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He found the concierge’s number on his phone and thumbed it as he walked toward the window, the dark room glowing strangely in the billowing colored smoke and streaks of light.
Chapter 38
In the cold air rush, Matthew lay breathing evenly, watching the window through the nightscope.
There were other people now at the hotel windows, some of them taking pictures as Sophie’s pack of skyrockets continued to streak at a slow and regular interval straight up from beside the park’s central statue.
He could feel his heartbeat thump as he watched 809’s floor-to-ceiling window kill zone. The curtain. The end of the couch. The painting.
&
nbsp; “C’mon,” he whispered. “Come to Papa.”
“That’s the last one. Any sign?” said Sophie as a big rocket burst into a yellow-and-red flower.
In its afterglow, Matthew watched, waiting, finger on the trigger.
No, damn it. Nothing, he thought. It wasn’t going to happen.
“Tell me you have something,” said Sophie.
“Negative.”
“Maybe he’s dead asleep or something,” she said. “What do we do?”
“We go back to the drawing board,” he said, packing up.
Matthew was about to turn to go down the ladder when the round hit him. It caught him about four inches below his brain stem, just above the center of his shoulder blades. Its impact knocked him flat, facedown, as if somebody had yanked out his ankles from underneath him.
He came to a skidding stop halfway off the elevator housing, and he just let himself topple the rest of the way into space, just in time to get missed by the next suppressed shot that blasted brick bits and tar paper between his boots.
He smashed hard into the roof, bashing the shit out of his elbows and the top of his head and his ribs as he landed on the XM24 in the clunky kit bag. Knowing he was safe, he pulled his backplate out.
The indent in it! He shook his shirt and caught the big and still-hot mushroomed bullet that had been meant for his heart and just stared at it.
The bastard must have run up to the hotel’s roof, which was level with Matthew’s perch.
“Hey, I’m in the car. Are you coming?”
Fear hit him almost as hard as the bullet. He imagined himself running down the twelve flights of stairs just in time to see the prick lighting up Sophie.
But he calmed himself and calculated quickly. What would he do if he knew he was being ambushed? Attack or hold position? Hold position, definitely. The Brit might have spotted him, the sly bastard, but he didn’t know what kind of operation he was up against. No way would he run from cover.
“Matthew, are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said after a few labored breaths.
He looked at the plate again and shivered.
“Fine, baby. Be there in a shake.”
Chapter 39
The telescoping stock of the rifle gave off a satisfying job-well-done snap as the Brit, crouching in the dark on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel, collapsed it with the callused heel of his palm.
He hid the new matte-black Belgian FN FAL with its suppressor and state-of-the-art night-vision scope under his fluffy white hotel robe. Then, still in a crouch, he slipped silently off the darkened hotel roof, back through the stairwell door.
Padding quietly down the hotel’s back stairs in his bare feet, he thought he very well might have hit the prankster on the roof of the building on the other side of Gramercy Park.
