Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

I felt incredibly bad for the both of them. Since 9/11, so many heroes in the military and intelligence services, like the Lerouxes, were out there on the front lines taking the hits for all of us. And did anyone even notice anymore? Or care?

Speaking of hopelessness, we hadn’t found the Brit. I’d gone back to the stadium to the luxury booth, where we had spotted him. But the man who had rented it, some British banker by the name of David Chester, had left. I traced him to the Carlyle hotel and then out to Teterboro Airport, only to find he had just taken off for London in his private jet.

Dear holy Pete, did it piss me off that some rich English jackwad actually knew the assassin!

Matthew Leroux’s boss, Evrard, said he was putting pressure on the State Department, which was putting pressure on the Brits to talk to Chester and figure out who the assassin was. But I knew what a load of hooey that was. If Chester had the kind of connections that a transatlantic private jet suggested, there was no way he would ever admit to knowing or consorting with an assassin. None. His lawyers would drag their asses on this like there was no tomorrow. While for Sophie Leroux, there actually might not be one.

I couldn’t believe this assassin had slipped away from me for the second time. He’d reached out and almost killed another one of us, and we still were no closer to finding him.

I was staring out at the lonely street when there was a knock on the passenger window.

I smiled as I turned to see that it was Mary Catherine. I reached over and opened the door.

“Where are you off to on this cold bitter night?” I said as she sat next to me and closed the door. “Back to Ireland? I wouldn’t blame you, you know. Heck, maybe I’ll go with you. It’s getting dangerous around here.”

“I saw the car. When you didn’t get out, I got worried,” she said.

I squeezed her hand.

“Rough day?” she said.

“Yep. Situation normal there,” I said. “How about upstairs? About the same? How’s Brian’s grounding going?”

“About what you’d expect. The surly level is even higher than usual. I think he’s got his headphones actually Krazy Glued to his ears now. But he’s home, at least. No more mysterious late-night library runs.”

“Thank God for small mercies,” I said as I reached over her and opened the car door and slid out after her.

“Did you eat?” she said as we headed for the front door of the building.

“I thought about it.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” she said with a smile. “I made fried chicken.”

“You don’t understand precisely how good that sounds right now,” I said. “Have you eaten already?”

“No,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

She’d wait for me forever, I realized as I watched her walk ahead of me to the door.

Are you actually going to make her? asked a voice in my head.

Part Four

Nowhere to Hide

Chapter 75

Noon two days later found me on Queens Boulevard, staring up at a building that was twelve tall stories of ugly.

It was a dirty beige brick seventies-style residential high-rise that looked pretty much exactly like a giant cardboard box with windows. There were lots and lots of windows. Eighty-four of them, to be exact. I’d counted them with my spotting scope three times already, looking for a rifle barrel.

Vladimir Putin had finally come to New York for the UN summit, and Paul and I and the rest of our task force were following him around. He’d just come in from Kennedy and his first stop was here on Queens Boulevard, in Kew Gardens, Queens, of all places. There was a restaurant of a long-lost cousin of his or something, and he’d just gone in with his brutish personal security detail for some backslaps and vodka shots.

It had fallen on us to stand watch and make sure that he didn’t get any of the nonvodka kind of shots to his head. Which was ironic, since we still didn’t know if he was behind the ongoing stalking of our own president by the still-missing assassin, the Brit.

“Paul, I gotta say, this international relations shit is truly pissing me off,” I said as we sat in an FBI van parked in the greasy alleyway between the Russian restaurant and a run-down funeral home. “I mean, here we are, busting our horns protecting this jackwad from getting taken out, when what we probably should be doing is slapping cuffs on him for trying to take out President Buckland. I mean, how the hell does this make even the slightest bit of common sense?”

“Mike, please. Where’ve you been?” Paul said from behind me, where he was sitting with some of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue commando guys, who’d recently been assigned to our detail. “Do you honestly believe that the bigwigs above us who run these things would deign to use something as common as common sense in making decisions? Our elite leaders, of course, use only Ivy League sense, which has had all the seedy lowborn common sense bred out of it for years now.”