Saint (16 page)

The boy was his son. Jamie.

The boy's guard put a hand on his shoulder and eased him forward, toward his father, who beamed at the sight of his son.

“What did you get?” the president asked, stopping twenty yards away.

Jamie hurried to his father and held up the binoculars.

Secret Service agents circled father and son like hens gathering chicks. Carl and Kelly had been scanned by every one of them, including the two responsible for the president's back.

Robert Stenton took the binoculars and held them up. “Fantastic!” He peered through them, past Carl, down the hall. “Perfect choice,” the president said.

Then he put his arm around his son's shoulders and walked back the way he'd come. The entourage disappeared around the corner, trailed by Jamie's dark-skinned agent, who turned and cast one last look at them before following.

Carl stared after them, mesmerized by the interaction between father and son. What was it about them that confused him?

He smiled at the guard, dipped his head, and turned around. “We should go,” he said.

“Yes. We should.”

16

R
obert Stenton glanced at David Abraham, who was watching him like a hawk. For the first time the president was beginning to understand his mentor's distress. Accepting Samuel's vision might require any ordinary person to jump through mind-blowing mental hoops, but there was a resounding ring of authenticity to everything David had just said.

One of his aides handed him a phone. “Ed Carter is on the line for you, Mr. President.”

Robert took the cell phone. “Thank you.” He walked to the window overlooking Manhattan and spoke softly to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Thank you for stepping out of your meeting, Ed.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I have a very simple question, Ed, and I want a simple answer. Is there an agency plan to deal with Assim Feroz? And when I say plan, I mean of any sort, technically sanctioned or not.”

That question caught him off guard,
Robert thought. Carter hesitated, then spoke plainly. “Not to my knowledge, no. We discussed this—”

“I know what we discussed. Now I'm being sure. I assume the bulletin that went out an hour ago was brought to your attention?”

“Yes.”

“Does the subject match anything you have?”

“We're still running the comparison against our database, but nothing on the list of priors matches. If this guy's an assassin, he's never been spotted.”

“Regardless, we have reason to believe there may be a threat to the Iranian defense minister's life. Do you know how badly this could go if he were killed on American soil during this summit?”

“I couldn't agree more. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“There is no right place or right time. I thought I made that clear.”

“A figure of speech. The security surrounding the minister's schedule would be difficult to penetrate.”

“Unless there was an inside operation,” Robert said. “But you're telling me that there isn't.”

“That's correct. None whatsoever.”

“If anything happens to Assim Feroz while he's in our country, you'll answer, Ed. I assume you understand that.”

“I don't think we have a problem, sir.”

“Please make sure of it.”

He hung up and faced David. “I don't know what else we can do at this point.”

“Nothing. You have to prevent him from killing Feroz, but you can't pick him up. Not yet.”

“So you've said.” David's explanation had taken a full fifteen minutes, laying out details that explained far more than Samuel's vision. What David revealed was tantamount to conspiracy. Their discussion still made his head hurt.

It was no wonder David Abraham had been wringing his hands for the last month.

“Are you absolutely sure the person you saw was him?”

“Yes,” David said. “I could never mistake that face, trust me.”

The president took a deep breath and set the cell phone on the lamp stand. “I have to be honest, David. I'm having a hard time buying into all of this. It's a stretch.”

“It's only a stretch for a mind that hasn't been where mine's been.”

“Well, if you're right about all of this, you've taken immeasurable risks and overstepped your place. I'm not sure how I feel about that.”

“Let's pray I made the right decision, then,” David said. “I'm sure you understand why I've said nothing about this before now.”

“That doesn't make it right.”

“Only time will tell. You can decide then whether to burn me at the stake or build a statue of me.”

17

M
anhattan offered a dozen possible sites from which Carl could kill Assim Feroz while he dined on the Waldorf-Astoria's tenth floor, but after only short consideration, he'd agreed that shooting from a hotel room would best facilitate the objective. There were numerous advantages to the protection offered by a room, chief among them silence and isolation. The room would absorb much of the sound, critical because a sound suppressor would affect the bullet's path and therefore would not be used.

There were as many disadvantages, perhaps the greatest being that most hotel rooms weren't conveniently positioned to offer a shot into the Waldorf. As far as Carl could see, there were only seven possible rooms, four of which were aligned vertically in the hotel in which he now prepared himself.

Seven hotel rooms, seven different shots, seven escape routes. But of these seven, only one was available—the one he now occupied. Regardless, it was an excellent choice. An obvious choice. Obvious because it was far
too
obvious to be taken seriously by even well-trained security personnel.

Carl sat cross-legged on the bed, staring at the round oak table next to the window. His rifle rested on its bipod, pointed at the pulled curtain less than a foot beyond the muzzle. He would wait until the three-minute mark to pull the curtain and prepare the window for the shot. He kept his eyes on the rifle and his mind in his tunnel.

Strange and wonderful and frightening emotions swam in the blackness beyond the pinprick of light that was his mission, but he held them all at bay easily enough. He didn't have to control fear, because there was none. He hadn't expected any. Instead, there was excitement, an emotion that could easily affect his pulse and by extension his accuracy.

And there was some empathy, an emotion he'd expected even less than fear. He was about to send a bullet toward a man who had done nothing to harm him. Kelly had told him what a danger this man was to the world, but none of her words mattered. Carl was simply a killer who would kill whomever she told him to kill. He needed no other motivation to please her.

Yet now, just a few minutes from doing precisely that, he was aware of this strange empathy lingering beyond his tunnel. He dismissed it and kept his mind on the light ahead.

Carl stared at the barrel of his rifle, allowing peripheral elements to stream into his vision without distraction. A four-inch LED monitor on the table captured the high-bandwidth video images transmitted from a small camera he'd positioned under the room's front door, peering into the hall. In the event his location was compromised, he would see any approach in enough time to make a quick exit into the adjoining room.

The room was warm. He'd turned off the air conditioner when he first entered in order to equalize the pressure between this room and the air outside. A part of him wished he could turn the heat up to better simulate his pit when it was hot.

He missed his pit.

But he'd left the safe world of that pit to fulfill his purpose. As soon as he'd reached the light at the end of this tunnel, he would be allowed to return to Hungary.

The light. That circle of white now beckoned him. Excitement tried to enter his tunnel again, but he deflected it without conscious thought and stared at the light.

He would kill the Iranian defense minister while the man ate his dinner on the tenth floor of the Waldorf, and he would do it with a bullet that came from the tenth floor of the Crowne Plaza on Broadway, roughly twelve hundred yards away. It would be a two-shot kill.

His first bullet would leave the hotel room Kelly had reserved for him, cross over one of the busiest streets in Manhattan, and travel down Forty-ninth Street for five blocks before crashing into a thick window. The bullet's soft, hollow point would allow the projectile to spread at first impact and blow the window inward.

His second bullet would follow on the heels of the first, free to fly unobstructed through the broken window, through an open doorway, and into a second room, where Assim Feroz would be seated.

The second shot had to be fired within two seconds of the first so that it would reach the target before the sound created by the exploding window elicited any reaction.

The strings that Kalman had pulled to give Carl a line of sight into the kill zone could have been pulled only by very influential people. Being sure that Feroz was seated at one of three tables facing the doors, for example. Making sure the doors were open. The drapes pulled. But none of that concerned Carl.

His task was to place the bullet in the target's chest at 9:45 p.m.

Kelly's soft voice spoke through his radio headset. “Four minutes.” The frequency was scrambled on both ends, allowing them untraceable communication.

“Four minutes,” he repeated.

He didn't need a spotter at this range, so Kelly coordinated the mission from the Dragon in Chinatown. Her contact inside the Waldorf had two tasks. The first was to raise the blinds on the window. The second was to make sure the double doors that led into the dining room were opened at 9:45 p.m., a far more difficult task in this security- rich environment than in any other. The server was being paid $100,000 in U.S. currency, a good payday, Kelly said.

A thousand men could hit a target at twelve hundred yards. But very few could shoot a bullet into a window, chamber a second cartridge even as the glass fell, acquire a target seated next to twenty other dignitaries through a narrow doorway, and place a bullet in the target's chest in the space of two seconds.

This was the light at the end of Carl's tunnel.

“Three minutes.”

Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds by the clock on the table.

“Three minutes,” he repeated.

Carl waited a beat. He unfolded his legs and stood. The only emotion that now threatened him was excitement, and he blocked it out forcefully.

He stepped up to the window, pulled the heavy curtains a foot to each side. A sea of lights filled his view. Times Square was two blocks south, Central Park a half mile north. A hundred feet below him, heavy traffic ran along Broadway, refusing to sleep just as the brochure Carl had studied claimed.

Two minutes and thirty-five seconds.

He lifted a black cutting tool from the table, pressed five suction cups against the glass, and ran the glass cutter's diamond bit in a two-inch circle. Three full turns and a gentle tug. The glass popped softly.

He set the glass cutout on the table and lowered the bit so that it rested on the window's outer pane.

A soft gust of air blew through the two-inch opening as he pulled the second circle of glass free. No wind in Manhattan, as forecasted. Wind had been Carl's greatest concern during the planning, but no more.

One minute and thirty-two seconds.

He eased into the chair, took the rifle gently in his hands, leaned over the table, and aligned the barrel with the hole. The weapon's smooth, cool barrel and familiar trigger brought him comfort, and he accepted it.

He peered through the light-gathering scope, quickly found the corner window that he would punch through in just over one minute, and let the air seep from his lungs.

The hot gases blown forward by the .308 cartridge would create both sound and light. The first would be absorbed in part by the room, baffled by the glass, and then muffled by the heavy traffic below. The fire would be dimmed by the flash suppressor affixed to the end of his barrel. Unless someone was peering directly at this window, the shots would likely go unnoticed.

He would escape easily enough either way.

“One minute.”

“One minute,” he repeated.

A stray thought penetrated his consciousness.
Is this just another test?
And then another thought.
It doesn't matter
.

Carl let his mind go where it now begged to go, into the scope. Into the tunnel. Through the dark passage toward that light. He walked his bullet's trajectory as he had a thousand times before.

“Thirty seconds.” Kelly's voice sounded distant.

As agreed, he did not reply now, but he wanted to. He wanted to say, “I'm in, Kelly. I'm going to kill Assim Feroz for you.”

Carl went deeper. His breathing slowed. His heart slogged through a gentle beat. Absolute peace. If called upon to do so, he thought he might be able to walk the bullet into a quarter at two thousand yards. Yes, he could do that, couldn't he?

“Abort.”

The shade was up, but the window was still dark. At any moment the doors would swing open and reveal the dining . . .

“Carl, do you hear me? Abort the current shot. There's been a change. There's a new target.”

Only now did her first word penetrate his dark place.
Abort
.

No. No, he couldn't have heard it correctly.

I'm inside, Kelly. I will kill Assim Feroz for you. Please let me do
this one thing for you
.
For us.

“Carl, acknowledge! You can't kill Assim Feroz. Do you hear me?” The urgency in her voice made his vision swim for a brief moment. “Acknowledged,” he said.

“There is a new target. Acknowledge.”

He could hear his breathing now, not a good thing. “Acknowledged.” “Your new target is the president of the United States, Robert Stenton. Acknowledge.”