He was outside in the plaza, fifty meters on the other side of the ratcheting turnstile, when he heard the yell at his back.
“Stop that guy in the white hoodie! Stop him!”
He didn’t turn around. Instead, he just moved north quickly, yet still passably casually. There were a hundred or so people moving around souvenir vendors and hot dog carts to hide among.
Then, as he reached the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue, where the elevated track was, he suddenly bolted beneath it.
He’d made it across River Avenue and was booking around the corner of the stair entrance for the uptown side of the subway when he almost ran straight into the uniformed beat cop coming at a run from the other side with his partner.
“Hey, yo! Stop!” the beefy Asian cop said, reaching out with his palm.
Instead of stopping, the Brit kept coming, and seized the cop’s hand and yanked hard, breaking two of his fingers. Then he reached and grabbed the baton out of his belt and cracked the other cop, a short Hispanic-looking woman, across the bridge of her nose. He brought the baton whistling back across at the first cop, breaking his wrist, as the Glock the guy was in the process of trying to pull from his holster clattered across the concrete.
The assassin scooped up the semiauto as he ran north up the incline of 161st. He needed to make the corner, he thought, as he flat out sprinted toward it, past shocked pedestrians out in front of the small, ugly run-down stores.
Just the first corner, he thought, his thighs and lungs beginning to burn.
The supersonic crackle of a bullet suddenly passed less than an inch to the left of his ear.
No! They were going to shoot him down in the back as he was running, the bastards!
The first bullet was followed by another that shattered the glass side of the phone kiosk on his left as he passed it.
Then he was around the corner, pulling off his hoodie, sweat flying and arms pumping in the cold as he ran for his life.
Chapter 71
Racing out of the stadium, I ran under the El on River Avenue and was twenty feet behind Matthew Leroux when he suddenly hopped up on the grass median between the lanes on 161st Street.
A woman across the street screamed as he produced a suppressed pistol and began firing right there in broad daylight at the sprinting Brit up the block.
“Are you crazy? Put that damn thing away! You’re going to kill someone!” I yelled, smacking the barrel of his gun down as I arrived.
“You’re right! I am! The president’s assassin!” he yelled back as he hopped off the median and started running north, after the Brit.
“Arturo,” I said as he and Sophie caught up to me. “The Brit just turned the corner and is heading south. You guys head south down River in case he tries to come around the block.”
People were coming out of the stores to gape as I ran up the north side of 161st Street behind Leroux. I thought I was pretty fast for my age, but Leroux was incredible. The commando was pulling away at an embarrassing clip.
I finally followed around the first corner onto Gerard Avenue and spotted Leroux in the middle of the street, already halfway down the block. Then he suddenly turned into an alleyway between two buildings on the right.
As I got to the entrance of the alley, I heard a clatter of metal and looked up. On the third-floor fire escape, I locked eyes with the gray-haired guy I’d just seen on the luxury balcony in Yankee Stadium.
For a split second.
I reared back in a kneeling dive to the asphalt as he pointed the Glock he was clutching. As the passenger window of a parked moving truck I’d just been standing beside exploded glass in my face, I scrambled out of the line of fire, to the right.
When the shock w
ore off enough for me to get my own gun out and hazard another peek upward into the alley, the Brit was gone. Instead, I saw Leroux booking up the fourth-floor stairs of the brown, rusted zigzag of the tenement fire escape like it was an Olympic event, and he was going for the gold.
Instead of taking the fire escape, I ran inside the building, through its lobby to its east side stairwell, and began running up.
An emergency alarm went off when I banged open the roof door, huffing and puffing, a minute later. Gasping for breath, I looked around the roof for Leroux or the Brit. To my right, ten feet away, was the edge of the building’s roof, the gap over a narrow alleyway, and then the edge of the roof of another building, to the north.
Had they hopped the gap? I wondered as I went to the edge, searching the next roof for any sign of either man.
I knew the answer to that was affirmative when I heard a gun pop twice on the other side of some huge AC units on the north building’s rooftop.