Chapter 6.

In the blind, the a.s.sa.s.sin put on his noise-canceling headphones and knelt down on the wood pallet platform beside the Barrett.

He lay p.r.o.ne and scooted in around the humongous rifle, embracing it like a lover at a picnic. He nestled the gunstock into his right shoulder joint ever so gently, like a newborn that needed a burp. His cheek went to the cold plate, his palm to the grip, and his finger to the metal comma of the trigger.

As he always did, he first closed his eyes and tried to actually physically feel the tension draining from his body as he breathed. With every release of breath, he envisioned it as a warm, glowing liquid spilling out of his pores through his clothes and flowing over the platform's sides.

He went through his checklist. Perfectly relaxed, naturally aligned, and oriented to the target. Check, check, and check.

He opened his right blue eye an eyelash length from the polished curve of the Zeiss's scope, his focus and concentration tightening like a slipknot. In the scope, the universe condensed itself into a circle picture of a sidewalk guard shack, an iron fence, a circular driveway, a reflecting pool, and a bronze sculpture.

His body was perfect stillness. His mind was perfect visual awareness. He was entering the zone. He could feel it. He was dialing it in.

Flashing lights crossed the meridian of his scope as the motorcade pulled up in front of the building. The lead vehicles slowed, and the huge presidential limo slipped in through the UN's opened gate. He tracked it around the circular drive, all the way around the pool, and watched as it stopped well before the entrance to the right of the sculpture.

The doors popped a split second later, and there he was. Voil! Like a rabbit out of a hat.

It was the new president, Jeremy Buckland, his famous face coming out of the car, dead center into the cross of the scope's reticle.

The a.s.sa.s.sin held himself. He was in the midst of inhaling a breath, and he needed to wait for his exhale, for that still zone between the oxygen coming in and the carbon dioxide going out, where everything leveled so he could squeeze.

He never got there.

It just happened. Something happened.

There was a bluish-gray blur in the scope, and the president was gone.

What?!

He looked up over the rim of the scope.

It was a helicopter. A helicopter had come from nowhere and was now level with his position. He hadn't heard it approach because of the headphones.

The Bell 412 had police markings and was twenty feet out off the building's edge, pointed directly at him. There was a cop in it next to the pilot, pointing binoculars, again, right at him through the hole in the blind. The cop was looking right into his face.

The a.s.sa.s.sin stared in horror for a moment, then did the only remaining thing he could do.

He shifted to his left and center-sighted the huge Barrett rifle onto the helicopter and squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 7.

It was one of those surreal moments when you say, Wait-this is impossible. I'm dreaming.

I'd just told the chopper pilot to head in closer on the east side of the MetLife Building for a second look, when under the rim of the roof, I spotted something with the binoculars.

It wasn't movement this time, but a box, a weird black box tucked in behind a bunch of wires and a satellite dish. The pilot moved a little more to the left, and through a slit in the box's front I suddenly saw what was inside.

It was a man.

Behind a rifle.

He was wearing earphones over a black balaclava ski mask and black coveralls, and he was lying p.r.o.ne beside an enormous black rifle.

I had just enough time to drop my jaw when he swung the rifle right at us.

"Sniper!" I yelled at the moment the muzzle flashed.

A second later, the entire helicopter's gla.s.s canopy shattered and cold air was rushing in my face, and we were spinning crazily. You could tell right away that there was something very wrong with the chopper. It felt incredibly top-heavy, hanging down and over to the right side as we wheeled and wobbled. An alarm was sounding in the console over the suddenly much louder whumps of the overhead rotor. All I could do was sit there and panic as, outside the shattered windshield, the sky and the buildings whipped past in a chaotic blur.

I looked up and saw the hole in the cabin ceiling spilling oil. Then I turned to my left toward the pilot to see him fighting with the joystick.

"My eyes! I have gla.s.s and blood in my eyes! I can't see!" he said, and then there was a horrendous metal groaning, and I rocked hard in my seat and blasted the side of my head against the cabin's bulkhead as we suddenly smashed into something and rolled over to the left.

"What happened? What happened?" yelled Greg in my ear as a horrible metal snapping sound came.

I learned later that it was the rotor and tail blades snapping off as they hit the concrete deck of the MetLife Building's roof, where we'd just crash-landed. Somehow, I quickly unstrapped and got my door open and dropped over and out between the toppled helicopter's skids. Greg, the sniper, was right on my heels, and a moment later, we pulled the bleeding pilot out and ran away from the still-whining, smoking chopper as fast as we could.

Not yet truly believing we were still alive, we found a stairwell door and opened it and set the injured pilot on the landing as we watched the chopper, spinning and smoking at the edge of the MetLife Building's roof. I looked out at the incredible skyline of Manhattan behind it as I shook my head. If I hadn't already believed in miracles, I would have been converted right then and there.

"There is no way in h.e.l.l we should still be alive," Greg said as we heard a click. It was a door, a door opening in the stairwell one floor below us.

Greg and I turned from the chopper and looked in over the stairwell's railing.

And saw the guy.

The guy in the balaclava-the a.s.sa.s.sin-standing there one floor below us, staring up.

Chapter 8.

When I saw that the shooter had something down behind his leg, three things happened at the same time.

I grabbed Greg by the back of his vest, I started to backpedal, and there was a shot.

We tripped over the still-sitting pilot's legs and landed back out on the roof. I pulled myself up and drew my Glock. I was about to help Greg up when I saw the hole between his nose and cheek and the blood spray on the concrete beneath his head.

He was dead.

My heart jackhammering in my chest as I wondered what in the name of G.o.d Almighty was going to happen next, I pointed my Glock straight at the stairwell doorway. I walked around the pilot as he crawled back out onto the roof, and I quietly stepped into the stairwell and took a deep breath and peeked back over the railing, Glock first.

I let out the breath. No one. Just a bare concrete floor. The shooter was gone.

I listened. There was no sound of running farther down the concrete stairwell. The shooter must have entered the floor just beneath, I thought with a nod.

I took out my phone with my free hand and thumbed Return Call.

"Mike, what happened?" Fabretti said.

"Shooter in the MetLife Building on the second to top floor," I said as I began to take the stairs down two at a time. "He's six feet tall. Black coveralls. Wearing a ski mask. He's armed and highly dangerous. He just killed a cop. I repeat: just killed a cop. I'm on the roof coming down after him. Seal off the MetLife Building lobby and send EMTs up to the roof for the pilot."

"The pilot? What? Aren't you in a helicopter?" Fabretti said.

"MetLife Building!" I hollered, and dropped the phone back into my jacket pocket as I pulled open the door at the bottom of the stairwell, carefully staying well to the left side of it. I waited and waited, then glanced in through the doorway behind my gun.

Over the Glock's sights, I scanned a long, empty, fluorescent-lit industrial corridor with some unmarked doors on each side. Behind the doors on the right, there was the sound of machinery clacking and humming. There was a strong smell in the warm air. It smelled like a garage, like motor oil.

It's where the elevators are, I thought. The motors for the ma.s.sive building's elevators.

I stood there, staring down the bright, empty industrial hall as my heart continued doing roadwork in my chest. I thought about Greg, dead on the roof, and about the Dallas cop Oswald killed after shooting Kennedy.

I was still thinking about all that and just about to take my first step into the hall anyway when a gun and arm appeared like a magic trick around the right corner of the corridor's far end.

The gun started going off, and the concrete of the stairwell wall beside my head started exploding. There were three shots, then four, then five, and concrete grit dusting my face and concrete dust stinging my eyes as I ducked and dropped back and kicked the door shut again.

A small piece of cement must have cut my face because when I touched my cheek, I saw blood on my finger. I coughed and crawled back some more as two more shots ripped jagged holes through the fire door.

"Shots fired!" I screamed into my phone. "I'm up on the floor where the elevators are. Second from the top. Get SWAT up here now!"

Chapter 9.

Mona Garcia, a twenty-eight-year-old recently naturalized immigrant from Belize, was in maintenance elevator number two and had just opened the door to the thirty-third floor when she heard the overhead thump.

She looked up as the ceiling hatch of the elevator car shrieked open. A man was standing there on top of the car. A man in black with a black ski mask and nice blue eyes.

Those blue eyes were the last thing she ever saw as two Federal Hi-Shok hollow-point .45-caliber bullets entered the top of her forehead.

The a.s.sa.s.sin dropped down into the car through the hatch and glanced into the hall behind his Springfield Range Officer M1911. Seeing that it was empty, he placed the RO down on the pebbled steel floor of the elevator and quickly unclipped the climbing harness from the ropes he had rigged in the elevator shaft two days before.

The ropes were his emergency escape route, which he'd just used after slipping into the shaft through a gap beside the elevator machinery up on forty-nine.

He glanced at his watch.

He had at most three minutes to get out of the building before it was completely sealed.

He dragged the cleaning woman's body by the ankles out into the empty maintenance hall and stepped back into the elevator. Then he hit the b.u.t.ton for the bas.e.m.e.nt as he reached for the zipper of the coveralls.

"Help you, Officer?" said a maintenance man, a skinny, pale, blond young white guy standing out in the hall with two other Spanish-speaking cleaning ladies, as the elevator opened in the bas.e.m.e.nt. He was gaping wide-eyed at the Springfield the a.s.sa.s.sin held openly by his leg.

"Listen up," the a.s.sa.s.sin said with a cop command voice from beneath the brim of the NYPD ESU ball cap he was now wearing. It went with the rest of the convincing NYPD tactical uniform that he'd hidden beneath the coveralls. "We got shots fired up on the street. A cop just got shot, and the perp ran into one of the train tunnels. You got access to the Grand Central Terminal train tunnel from the bas.e.m.e.nt here? I need to get to the tunnels."

"Yeah, I think so," the kid said, blinking and nodding rapidly. "Through the boiler room there's an old access door."

The a.s.sa.s.sin already knew that. It was how he had entered the building two days before.

The young maintenance guy unclipped the radio at his belt.

"You want me to call the building manager?"

"No. No time. Show me now. There's no time to waste," the a.s.sa.s.sin said, grabbing the guy's elbow and urging him along.

Chapter 10.

East 50th next to the Waldorf Astoria, where the president was staying, was completely blocked off when I arrived there on foot with ant.i.terror FBI head honcho Paul Ernenwein at around five thirty that evening.

It had begun to snow again a little, and through the swirling bits and gloom, I saw more cops per square inch in the street and on the sidewalk around the famous block-size art deco hotel than on Saint Patrick's Day. Unfortunately, a lot of news vans were parked three deep on Park Avenue as well, I noticed. We'd kept details to a minimum so far, but the helicopter crash and the shootings of Greg and the cleaning lady were already being broadcast fast and frantically out there in connection with the president's arrival.

Paul and I had just come from working the three different crime scenes at the MetLife Building: the sniper's nest; the crash scene on the roof, where Greg had been shot; and the freight elevator, where the shooter had killed the cleaning lady. We were still putting interviews and details together and combing for evidence, but the basic depressing bottom line so far was that we didn't know who the shooter was or, more important, where the h.e.l.l he was.

Paul had gotten a call from one of his bosses saying that we should head over to the Waldorf to give the head presidential protective agent a personal briefing, so we'd decided to walk the five Park Avenue blocks. You could actually see the silhouette of the crashed helicopter still on the roof from the street, I noticed when I looked up. Figuring out how they were going to get it down from there was thankfully someone else's job.

After we credentialed our way past two checkpoints, we walked through the 50th Street entrance of the hotel's top-shelf premier section, called the Towers of the Waldorf. Its lobby was amazing, an Old New York, gleaming, opulent jewel box of creamy marble and paneling and gilt moldings. I'd never been there before in my life, but I knew that, like the Empire State Building, the Waldorf had been built in the art deco skysc.r.a.per heyday of the early thirties. I thought that at any moment, Mr. Monopoly would come around the corner in his top hat and spats.

Instead, Tom Kask, the Secret Service team head, arrived. He was a big guy-six five, maybe-well dressed and lanky, with slicked silver hair and a cold, remote look on his face. If I had to judge a book by its cover, I'd say he looked like a big dumb jock bully.

"So you're the cop who lost him?" Kask said, looking down at me as he arrived.

"No," Paul said calmly as he showed him some of the crime scene photos from his phone. "He's the cop who found the guy with the Barrett fifty cal that you jackwads missed. Mike here is the guy who probably saved the president's life, and even your career, Tom, if you think about it."

There were a bunch of factors to explain why his guys hadn't seen the shooter, the incredible distance being the most glaring, but it didn't matter. They, the glorious Secret Service, had screwed up royally, and a lowly NYPD cop had done their job for them.

"Sorry. That came out wrong," the big b.a.s.t.a.r.d Kask said, not looking very sorry at all. "It's that kind of day, you know."