Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“Here. Use mine, supercop. They’re a sixteen,” he said, shoving his binocs at me. “We can call off the air strike. I think we’re good.”

Just as I looked, something dropped out from underneath the rim of the massive office building and unfurled.

Greg continued cracking up as I saw the red tail feathers and realized I was looking at a hawk.

Chapter 6

In the blind, the assassin put on his noise-canceling headphones and knelt down on the wood pallet platform beside the Barrett.

He lay prone and scooted in around the humongous rifle, embracing it like a lover at a picnic. He nestled the gunstock into his right shoulder joint ever so gently, like a newborn that needed a burp. His cheek went to the cold plate, his palm to the grip, and his finger to the metal comma of the trigger.

As he always did, he first closed his eyes and tried to actually physically feel the tension draining from his body as he breathed. With every release of breath, he envisioned it as a warm, glowing liquid spilling out of his pores through his clothes and flowing over the platform’s sides.

He went through his checklist. Perfectly relaxed, naturally aligned, and oriented to the target. Check, check, and check.

He opened his right blue eye an eyelash length from the polished curve of the Zeiss’s scope, his focus and concentration tightening like a slipknot. In the scope, the universe condensed itself into a circle picture of a sidewalk guard shack, an iron fence, a circular driveway, a reflecting pool, and a bronze sculpture.

His body was perfect stillness. His mind was perfect visual awareness. He was entering the zone. He could feel it. He was dialing it in.

Flashing lights crossed the meridian of his scope as the motorcade pulled up in front of the building. The lead vehicles slowed, and the huge presidential limo slipped in through the UN’s opened gate. He tracked it around the circular drive, all the way around the pool, and watched as it stopped well before the entrance to the right of the sculpture.

The doors popped a split second later, and there he was. Voilà! Like a rabbit out of a hat.

It was the new president, Jeremy Buckland, his famous face coming out of the car, dead center into the cross of the scope’s reticle.

The assassin held himself. He was in the midst of inhaling a breath, and he needed to wait for his exhale, for that still zone between the oxygen coming in and the carbon dioxide going out, where everything leveled so he could squeeze.

He never got there.

It just happened. Something happened.

There was a bluish-gray blur in the scope, and the president was gone.

What?!

He looked up over the rim of the scope.

It was a helicopter. A helicopter had come from nowhere and was now level with his position. He hadn’t heard it approach because of the headphones.

The Bell 412 had police markings and was twenty feet out off the building’s edge, pointed directly at him. There was a cop in it next to the pilot, pointing binoculars, again, right at him through the hole in the blind. The cop was looking right into his face.

The assassin stared in horror for a moment, then did the only remaining thing he could do.

He shifted to his left and center-sighted the huge Barrett rifle onto the helicopter and squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 7

It was one of those surreal moments when you say, Wait—this is impossible. I’m dreaming.

I’d just told the chopper pilot to head in closer on the east side of the MetLife Building for a second look, when under the rim of the roof, I spotted something with the binoculars.

It wasn’t movement this time, but a box, a weird black box tucked in behind a bunch of wires and a satellite dish. The pilot moved a little more to the left, and through a slit in the box’s front I suddenly saw what was inside.

It was a man.

Behind a rifle.

He was wearing earphones over a black balaclava ski mask and black coveralls, and he was lying prone beside an enormous black rifle.