He knocked.
The light shining through the peephole went dark for a couple of seconds. Then the door opened. George smiled at him. "I was hoping you'd see the note."
"Yeah, I saw it. Didn't figure there were any other Ray Flukers around."
"If you had a cellphone I could have called you."
Fluker waved a hand, dismissing the suggestion. "Haven't had need for one since I got back."
George stepped out of the way. "Don't stand out there all day, pal. Come on in. And thank you so much for lugging that old thing up here."
Fluker stepped inside. Behind him, George said, "I really wrenched my back something fierce getting that washer and dryer up."
Fluker couldn't see George anymore, but he said, "Why didn't you wait 'till I got here to give you a hand?"
The apartment was fantastic. Fluker had never seen anything so nice. Like it belonged in a magazine or something. A den with a stone fireplace, a kitchen with stainless steel and copper pots and pans hanging from hooks, looking like they'd never even been used, and a balcony. Oh, Lord, what a view. Like the whole city was the back yard except that you were two hundred feet above it.
The only thing that seemed out of place was the table. It looked like it had been dragged over from the little nook where it was supposed to go and set in front of the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. A pile of small sacks sat on top of the table. Bags of dry beans, maybe? Fluker was about to ask when he heard George say, "Just set it by the fireplace, if you don't mind." George was behind him, somewhere out of his sight.
"What is it?" Fluker asked, walking toward the stone fireplace.
"It's a telescope," George said.
"Like for looking at the stars and stuff?"
"Something like that," George answered, sounding like he was standing right behind Fluker.
Craning his neck to try to see his friend, Fluker said, "I didn't know you were into that sort of—" He felt two cold spots touch the base of his neck. Like metal...Then he heard, and almost seemed to smell, the crackle of a sharp electric discharge.
Then everything went black.
Chapter 48
Jake drove. The traffic was terrible and so were his nerves as he tried to steer the big green land yacht in concentric circles around Dealey Plaza while passing by Dallas cops and state troopers at every turn. Favreau sat in the passenger seat with the Dallas Morning News in his lap, folded so that just the graphic of downtown showed. He would look down at the newspaper graphic, then scan the skyline, focusing on one tall building after another.
Jake glanced at the Frenchman. "When we first met, you said you had a photographic memory."
Favreau answered without looking at Jake. "I have an excellent memory."
"Then why can't you find the building?"
"Perhaps I exaggerated," Favreau said. "I meant it's photographic some of the time."
"Now needs to be one of those times."
"It's been three months since I saw those photographs."
"Think," Jake said.
"Son?" Gordon said from the back seat.
Jake eyed him in the rearview mirror.
"Jake," Gordon corrected himself. "He's trying as hard as he can. Extra pressure is not going to help."
Jake opened his mouth to reply, intending to remind everyone that they were all federal fugitives, driving in circles through an army of cops in downtown Dallas, barely three hours before a presidential speech, in a stolen car, when Favreau pointed out the window and said, "There it is!"
Jake followed Favreau's finger. There was more than one building. "Which one?"
"The tall one," Favreau said.
"They're all tall."
"The gray one."
The building was smoked glass with white trim running up the sides, probably stucco. "The one with the white..." Jake wasn't sure what to call them. "The white lines?"
"Yes."
It was at least ten blocks away. And in this traffic, who knew how long that would take. They couldn't afford to be wrong. "Are you sure?" Jake asked.
The Frenchman hesitated for just a second, then said, "Yes, that's the building I saw in the photograph. I'd stake my life on it."
"Good, because you're staking the president's life on it," Jake said as he spun the wheel and turned down a side street that was only backed up about halfway with traffic.
***
Fluker lay in a heap on the hardwood floor. Gertz kneeled beside him and jabbed a syringe into his neck and shot five milliliters of Propofol into his bloodstream. Fluker twitched a few times then dropped into an even deeper level of unconsciousness.
Rising, Gertz laid the stun gun and the empty syringe on the narrow console table behind the sofa. Then he picked up the plastic case Fluker had hauled upstairs for him.
The five-foot long, rugged, hard-sided case was made by a company called Pelican, which specialized in manufacturing waterproof and shockproof containers for all sorts of sensitive equipment in a variety of sizes. Gertz laid the case in front of the fireplace and popped open the four latches, then raised the hinged lid. The inside of the case was filled with dense foam, part of which had been carefully carved out to form an inset in the shape and size of a large scoped rifle, complete with room for a folded bipod under the forend. But there was no rifle inside the case. Just eight common masonry bricks wedged into the rifle's inset.
Gertz looked at Fluker and saw his chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. Getting the correct dosage of Propofol had been important. Gertz didn't want Fluker to die. Not yet. And not of an overdose. Fluker needed to keep breathing until the very end. His autopsy needed to show searing and scorching in his lungs and the presence of white phosphorous.
If Gertz had been a different kind of man, he might have felt sorry for the poor dumb bastard. But he wasn't that kind of man, and he didn't feel sorry for Fluker. He merely thought of the mentally damaged US military veteran as a tool. Just like the Mercedes, the Steiners, and the Barrett were all tools to help Gertz accomplish his mission, Ray Fluker was a tool, an easily duped tool who had thought he was doing his new friend "George" a favor.
There had been no new washer and dryer to haul up. Only a rifle case, empty except for the bricks to give it some weight. And the only reason Gertz had had to go to so much trouble to arrange for Fluker to bring the case up in the service elevator was so the security camera could record him doing it.
Gertz removed the bricks from the rifle case and stacked them on the hearth beside the fireplace. He set a potted peace lily on top of the pile. Then he closed the case and carried it into the bedroom, to the tightly made up queen-sized bed. His training in the Deutsches Heer, the post-Cold War German Army, had not left him, and he always made up whatever bed he slept in as soon as he got up, even in hotels.
He laid the empty Pelican case on the bed beside the gun it was meant to carry, a Barrett M-82 .50-caliber semiautomatic rifle, equipped with a sixteen-power Leupold scope. The rifle's nylon stock had a bipod attached beneath the forend, but Gertz would not need the bipod today. He picked up the heavy rifle and walked back into the den.
The sliding glass door leading from the den to the balcony was open, and just inside the door stood the round breakfast table. Piled in the center of the table were five sacks of dry beans, each weighing 2.3 kilograms, five pounds in the American system. Two of the sacks lay side by side, with two more on top of them, and the fifth sack centered on top of the other four. Gertz laid the rifle's forend across the stack.
What he had discovered while trying to line up his shot was that with the rifle positioned on the table and braced on its attached bipod, the downward angle of the barrel he needed to use to align the muzzle with the target would not clear the balcony railing. The railing was several inches too high to shoot over. So he had bought sacks of beans to build up his shooting platform. First he tried three, but the rifle still wasn't quite high enough to shoot over the railing. So he bought two more. Now the angle was per
fect.
There were several other important tools on the table: his Steiner 15x80 binoculars, now mounted on a small tripod with telescoping legs and adjusted to hold the binoculars at the approximate height and angle of the rifle's scope; a digital stopwatch; a walkie-talkie, the kind you could pick up in a double-pack at Radio Shack; and a Heckler & Koch USP 9mm pistol.
Gertz pulled a chair over to the table and stacked two sofa pillows on the seat. Yet another thing he had discovered about his shooting position was that with the rifle resting on the sacks of beans and elevated a foot above the table, even at six feet tall he could not comfortably raise his eye to the scope while seated in one of the chairs.
For any precision shot, and particularly one at extreme range, like the one he was about to make, his body and the rifle had to work as one. Every muscle needed to be relaxed. He had to mold his body around the rifle. Tension anywhere, in his back, his neck, his arms, even his fingers, could move the muzzle a millimeter off its true aim, and even a single millimeter off at the muzzle equated to being off target several feet once the bullet traveled fifteen hundred meters downrange. That was why preparation was so important. There was no such thing as luck. There was only prepared and unprepared.
Gertz sat on top of the pillows in the chair and pressed his eyes to the binoculars. He moved them slightly, then adjusted the focus ring to bring into clear relief his target area, which was only three hundred feet short of a mile away. A long shot even with this amazing rifle. And under difficult conditions. He took a deep breath, held it, then let half of it out. He felt a calmness seep over him. Then he let his eyes fix on the double glass doors at the back of the Dallas County Administration Building, the same building that had once been known as the Texas School Book Depository.
Chapter 49
Jake slammed the pimp mobile to a stop in the fire lane in front of the high-rise apartment building. He looked at Favreau in the passenger seat, then glanced in the rearview mirror at Gordon and Stacy. Stacy was looking out the side window, craning her neck to see the top of the high-rise. "That's a big building," she said.
Turning back to Favreau, who was also staring up at the building, Jake said, "You sure about the apartment?"
"I'm sure the number two-two-zero-five was written on the photograph of this building," Favreau said. "But I'm not sure what it meant. Maybe an apartment...maybe not."
Jake too looked up at the tall building. How many apartments were there in that thing? "It's all we have to go on."
"Beggars can't be choosers, right?" Stacy said.
Jake nodded. "Exactly."
They climbed out of the Cadillac.
Jake led them across a concrete patio and through a revolving door into the lobby. They stopped for a moment to get their bearings. Straight across the lobby stood a bank of elevators. To their right a security guard sat behind a long counter. He was an older man with thick gray hair swept back from his forehead and a neatly-trimmed cop mustache. The guard glanced up from something he had been looking at behind the counter. "Can I help you?" he said.
Jake heard the low-volume drone of a television and noticed the top of a flat screen TV peeking up over the short parapet that ran along the front edge of the counter. The TV sounded like it was tuned to a news broadcast. "No, thanks," Jake said. He started walking toward the bank of elevators. The others followed.
"Excuse me," the guard said.
Jake ignored him, but in his peripheral vision he saw the guard, almost certainly a retired cop, jump to his feet, and heard him say again, much louder this time, "Excuse me."
Still ignoring the security guard, Jake punched the elevator's UP call button.
"You have to sign in, sir," the guard said.
The ding of a bell announced the arrival of an elevator car. When the door opened, Jake pulled the others inside and jabbed the button for the twenty-second floor. As the door closed, Jake saw the guard pick up a telephone.
***
Sitting at the breakfast table, Gertz breathed in, held it, then breathed out. Total relaxation, that was the key to making a good shot. And today he needed to make a great shot. He checked his watch. The president was scheduled to speak in two and a half hours. Gertz allowed himself a tiny smile. His preparation had paid off. Everything was in place and ready. Exactly as it should be. He glanced at Fluker. Still unconscious and still breathing. Perfect.
***
The elevator stopped and the bell dinged again. The floor counter showed '22'. Jake glanced at his companions. The door opened. "Okay," he said and stepped out. Favreau, Gordon, and Stacy followed. Behind them the elevator door closed.
They stood in a long hallway lined with apartments. The carpet, the paint, the art were tasteful and expensive, as befits a luxury apartment building. For an instant Jake thought about the somewhat rundown apartment in the slightly seedy part of Washington, DC, that he shared with Chris Stanley. Used to share with Chris Stanley was more like it, he thought. He wondered what Chris was doing now? Probably helping track me down.
"Jake?" Stacy said.
It snapped him back to the here and now. He turned to her.
"Everything okay?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said, then smiled. "Peachy. How about you?"
She smiled back. "Peachy."
"I was just thinking about Chris. And all that's happened in the last...What's it been, two days?"
She nodded. "I know. But if we're right, we're going to stop an assassin and save the president."
"Then what?" Gordon asked. "You think he'll pardon us?"
"You haven't done anything illegal," Jake said. "Stacy either. I'll make sure they know that."
"Let's find the shooter before we start passing out pardons," Favreau said. He pointed to a brass plaque with arrows indicating the way to different series of apartment numbers. He nodded to the left. "This way." Then he led them down the hall.
The fifth door on the right bore a small brass plate beneath the peephole that read 2205. Jake motioned the others to stand on either side of the door, just as he'd been taught at the FBI Academy. Standing directly in front of the door was a good way to catch a bullet or a shotgun blast in the gut, his instructors had told him and his classmates during their training on how to property execute search and arrest warrants. Jake had never actually executed a warrant before, search or arrest, but this situation was pretty close to it, so he figured he would soon found out just how much of that training had sunk in.
Jake slid a Beretta pistol from under his jacket. Favreau drew another Beretta. Jake had stashed both pistols in the trunk of the Caddy when he thought they might have to walk through the security perimeter set up around Dealey Plaza, but since their plan-if it could even be called a plan-had changed from simply trying to spot the shooter and reporting his position to the local police or Secret Service to actually finding the shooter themselves and...and what? Arresting him? Killing him? Jake wasn't sure. They would have to play that part by ear. A lot would depend on what the German did once they found him.
But since the change of plans, Jake had dug the guns out of the Cadillac and given one to Favreau, still self-aware enough to appreciate the irony that he, Mr. Law and Order, Mr. Straight-as-an-arrow, Mr. By-the-book FBI agent, was handing a loaded gun to an international fugitive and confessed presidential assassin. There actually was a federal law on the books that made it a ten-year felony to give a gun to a fugitive.
So that was yet another crime he would have to answer for, this time probably to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which enforced the nation's firearms laws. But maybe if he bagged the German shooter and saved the president, the Department of Justice would have to cut him some slack. Then again, he had broken about a thousand laws in the last two days, so maybe DOJ's idea of slack would be fifteen years at Leavenworth instead of thirty.
Stacy pulled a Glock from under her jacket, the same Glock Jake had handed to her in the motorhome, the same one he'd used to shoot a man in the
throat. Jake stared at her. She was an analyst, not a field agent. She met his stare. "We're talking about the president's life."
Jake nodded. Then looked again at the brass number plate on the door, 2205. He glanced at Favreau and whispered, "You sure about the number?"
The Frenchman shrugged. "Pretty sure."
Jake shook his head, then glanced at Stacy and Gordon. "Ready?"
They nodded together.
Stepping squarely in front of the door, Jake shifted his weight to his left foot so he could kick with his right. Only in movies and on TV did cops try to break down doors by slamming their shoulders into them. Real cops kicked doors open. "Like the lady said," Jake mumbled, "we're talking about the president's life."
Then he took a deep breath and raised his right foot.
***
Gertz set the butt of the rifle down on the table and stood up to stretch his back. A quick glance verified that Fluker was still out cold and still breathing. Gertz unlatched the binoculars from the small tripod and stepped around the table to the threshold of the sliding glass door.
Chapter 50
"It was almost like one of those out-of-body experiences. I saw myself doing it, but at the same time I felt like I was watching it from a distance. Like it was on TV. I just knew I was going to go through that door and save the president. But, of course, that didn't happen."
***
Jake drove his right foot against the door two inches to the inside of the knob. Perfect placement. And putting all of his 180 pounds behind it. The frame splintered as the door burst open. He charged into the apartment. Favreau followed quick on his heels with Stacy behind him and the unarmed Gordon trailing.
The Second Shooter Page 21
