Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

Good.

She cast a quick glance at the Gramercy Park Hotel, straight in front of her. Then she walked back to the statue and casually dropped the massive backpack she was carrying at its feet. She quickly zipped open the bag, making sure the flap was pulled all the way back. She scanned it. Everything looked good. Wired tight.

A moment later, sans backpack, she exited through the Irving Place gate and continued east down 20th, picking up her pace.

“It’s in place. Are you?” she said into her Bluetooth.

Chapter 36

“Just a sec,” said Matthew up in the windy darkness above her, looking down at the park and the city lights.

The building he was on top of was a block behind her, on 19th, just in off Park Avenue South. It was a twelve-story prewar office building, uninhabited, with a sidewalk shed and black mesh wrapped around its edifice due to a major rehab.

His setup was pretty sweet. There was a brick structure atop the roof that housed the elevator equipment, and he was on top of that, belly down on the tar paper behind a tent made up of several sheets of the black construction cladding.

The rifle he lay beside was one of his favorites, a precision XM24 SWS with a long suppressor and five .300 Winchester mags in its detachable box magazine. Up on its bipod, it was pointed across the park on his target at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Suite 809, to be exact.

It had taken Matthew a long, busy, and messy two hours to persuade Pavel to tell him where he could locate the man he was looking for. No one knew the assassin’s real name. Not even Pavel. The assassin was a hard old bastard who’d been around forever and whom they called the Brit. A true mercenary, he worked for the highest bidder.

And tonight, his long career was going to come to its inevitable end, Matthew thought, leaning into his rifle’s fixed cheek piece.

Matthew blinked as he looked through the S & B nightscope. It was already dialed in on 809’s floor-to-ceiling window, in off the corner of 21st and Lex. Beyond the curtain of the big window, the end of a low, dark leather couch and the edge of a huge, modern splatter painting on the wall were visible.

It was a joke of a shot, really. A little over two hundred yards on a slight left-to-right, four-story downward angle. He could have almost hit it with a pistol at that range, but it was windy. A steady ten-mile-an-hour wind was blowing out of the northwest; he needed the pop of the XM24 to compensate.

The setup was straightforward. Get him to come to the window with a distraction, then blow out the first visible, vital part of him with a .300 Winchester’s supersonic boat tail.

Matthew wasn’t the biggest fan of distractions. They worked far less often than people thought, and were just as likely to make your quarry alert as to trick them. But then again, everybody let their guard down sometimes.

“Okay, talk to me. On your call,” said Sophie in his ear.

Matthew took some breaths, then closed his eyes, just listening, trying to still himself. After thirty seconds, he felt himself become one with the building beneath him. He felt the rush of the cold wind on his cheek, listened to the high shriek of a bus somewhere in the darkness below, a car horn.

He opened his right eye and dead-centered the reticle on the window.

“Ready. Hit it now,” he said.

Chapter 37

The Brit came awake to a pulsing flash of light on the wall of his hotel bedroom. There was a low boom, then light was shaking the room as a rattle of firecrackers went off close by.

“What in the world? Fireworks? Is it some Yank holiday?” his wife said, already sitting up and looking toward the pulsing window. “Maybe it’s the anniversary of that horrid little park. It’s coming from that direction. Look.”

The assassin checked his Rolex on the bedside table.

“Maybe,” he said as another skyrocket popped softly outside the window, shivering the walls of the suite’s living room with a pale-green light.

“Oh, it’s pretty,” said his wife, who was still quite tipsy from all the wine they’d had that evening at the Four Seasons. “Let’s see if we can get a better look from the living room. Maybe the hotel is doing it. Call down and see what it is.”

“Just go back to sleep,” the Brit said. “You know the amount of work we have to do.”

“You and your work. Please, for once, would you let us have a little fun?”

“Fine.”

The Brit got up and walked out the bedroom door. Two more rockets burst in the air as he crossed to the kitchenette’s dark quartz island, where he’d left his phone.

Then two more exploded right at eye level, a yellow one and then another green. He smiled. He loved fireworks. Who didn’t? It would be lovely to hug his wife and watch them. Enjoy one of those rare happenstances that entirely make a trip.