Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

“Christ,” said Milt. “It’s raining.”

I was praying for any hiccup to derail the day. I was. But things were well on their way to going wrong, and the bad weather was merely an appetizer for the bad news. When we arrived at the courtyard, we saw the essential issue: foot traffic had completely rerouted to the perimeter. Nobody was crisscrossing the middle of the yard. That meant our walking paycheck, Goran Mesic, would be in the mobbed side walkways.

We did check the weather. But there’d been only a forecast of “light wind with possible light drizzle.” Now it looked like some classes were getting out early to handle the surprise downpour, which meant we were already behind schedule.

Our contingency plans could handle that. We were already in position, ready for Goran. What our plans couldn’t handle was the fact that Goran was walking directly between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Not in front, not to the rear. But between his two bodyguards.

Barely any of our reconnaissance would be of use now. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a moment. I took a breath. I pictured the most chaotic possible outcome of the next hour and let its climactic moment unfold in front of me in slow motion.

People reaching for weapons. Witnesses diving for cover. Slow motion. Like an NFL replay. I tried to see where each step could go wrong, letting the frozen moments inform me how to re-choose the better step. If the guards protectively shove Goran down to the pavement: I shoot all three of them. If Goran runs directly away: I let Milt handle them while I footrace the kid off campus. When you think like a victim, you choose paths based on fear. Fear trumps all. Goran would panic at the threat on campus and think to run from campus. That would mean crossing Quincy Street. I could head him off if I circled around the library and ambushed from solid cover.

What a fun job—shooting kids.

I felt nauseous.

“He’s twenty,” argued Milt. “He ain’t no kid.”

I’d already wanted to leave this career. I’d been searching for a doable exit plan for months. I had a wife who would barely kiss me anymore. A dog who barely nuzzled me. Ulcers. A leaky roof.

My work was the culprit. My wife hated what I did. I’d come to hate it, too.

“Anyone under thirty is a kid,” I said to Milt.

By 10:05 a.m. we were established in our positions at the upper end of the quad. I could see Milt and he could see me. We’d given ourselves strict orders not to use the cell phones. Phone records can be searched. Checked. Studied. Conclusions drawn. You just don’t know what kind of paper trail a text message becomes, should the cops get hold of you. Or worse, should the Croatian Mafia get hold of you.

“Is this chair taken?” I said to the girl next to me.

“Uh…no,” said the girl, puzzled. She was wearing a giant, thick scarf, the kind that would discourage unwanted attention.

She moved her bag. “Go for it,” she said.

The patio had stayed dry under its awning. I sat down. I needed to look like I wasn’t standing around waiting for a homicide.

At 10:08 a.m. I checked for Milt. But Milt was no longer there.

He was hustling down the steps toward the middle of the quad. Worst-case scenario getting worse by the minute. There was Goran, and instead of being at the outer edges of the quad, he was walking right down the middle, which meant he couldn’t be more noticed. Yet before I could even begin to strategize a new plan, our frightfully obsolete original plan commenced on its own. Blam! Blam! Blam! The gentle acoustics of campus gunfire.

Chapter 6

The sound of bullets ricocheted off all corners of the courtyard—all—disorienting anyone trying to locate the shooter. Did Milt fire first? I dropped to the ground as two more shots pealed through the air. Crack! Crack!

I looked up to see the chest of the first bodyguard explode forward. But he didn’t go down.

On the far side, I could see Milt spin around to square up against the second bodyguard, just as the girl in the scarf spun around to look in the wrong direction. I got my handgun ready inside the front pouch of my hoodie. Two stray bullets tore into the glass next to us in the window of the café.

“Get inside,” I told the girl in the scarf. “Stay low.”

Operating on pure panic, she ducked inside the bistro. She didn’t take her latte, she didn’t take her laptop. And, most importantly, she didn’t take her phone.

I still had my weapon somewhat hidden. Did the bodyguards spot me or were those bullets that passed me strays? Where was the kid? Where was Tweedledum? I could handle the onslaught of gunfire from the two bodyguards; what I couldn’t handle was the deluge of Cambridge police officers who’d be arriving here oh so soon. Within two minutes eight seconds, if our research held up.

Do we abort?

The goons had spotted Milt across the yard. But they hadn’t spotted me. Distraction might work in my favor. They were concentrating on dealing with him. They had no idea I existed.

I grabbed the phone belonging to the scarf girl and started to rush through the scattered crowd, sowing the seeds of our exit plan. I told each student I passed that there was a lone shooter out on Oxford Street. I kept repeating the phrase. Lone shooter, Oxford Street. Moving from one spot to the next. Didn’t matter what they were actually seeing; they just needed a catchphrase. Crack crack crack crack . Bullets flew over my head as I journeyed from one huddled kid to the next, ducking into whatever makeshift foxhole I saw—a terrace chair, a planter, a bench, a trash can. I’d cower with him or her and bequeath unto them the mantra. Lone shooter, Oxford Street.

The trail I’d left while making my way over to Milt, who was pinned down near a set of steps, would lead to a flurry of 911 calls. Then I made my own call.

“Nine one one. What’s your emergency?”

“I think they detonated a bomb at MIT,” I said into the phone. “I can see it from my balcony window. There’s smoke. This is an attack. This is—”

Then I threw the phone in the wet gutter.

Then I found the next foxhole. A trash can in front of a trembling engineering student. I crouched with him and shared that people had seen three guys shove a girl into a white van, with the license plate number “something something KHR-11.”

“Something something KHR-11,” he parroted back.

“Can you call it in? My battery’s—” I completed my sentence with a shrug.

He understood. He began to call it in.

“You saw ’em, right?” I said. “Unreal, man.”

Then I leapt up and ran around the corner, spotted Tweedledee, and let four rounds of my five-round .38 rip through the atmosphere.

Every kid saw me do it.

“Cambridge PD,” I yelled to them. “Get down.”

The kids got down. I ran to the next post and shed my hoodie. Layer one—shed. Crimson to blue. I went from a Harvard tourist to a Patriots fan. Scrambled eggs.

Milt put his own 911 call in, reporting that two foreigners were on the roof of a tall building shooting at cars and pedestrians.

All designed to tax the system. Resources would be spread out in every direction. Eventually the main catastrophe—our catastrophe—would get lost in the shuffle. Eventually we’d have our escape route smoothly paved.

But then the second bodyguard spotted me. He seemed to recognize my unique fixation on Goran. Like any skilled protector, he foresaw the threat.

And like any skilled assassin, I foresaw him foreseeing my threat. I fired two shots right at him.

He fired back at me. And then another shooter joined the game.