Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“Okay. Maybe you can help bring me up to speed on all of this,” she said, gesturing at the collage of printouts and photographs.

“Basically, the morning the president came to the UN, the FBI New York office got a call from a confidential informant,” Paul said as he sat down.

“Our counterintel division has had a pretty high-up guy in the Russian embassy for years who we trust. He told us six months ago that he had heard a rumor that a big hit was about to go down in the States and that it was being authorized by the Russian government. But he didn’t know the target. Then, the morning of the president’s visit, he called, frantically saying he had just found out it was the president.”

“That’s insane. Just incredible,” Foley said. “Do the Russians want a world war? Who’s the shooter supposed to be? A Russian?”

“No, we think the Russians probably opted for a professional killer for hire,” Paul said. “Why bring one of your own people in when you can use a world-class sniper turned mercenary?”

“Where did you come into all this, Mike?” Foley said, turning toward me.

“I was put on a task force with Paul’s guys on the morning of the president’s arrival to find the shooter. It didn’t take long. I was part of the aerial countersniper surveillance covering the presidential motorcade coming in from Kennedy, and as we came into Manhattan with the motorcade, I spotted something under the lip of the MetLife Building.”

“The sniper’s blind,” Foley said, tapping the crime scene photos on her board that showed the blind. “Okay. So you crash-land on the roof and attempt an arrest, but the assassin shoots the cop with you and escapes. Then what happened?”

“Our Russian confidential informant from the embassy went missing,” Paul said. “But not before he gave us a lead on a guy named Pavel Levkov.”

“Levkov,” Foley said, pointing to a picture of him. “That’s the guy who was shot in the kneecap?”

“One and the same,” I said. “We think he was the shooter’s handler. We also think that we’re not the only ones looking for the shooter.”

“Who’s the guy, Kuznetsov, that you picked up yesterday? How does he fit in?”

“Kuznetsov’s the head of the Russian mob in New York,” I said. “We found his number on Levkov’s phone. What makes things even more interesting is that Kuznetsov also has ties to Russian intelligence. He has an older brother in the GRU, the Russian army’s military intelligence.”

“So more Russians again,” Foley said, shaking her head.

“We figure maybe that Kuznetsov got the order from the Kremlin to do the hit, then hired Levkov as a middleman to hire an assassin,” I said.

“It’s a theory, at least,” Paul said with a shrug. “We actually had a talk with Kuznetsov last night, but his lawyer sprung him after ten minutes of getting nowhere. We have surveillance on him and Levkov, so hopefully something will break.”

“What’s the deal with the president?” I said, peeking out the meeting room’s blinds.

I looked up at a jaw-dropping view of the Empire State Building two blocks northwest, then back at Foley. It was getting cloudy now, darker, threatening to snow.

“Is he actually coming back for this next round of UN meetings?” I said.

Margaret Foley popped the cap back on the marker.

“We advised against it, of course, since this shooter might very well still be around,” she said.

She clicked the marker to the magnetic whiteboard and crossed her arms.

“But the president insists. He’s stubborn,” she said.

“Stubborn,” Paul said as he drummed his fingers on the table.

“Sounds like our job just got a whole lot harder,” I said.

Chapter 45

The British assassin entered the Holland Tunnel from Manhattan to New Jersey at a little after twelve noon.

It began to snow lightly when he came out of the tunnel. He turned up the h

eat in the rental car, a Chevy Camaro LS, which he thought would be crap, but it was actually surprisingly nice, fast, comfortable, and quiet.

He drove through Jersey City and got off I-78 before the Newark Bay Bridge. At a Shell station on the opposite side of the exit ramp, he stopped and went in and bought a cold bottle of raspberry-lime seltzer that he drank as he checked the address again on his phone.