established that we had, in fact, somehow managed to still keep our flag waving o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave, at least for the time being, there was much hooting and cries of "Let's go! Let's go!" from the field and the stands.

We were at Fordham Prep's famous homecoming Turkey Bowl game against Xavier, and Mary Catherine and Seamus and all my kids and I went nuts as Brian and Marvin took the field with the rest of the Rams for the kickoff.

"Well, they made it, the two knuckleheads, despite all their own efforts to the contrary," Seamus said.

I shook my head. I didn't want to even think about what could have happened to them once I had gotten to the bottom of the saga of Marvin and Brian and the drug dealer. Sometimes, if you're wise and like to sleep at night, as a parent you say, "All's well that ends well," and leave it at that.

Which is exactly what I did say as I handed Seamus and Mary Catherine br.i.m.m.i.n.g plastic cups.

After I clicked cups with two of my twelve favorite people in the world, I took a long, much-deserved sip out in the cold air as Fordham booted the ball high and long for the kickoff.

Marvin, of course, being the biggest and yet somehow fastest kid on the field, made the first tackle, sending a Xavier kid into a sideline tuba player.

I patted Marvin's uncle, in front of us, on the back.

"Tuba players, be warned," I said, smiling. "We expect nothing less than the Bronx's version of Bo Jackson."

Mr. Peters, who was almost as big as his nephew, gave out a bellowing laugh. The sweet old man had finally made it up from North Carolina to stay with Big Marv, who had moved out of the Bennett abode amid many teary good-byes and hugs two days before. We were all going to miss the big galoot.

"And remember, Mr. Peters, he's to play basketball at Manhattan College," Seamus said, patting the man's huge shoulder. "Not Manhattanville. Just plain old normal, Catholic, meat-and-potatoes Manhattan. In Riverdale. Don't forget, now."

Chapter 99.

I was heading down the bleachers for the next round when I got the text from my good buddy Paul Ernenwein.

How's it hangin, Miss Oakley? it said.

Rootin tootin, I texted back, laughing at our little inside joke.

There had been a lot of hoopla about the shot that had dropped the a.s.sa.s.sin. Especially the fact that he had been shot through the hand holding his rifle before he'd been killed. World-famous snipers had weighed in with glowing reviews of the shot's professionalism, which suggested years and years of training. The Post even did a detailed mock-up of it. Where the chopper was. Where I was. Where Matthew Leroux was. A dotted line showing the trajectory of the bullet up 67th Street.

I had to struggle to stifle my laughter every time I looked at the 100 percent wrong mock-up or read one of these lauding reviews.

Because the whole thing, the famous world-cla.s.s shot, was actually a complete accident.

Before I was able to adjust my aim, the big awkward CheyTac rifle had slipped from where I'd placed it between the crenellations. Grabbing at it to keep it from falling, I'd hit the d.a.m.n thing's hair trigger.

Call it dumb blind luck. The hand of G.o.d. But I had nothing to do with shooting the Brit through his hand holding the rifle.

Since I knew hoopla to be far more trouble than it's worth, I had actually insisted that Leroux had done it. After the shot, Matthew Joseph Leroux died right there on the roof as we were trying to get him back into the chopper. Crediting him was the least I could do for his poor family after all the sacrifices he had made for us.

The Brit's real name, it turned out, was Andy Heathton. The FBI had sent a photo of the body to British intelligence, who had finally been able to ID the shooter. The thirty-nine-year-old professional killer had been born and raised in Leeds, England, and had been taught how to shoot by the British Royal Marines at age twenty-one. Apparently, he had spent the next several years of his life as a mercenary, killing folks all over the world.

His wife, Holly Heathton, thirty-three, who was thought to be responsible for the remote-controlled dump truck that had rammed the motorcade, was caught by customs out at JFK, trying to leave the country the night of the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination.

You hear? Paul texted me a second later.

About what? I texted back.

"About the Times article," Paul said from behind me.

I turned and stared at the redheaded fed.

"No," I said. "But something tells me I'm about to find out about it."

"C'mon," Paul said, patting me on the shoulder as he pocketed his phone. "Let's walk and talk."

Chapter 100.

"We arrested Secret Service SAC Margaret Foley late last night," Paul said as we walked down a breezy drive past Fordham's beautiful old stone buildings.

"Is that right?"

"Yep. We got up on a phone we found in the shed of her house in Silver Spring. There were hundreds of calls between her and Mark Evrard. Photos on there as well. Startling ones."

"Of an intimate nature?" I said.

"The most highly intimate. She'd been sleeping with him for years, apparently. They met down at the pile after nine eleven."

"Love among the wreckage," I said. "Romantic."

"She finally broke last night," Paul said. "She had given Evrard the president's route and itinerary, which he then pa.s.sed along to the a.s.sa.s.sin through back channels. They'd been planning this for over a year."

"She happen to mention why she and Evrard wanted to off their own country's leader? Nothing new on Netflix?"

"She said it was about Buckland's call to slice the federal budget to the bone and do a thorough audit of all the books, including Homeland Security. She said she had misappropriated a few dollars here and there over the years and didn't want to wind up on the unemployment line or in jail."

"Wow. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't she have a family?"

"Yep. Married, with three kids," Paul said.

"How do you go from skimming off the top at the Secret Service to planning your boss's funeral because there might be layoffs?" I said. "Are things really that corrupt, I wonder? Or have we gotten to the point where we don't catch it anymore?"

"That's if you even buy that story," Paul said. "Evrard was a spy. And I think, like all spies, Evrard sold her and played her like an a.s.set. Used her own fears and desires to manipulate her. He needed the info she could access."

"Too bad we can't ask him to confirm, huh?" I said.

Evrard had hung himself with a tied-together pair of sneaker laces in his cell down at the federal detention center in lower Manhattan, on the second night after his arrest. No one knew how the sneaker laces had gotten into his solitary confinement cell, but I wasn't worried because it was "under investigation."

"Why do you think Evrard did it? Was he a double agent? Hired by someone else?"

Paul shrugged. "He was hired by somebody. And my gut says not the Russian government. I think he just got the Russian mob involved in order to make it look like it was coming from Putin's direction, but it wasn't. It was just a smoke screen."

"But who could fund an operation of this scale?" I said. "It would have to cost a pretty penny these days to a.s.sa.s.sinate a president. Who has that kind of juice?"

Paul looked at me. "You're right. The Brit didn't work cheap. I heard a rumor that he had a numbered account in the kind of Swiss bank they won't let you into the lobby of unless you're there to park eight figures. But don't forget, Evrard's been in the business a long time. He definitely had the connections." Then he shrugged. "Buckland did mention he wanted to audit the Federal Reserve."

"Ah, the central bankers," I said. "That's true. Auditing them is probably something they don't want. Making money out of thin air must make it easy to fund an a.s.sa.s.sination. Let's face it: there isn't anything that's really too much of a problem for them with that kind of power."

"True," Paul said. "But perhaps it'll all come out in the congressional commission that's being a.s.sembled."

I stopped walking. A gust of cold wind blew up, hammering the trees as the branches cracked against one another like kids playing swords with broomsticks.

"We'll never know, will we?" I said after a beat. "Just like JFK's a.s.sa.s.sination, we'll never know."

"No, Mike," Paul said. "I don't think we ever will. But look on the bright side. Whoever it was, we squashed them. We checked their s.h.i.t. We could be going to a presidential funeral right now."

"We stood our watch."

"We did. All of us. You, me, Matt, your detective friends. Sometimes it's all you can do."

Then I shook Paul's hand and turned on my heel and went back down the drive toward the cheers and the field.

At this point, I was wise enough to no longer give a care. One day at a time and all that, and this one day was one of my favorites of the year. I wasn't about to waste one more second of it on work.