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It was a subcompact. A small, semiauto black metal pistol with a light-green crosshatched synthetic rubber side panel on the grip.
Eddie, who may have played very realistic first-person-shooter video games at a friend’s house, didn’t have to read the P-32 KEL-TEC stamped into the scuffed black steel of the pistol’s barrel to know that it was real. He even knew at a glance that it was loaded—by the little metal comma of the magazine sticking out at the bottom of the grip.
What he didn’t know was what it was doing there. Nor did he care. His young brain was too mesmerized by the sight of the sleek L-shaped hunk of dark metal that lay there, practically glowing with coolness.
He suddenly longed to feel it in his hand. Just once. Just for a second.
“What the hell are you doing?” Brian said, suddenly at his back.
Eddie, spasming as if he’d been Tasered, dropped the mattress.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was looking for the iPad. I swear!” he said, backing up with his hands raised.
Brian went to the bed and lifted the mattress and then removed the gun, mindful of the trigger. He stared at it with a furious look on his face.
“I can’t believe this. He’d bring this here? Here! Into our room?” Brian said in outrage. He quickly left the room with the gun.
“Hey, where are you going, Brian? Dinner won’t be long,” Eddie heard Mary Catherine call from the kitchen.
“To the library. Be back quick. Promise,” Brian said.
“Oh, no,” Eddie whispered to himself as he heard the apartment door slam shut with a loud bang.
“What did I do now?”
Chapter 60
“Hello. Do you sell Barretts?” I said into the phone.
“The .50-caliber sniper rifle?” asked the dealer at Harry’s Guns for the Good Guys, of Dublin, Pennsylvania, the seventeenth gun dealer I had spoken to in the last hour.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is this a joke?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“You are aware that the rifle you’re talking about costs in excess of ten thousand dollars?” he said. “I also believe the going rate of each round is four or five bucks.”
“Yes, I heard it’s expensive. Do you have one?”
“Money’s no object, huh? Lucky you,” the guy on the phone said. “Well, no, I don’t have the gun in stock per se. But what we can do is have you order it online and then purchase it through me. See, they won’t just ship it to your house unless you have a federal firearms dealer’s license. You have to have it shipped to my s
tore so we can do the background paperwork and whatnot. Provided you don’t live in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut, which all have a ban on large-caliber sniper rifles.”
Too bad no one told the guy who had almost blown away President Buckland from the MetLife Building, I thought.
“Wow, that’s interesting,” I said to the dealer. Then I asked him what I really wanted to know. “Have you actually bought any Barretts for anyone recently?”
“Don’t I wish,” he said with a sigh. “Dealers get a tidy cut of the Barrett’s price for their trouble.”
A moment later, I racked the phone after another dead end and rubbed my eyes and stared up into the dusty ceiling of our task force’s new work space at the FBI’s midtown building at 56th Street. The first office had been drab, but this one was even more so: a small windowless cell in one of the subbasements. It had a striking resemblance to a boiler room.
Was it because we were working with the CIA now that we had to be in some secure bombproof location? I kept wondering. Would we be issued shoe phones?
This new tack in our search for the shooter—talking to gun dealers—had come from our suspect turned partner CIA soldier, Matthew Leroux. He said if he was in town to take somebody out, he’d buy all his hardware locally, if possible. It wouldn’t be that difficult, he said, if you had the proper fake ID.
That was just the thing with the task before us. We had to find a guy whose name we didn’t know. A guy who was most likely moving around a lot, paying in cash, and using fake IDs.
