Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

In the glow of the paused screen image, the assassin’s wife pulled off her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She lay back on the couch, staring at him with her feline-gray eyes.

As he watched her slip out of her jeans, the British assassin imagined the new Italian Racing Red Jag XFR-S he was going to buy when the final payment came. The rumble of its five-hundred-plus horsepower under his palm. The way it would drift on the hairpins above the Mediterranean.

“Then what are you waiting for?” his wife said in the glow. “Push away.”

Chapter 67

It was Saturday, and down on the field, a bunch of thin dudes in baby-blue uniforms milled around another crew of skinny guys wearing all-white uniforms.

The crowd around me suddenly roared as a light-blue guy with girlie hair booted the ball with a loud champagne-cork-popping sound. The spinning ball made a surprisingly sharp curve through the air as it streaked for the top right corner of the goal. Then the crowd groaned as the ball banged off the goal’s top bar and spun out-of-bounds.

As I watched the slo-mo replay of the corner kick up on the massive Jumbotron above Yankee Stadium’s center-field wall, I couldn’t decide which was more surprising: that I was actually at a professional soccer game or that the soccer game was sacrilegiously occurring down on the hallowed outfield grass of my beloved Bronx Bombers.

“Gee, get out of here. There wasn’t a goal made?” I said sarcastically to Arturo, beside me.

We were standing in the cold of the open terrace-level seating, just below the stadium’s upper deck on the third base side. Around us, a crowd of about thirty thousand surrounded the improvised soccer field, set up foul pole to foul pole in the baseball stadium’s outfield.

“Tell me, is there ever a goal in soccer?” I said. “Or is zip-zip the point? Is it, like, a Zen thing?”

“Soccer no longer exists, Mike,” Arturo said as he lifted his binoculars. “It’s called football now, and it’s the world’s sport, so get into it.”

“Oh, I do, Arturo,” I said, lifting my own binocs. “But only when it’s played properly, on Sundays by men with upper body strength who wear helmets.”

I was on my way home from another fruitless day of not finding the assassin the night before when Arturo had called me. Arturo, a soccer fan, had heard on the radio about the Saturday exhibition match between the new New York City Football Club and a team from England called Leeds United.

Leeds United, as it turned out, was a team from northern England.

Precisely where our shooter was supposed to be from.

Coming here this afternoon with Arturo to look for him was a long shot, I knew. Under normal circumstances, I’d say there was probably no chance in hell that a public enemy number one on the run would do something as nuts as pop by and cheer on his home team.

But then again, this was no normal crook.

I’d been studying up on these warrior sniper types, and the thing about them was, although they were extremely precise and patient, they truly had no problem with risk. Things like grenades without pins, tightropes with no nets, and jumping out of perfectly good aircraft were for some reason incredibly alluring to them. Risk was how they got their rocks off.

Also a plus point—probably the only one—was that the CIA had actually dug up another, slightly better photo of the Brit, standing in the crowd at some Middle Eastern market. He was wearing aviator sunglasses, but the shape

of his nose and ears and jaw were clear. Better than that, the smug frown on his face and the way he held himself, with a kind of shoulders-back, arrogant swagger, were quite distinctive.

I studied the photo for the thousandth time, the features, the demeanor and carriage. Then I lifted my binoculars and went back to scanning the crowd. If he was here, we could find him.

Maybe.

I panned over the sea of baby blue. Though the mostly male crowd jumped up and down a lot and did weird chants as they drank beer, they struck me as, rather than violent Euro hooligans, clean-cut fellows who had probably played soccer in high school and college. Good-natured enough. Well, except for the idiots who insisted on constantly blowing those stupid head-splitting vuvuzela horns that sounded like bees buzzing.

After another minute of not finding the needle in the haystack, an air horn went off near us at an eardrum-perforating volume as another baby-blue guy failed to kick the ball into the goal.

“Take me out to a real ball game,” I sang under my breath as I put my Nikon binocs back up on my eyes.

I saw it a nanosecond later. I aimed the glasses down on the main level almost directly by first base and kept them there.

“No,” I said, spinning the target into focus. “No.”

“What is it, Mike?”

“C’mon,” I said as I jogged up the stairs for the concourse. “Hurry up!”

Chapter 68