“You’re losin’ it, a corn-fed Indiana boy like you, letting me sneak up on you like this,” Evrard whispered as he elbowed him. “You have a minute?”
Matthew closed the book on the photograph of Laocoön that he’d been studying.
“You have a car?” he said.
“Yeah, but let’s take a walk instead,” Evrard said, gesturing beyond the precarious sea of stacked books, toward the door.
They didn’t talk as they went north up Broadway. Or even when Evrard led him across Union into an old pub a block past the park.
“Ah, if these tin ceilings could talk,” Evrard said when he arrived back at the darkened rear booth with their whiskeys. “Does anything on earth beat one of these when-New-York-was-Irish joints?” They were the only ones there so early, besides the bartender.
Matthew nodded. “What’s up?” he said.
“Good job on the uptown shuffle, Mattie, not to mention your antics under the bridge,” Evrard said as he gently clinked Matthew’s glass. “You said you’d come through, and as ever, you’re a man who does what he says.”
“Yep. That it?”
“Of course not,” Evrard said, slipping him a thick envelope under the sticky table.
It was the same kind of paper as the one for Rafael Arruda. Thick stationery. Scratchy. You could feel the threads in it.
Matthew tried to hide his shock and numbness as he tucked it inside his jacket.
He had thought they were done.
He’d thought wrong.
“So he’s here?” Matthew said.
Evrard took off his glasses and rubbed at his dark doll’s eyes and then put the glasses back on.
“He’s here,” he said.
“The last of the Mohicans,” Matthew mumbled.
“The last,” Evrard said as he turned the thick glass tumbler in his big hand. “And most dangerous.”
Matthew’s eyes went wide as he figured it out.
“Wait, the president thing?” he gasped. “With the MetLife and the chopper and the cop?”
“Yep,” said Evrard, nodding. “He might have had him, too. Rumor is, in the blind there was a big ol’ Barrett zeroed in. Who knows what would have happened if that cop hadn’t got lucky.”
Matthew did the quick calculations in his head. Lex to First Avenue, little over a mile.
“Just mighta had him at that,” Matthew said with a whistle. “How did he get in, though? I thought he was in Dubai.”
Evrard shrugged his grizzly bear shoulders in his prissy coat. Though he looked like an academic, the Chicago native had played defensive tackle at the University of Michigan before he tore his ACL.
“Who knows? Mexico? That barn door is wide,” Evrard said. “It ain’t like before. Everything’s screwed up now, Mattie. Truly, madly, and deeply. Why do you think I’m sitting here with you?”
“And he’s still here?”
“Far as we can tell. But check the paperwork. You have to talk to a guy first. But you know this bastard. He’s just like you, Mattie. He likes to finish a job. You sure you’re down for this? Should Sophie be sitting here with us?”
“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.
“Coming to you,” he called into his phone to his wife.
He heard the low report of the suppressed rifle off to the left just as he was coming out of the parking lot. He looked ahead to his r
ight, down Division, and saw Yu running flat out in the street beside the parked cars and traffic. He was cradling his left shoulder with his right hand as he ran. He was dripping blood. Some was splattered on the pale sleeve of his jacket. She’d nicked him.
There was another shot, and a hole appeared in the side of the dirty graffiti-covered box truck Yu was passing. The round had landed right beside the Asian version of Usain Bolt’s spiky head.
“Damn it! He’s out of sight and range!” she said into the phone.
“It’s okay. Get out, now! I got this,” he said, seeing the drips and lines of blood splatter on the asphalt as he picked up the pace.
Chapter 31
The assassin reached the end of the block just in time to see Yu dart under the shadowed base of the Manhattan Bridge. When he arrived at the other side, he saw Yu make a right onto Pike, and when he reached Pike, he saw Yu make a left onto Henry.
Damn, the little kid is fast, he thought as he ran down Pike Street. I’ll give him that.
Two surprising things happened almost at once as the assassin turned at a run around the corner of Henry Street.
The first was a funeral procession coming out of a church right there, off the corner beside him. A crowd of mourners dressed in black stood on the corner, respectfully waiting as pallbearers brought a coffin down the steps.
The second and far more interesting thing was that Richard Yu was standing past them at the end of the short block by the subway entrance to the F train, pointing a gun at him.
He dove in front of the hearse as the gun went off. Several mourners in the crowd screamed as one of the elderly pallbearers fell and the coffin clattered down the steps.
He poked his head around the hearse just as Yu fled down into the subway.
“Hey! What you got? What you got?” yelled a jacked cop who appeared suddenly from the park across from the church.
“Ah, an armed robbery. In pursuit of an Asian male!” the assassin said as he took off. “Just went into the subway!”
“Didn’t hear nothing on the radio. You call it in?” the young eager cop said as he ran beside him, matching him step for step.
“Not yet. Just happened. Can you?” the assassin said as he took the subway stairs down two by two, trying to distance himself from the real cop.
Damn it! he thought as he arrived at the bottom of the rancid steps and saw that there was a train in the station. He heard the doors bing bong as he reached the turnstile and hopped it and dove into the car at the last second, through the closing doors.
“Yo, dude! Help!” said the cop, who was now wedged in the doors of the train car.
The assassin looked at him.
Then he lifted his foot and booted him square in the center of his muscular chest, knocking him sprawling onto the filthy East Broadway station platform. The doors rattled closed and the train pulled out.
He ran to his left down the train, through the cars, following the screams.
He ducked—there were more shots and the sound of breaking glass—as he pulled open the door to the last car.
He couldn’t believe it. The window in the door at the end of the train was missing. The punk Asian kid had actually broken it somehow and escaped!
Or maybe not, he thought as he ran the length of the car.
He arrived at the door and saw Yu rapidly disappearing in the distance in the glow of a tunnel bulb, his anime hair casting spiky shadows on the wall.
The assassin calmed himself. He cleared his mind and body with a breath and put the sights of the Glock 23 on the orange Knicks basketball on the back of the kid’s jacket and unloaded.
He watched as Yu took two more steps and fell face-first between the tracks.
The assassin smiled as the train reached the next station and the doors opened.
Nice chase, Richard. You were just outclassed, son. Professionals never quit, he thought as he hurried for the exit.
Chapter 32
Paul Ernenwein was standing beside Chief Fabretti when I opened the door of the cramped observation closet on the third floor of One Police Plaza.
“Hey, Paul. What’s up?” I said with mock cheeriness as I shook the middle-aged redheaded fed’s hand.
As if I didn’t know.
It was too bright and too warm in the tiny space. The overhead fluorescent buzzed like a trapped angry insect. You could smell and almost taste the frustration in the close air.
“This nut won’t crack, huh?” Ernenwein said, cocking his chin at Pavel Levkov on the other side of the one-way mirror.
I looked over at him glumly. The muscular Russian was whistling as he drummed his fingers on the table he was sitting at. He had looked like that ever since I’d dragged him in. Like a hapless, lackadaisical guy with nothing to do, patiently waiting for a bus.
“That’s an affirmative,” I said as I tried to roll the tension out of my neck. “I tried three times, but our Russian friend here is about as communicative and cooperative as a cinder block. Any word on your informant that he scared away?”
“None,” said Paul. “We’re up on his wife’s phone, but so far, jack. What’s crazy is we have a crack Russian mob squad, and this Pavel here isn’t on any of our lists. He doesn’t go to any of the clubs out in Brighton Beach. We even checked his bona fides with our counterintel people on Russki spies, and he came back clean.”
“Exactly,” said Fabretti. “Besides the parking tickets, he’s never so much as gotten pulled over for speeding.”
“I mean, he looks mean enough,” said Paul, “but he’s not even remotely on our radar. I can’t for the life of me think why our informant is so scared of him. Guy like this who seems so deeply connected pops out of the blue, makes me want to consider retirement, purchase some land in northern Wyoming, maybe.”
I checked my watch.
“Whatever it is, we can’t hold him forever. What do you want to do?”
Paul yawned elaborately. Then he passed a hand through his thinning orange hair.
“Let him walk,” Paul said finally, taking out his phone. “I have a team of my guys waiting downstairs to cover him. Let’s put a little slack in this dog’s leash. Who knows? Maybe he’ll lead us to where he buried the bone.”
Chapter 33
After his release, Pavel went straight to the Bronx to the most secure of his several residences.
“Eat it, you stupid cops,” he mumbled as he hit a remote on the sun visor of his Jeep. He looked in the rearview mirror as the electronic security gate closed behind him, sealing off the driveway of his property on East 233rd Street.
He had noticed at once the three-car surveillance detail when he came out of the Brooklyn impound yard.
They wanted to watch him? They could do it far away, from the street. Maybe later, after dinner and a couple of drinks, he’d go to his window and give them something to look at—namely, a good long glimpse at the glowing white cheeks of his ass.
He came up the winding driveway toward the rambling old three-story Tudor house. Its six-acre wooded lot was completely sealed in by old rusting chain-link. He had bought the place in 2001 to build a housing development, but he never seemed to get around to it.
He got out into the circular drive. “What the hell are you doing, eh? Sleeping on the job?” he said as he knelt and kissed his two Dobermans, Sasha and Natalya.
He kept them within a tight perimeter around the house with an electronic dog fence that he called his moat. The dogs whined at him hungrily now.
“Okay, fine, ladies. I’m a sucker for such pretty girls.”
He took the creaky front stairs two by two and opened the big oak door into the darkened, drafty front hall. The house had great bones, as they say. Like so many of the house’s fine appointments, the elaborate mahogany staircase had been shipped over from a French château when it was built. But the house needed a couple million dollars of work.
Originally, at the turn of the century, it had been the compound of a paranoid, apocalyptic religious
group, and though he kept it to himself, in the house at night, Pavel sometimes heard some wild, unexplainable shit. Footsteps. Doors slamming. A few times what sounded like screaming.
If he didn’t sleep with his girls, a dead bolt lock on his door, and a fully loaded Armsel Striker street sweeper semiauto shotgun on his bedside table, he might have actually been scared.
“Hey, ghosts, I’m back. Miss me?” he said to the shadows as he headed to the butler’s pantry to get the girls their dinner.
He was coming back into the kitchen when his knee exploded.
He didn’t feel it at first—it happened so fast. He was just walking toward the drawer to get the can opener, and then he was collapsed on the yellow pine floor with a bloody ragged hole in the knee of his slacks.
“Pavel, hello down there,” said a voice.
Starting to hyperventilate at the growing pain, Pavel looked up at a distinctly unghostly-looking blue-eyed man who stepped out of the shadows with a smoking suppressed H & K Mark 23 in his right hand.
“You don’t know me, Pavel, but my name is Matthew,” he said.
The sniper smiled as he squatted, getting down on his level.
“And I have a couple questions for you today.”
Chapter 34
“And the plot thickens,” said Paul Ernenwein as we stood by the nurses’ desk at the second-floor ICU unit of Montefiore Hospital, in the Norwood section of the Bronx.
Pavel had been admitted at a little after two in the morning. A cab had come to his place, and the surveil team had followed it and Pavel to the emergency room.
He had some broken ribs and electrical burns on certain sensitive parts of him, and someone had put a .45 clean through his right kneecap. Apparently, he’d been worked over by someone who knew what they were doing. Who that someone was we didn’t know, but we were very interested in finding out.
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