Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“They’re about to bring the president out,” the pilot called back to us.

“No!” I screamed. “No! Tell them not to! Tell them to leave him in the car!”

“What’s the matter? What’s going on?” said Leroux anxiously, still focused on the limo.

“It’s Evrard. He killed Levkov! He’s the one behind everything!”

“Are you sure?”

“This is the photo of the guys who killed Levkov,” I said, showing Leroux my phone.

“You mean…”

“Yes,” I said. “He set you up. He set all of us up.”

I pointed my spotting scope at the street. Down on the corner, Evrard was looking east down 67th, then looking up. He glanced at the presidential limo as he took out his cell, checking something. Then he looked back east, back up.

“Matt, watch Evrard! He’s looking up. East up Sixty-Seventh. He keeps looking up!”

Leroux lifted the Secret Service radio.

“This is air cover one. We have a problem on the outside of the vehicle. Do you copy? Keep Bronco in the vehicle. Copy.”

We listened to the radio. There was nothing. There was just static. White noise.

“Hey, can you get them?” Leroux yelled up to the pilot.

“No, it’s not working,” he said. “Nothing.”

“They’re jamming the signal or something!” I cried as I looked frantically up 67th Street with the spotting scope. “They’re going to kill him now!”

“I see it! I see it!” I said a second later. “That white building! Farthest window on the right, two floors down! See how the other windows in the building have a sun glare on them? But that one doesn’t have any. He must have taken out the glass!”

I zeroed in tighter with my scope’s zoom. Instead of shades or blinds in the window, there was some kind of Chinese screen and a little curtain. Between them were what looked like the aluminum legs of a ladder or a painter’s scaffold.

That’s when I remembered the sniper’s blind in the MetLife Building. The shooter had been up high, near the ceiling of the space, far back to get a down shot angle on the street.

When I took my eye off the scope, I saw Leroux pounding on the shoulder of the pilot.

“Down! Down! Put me on the roof of the Armory!”

Chapter 96

Because of the raised structures on the Armory’s roof, the helicopter could only get us to about ten feet above it.

We had to hang off the sides and jump, and I went first. It was farther down

than I’d anticipated, and I landed off balance and went over onto the rough tar paper, the breath knocked out of me.

I was standing, looking up, waiting for Leroux to follow when his sniper rifle fell out of the chopper’s side door and clattered to the rooftop beside me.

What the hell? I thought, looking down at it. Then I looked up again and saw Leroux himself drop sideways out of the helicopter, crashing hard onto the roof.

“I’m shot,” he said as he clutched himself with both bloody hands above his groin.

What?! I thought. It was unbelievable. Impossible. Just like that?!

“I saw the muzzle flash,” he gasped as blood began to pool out onto the tar paper beneath him. “It was from the window, the one you spotted.”