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Buildings got noticeably nicer as the truck, picking up a little speed now, arrived at the midsixties. Sidewalk awnings began to appear on apartment houses, as well as flags and doormen outside hotels.
The dump truck had been getting a bunch of green lights at each of the cross streets, but on 60th, it went through a yellow. A block later, at 59th, it rolled on through a just-turned red, almost clipping a guy in surgical scrubs by the corner, talking on his phone.
“Whoopsie,” the assassin’s wife said in the vestibule of the bank, where she was piloting the remote-controlled dump truck with her smartphone.
Far in the distance on her screen, she could see the flashing lights of the president’s motorcade passing right to left through the Lexington Avenue intersection at 52nd Street.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she mumbled. Was she too late?
With a swipe of her thumb, she steered the truck into the center lane and dropped the hammer. In a blur, 58th Street went by, then 57th, 56th, 55th. On her screen, she read the remote speedometer. The massive truck, in its top gear now, was hurtling at an incredible seventy-three miles an hour.
It was all about math now. Math and physics, she thought as she blasted the truck through the wooden sawhorse detour at 54th Street like a runaway freight train.
Two blocks and closing.
She swallowed, her thumb down on the accelerator.
This was going to be very close.
On her screen, at the intersection of 52nd and Lexington she could now clearly see the rapidly closing white sides of the massive city sanitation trucks that were being used to protect the intersections along the entire motorcade’s route.
But instead of T-boning a sanitation truck, she flicked the control with her thumb again, and the blue dump truck suddenly lurched and moved hard left.
Straight toward the front doors of 599 Lexington Avenue, on the corner of 53rd Street.
Five ninety-nine Lexington was one of those massive midtown office buildings that are practically a whole block wide, and because of this, they have lobbies that pass through the full length of the building. Five ninety-nine Lex’s lobby was unique, as it actually crossed the block in a diagonal, from the southeast corner of 53rd and Lex to a quarter block east of 52nd and Lex.
Directly out in front of the building’s entrance, the hell-bent-for-leather speeding dump truck bounced up like it was about to do a wheelie as it smashed up off the high curb. Then, as it bucked down on the sidewalk, its twenty-five tons of rolling steel ripped through a sidewalk Citi Bike rack like it was tissue paper and burst through 599 Lexington’s doors and glass wall with a breathtaking eardrum-crushing smash of pulverized glass.
Sparks and an ungodly grinding sound roared from its steel dump bed sides as it rode the interior lobby’s left-hand marble wall. It ate the lobby’s security desk in a splintering explosion of mahogany, then continued its hurtle down the marble interior concourse.
Pouring off plumes of smoke and dust behind it like a square steel meteor, the massive truck rocketed toward the presidential motorcade, which could clearly be seen now, passing obliviously by on the side street, through the glass wall just beyond the lobby’s far end.
Chapter 92
The governor of New York’s smartphone, as well as his wife, Janet, flew forward into President Buckland’s lap as the presidential limo screeched to a sudden dead stop.
Buckland, in shock, looked down at the governor’s wife, whom he now suddenly held in his arms, and then looked forward, out through the limo’s windshield, trying to believe what he was seeing.
A moment before, there had been a terrible sound off to the left, like metal ripping. Then a massive blue dump truck had emerged, impossibly, out of the side of a glass office building on the left and punched through the pedestrian sidewalk barriers, smashing a direct hit into the dummy limo directly ahead of them.
The hurtling truck had T-boned the dummy limo center mass and flipped it up and over, onto its side, and sent it spinning up onto the south sidewalk. The truck’s momentum had carried it straight through the opposite sidewalk’s barrier, and it now sat embedded in the front of a restaurant.
Through the rising dust, Buckland could see that the cab of the truck was in flames. One of the steel walls of the dump truck’s bed had become detached and was quivering back and forth like a just-used diving board. As he watched, the tailgate it was attached to ripped free and fell into the street with a hollow clang.
“Move! Back!” screamed Secret Service agent Luke Foldager to the driver as he somehow leaped through the open driver’s partition and into the rear of the limo and pulled the governor’s wife out of Buckland’s lap.
“Are you hurt, sir?” Foldager said.
A high-pitched metallic radio twirping was coming from the dashboard as the limo began reversing, its tires squealing.
“Is Bronco injured?” Agent Kellett yelled from the front seat, not waiting for an answer.
“Hotel Seven, we have contact! We have contact! Fifty-Second between Lex and Third!” Kellett hollered into his radio. “Do you hear me?!”
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Buckland said.
“That’s a negative. Bronco is secure,” Foldager said to Kellett.
