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The two were an attractive pair: a weather-beaten blond guy in his late thirties and his pretty platinum-blond wife, probably five years younger. The guy reminded me of that laid-back dude on the HGTV show Fixer Upper, only he had a ridiculously muscular Olympic gymnast’s body, a slim waist with broad shoulders, and huge forearms and hands.
The couple was being videotaped with a zoom lens from over a block away by one of Paul’s guys in a state-of-the-art surveillance car that looked like a taxi minivan. The van and feds had been on them since I’d sent in the lead the afternoon before. They were also up on their house and cell phones.
“Despite the tourist getup, they look like professionals, don’t they, Paul?” I said. “Just the way they move, heads up, relaxed yet alert. Also the way they keep a lot of space between themselves, almost as if they don’t want to reveal to anyone watching if they’re actually together or not.”
“They’re operators, all right,” Paul said, nodding. “Who leaves their primary cell phone at home in the middle of the day? That’s tradecraft.”
“As was the superslick way Matthew hired Jinete in Hamilton Heights,” I said. “Intelligence service asset recruitment one oh one.”
“Though they’re trying to appear to be tourists,” Paul said, “watch how even as they look up at buildings, they don’t stumble or bump into people. You can tell they’re familiar with the area. These guys are analyzing, fact-finding. They’re in mission mode.”
“You think they’re scoping out the motorcade route?”
“Could be. Mike, you saw the shooter. Could this guy be him?”
I stared at Matthew Leroux as he walked with his wife.
“Maybe,” I said after a bit. “Same athleticism. Same build.”
I’d already read through the extensive info folders Paul and his team had put together on Matthew and Sophie Leroux from the fed databases.
It turned out they weren’t your regular art gallery owners.
In fact, they were both ex-CIA.
They’d met in 2005 in Iraq, where Matthew, a former Navy SEAL turned Special Operations Group team leader, and Sophie, a CIA analyst, both cycled into the Joint Special Operations Command.
What they had worked on together there was classified, but Paul had spoken to some people at State and speculated that they had both been ground zero in the insurgent terrorist-hunting business. For four years, they had worked side by side, gathering intel and finding and fixating and terminating jihadi bomb makers in and around Falluja and Mosul.
When Matthew was a SEAL, he’d actually earned the Distinguished Service Cross, one medal below the Congressional Medal of Honor, for almost single-handedly suppressing a truck bomb attack on a forward operating base in Bagram.
He and Sophie had married in ’07 and had put in their papers at the same time in 2011, when she had gotten pregnant with their now four-year-old daughter, Victoria. Matthew was a hick from rural Indiana, so it was Sophie who was wearing the pants in their somewhat successful art gallery biz. Sophie was a born-and-bred Manhattanite with a father who had apparently been a famous gallery owner.
They didn’t seem like assassins, but then again, we had every indication that they had been involved in the hit in Hamilton Heights.
And now they looked like they were casing the streets between the Waldorf and the UN, where the president would be driving around in less than a week’s time. It was concerning, not to mention scary as hell.
“Is this even possible, Paul?” I said as I watched them. “This can’t be what it looks like. Two former distinguished and dedicated patriots now working for some unknown enemy actually setting up our own president?”
I watched the good-looking couple on the screen as they took another picture.
“It seems weird to me, too, Mike, but anything is possible,” Paul said. “Maybe they’ve got money problems or a drug habit, if you consider how wackadoo the art world can be. Or maybe they picked up a crazy ideology. Couples do go nuts sometimes, and these guys were deep in the shit over there in Iraq. For years, all they did was eat, drink, hunt and kill people, and sleep. These people are definitely persons of interest.”
Chapter 49
At a minute before five o’clock that evening, I found myself at Riverbank State Park in Harlem, listening to Katy Perry sing about fireworks from the cranked-up ice rink speakers over my head.
“Dad, what do you think of my moves?” said my son Ricky, excited as he wobbled past, almost falling three times.
“They’re persistent, son. Real persistent,” I said, wondering if I should fetch him a bike helmet from the van.
A moment later, Fiona and Julia and Jane sailed past on their skates quite gracefully, their elbows locked as they sang along with Katy at the top of their lungs. I joined them for a few bars from the sidelines, until for some
reason they told me to stop.
“What’s the problem?” I called after them with mock concern. “Wrong pitch? No, wait. It’s my key, right? Where are you going? Wait, I can go higher.”
The annual skate-athon fund-raiser for my kids’ school, Holy Name, was officially under way. As an official rinkside lap counter, I was freezing, but it could have been worse, I knew. Instead of my kids, it could have actually been me out there, falling and scraping and clunking against the boards over the Zamboni-freshened ice.
