AllFreeNovel
Share Us
To the left of the reticle was the Armory’s rear doorway.
And to the right was the just-arrived limousine of the president of the United States of America.
To be precise, the scope was zeroed in sixty-nine inches up above the corner, just a skosh under Buckland’s six one height. The protective agent would come out and open the limo door and allow the president onto the curb first, the British assassin knew.
The moment Buckland stepped from the street onto the sidewalk would be exactly when he was going to drop him with a head shot. One shot center mass, just above Buckland’s left ear, would shear the entire top of his head clean off.
The greatest assassination in the history of the world, after all, deserved nothing less than a one-shot clean kill.
The preparation was over. The windage determined. The elevation adjustments calculated.
As he lay there, certainty came to him. As if it had all been recorded already in the history books.
The sniper who wouldn’t quit, they would call him. The ultimate professional. The greatest shot who ever lived.
Chapter 95
Low above Park Avenue Armory in the trembling helicopter, Leroux and I frantically did a systematic visual search of the surrounding windows and rooftops.
The president’s limo was there below us on the southwest corner of Lex. We had word that the president was still inside it. They had cordoned off 67th between Park and Lex, and the bullet- and bombproof vehicle had been determined to be the safest place for him until the situation on the street was better put under control.
It was the strangest thing. I don’t know if the attack on the motorcade had been tweeted or something, but there were now about a couple hundred people on the side street and avenue sidewalks near the limo.
Most of them seemed to be students from Hunter College, located not far from the Armory. Were they trying to get selfies? I wondered. Just bizarre. Thank God a bunch of uniformed cops from the Nineteenth Precinct, halfway down 67th, had arrived to deal with it, but it was still quite a volatile, kinetic scene.
I swung my spotting scope down to the street toward a sudden surge in the crowd surrounding the limo. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. The cops were trying to arrest some dreadlocked white boy who had gotten too close to the limo.
Now was no time for a sit-in. Where the hell were the rest of the Secret Service people to take care of this circus? I wondered. It was becoming a riot down there.
Just as I wondered it, I caught something in the edge of my scope, down there on the street. On the northwest corner of Lex, opposite the president’s limo, among the crush of students, there was a tall preppy guy in an overcoat standing beside the pillar of the Hunter College building.
It was Matthew Leroux’s CIA boss, Mark Evrard.
“Matt, three o’clock, on the corner. Is that Evrard? That’s your boss, right?”
“Yeah. It is,” Leroux said, looking down through his own scope. “That’s weird. I thought he said he was heading back down to DC.”
I had a strange feeling right then, staring down at Evrard. He just looked wrong. Out of place. Foreboding. Everything was moving around him, but he was as still as the post he stood beside.
Then something in the back of my mind shifted and knocked against something else.
This was really no time to be checking my phone, but I checked it anyway. I opened the message from Doyle that had been sent sometime in the last ten crazy minutes.
Mike, we did it!!! The link to Levkov!!! Here’s a video still of the SUV off a camera at the nearest gas station in Yonkers. Witness has already ID’d. These are the guys who dumped Levkov’s body.
I tapped the photo and nodded my exploding head.
I looked down at the corner, then at the photo, then down at the corner again.
In the photo was Evrard.
Mark Evrard with that goon of a driver I had met the night I followed Leroux from the gallery. I didn’t know why, but it was Evrard. Evrard was behind the whole thing. The man behind the curtain. Evrard had hired the assassin.
But he was here now. Why? The attempt at the motorcade had failed.
Because here and now was here and now, I realized.
The assassin’s intent was to get the president to the Armory all along. We had no time. It was about to happen.
