Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

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 assassin 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 button for the basement 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 basement. He was gaping wide-eyed at the Springfield the assassin held openly by his leg.

“Listen up,” the assassin 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 basement 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 assassin 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 assassin 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 antiterror 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 hell 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 skyscraper 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 bastard Kask said, not looking very so