After a while, he said, "The president has been having some heart problems."

Bliss turned and looked at him. Collins was staring up at the ceiling, smiling.

"Really? Like what?"

"He nearly had a heart attack at Camp David. It was kept out of the press, but the doctors are freaked. They ran all the tests and his arteries are for s.h.i.t. They're going to try him on some statins to see if that will clear things out, but if not..."

"What? You think he'll have a heart attack for real?"

Collins barked out a sour laugh. "I'm not that lucky. No ... they're talking bypa.s.s surgery."

"Oh."

There was a moment of silence and then Bliss realized that Collins was waiting for her to say something. She replayed the conversation and then realized what it was.

"If he has surgery and they use a general anesthesia," she said, "wouldn't that mean that you'd be president?"

"Short term ... but abso-f.u.c.king-lutely."

She turned and propped herself up on her elbow. "Bill-that's so exciting."

"It does not suck," he agreed.

"Now, all we need is an allergic reaction to the anesthesia."

"Or a surgeon with the hiccups."

They were silent for a long time, and she pulled the sheet over herself. The room was getting cool. "Bill ... while you're acting as president, I mean ... you'll actually be the president, right?"

"Yes."

"With all of the powers of the president?"

"Yup." He stroked her hair. "Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. It's just that it seems like a great opportunity. There has to be something you can do with that chance."

"Yeah," he said. "But what?"

Bliss smiled. "I don't know. But let me think on it."

Chapter Thirty-four.

Pierre Hotel East Sixty-second Street New York City Sunday, August 31, 12:25 p.m.

Ludo Monk was playing a video game while he waited to kill people. It was a great way to unwind one kind of tension-ordinary, everyday stuff-and an equally great way to ramp up for the trigger pulls to come.

He was on level sixteen of Burn to Shine, and he'd just completed the second Virus Vault level. He'd burned through two lives to do it, but the game gave you an unlimited number of replays.

The hit itself was of little concern to him. The target, location, angle, weapon, and escape route had all been worked out to the smallest detail, a process that included consideration of many hundreds of variables. Ludo had spent weeks getting it all set up the right way. He did not believe in haste. He never took a job that did not permit at least a month of planning, and preferred to have more time than that.

It was all about the variables.

Time of day, weather, wind conditions, location, angles, access and egress, distance to resources, traffic congestion at different times of day, frequency of police car and air patrols, access to multiple vantage points, availability of additional a.s.sets, reliability of those a.s.sets, training of same, events on that day's calendar for any venue within a mile, even the particulate count in the air quality report.

He was aware that some of the variables he considered were requested by parts of his brain that were less orderly and reliable than the part that generally drove the car. But that was fine. The frequency of his own madness was also a variable and it had to be considered.

Had to be.

Things went wrong only when planning was weak. The hit on Joe Ledger and Reggie Boyd in Baltimore was a prime example. That was rushed, built on poor intel, and it relied on some of Mother Night's goofy suicide flunkies. Henchmen, as Monk thought of them. Henchmen were notorious for flubbing things. Ask anyone. Read a comic book.

Monk never used henchmen. He would occasionally use a lackey, but they were different. Lackeys were for fetching and carrying, not for wet work in the field. Lackeys picked up supplies for him, had his vehicles serviced, delivered packages, and made sure he had licorice, c.o.ke, and plenty of pills. They were good at that sort of thing.

It was the henchmen who f.u.c.ked things up. Attacking someone like Ledger with a car and then trying to outgun him. Seriously? Ledger had killed more people than smallpox. Monk knew, he'd read the files. Ledger was a psychotic killing machine-or at least that's the phrasing Monk used in his head, and he figured he was not very far off. Monk would have handled that whole thing differently.

For one thing, he'd have picked a secure and dry shooting position, ideally in one of the buildings across the street from the Warehouse. Then he would have used explosive rounds and parked six shots through the windshield as soon as Ledger pulled up to the security exit. There was a three-second window of opportunity there while Ledger showed Boyd's transfer papers. It would have been a clean kill. Three shots into Ledger, and then three into Boyd, allowing the explosive rounds to turn the inside of the Explorer into a fireball. Then he would have abandoned his gear, set a ten-minute explosive charge in the room he was vacating, and been halfway across Baltimore before the debris stopped falling.

That's how it should have gone.

But Mother Night had decided to let the clown college handle it, and that resulted in zero targets being eliminated while the entire so-called kill squad was butchered by Ledger and his dog.

As he thought about that he felt something shift inside his head. The colors of the paint on the walls started shifting in tone.

"Uh-oh," he said and made a grab for his pills.

He stuffed a few into his mouth, reminded himself not to chew them, washed them down with warm c.o.ke, and waited for the colors to return to normal.

"f.u.c.king henchmen," he said to the air around him.

Monk returned to the window and settled himself down. His elevated shooting position was inside a hotel room that had two banks of elevators and excellent stairwells. Six runners-all reliable lackeys-were positioned to flee down the stairwells, each of them wearing a ski mask. Monk would simply walk down the hall, enter a room booked under a different name, and take a bath. All of his equipment and clothing would be collected and disposed of by a woman seeded into the maid staff two months ago. The equipment would be placed in a barrel filled with hydrochloric acid, sealed, and stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt among three other similar barrels, each marked as diesel fuel for the back-up generator.

Monk's cover was ironclad. He was in town for a business meeting, and was, in fact, enrolled. A superb double would attend the meetings wearing a mike so Monk could hear the lectures. He'd already watched videos of yesterday's sessions, and he would attend the closing session tomorrow. In the unlikely event that he was questioned, his alibi would hold water.

And polygraphs are virtually useless with the insane. He knew that from experience.

His team of lackeys had already prepped the shooting room before he arrived, but Monk chased them out and spent two hours going over everything. Obsessively. Multiple times. The only thing he did not do was disa.s.semble the rifle. In the movies snipers did that, but it was silly. When you took apart a gun, no matter how carefully you handled it, you disturbed the settings. Those settings could not be perfectly duplicated without sighting it again on a range. He'd arranged to have the fully a.s.sembled gun wrapped loosely in bubble wrap and brought here by two lackeys who understood his rules.

Those two were replacements for a team who'd made an error on a previous job. Monk regretted what he'd done to them, but you couldn't put people back together after they'd been hacked apart. He knew, he'd tried.

The new team was very, very careful, so it was really an opportunity for them all to grow together.

The rifle was a Dragunov sniper rifle, which was not his weapon of choice, but its use in this. .h.i.t-and later discovery-would send a nicely conflicted message. It had mechanically adjustable back-up iron sights with a sliding tangent rear sight and a scope mount that didn't block the area between the front and rear sights. Very useful and a nice piece of design work. Bravo for our Russian brothers, he thought. It fired 7.62 by 54 millimeter rounds at 2,700 feet per second, fed from a ten-round box magazine.

He decided to name it Olga.

Monk sat with Olga for a long time, explaining to the rifle what was expected of her and why it was important.

Olga listened without comment.

That was not a given. Monk had engaged other weapons in long and complicated back-and-forth conversations. His meds had changed since then, and he thought wistfully of the subtle insights of the German PSG1 and the wacky humor of the Beretta .50.

When Monk realized that he was falling into a depression because Olga wasn't speaking with him, he got up and crossed to where he'd hung his jacket, dug his blue plastic pillbox out of the pocket, sorted through all the colors, made a selection, and swallowed two pills. He crouched in the closet until talking to a rifle seemed ridiculous.

He was grateful there were no cameras here in this room. His employer knew that he was mad, but she probably did not know how thin the ice was beneath his skates. Most of the time he didn't, either.

It frightened him to realize that he was probably slipping. Or maybe had already slipped. At least a notch or two.

The woman he worked for was always looking, always watching. If he slipped in her eyes, then he would be dead. Two in the back of the head and his body run through a wood chipper. He'd seen that done to others. He'd helped do it to others, so he understood that it was standard operating procedure.

He was sad, he was crazy, but he didn't want to die.

And he definitely didn't want to become mulch.

Monk squatted inside the closet until he was sure that the meds had kicked in. As much as they could or would kick in. He'd have to up his dose soon, and that was going to change him. It would sand another layer from his mental sharpness. Dull him. Make him less of what he was.

When he opened the closet door he had to avoid looking at Olga until he was sure there wasn't more he needed to say to her.

No, he warned himself.

Not Olga.

Not like that.

Just a gun.

A tool.

Nothing else.

"f.u.c.k," he said aloud. He permitted himself five curses or obscenities each day. This was his first for today, so he repeated it. "f.u.c.k!"

The gun remained a gun.

He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

He accessed an app on his smartphone that asked him a bunch of pop-culture questions. Monk was excellent at trivia, and appearing on Jeopardy was the third item on his bucket list. He took time to consider the answers. Who was the current speaker of the House? Who played Radaghast the Brown in The Hobbit? How many Americans walked on the moon?

Like that.

He answered all his questions and got each right. Weird answers raised flags and made him want to reach for his pillbox.

He took a breath and smiled a little as he let it out. The pills he'd taken seemed to have bolted him to the ground very nicely. It was a relief.

His phone vibrated. The screen display said "Mom," which was not true. His mother had died in a fire when Monk was fifteen. It was the first fire he'd set that had taken a life, and as such it was sacred in his memory.

Nevertheless, when he answered it he said, "h.e.l.lo?"

"Things are moving," Mother Night, "but we're not ready for you yet. You need to be patient and wait for the signal."

"Okey-dokey."

There was a pause.

"Monk...?"

"Yes, Mother?"

"Don't say 'okey-dokey.'"

"Oh. Okay."

Another pause. "How are you doing?"

He suspected that Mother knew about his problems, though not about their severity. The question was layered and it contained traps both obvious and subtle.

Ludo Monk was mad, but he had been managing his damage for too long to make that kind of mistake. On reflection, though, he wondered if Mother knew that about him and was giving him a gentle nudge toward self-management.

"I'm doing well," he told her, and at the moment he meant it.

"Good," said Mother Night.

She disconnected.

Monk moved a chair across the room and positioned it behind the tripod-mounted Russian sniper rifle. He did not check the box magazine. It had been preloaded by another member of their team. Someone who had fingerprints that would be consistent with Russian intelligence.

The tripod was set up well inside the room, away from the window. There was no chance of anyone spotting a gun barrel sticking out, no chance of sun glare on the blued steel. He turned the room lights off, made himself comfortable on the chair, and bent his eye to the scope.

It took very little time to find the big picture window on the third floor. The gla.s.s was clear, the angle of the sun was perfect to allow for a crystal-clear view of the boardroom at FreeTech. Several people sat in big leather chairs around a blond wood table. Four women, three men, and a teenage boy. Monk knew little about most of them and cared even less. Mother Night had specified only one target, and Monk knew everything about her. She had a very specific outcome in mind. Actually, Monk appreciated the effect she was going for. It was so deliciously subtle.

He tucked the stock into his shoulder and closed his hand around the gun, laying his finger along the outside of the trigger guard. Across the street, 206 yards away, one of the women began pa.s.sing blue file folders to the others at the table. She was a very pretty woman. Tall, but not too tall. A bit on the thin side. With ma.s.ses of curly blond hair and a lovely spray of sun freckles across her nose and cheeks.

Monk looked at that hair. At how light seemed to move through it and change. How it framed so beautiful a face.

He wondered if a bullet would knock that hair off her head.

It was, after all, a wig.

Chapter Thirty-five.