"Yeah, you're right. It did come out wrong," Paul said, continuing to give him h.e.l.l with his Southie Boston accent.

I was beginning to like Paul. He'd been totally hands-on in helping the PD and FBI response teams at the crime scenes-not exactly a common occurrence for an FBI boss. Not bad for a Red Sox fan, either, I thought.

"Anyway, Tom, we're still smack-dab in the middle of this," Paul said, putting his phone back into his pocket. "Anything else?"

"Actually, yeah," Kask said. "Follow me. He wants to see you. Well, him, actually."

"Who, me?" I said. "Who wants to see me?"

"The president. Who else?" said Kask.

Chapter 11.

With that, Kask led me around a corner of the incredible lobby.

We walked past two more Secret Service presidential detail agents and an impeccably dressed desk clerk into a waiting elevator. The doors closed, and the b.u.t.ton for 29 lit up by itself somehow, and we started to ascend.

Kask ignored me and began checking his phone while I did my best not to gape at the impressive surroundings. I'd been in elevators for work before, just never a lacquered, bird's-eye mahoganypaneled one that was inlaid with art deco sunbursts and chevrons.

The elevator doors opened onto a small Oriental-carpeted foyer where four tall spit-shined Secret Service agents stood at attention. Between them was a set of bright-white double doors with the words WALDORF PRESIDENTIAL SUITE written in gold script.

Before I could ask someone to pinch me, I watched as Kask opened the door without knocking, and I saw President Buckland for the first time.

Beyond another small foyer, the president was sitting in a little living room on a love seat with his hands behind his head. His eyes were closed, and he was nodding as an aide read him something. Then he opened his eyes and saw me and stood up and smiled.

"Thanks, Tom," the president said to Kask, who immediately left. "Detective Bennett, I believe I owe you a thank-you," he said, offering his hand.

I stood there for a second, staring at his hand, stunned by it all.

"Yep," I got out as I finally shook his hand. "I mean, no, of course not. No, sir. Are you kidding me? I'm just glad that you're okay. I'm just glad to help."

"Oh, thank you so much, Officer," the First Lady said as she came out of another room. "The whole thing must have been terrifying."

She was Snow White cla.s.sically pretty, with her dark hair and pale skin. She had on a cream-colored pantsuit but was wearing slippers, I noticed, and I found myself amazed again that all this was actually happening. That I was standing in the Waldorf's presidential suite enjoying a chat with the commander in chief and his wife.

I'll never forget this, I thought.

I couldn't wait to tell the kids and Mary Catherine.

"Officer, Alicia? Really? It's Detective. Detective Michael Bennett," President Buckland said, rolling his eyes. "You think you'd remember the name of the man who just saved your beloved husband's bacon. I mean, did you even vote for me?"

"You'll never know, Jeremy, will you?" the First Lady said, winking at me before she headed back toward the other room. "Thanks again, Detective Bennett."

"So, Detective," said the president.

"Please call me Mike, Mr. President."

"If you call me Jerry."

"Okay, Jerry," I said, finally at ease. I definitely liked this president's style.

"So, Mike, I wanted to talk to you to get your firsthand opinion. I hear advisers say things that they themselves were told, and on and on like a game of telephone, so I wanted to talk to you. You saw this guy, right? In your opinion, this guy was the real deal? He was going to kill me?"

I nodded. "I was in the blind. Looked through the scope myself, sir-I mean, Jerry. It was dialed in right on you. He'd been there a couple of days, it seems. Not to mention the way he killed my partner. It was a h.e.l.l of a pistol shot. My partner never had a chance. Then he got away with rappelling equipment in the elevator shaft. That's about as professional a killer as I've ever encountered."

"Mr. President," said his aide from across the room. "This just in off the AP wire."

The president turned.

"The Russians have made it clear that they had nothing to do with any threat against the president. They find the suggestion insulting, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

The president's demeanor changed for a second. He looked down at the table we were standing beside. The emotion was there for a moment-raw hurt, slightly afraid. When he looked back at me, it was gone, and he was smiling.

"I'll let you go, Mike," the president said. "Miles to go and all that, but I'll never forget what you did for me and for your country."

"Mr. President," I said.

"What happened to Jerry?" he said as Kask appeared again.

"Mr. President, I'm going to catch this guy," I said.

Chapter 12.

The a.s.sa.s.sin licked away the last of his chocolate cremeux and dropped the spoon and closed his eyes as he leaned back in the tufted banquette.

The restaurant was called Elise. It was on a cobblestoned street on the outskirts of the meatpacking district, and it served Michelin two-star French molecular deconstructive cuisine that was as absurdly good as it was expensive.

The decor was seductively dark in the dining room and bar below, with dramatic lights thrown upward onto gorgeously textured high white limestone walls. With his back to the wall in the darkness, even a man like him could relax, the a.s.sa.s.sin thought. At least for a moment.

He had just consumed a four-hundred-dollar nine-course chef's tasting menu that pulled out all the stops: a parade of caviar and white truffle risotto and fried sweetbread piccata and herb-roasted tenderloin of wagyu. All of it arranged like museum-quality art and matched with preposterous precision with the best wines of Burgundy and the Rhne.

He had gone hungry more than once as a young child, and since then, he had never failed to treat food with its proper reverence. To eat meant more than just filling his belly. It was a communion with...something. Life? Death, perhaps? He didn't know. He was no philosopher, but food was something just...more. It was more than simply a combination of pleasant sensual experiences.

Ecstatically stuffed and drunk, he listened to the surrounding murmur of the expensive restaurant. The plate clacks and conversation and discreet laughter. The festive rattle of the bartender somewhere off to the left, shaking ice cubes. Music to his ears.

"Can I get you anything?" his wife said. "A hot towel, perhaps? Maybe a pillow and a blanket?"

"Absolutely nothing," the a.s.sa.s.sin said, opening his eyes with a smile. "That was..."

"Expensive," his wife said with a frown.

"Oh, yes, it was. And well worth it," he said, swirling his twenty-one-year-old Elijah Craig single-barrel bourbon.

He'd picked up an addiction to the American spirit three years ago on a job in Osaka, j.a.pan, of all places. The j.a.panese were nuts, but he was all over their fetish for mastery. Maybe he'd been j.a.panese in a previous life.

"I don't understand. The mission failed," she said.

He looked at her.

"Sweetheart, the helicopter landed on the roof. I mean, I'm one for planning for eventualities, but I didn't see that one coming. I come out and look up, and there's the cavalry. You know how close I came to getting pinched?"

"All too well."

"But I didn't," he said, winking as he sipped at the smooth fire of the bourbon. "If that's not something to celebrate, I don't know what is."

"How about finishing the job? You know, getting paid? That helps, with the way you blow it."

"Darling, I had him," he said, kissing her hand. "His face was right there. We were in. He can be had. We'll get another chance. You'll see. In the meantime, I just got an offer I can't refuse. A quick little job here in town. You in?"

She rolled her eyes playfully at him.

"Ever the sweet-talker, I see," she said, smiling. "Count me in, as usual."

Chapter 13.

Around midnight, I was doing what I always like to do after helicopter crashes and meeting US presidents.

I was kneeling on the floor of my apartment bathroom, pinning the family cat, Socky, to the tile floor.

The Sockster had been sick the last couple of days-some upper respiratory thing-and he wasn't eating or hardly even drinking, so Mary Catherine and I had to, per the vet's order, syringe-feed him. Mary Catherine was on syringe duty while I wrapped him up tight in a bath towel. I was wearing kitchen gloves as I held him down to avoid getting clawed.

With good reason, too, because Socky didn't seem to be enjoying his force-fed meal in the slightest. In fact, he sounded a lot like a Harley at full throttle as he squirmed.

"So anyway," I said to Mary Catherine over the unG.o.dly howls as she slipped a paper towel bib over Socky's head, "I'm standing there, and the door opens and there he is! Buckland's sitting five feet away, talking with one of his advisers."

"No!" she said, staring at me.

"Yes!" I said, nodding, still hopped-up from the day's excitement. "If I wasn't currently using it for lion taming, I'd show you the hand that shook the hand that shakes the world."

Mary Catherine smiled as she tried to squirt cat vitamin water between Socky's fangs.

"You're not so bad yourself, Detective Bennett. You saved his life, you did."

"Well, keep that to yourself, please. They're actually trying to keep that under wraps for now, a full media blackout, and it's working for once. Plus I don't want the kids to know that I was in the helicopter crash. Not yet. They have enough to worry about."

"It's so hard to believe somebody would want to kill Buckland after his landslide election," Mary Catherine said, shaking her head. "How many states did he win? Forty-four? Forty-five?"

"Forty-six," I said. "Maybe that's just it. He said he was going to shake up the status quo, and he's got the mandate to do it. You have to think that there are a lot of folks with entrenched power at home and abroad who are feeling pretty rattled right now."

"Rattled enough to put a hit on a sitting US president?" Mary Catherine said.

I looked at her.

I didn't even want to mention the Russian tip from the FBI. That an attempt on Buckland's life might have actually come from the Russians and that some new vicious revamping of the Cold War could right now be under way. It was too terrible to contemplate. I almost wished that I didn't know.

Socky hissed, got a claw out, and raked my gloved wrist before I was able to subdue him with the towel.

"I don't know, Mary Catherine," I said with a shrug. "Who knows today? Anything seems possible."

"Well, all that matters now is that you're home in one piece," she said, smiling.

"Couldn't agree more," I said. "Now let's just hope Socky here will let me stay that way."

Chapter 14.

Next day around four thirty, I was uptown in Hamilton Heights, standing on the third-floor fire escape of a building on West 141st between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Taking in the lay of the land, I decided that it had to be one of the most architecturally interesting crime-ridden neighborhoods I'd ever been to. There were stone row houses with Greek-columned entrances and apartment buildings with Juliet balconies. I noticed there was an equal number of reno Dumpsters and beat-up, tinted-windowed cheap Nissans and Mazdas in the street in front of the buildings.

Like everyplace else in the perpetually skyrocketing rent zone that is NYC, even the Heights seemed to be in the midst of gentrifying. Too bad I wasn't looking to flip an apartment, I thought. A shooting had occurred here the week before, when an entire seven-member drug crew running an ecstasy lab in the apartment behind me had been slaughtered.

Such things happened from time to time in New York, of course, but the weird thing about it was how it had happened. Apparently, suppressors had been used. The power line to the building had been cut. In sum, it had the earmarks of a professional hit.

Just like the attempt on the president.

We were still stone cold in the leads department on the MetLife Building a.s.sa.s.sin's whereabouts, so we were looking at anything and everything that might be related.

"Don't jump, Mike. It's not that bad," Detective Jimmy Doyle said as he and Detective Arturo Lopez came out of the drug apartment and stood beside me by the snow-topped railing. My buddies and proteges from my special a.s.signment in Harlem a while back were among the many Thirtieth Precinct detectives who'd caught the seven-body case.

"Yeah? Tell that to Chief Fabretti," I said, flipping up the lapels of my overcoat as a cold wind sliced in off the Hudson to my left. "Now, one more time from the top."

"Shots fired call comes in at eight fifteen," Doyle said, Magliting the clipboard he was holding. "Responding officers were here in five. Straight off the bat, they see the first bodies slumped in the exterior sidewalk stairwell down there on the left, then head into the lobby. The other four they spot just off the lobby at the foot of the east stairwell."

"All dead? Not dying? Dead?" I said.