Bullseye Part 7

She made a disgusted face.

"Then he started being a jerk to me after a month or so. But I couldn't stop seeing him."

"Lisa, did he mention if anyone was after him? Maybe you heard him talk on his phone about someone or something he was worried about?"

"He was always cryptically talking on his phone," Lisa said, shrugging again as she darted a pained look at me. "Only in Spanish, though. He could be rude like that, speaking in Spanish in front of me to people, like I didn't exist. I was sad when I first heard the news, but I think I'm happy now, Detective. In fact, I'm glad the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's dead."

"Lisa, if this is too much for you to deal with, they probably have counseling services on campus. Maybe you should talk to someone."

"Maybe," she said with another shrug. "I don't have a lot of friends here. New York, I mean. It's so cold at times. I'm thinking about maybe going home at the end of the semester. Get my head straight."

"That might be a good idea, Lisa," I said as another bell sharply rang out in the hall. "Here's my card. Don't hesitate to call if I can be of help to you. You've been through a lot."

"Thanks, Detective. Maybe I will."

Chapter 21.

After a day spent digging dry holes, I finally lucked out by walking smack-dab into the middle of Bennett pasta night when I got home.

Mary Catherine must have been part Sicilian somewhere way back in her family tree, because the Irish la.s.s made the kind of meatb.a.l.l.s and marinara gravy Martin Scorsese's mother would have been proud of.

I gleefully pulled up a plate and sat down beside our new houseguest, Marvin Peters, who'd come home with Brian. Marvin was a big African American kid, about six four, with double-wide shoulders and a boyish, round, soft face that made him look approachable despite his formidable size. He looked like a friendly bear. He also looked a little sh.e.l.l-shocked as he sat staring at our frenetic dinner table.

"Quite a sight, isn't it, Marvin?" said Seamus, who was sitting on the other side of him. "But I'd be doing more shoveling than staring, if I were you."

"He's right, Marvin," I said. "You'll need to tap into some of your athletic skills at mealtimes around here if you want to feed yourself before it's all gone."

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate you letting me stay with you, sir," Marvin said, staring at me earnestly. "All you guys are such kind people. I don't know how to thank you."

"I do," said Seamus as he swirled spaghetti on his fork. "A Catholic school win in the all-city basketball finals this year should do quite nicely. Also, Manhattan College would be a grand school for you to play for in a few years. A grand school with a fine Catholic tradition, right here in the city of your birth."

"Seamus, would you please stop recruiting Marvin at the dinner table," I said. "I can't believe I had to actually just say that."

"What? A priest isn't allowed to support Catholic schools now?" Seamus said. "We've been locked out of the all-city three years in a row. And Manhattan needs to make it back to the dance, and quick. Marvin here is fierce powerful, so he is. Just look at him. He's our meal ticket."

"Seamus, do I actually have to send you to your room?" I said as everyone started to giggle. "He's a real priest, Marvin, I swear. I know it's difficult to believe."

"Oh, don't worry about it, Mr. Bennett." He turned toward Seamus. "I don't know about Manhattan College, sir-I mean, Father. I'll have to look into that. But I'll do my best for you to win this year in the all-city, if we get there. I promise."

"Don't let Seamus bother you, Marvin. He just likes to tease," said Mary Catherine, not missing a beat with our newest family member.

Marvin smiled his friendly-bear smile.

"Hallelujah," Seamus said sheepishly.

Chapter 22.

"Puller, ready," President Buckland said as he gently shouldered his Mossberg over-and-under 12-gauge shotgun.

"Ready," said his son, Terrence, a safe twenty feet to his rear.

"Okay, let's see one," Buckland said.

There was the familiar click and whang of the remote-controlled trap machine, and then two clays were aloft in front of him. The little terra-cotta Frisbees bobbed a little in the cold air as they sailed for the tree line of leafless poplars and maples and white oaks, as if trying to get away.

As if.

Buckland tracked textbook smooth from the waist, and then, two quick shotgun blasts later, another two clay pigeons were subtracted from the world.

"You're on fire, Dad!" Terrence said as he gave his father a high five.

"It was some pretty sweet shooting, wasn't it, son?" Buckland said, glancing over at the First Lady, who sat smiling by the fire pit. "One might even say it was done with perfect execution. Which only makes sense, my being the head of the executive branch and all." He winked at his son.

Terrence groaned along with his mother. The three of them were at Camp David, the famous presidential retreat in rural Maryland, standing beside the snow-filled tennis court where they'd set up a trapshooting rig.

Some presidents jogged or golfed to blow off steam; Buckland liked to shoot things. The family actually had a regulation skeet course built at their personal vacation place in Pennsylvania.

"Tres cla.s.sy," his wife said after Buckland picked up the tall boy can of Heineken at his feet and took a pull and burped. "If only the press could see you now. Where's the paparazzi when you need them?"

"Now, now. No more stalling, scaredy-cat. I do believe it's your turn," Buckland said.

The blasts of the First Lady dusting her two clays were still ringing in the air when the black Chevy Suburban pulled up behind their security detail back on the road.

"Were you expecting them?" she said.

"I'm sure it's nothing, honey. I got this," President Buckland said as he started walking over to Secret Service head John Levitin, standing by the SUV's back door.

"Don't waste your breath," President Buckland said as he sat in the backseat. "You drove all the way up here for nothing."

"Mr. President, please be reasonable. We can't go back to New York. Not now. It's just not safe. We haven't tracked down the shooter, who, by all evidence, is a world-cla.s.s sniper. These guys are wizards, sir. The amount of exposure they need is almost nothing. You need to back down."

"No, it's Russia that has to back down," President Buckland said. "This situation we're facing, John, it's bigger than all of us. We have to show unity right now, not fear. Besides, even if it all goes to s.h.i.t-and it won't, since you guys are the best-there are worse things than me being dead. Far worse. Like Russia taking over Western Europe."

"I strongly, strongly advise you not to go back to New York right now."

"I hear what you're saying. I'm listening. I really am," the president said as he watched his wife kill a couple more clays and share a high five with their son.

"But I'm going to New York," the president said as he opened the door.

Chapter 23.

The beat-up white work van pulled into the empty parking lot of the Kohl's in the Caesar's Bay shopping center in the South Brooklyn neighborhood of Bath Beach at 3:47 in the morning.

Immediately, it rolled to the lot's waterside guardrail beside the closed shopping center and stopped and stood idling. Beyond the guardrail, far off on the dark-gray water, were the yellow running lights of a ship. A large ship that had just sailed in off the New YorkNew Jersey bight into Lower Bay.

In the van's pa.s.senger seat, Matthew Leroux lifted the three-thousand-dollar FLIR Scout II thermal camera from his lap and thumbed the zoom. After some more pans and zooms in the black-and-white display of the infrared camera, he finally read MV Vestervig off the ship's starboard side.

"Is it her?" asked Leroux's wife, Sophie.

"It's her," Matthew said.

The container ship MV Vestervig flew under the Panamanian flag and was owned by a j.a.panese shipping concern. It was a hefty Panamax-cla.s.s vessel that had a capacity of forty-five hundred containers and was now heading inbound for the Port NewarkElizabeth marine terminal, he knew. Having done nothing but go over the job for the last three weeks, he knew all about it.

"Isn't it ahead of schedule?"

Matthew checked his Rolex.

"A little," he said.

"How long do you figure?" she asked.

Leroux put down the camera and looked out at the tiny lights on the water. He scanned up the bay to the right and bit his lip. Containers averaged about twenty-five knots, he knew. Plus you had to time this right. Couldn't be too early. Not a lot of wiggle room in this one.

"Give it twelve minutes on the b.u.t.ton," he said.

"From here?"

"From here," he said, putting down the camera and climbing into the back of the van.

He'd just slipped into all the gear and rechecked the kit bag when his wife's iPhone alarm started ding-a-linging.

"Ready?" she said.

"Hit it."

She zipped the van out of the lot and got them up on the ramp for the Belt Parkway west. Leroux held on to the back of her seat, looking out the windshield as they drove. The dark water on their left. The lights of Staten Island on the other side. There wasn't a car on the road.

Another mile up, they took exit 3 on almost two wheels to West 278 and then got in the lane for the lower level of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Half a minute later, they were under the upper deck, girders steadily going by on the right beyond the low concrete divider wall.

They pa.s.sed the first of the suspension bridge's two seventy-story towers, and then Sophie slowed and stopped the van midspan, and he jumped out with the bag and the ropes. A car went by on his left a minute after Sophie drove off. He didn't even glance at it. In his coveralls and reflective vest and bridge worker's hard hat, he knew he was wallpaper.

Twenty paces up from where he'd been dropped off, he found the premarked girder, set up his six-millimeter accessory cord anchor around it, and then clicked onto the two hundred feet of climbing rope and chucked the rope over the side. Under the sodium light beside the bridge's guardrail, he knelt on the concrete and looped and clipped the rope into his rappelling harness's maillon and tightened the lock. Then he climbed out over the rusted guardrail and leaned back out into the wind and s.p.a.ce.

Chapter 24.

On the outside of the bridge, Matthew descended a few feet out of sight of the roadway and waited, dangling there twenty stories over the dark water. When he tilted his head back, he could see the lights of Manhattan sparkling against the cold night.

It arrived less than a minute later. He looked down, and rolling beneath him was the mighty arc of the MV Vestervig's bow, followed by the orderly rows of colored containers stacked up from its hold like hundreds and hundreds of giant Legos.

The swush of the ma.s.sive ship pushing through the water drowned out the whistle of rope through the maillon as he lowered himself in a slow, controlled rappel.

He stopped himself when he was ten feet above the top row of containers and stared at the wheelhouse coming at him. The container tops sliding by beneath his boots looked like the cars of several slow-moving trains. He lowered himself some more, and when he was five feet above the plain of rolling container steel, he let go with his brake hand and landed on his side on one of the container tops with a hollow thud.

He lay there for a full minute, listening for some outcry. The ship had a twenty-three-member crew, but only two navigation officers and an engineer worked the night shift. But there was nothing. Just the wind and the rhythmic slap of the water off the ship's moving hull. Good, he thought as he took his map out of the bag and clicked on his flashlight.

Even with the exact bay row and tier on his ship map, it took him five minutes to find it, a battered blue Maersk box on the top row. He snipped through its high-security bolt seal with the cutters he'd brought, creaked open the container's swinging door, and stepped inside and swung it closed behind him.

"My, my, my," he said as he pa.s.sed his flashlight over what was inside.

It was a car. But not just any car. A sleek, museum-grade '67 Lamborghini Miura, cherry red with a mustard leather interior. It was worth well over a million dollars.

"Stop your drooling and get to work," he mumbled to himself as he opened the supercar's door and pulled the latch for the hood. Under it, instead of the engine, there was a spare tire and the battery. Leroux reached into the bag and brought out the device.

It was a sheet of plastic explosive along with a small radio-controlled detonator and a microphone. After activating its transmitter, he reached in under the hood on the driver's side and sealed the device up against the cha.s.sis, just to the right of the left front wheel well. Then he wiped engine grease all over it until it was hidden.

After he was finished, he tested the device's signal, then closed the hood and the car's door and smiled. Now, unbeknownst to the owner, the occupants in the car could be heard-or, better yet, killed-at any moment.

He checked his watch.

"Okay, time to go."

He came back out of the container and resealed it with an identical high-security bolt seal from his bag.

When he climbed back on top of the container's roof, he could see that the ship was already in the tight Kill Van Kull waterway that separated Bayonne, New Jersey, from Staten Island's north sh.o.r.e.

Some industrial tanks went by along the right sh.o.r.e of the shipping channel. Then he pa.s.sed a smaller container ship, called a feeder, sitting at a dock before he saw the Bayonne Bridge.

With only one hundred and fifty feet of clearance from the bridge to the waterline, the huge MV Vestervig's radio and radar antennas would clear it by only twenty feet. He spotted the rope ladder hanging down off the bridge a minute later, and he walked over the tops of the containers and caught it and quickly scurried up to the bridge deck.

He had to wait a few minutes, hanging from the bridge's guardrail, after the ship was gone before Sophie arrived.

"How'd it go?" she said after he collapsed in a ball of sweat onto the floor of the van's rear.

"Swimmingly, darling. Just swimmingly."