Bullseye, Page 2

  Instead of answering, the driver knelt and removed Rafael’s wallet, trying not to look at the hot mess that an ounce of lead makes when it’s sent traveling through a human head at the cruising speed of a 747.

  “It’s him,” said the driver, calmly pocketing the target’s driver’s license and checking his watch. “Our work is done here. Time to go.”

  Five

  They scooped up their brass, left the BMW bike out on 141st, and went out at a quick, steady pace through the back of the building, taking a garbage alley that led out onto Riverside Drive.

  Three blocks south, parked alongside Riverside Park, was the preplaced getaway vehicle: a beat-up dingy white work van with the baffling and meaningless words THE BOWLES GROUP LLC poorly hand-painted on the door.

  Once inside the rear of the van, the driver finally pulled off his helmet. He was a fit-looking white guy in his late thirties with close-cropped blond hair and light-blue eyes that were striking in his otherwise easy-to-forget plain and pale face.

  He scrubbed the sweat from his hair with a towel and then put his pale-denim-colored eyes to his stainless steel Rolex. It seemed like it was last week that they were up on Amsterdam, but the assassination had taken eleven minutes from start to finish. Eleven!

  He looked over at the rider getting changed beside him. Then he reached around and cupped her perfect left breast. Her right one wasn’t so bad, either, he felt. She turned and smiled at him, an improbably gorgeous woman in her early thirties, petite yet athletic, with white-blond hair and large greenish-brown doe eyes. His pet name for her ever since they met was Coppertone Girl.

  Coppertone Girl made a quick twisting move and then he was somehow down on his back with something hard digging into his crotch. He looked down. It was her .45!

  “I’ll do it. You know I will, you pig,” she said, her green eyes cold behind the white-blond shards of her bangs.

  Then she kissed him hard.

  And they both started to die laughing.

  It never got old, this fired-up feeling afterward. They’d walked the rope with no net, and now they were back on sweet, exhilaratingly solid ground.

  They kissed again, and then he pressed in her pouty pink lower lip with his callused thumb. She bit his thumb playfully, and then he was jumping over the front seat and turning the engine over.

  An hour later, they’d put all the gear and the van back at the South Bronx safe house and were showered and changed and rolling back into Manhattan in their new Volvo crossover. They actually found a parking spot right in front of their Federal-style brick town house, in SoHo on Wooster Street between Broome and Spring.

  They stood holding hands on the sidewalk for a moment. Nothing but the famous chic neighborhood’s incredible beaux arts nineteenth-century cast-iron buildings in every direction. The cobblestones, Corinthian columns, and delicate wrought-iron railings dusted in the still-falling snow were like what might appear on the cover of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.

  Not bad for an Indiana shit kicker, the man thought, drinking in the billion-dollar view down his block.

  Not bad at all, he thought, looking at his exquisite wife, now in a candy-blue Benetton down coat, cream mini-sweaterdress, and black leather leggings.

  He knocked the snow off his shoes on their doormat and keyed open their front door.

  “Mommy! Daddy! You’re home!” their four-year-old daughter, Victoria, squealed, a blur of pink footie pajamas and strawberry-blond curls as she ran in from the family room, sliding on the gleaming hardwood in her Nana-made wool slippers.

  “Yes! We! Are!” said the husband with equal excitement as he pretended to let his giggling daughter tackle him.

  “That was a quick movie,” said Jenna, the babysitter, bringing up the rear, holding a sheet of still-raw cookies.

  “We arrived late, with all the snow, so we just decided to get some dessert instead,” said the wife.

  “Dessert? Wow. You guys just live on the razor’s edge, don’t you?” said their ever-sarcastic NYU film student sitter with an eye roll.

  “Oh, that’s us. We’re real wild,” the husband said, laughing as he hung his car coat in the front hall closet and snitched a glob of raw oatmeal cookie dough.

  “Yep, we’re complete psychos, all right,” agreed his wife as she lifted Victoria and blew a raspberry on her cheek.

  Part One

  Hail to the Chief

  Chapter 1

  Early Saturday morning, a lone figure stood center stage in the storied culinary arena of the Bennett family kitchen.

  That figure was, of course, moi, your friendly neighborhood cop, Mike Bennett, but unlike an iron chef, I found myself where I often do when I make the mistake of going near pots and pans—namely, very, very deep in the weeds.

  I was doing pancakes, Mike Bennett–style. Well, I guess technically you could call it Ina Garten–style, as I had her latest cookbook open on the kitchen island in front of me. Unfortunately, things weren’t going very well. Poor Ina was covered in flour, and she had a lot of company. There was flour all over the island, on the stools, on the floor next to the egg I’d dropped. There was even flour on Socky, the cat, who was licking at the broken egg.

  As I stood there sweating and whisking and wondering if cats could get salmonella poisoning, I detected a distinctive aroma. I turned to the stove, where the sausages were burning in the too-hot cast-iron pan.

  Dagnabbit! I thought as the next batch of toast popped. How was I supposed to put everything hot together at once? I wondered. And how come you never saw this crap happening on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives?

  “Are you okay in there?” my kids’ nanny, Mary Catherine, called from the foyer, back from a walk with Jasper, our border collie. “Correction. Are you still alive in there? What’s going on?”

  “The making of culinary history, Mary Catherine,” I said as I hopped over the cat and turned down the stove. “Sit tight. All is well.”

  “It doesn’t sound all that well,” she said. “I’m coming in.”

  “Don’t you dare. It’s your day off, remember?” I said. “Put your feet up, relax, and soak in the tranquility.”

  That last remark was made with pointed irony, of course, this being the slow-motion not-so-quiet riot known as the Bennett household. As I burned down the kitchen, there was quite a din coming from the living room: the sound of buzz saws and laser beams, and the gloop-gloop-gloop of something dripping followed by a cacophony of what sounded like evil Tweety Birds laughing, all at 747-at-takeoff decibels.

  The older of my ten kids were luckily still sleeping or plugged into headphones, but the younger ones, Eddie and Trent and Shawna and Fiona and Bridget and Chrissy, were sprawled out in front of the boob tube, watching some Saturday morning ’toons—mind-meltingly stupid, probably magic mushroom–inspired ones, by the sound of them, brought to my kids by the fools at the forbidden Cartoon Network.

  Isn’t it hard enough trying to raise kids without edgy television execs trying to fit them for straitjackets? I thought as I made a mental note to change the parental block code again. That Eddie was worse than a safecracker when it came to unraveling the TV combo.

  In between burning breakfast items, I was watching a little insanity-inspiring footage myself. I had the local CBS news site on the flour-covered iPad propped beside Queen Ina. On it, a report was scrolling that showed politicians. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. It was a story about the newly inaugurated president, Jeremy Buckland.

  Surprisingly, I found myself liking Buckland. Maybe it was just a superb acting job, but he really did seem like a straight shooter. He’d been an Eagle Scout, a decorated war hero in Iraq one, a test pilot. The former governor of Pennsylvania also seemed smart and funny and deadly serious about making the country and world a safer, freer, happier place for everyone involved.

  His wife was a nice, pretty, black-haired woman named Alicia, and they had four kids: three middle school–age daughters along with the true star of the show, their
cute little five-year-old boy, Terrence. The kindergartner had captured the world’s loving attention by carefully imitating one of the full-dress marines at the inauguration.

  I guess it was a good thing Terrence was so cute, because the news report was saying that the prez was due in town today for a series of upcoming UN meetings that were going to clog up city traffic as tight as concrete in a drainpipe.

  “You’re up early,” I said as my oldest son, Brian, came in.

  “Yeah, I know. I heard some old guy yelling,” he said, elbowing me as he grabbed the OJ out of the fridge.

  I glanced down at my flour-covered phone as I heard my text ringtone.

  “Fu—I mean, rats,” I said, looking at it, then at the tablet’s screen.

  “Furry rats?” said Brian groggily, draining his glass.

  I took off my apron and hung it around his neck.

  “There are times in life when a man has to pass the baton to his son, Brian. I’m all out of batons, so I’m passing this spatula. Your beloved nanny is in there, and she and the other multiple members of this family are very hungry and counting on you. Feed them well, my son. Watch the toast. Don’t let it win.”

  “What? Cook breakfast? Me? I, eh, I have practice.”

  “Practice? You have a game at one. It’s eight.”

  “Um, sleeping practice.”

  “Don’t worry, kiddo,” I said as I headed into the dining room. “You have that skill down pat. Again, beware of the toast, and may the force be with you.”

  “Mary Catherine,” I said as I came into the dining room waving my phone. “How can I break this gently?”

  “Work? On a Saturday morning?” the blond Irish beauty said, wide-eyed as she gave me a look.

  I hated that look. In addition to being my kids’ nanny, Mary Catherine was also my…girlfriend? Significant other? Like everything else in my life, I guess you could say it was complicated.

  But does it have to be? I wondered, not for the first time.

  “On a Saturday morning?” she repeated.

  “It seems so,” I said as I closed my eyes and bowed my head solemnly.

  “But we were going to go skating in the park. The kids were looking forward to it. Have all the other flatfoots in the entire city perished?”

  “It’s Chief Fabretti or I’d ignore it.” I shrugged. “It’s important. Something is up, I guess.”

  “When is something down in this town, I wonder?” Mary Catherine said as I slunk out of there.

  Chapter 2

  A little over an hour later, I was in Queens, sitting in a large open room on the second floor of an ugly brown concrete-and-glass building off a service road in the south part of the small city that is JFK International Airport.

  The building was the Port Authority Police Department JFK Command Center, and outside the window next to me, bursts of white exploded up into the crystal clear air from the massive airport plows working the snow from one of the airport’s four runways.

  Between the runway and the PAPD building, there was what looked very much like a parking lot, but on it, instead of cars, were several small white bullet-nosed corporate jets, and from the planes came groups of mostly male passengers.

  Some of them were tall and slim and wore dark business suits, and some of them were tall and bulky and wore olive-drab military fatigues. Every once in a while, one of the curious incoming passengers would enter the room I was sitting in and pass on through to one of the conference rooms at the far end, where various closed-door meetings were taking place.

  The tall gentlemen were Secret Service, I knew. The guys in the suits and polished wing tips? Presidential protection agents. The guys in the drabs with the long gun bags? Secret Service CAT—counterassault team—tactical agents. From the news report I’d seen this morning, I surmised that the Secret Service people were the forward contingent prepping for the president’s imminent arrival in NYC for the General Assembly at the UN.

  What I didn’t know was what I was doing here. I was working in the Major Case Squad, not Dignitary Protection. My boss, Chief of Detectives Fabretti, hadn’t said much in his text except for me to get here forthwith.

  As I sat pondering the continuing mystery, I realized that I’d actually been in this building and squad room before. It was in 2001, when I’d been in the NYPD’s ESU SWAT A team. We’d been assigned to assist the NYPD’s Dignitary Protection squad to protect George W. Bush when he came to New York three days after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.

  I was actually right there among the firefighters and phone guys and welders in the crowd at the pile down at Ground Zero when he gave the famous bullhorn speech.

  It was a pretty unforgettable moment, the president standing on the pile of devastation, his rousing words lost after a moment in the overhead roar of the two F-16 fighter jets flying air cover around the perimeter of Manhattan.

  But the fact that I was now here, back in this room, going over that dark rubble-strewn memory, wasn’t exactly boding well. What was adding to my growing worry was what I couldn’t help but notice about the Secret Service personnel. Usually, the Secret Service guys are somewhat laid-back when POTUS isn’t around, but every one of them walking past looked stressed and tense and quite concerned.

  After a few more minutes, a conference room door opened, and Neil Fabretti stuck his head out and waved at me.

  I thought the room would be packed, but besides Fabretti, there was only one person inside, a stocky redheaded guy sitting at an Office Depot discount conference table talking on his cell. Though he was wearing a suit, he didn’t look like one. His rusty-colored hair was military short, with sidewalls the color of a Carhartt coat.

  “Mike,” Chief Fabretti said as the guy got off his mobile. “This is Paul Ernenwein, the new antiterror ASAC at the FBI’s New York office.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Paul,” I said as he almost broke my hand with his meaty one.

  “Here’s the story, Mike,” Ernenwein said with a Boston accent. “Right when Air Force One went wheels up, we got a credible threat that a hit is going to be attempted here in New York City.”

  I almost jumped out of my shoes, then just stood there, stunned and blinking. I knew something was up, but wow. Talk about a sledgehammer to the face.

  “A hit? An assassination attempt?” I said.

  Ernenwein slowly nodded his large red head.

  “It’s a long story, but an extremely reliable Russian mafia informant has provided credible information that a hit is going down now. And I mean right now, perhaps on POTUS’s entry into New York. It’s a long saga, but we actually think Vladimir Putin himself might be involved in this assassination attempt.”

  I tried to absorb that. It wasn’t easy with all the alarms still clanging inside my head.

  “But why not abort if the president might be in danger?”

  “POTUS refuses,” said Ernenwein, biting his lower lip. “Look, all we know is that Putin is trying to start up the Cold War again. The president ran on putting a stop to it, but he needs help, and he has a meeting this morning with some of our shakier NATO allies. Any suggestion of weakness, that he has to hide on our own soil, would be disastrous. He told us to do our jobs and to protect him.”

  “If it’s true that there’s a hit team already in New York, we have to find them yesterday,” Fabretti said, staring at me. “I want you as our front man in the task force with the FBI to help track them down.”

  “Of course,” I said as another whining corporate jet roared in beyond the window.

  I took a breath as I stared at it, trying to ramp up to speed.

  A second ago, I was making pancakes, and now we were…what, back on the brink of WWIII?

  This was crazier than Cartoon Network.

  Chapter 3

  Usually, the NYPD takes exclusive care of all air cover on presidential visits, but since such a dire threat was so imminent, it was all-hands-on-deck time, and every police aircraft and tactical team in the tristate area had
been called in to assist.

  When I learned about the manpower shortage, I mentioned to Fabretti that I had actually been a spotter on a sniper team when I was in the ESU. He made a call, and I found myself teamed up with a sniper from the Nassau County SWAT team whose partner was out of town. Then, twenty minutes later, I was out on the airport’s cold, windy tarmac with my overcoat collar up as a whining Nassau County PD Bell 412 helicopter touched down in front of me.

  Sitting in the backseat behind the pilot was the sniper I was there to assist. His name was Greg something Polish that I didn’t quite catch. Definitely not Brady. He was a slim, cocky, thirtyish guy with a shaved head and lots of tats. He had even more lip than ink, if that was possible. I don’t know what it was, the five-alarm stress or adrenaline or if he was just a natural-born jackass, but he started being a jerk from the very second I strapped in beside the pilot.

  “You’re my spotter?” Greg said in the chopper’s headphones. “Where’d you pick it up, Korea or ’Nam? And nice tie. I didn’t know this was dress formal tactical response, or I wouldn’t have left my cummerbund in my other kit bag.”

  “Hi, Greg. My name’s Mike Bennett,” I said, smiling back at him where he sat in the chopper’s backseat. “I know this is last-second, for everybody to get chucked together like this. Believe it or not, I worked on a sniper team in the NYPD’s ESU for a few years and know my way around a spotting scope. I’m also pretty familiar with the area around the UN. Let’s say we get the president to where he has to go, okay?”

  “Whatever,” my new charming friend, Greg, mumbled in reply.

  With that, the chopper’s rotor whine rapidly increased in pitch, and we were ascending up and out over Jamaica Bay to the airport’s south. As we stilled to a hover, beyond the fishbowl canopy I could see a half dozen other hovering police helicopters in a loose string along the airport’s perimeter.