Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“No, we got this,” Matthew said, patting the envelope. “Believe me. This one we’ve been waiting for.”

“Not just you,” Evrard said into his Jameson’s.

“Then we’re done,” Matthew said as if he were talking to himself. “One last one, and it’s all over.”

“To the ending,” said Evrard, staring into Matthew’s too-blue sniper’s eyes as he raised his glass.

“Of a nightmare,” Matthew agreed as he clinked and tilted and drank.

Chapter 29

The assassin’s wife made a right off Pell onto Doyers Street in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and stopped and checked the address on her phone again.

Tucking her phone away into her large knapsack, she looked up into the fearsome face of a paper dragon draped in the tourist shop window in front of her.

“Oh, aren’t you cute,” she said, walking past it alongside the graffiti-covered steel shutters beneath the dirty store awnings.

Around the bend of Doyers, across the street from the Chinatown post office, she opened the door of a small, ugly green brick building and promptly scrub-picked the cheap lock on its inside door. Quickly and quietly, she went up the small building’s four narrow, sour flights and then opened the door to the roof. Directly outside the doorway was a black wooden water tower, and she quietly walked to it, ducked beneath its metal base, and knelt and unzipped her bag.

The rifle she removed from it was a suppressed short-barreled McMillan CS5 loaded with specially made 200-grain subsonic .308 ammo. She flicked out its collapsible tripod and stock and laid it on the gritty tar paper and put her eye to the scope.

Down below her was the crazy four-way intersection of Chinatown, where Bowery met Doyers and Catherine and Division Streets. She glassed up Division Street and rolled her neck and got comfortable. Then she dialed her phone.

“In position,” she said.

Chapter 30

“Okay, love. Look lively,” her husband said from the van parked two blocks east, over on East Broadway.

Hanging up, he glanced at himself in the mirror attached to the rear van wall. He was dressed once again like a cop now, an NYPD beat cop, with the iconic yellow-and-light-blue patches on the shoulders of his midnight-blue jacket and a metal badge on his peaked hat.

Knowing there would be witnesses and maybe even phone video of what was about to go down, he had a fake mustache now and was wearing brown-tinted eyeglasses. But the key to his disguise was hiding his race, courtesy of his wife’s expert makeover, which gave his skin a warm brown Hispanic tone.

“Okay, you got this. You got this. You got this,” he said, pumping himself up as he stared in the mirror. Then he rolled open the door and jumped out onto the street.

He threw out a hand to stop traffic as he hurriedly crossed East Broadway, and then crossed the sidewalk in two steps and pulled the handle of the Baijiu Liquor Shop door.

The old guy behind the counter reading a Chinese-language paper gave him a look of sheer bewilderment as he drew his Glock. Without a word, the assassin rushed toward the back and kicked open a cheap wooden door at the right-hand rear of the crowded store.

“NYPD! Nobody move! This is a raid!” he yelled as he rushed in behind the Glock.

Forty or fifty Asians, looking as shocked as the counterman, stared at him through thick smoke. They were sitting in groups of four at small green-felt card tables covered in purple-backed tiles. It was a mahjong parlor, a 24/7 illegal gambling house, one of the biggest in New York City.

He scanned faces, looking for the one he had already memorized, his target, Richard Yu.

He spotted him a second later at one of the farthest tables, a young guy with a New York Knicks varsity jacket and a mop top of spiky hair, like a crazy anime character come to life. He seemed younger than in the picture Pavel Levkov had given him.

What this girlish Asian kid had done to have a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contract on him was difficult to comprehend. But as was true for most old soldiers, his was not to wonder why.

“You, Spike! Stay right there! Hands! I want to see your hands!”

Yu peered back at him through his blade-sharp hair, then suddenly jumped up and hit a door to his right, fleeing into the back alley.

The assassin hit the edge of a table, sending Chinese character tiles flying as he ran across the parlor and through the door after him. Surprisingly, Yu was already hopping the alley fence to the parking lot when he came outside.

Good, the assassin thought as he followed at a jog. Run along, now.

The parking lot on the other side of the fence had only one way out, he knew. Right into the middle of Division Street.