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He remembered it like it was yesterday. He had prepared a special dinner for the two of them—loin lamb chops and garlic mashed potatoes—on a plastic table on the balcony of his crummy first apartment, near his first post in Tucson. The balcony overlooked the parking lot of a Goodwill store, but it had looked like the Champs-Élysées seen from the window of the nicest hotel in Paris when she sat down across from h
im, done up in the little black dress she’d worn for the occasion.
Dessert, which they had only gotten around to the morning after, had been two Klondike bars melted to mush on the kitchen counter.
Buckland smiled. How long ago had that been? He suddenly thought about all of it, the summers and Christmases and dozens of birthdays, first together and then with their kids. All that fun and joy. The fullness of the life they had had because they had somehow found each other.
People talked about his heroic accomplishments, but no one knew that every one of them had been because of her. She was the one who had fulfilled his potential. He had simply been lucky enough to have found someone to be a hero for.
“I was going to use this as a way to beg you not to go to New York,” his wife said, “but that would be useless. In fact, selfish. Our country needs you to go. The world does. Putin is a wolf. It’s time he learns what a sheepdog is all about. Somebody has to do it, and it’s you.”
She took his hand and led him through the darkened kitchen toward the elevator.
“But wait. What about the Klondike bars?” he said.
“Tomorrow morning, Mr. President. We have to do this right, remember?”
Chapter 66
The bright white rectangle of the TV screen lit up in the darkness and then the video was rolling.
The footage opened up on the long gray carpet of a downward-sloping New York City cross street near the United Nations in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, east of Madison Avenue. The Midtown South side street was unnaturally clear of traffic and parked cars, and there were steel pedestrian barriers, as one would see at a parade, completely lining the curbs in both directions.
By the gold tinge to the light and the short sleeves and summer dresses of the handful of pedestrians behind the barriers, it appeared to be a summer evening. At the top of Madison Avenue in the distance, through the suffused light, appeared the silhouette of a uniformed cop with his arms folded, his back to the street.
Then the vehicles came over the rise.
A blue-and-white marked NYPD cop car came first, its flashing and blinking lights barely perceptible in the twilight. It moved by quickly—forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour. It was followed by an equally rapidly moving black Chevy Suburban, then a blue-and-white marked NYPD SUV, and then an NYPD tow truck. Behind the tow truck came another black speeding Suburban SUV, and then another, and then another.
“How many bloody cars are there again?” the British assassin’s wife said as they watched in the dark of the old office.
“Altogether, fifty-four,” the assassin said. “Shh. Watch.”
There was a break in the motorcade for nearly a minute and then a rumble began. Seconds later, in a phalanx of blinking red and blue, there were NYPD motorcycle cops, half a dozen in a loose V, followed by more and more cop cars and vans and SUVs.
Finally, a full four minutes into the video, down the slope came what everyone was waiting for. Pedestrians at the curb began lofting phones and waving plastic American flags as what was referred to as the Beast—the first of two massive presidential Cadillac limousines—barreled over the rise.
The assassin hit the Pause button on the remote.
“Right there. You see?” the assassin said, pointing behind the barrier, to the right of the limo. “It happens right there.”
“Oh…I see. That’s brilliant! You’ve outdone yourself. I can picture it now. Out of nowhere like that. When it happens, it’s just gonna be…”
“Bedlam,” the assassin agreed.
He got off the couch and went to the small washroom and clicked on the light and began scrubbing out the oil beneath his fingernails with Lava soap and a brush.
They were at the rented workshop in Brooklyn, and they’d just finished all the final adjustments on the dump truck. Everything was ready. Everything was in place. Disguises. Equipment. Distances. Now vehicles. Done, done, done, and done.
“And the route is confirmed?” his wife said at his back.
“Our contact is in the Secret Service, love,” he said, glancing at his fingernails and switching the brush to his other hand. “They know before the president himself does.”
“It can’t be stopped, then. It’s done. We’ve done it.”
The British assassin rinsed his hands and smiled at his reflection, then came back into the room. He finished the Gatorade he’d been drinking and bank-shot the bottle into the wastebasket along the old office’s brick wall.
“The toy soldier has been wound, doll. Now it’s just a matter of pushing the button.”
