Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (8 page)

And no wonder Arturo was freaking out. The mayor had been rushed to Columbia Presbyterian, but everyone knew he was dead. First a bombing and now an assassination? We were in a new territory of spooky, and the adrenaline couldn’t have been running higher.

“What did you just say?” said Brooklyn Kale from the backseat. “The media? What are you talking about, Lopez?”

“Exactly, Arturo,” said Doyle, sitting beside her. “When you open your mouth, it would be nice if you maybe made some sense from time to time.” Jimmy Doyle, another young cop from the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, had become my right-hand man.

“Use your brains, fools,” Arturo insisted. “The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody’s attention.

“Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field.”

“So don’t tell people there’s terrorism? That’s your solution?” said Brooklyn.

“How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?” Arturo said. “This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin’ popcorn.”

“Congrats, Arturo,” Doyle said as we skidded to a stop in the driveway of the Haven Avenue building’s underground parking garage. “I think you actually might have made your first-ever good point.”

“Shut up, people, please,” I said, turning up my radio as a just-arriving NYPD helicopter swooped in from the south and hovered over the building.

“There’s something on the east side of the building,” the pilot said after a minute. “It looks like some sort of a rifle.”

The ESU cops spilled out into the driveway and busted out their ballistic riot shields and submachine guns. We stayed behind them as we went across the pavement toward the side door of the building. Having neither the time nor the inclination to find and ask the super for the key, the ESU breach team unhesitatingly cracked the door open with a battering ram.

After dismissing the elevators as dangerous because of potential tampering, the ESU guys left a small contingent in the new building’s sleek marble lobby as the rest split up into the building’s two stairwells.

My team and I followed the ESU team in the north stairwell. Despite being pumped up with adrenaline, we had to stop twice for short breathers to get up the thirty-two floors.

We were the first team there. An alarm went off as the lead ESU guy hit the roof door, and we were out in the suddenly cool air with the roaring, hovering NYPD Bell helicopter right there almost on top of us. The pilot pointed to the top of a little structure that housed the elevator equipment.

I ran across the tar paper to its ladder and climbed up and just stood there staring at it.

I’D NEVER SEEN
anything like it before. I wasn’t an expert, but the long black rifle looked huge, like a sniper rifle, perhaps a .50 caliber. It was bolted into two strange, bulky stands that could have been motorized.

But the strangest thing was what was attached to the top of the rifle. Perched where the scope should have been was a bulky device about the size of a hardcover book that looked like a robotic owl. It had a single viewfinder in the sighting end and what looked like greenish-tinged binoculars in the front.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said ESU sergeant Terry Kelly as he arrived behind me.

“What the hell is it?”

The short, muscular cop spat some chewing tobacco as he knelt and carefully tilted the gun over on its side.

“One of those damn things!” he said. “On a .50-caliber Barrett! Of course. Why not? It’s like the training video said. Only a matter of time.”

“What are you talking about, Sergeant?” I said.

“We saw a Homeland Security video about this three weeks ago,” Kelly said. “See this scope thing on top? It’s a computerized targeting system. It has a laser range finder in front, like rich golf guys have to get exact distances.”

I nodded.

“Well, you get behind it and sight your target through the system’s long-range zooming video camera and just tag it with the laser. Then the computer calculates all the factors of the shot—the air density, Magnus effect, even target movement—and puts them through the computer. Then the computer—not you—robotically positions the gun and fires it.

“Anyone, a three-year-old child, can become a world-class sniper with it. All you have to do is tag the target. What am I saying? You don’t even have to be behind the gun! It has Wi-Fi.”

“So this was probably done remotely,” I said.

“Without a doubt,” he said. “Why expose yourself on a rooftop when all you have to do is set the gun up beforehand and just do it from cover? All you would need is to be within Wi-Fi range.”

“Call the other team and tell them to go straight to the top floor,” I told him. “We need to get the super up here and start searching every single apartment.”

We rushed off the roof and down onto the thirty-second floor and started banging on doors like it was Halloween for cops. Only three of the residents were home. After we were done searching their apartments, the super, a tall, middle-aged guy who looked like a stoner, finally showed up in a brown bathrobe, holding a set of keys.

“Listen, man,” he said, “I’m still waiting to hear back from the management office. I don’t even know if I should be letting you into people’s apartments. Don’t you need a warrant or something?”

“Tune in, bro,” Kelly yelled in his face. “While you were busy watching
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
, the mayor just got blown away with a rifle we found on your roof.”

“What? Okay, okay. Give me a second,” he said, fumbling with the keys.

One by one, we searched seven apartments, but there was nothing.

“What about this apartment?” I said to the super. “Where’s the key?”

“Uh…that one’s vacant,” the stoner said. “It’s for sale, so I don’t have the key. The management company has it, I think.”

“Don’t worry about the key,” said Kelly as he led the way, holding the battering ram. “Fortunately, we brought our own.”

The ESU men blasted open the door of 32J and rushed inside.

When they gave the all-clear and we went in, the first thing I noticed was the shattered living room window. The second was the skinny guy with a gray ponytail sprawled out in front of the kitchen’s breakfast bar with the top of his head missing. There was an iPad beside him.

I turned and looked west, out through the broken window at the Hudson.

On the Jersey side of the river, about a mile away, there was another high-rise.

Where someone else had shot the mayor’s shooter with another computerized rifle, I thought. I would have bet my paycheck on it.

This isn’t good, I thought as I radioed aviation to hit the roof of the building on the Jersey side to see what they could see.

“Mike, you really think this is the guy who killed the mayor?” asked Brooklyn as she stood over the body.

I nodded.

“And who killed him?” asked Arturo.

I stared out the window as the chopper appeared overhead on its way across the Hudson. The sound of the rotors was almost deafening through the broken glass.

“The nut job who’s trying to show us how smart he is,” I yelled.

AT EXACTLY 1:23 P.M.,
thirty-seven minutes after the mayor’s assassination, a hundred blocks almost directly south, a white delivery van turned west onto 81st Street from York Avenue on Manhattan’s famous Upper East Side.

“Dude, four-two-one. That’s it. Up there,” said the preppy white college kid in the van’s passenger seat.

The handsome young Hispanic driver beside him squinted ahead out the windshield.

“That old church there?” he said.

“No, stupid,” said the white guy. “The church? How we gonna put it on the pointy roof of a church?
Next
to the church there. That crappy white brick building.”

The white guy’s name was Gregg Bentivengo. His handsome Hispanic buddy was Julio Torrone. They were recently graduated New York University students, now roommates and partners in a start-up marketing and promotional firm they’d dubbed Emerald Marketing Solutions.

“A church?” Gregg said again, rolling his eyes. “There’s even a picture of the building on the instructions. Didn’t you see the picture of it?”

“That’s your job,” Julio said, coming to a dead stop as a green pickup two cars ahead parallel-parked. “You’re the navigator, bro. I’m the pilot. Where should I park us, anyway? This block is jammed.”

“Too bad we didn’t pick one of those blocks where it’s easy to park,” said Gregg, rolling down his window and sticking his head out. “The building’s got an underground garage. Maybe they’ll let us leave the van off to the side in the driveway there for a second while we unload. You know, I would have asked for more if I’d known how bulky these damn things are. Plus they weigh a ton.”

“You can say that again. I’m not lugging it across the street again, especially the way you almost let it bail when we were getting it over the curb.”

“
I
almost let it bail? I beg to differ, my friend.
You’re
the one who didn’t tighten the hand truck’s strap,” Gregg said as he rolled the window back up and removed a small navel orange from the pocket of his white North Face shell.

Gregg was always doing that, thought Julio, annoyed. Grossly hoarding food in his pockets like a squirrel or something. Peanuts, little candies. Drove him nuts all through school.

“Besides, you’re the muscle in this little caper,” Gregg said as he began peeling. “I’m the sweet-talking, persuasive guy.”

“The what?” Julio said. “You were tripping over your tongue with the concierge mama at the last place so much I thought you were doing an impression of that ‘That’s all, folks’ pig dude in that old-timey cartoon.”

“Screw you,” Gregg said, flicking a piece of orange peel at him. “When she looked up, she was so hot that I got a little startled is all. I was lovestruck. Besides, I recovered quick enough.”

“That’s true,” said Julio, smiling. “I almost pissed myself laughing when you told her it was the new flux capacitor for the roof, and she was like, ‘Oh, okay, elevator back to your right.’”

“Hey, you know my motto. If you can’t bowl them over with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit.”

“Hey, traffic’s moving now,” Julio said. “Let’s get this over with.”

It was even easier than the last drop. The middle-aged Asian guy at the garage must have been new or something, because not only did he let them park in the driveway, he also let them into the side door of the building with his key without calling the super or even seeming interested in what the hell they were doing there.

It took them exactly eleven minutes to position the green metal box that was about the size and weight of a large filing cabinet on the southeast corner of the six-story building’s roof, as per the instructions.

It must have some internal battery or something, Gregg thought idly as they were leaving the roof, because, like the first metal box they’d dropped off at the hotel on Lexington and 56th, it didn’t need to be plugged in or turned on or anything.

“What do you think they are, anyway?” Julio said as they got back into the van.

“Weren’t you listening? They’re carbon meters,” said Gregg, picking up the half-peeled orange he’d left on the dashboard. “The clients are environmental activists who want to take readings of this one-percent-filled area but were denied by the city and the building boards. Enter us, underground marketing heroes extraordinaire, to the rescue.”

“Carbon meters, my ass,” Julio said. “Whoever heard of a freaking carbon meter?”

“Do I know?” said Gregg. “You can call it a fairy-dust-reading meter if you give me five grand cash to sneak it onto some dump’s roof.”

“Probably some sketchy guerrilla data-collection thing hoovering up the whole block’s passwords and data or monitoring people’s online porn habits,” Julio said.

“I peg this guy for a hot Asian nurses fan,” Gregg said as the stupid parking attendant gave them a friendly wave and they began to back out onto the street.

“Who knows?” Julio said after they were rolling. “Maybe our clients are NSA.”

“I doubt those two bastards were NSA,” said Gregg.

“They were definitely bastards, but smart ones,” Julio reminded him. “Don’t forget, nerdy NSA types are computer geniuses and shit.”

“Right,” Gregg said skeptically. “You play too many video games.”

“True,” Julio said. “Anyway, it’s done. What do you want to do now? Hit the gym?” asked Julio.

“Too early,” Gregg said. “Pizza?”

“Okay, but then we need to get this truck back or we have to pay for eight more hours.”

HOME FINALLY, AND
still damp from a glorious hot shower, I plopped my tired carcass down at the head of the dining room table at around 7:30 p.m.

I was clad in a pair of orange swim trunks and a Yankees number 42 Mariano Rivera jersey, which worked better than you might think as a pajamas ensemble. Actually, my atrocious getup was the only thing I could find now that the laundry was piling up at an alarming rate. I was down to the bottom of the drawer and would be staying there, no doubt, for the time being.

My hastily put-together late dinner for
la familia
Bennett was French toast, one of my go-to dishes. I’d offered to get pizza again, but the kids were pizzaed out and demanded a home-cooked meal. They had probably meant a home-cooked
dinner
, but too bad for them—they hadn’t specified. They seemed to enjoy it well enough, or at least they enjoyed my wise heavy-handedness with the confectioners’ sugar.