Andrew Britton - The Assassin

It was the best memory of his life.

Horns blared behind him, pulling him out of his reverie. As he came back to reality, he wished so much that he could go back to that time, a time when anything seemed possible. A time when they still had the chance to make the right choices. He felt something warm running over his cheeks and realized that he was crying.

When he hit the light at West Fifty-sixth Street, he swung the wheel to the right. The hotel was less than five minutes away, and he knew now what he had to do.

All doubt was gone.

In the warehouse on West Thirty-seventh, Naomi Kharmai was still sitting on the smooth cement floor. For the moment, she was lost to the world, mired in her own private hell. She couldn’t seem to settle on any one emotion: the guilt would start to take hold, only to be replaced by a surge of self-pity. These twin tenets of misery were propped up by anger: anger at Harper, for letting her have her way; anger at Ryan, for not walking in first. If Crane had been the second person through the door, Naomi never would have pulled the trigger. But it just hadn’t worked out that way, and now an innocent person was gone forever.

She still couldn’t believe it. Through the tears in her eyes, she stared at Crane’s body in the near distance, silently begging the other woman to stand up and shake it off. It just didn’t seem possible. She had taken a life. An innocent life. It was the one word she just couldn’t shake from her tortured conscience. It was also a word that didn’t apply to Matt Foster, and for this reason, Naomi didn’t regret shooting him at all. Samantha Crane was the only victim here, but if Crane was innocent, what did that make her? The answer was incredibly simple, yet so hard to accept.

She was guilty. Guilty of the worst possible crime. Naomi just couldn’t see a way past this mistake. Even if Ryan somehow managed to stop Nazeri, how was she supposed to live with herself? To come to terms with what she had done?

The thought brought on a fresh wave of bitter, scalding tears. They were flowing steadily now that the shock had worn off, but she knew this was only the start; the shock might have faded, but reality had yet to set in. As sorrow welled up in her chest, she heard a noise at the doors and looked up. Suddenly, her grief was replaced by something even worse. As she stared, openmouthed, at the man standing before her, she couldn’t help but wonder if this was some kind of divine punishment for what she had just done. If so, the punishment was fully befitting her crime.

Will Vanderveen was standing there, holding a gun in his hand. Her gaze instantly moved to the gun near Foster’s hand — the one Ryan had cleaned of her fingerprints — but Vanderveen seemed to sense her thoughts.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said. Smiling, he gestured for her to stand. “On your feet, Naomi. We’re going for a little ride.”

The six-minute drive from the warehouse to the intersection of Forty-eighth and Seventh was the longest of Ryan Kealey’s life. He was caught up in a surge of emotions: rage that he’d missed Will Vanderveen yet again, sympathy for Naomi and what she had yet to endure, and building despair over the death of Samantha Crane. He hadn’t known her, but she had been innocent of this whole mess and, from what he could tell, a good agent, despite the fact that she’d been blindsided by Rudaki and Matt Foster, her own partner. He couldn’t really fault her for not seeing the truth earlier; he had been similarly betrayed in the past, and he hadn’t seen it coming, either. He only wished he had been able to get to Naomi first; if he’d been able to warn her, Crane would almost certainly still be alive. In truth, he was as much to blame as she was.

He had found the lights shortly after making the turn onto Eighth Avenue, and the siren soon after that. As the Bureau sedan swept toward Times Square, he was scanning the surrounding traffic, as well as the cars lined up at the curb, searching for any sign of a white Isuzu truck. He saw a few possibilities, but he didn’t have time to check them. At this point, his only chance at stopping Nazeri would be to get to the target as fast as possible. The only thing he couldn’t understand was why he had not heard the blast. It should have happened at least ten minutes ago. He kept waiting for the rising plume of shattered cement and dust, as well as the thunderous explosion, signifying the death of thousands of people, but it never came, not on West Thirty-seventh Street, not on Eighth Avenue, and not as the Crown Vic he had borrowed squealed to a halt at the intersection of West Forty-eighth and Seventh Avenue.

He’d cut the lights and the siren a few blocks earlier, not wanting to warn Nazeri if the other man had already reached his destination. Now he got out of the car and looked around, searching frantically for the truck that Naomi had described. Not seeing it, he took a second to scope out his surroundings. The Renaissance Hotel was on his right, twenty-six stories of black glass and steel. From where he was standing, he could reach out and touch the gleaming facade. Above his head was a huge sign edged in gold filigree, at least six stories in height, with a large, circular clock on top. He checked the time and saw that the General Assembly was not set to convene for another three hours. In other words, at least thirty members of the United Iraqi Alliance were inside the hotel at that very moment, along with several hundred businessmen, conventioneers, and tourists, all of whom were blissfully unaware of the looming threat.

In the distance was the narrow northern face of the world-famous One Times Square, the Bertelsmann Building off to the left. Times Square Tower rose behind all of it, glistening like a vertical wall of blue-green water in the midday sun. In between, passenger cars flashed back and forth on the through streets, along with dozens of buses and what seemed like hundreds of yellow cabs, though the actual number was far less. The traffic on Seventh Avenue was southbound in four narrow lanes, hurtling toward One Times Square and the intersection with Broadway, the view partially obscured by towering columns of steam, which seemed to gather in ominous clouds in the cool air.

People were everywhere, choking the sidewalks, dressed for the weather in long-sleeve shirts and light sweaters. The temperature was about 65 degrees, much warmer than it had been in Washington the previous night, but still fairly brisk for September. Kealey automatically started looking for police officers and was momentarily shocked when he didn’t see any. Then he remembered that half the force — and 90 percent of the Manhattan Patrol Borough South — was conducting crowd control at the UN enclave a few blocks to the east. He wondered why the crowd didn’t extend to this area, then recalled that the demonstration stretched north on Second Avenue, from Fifty-first to Fifty-fifth. In other words, this was the perfect place to strike: for the moment, the hotel was completely unprotected. Completely vulnerable.

Kealey swung around and looked north, scanning the approaching traffic. If Nazeri was coming, he guessed it would be from this direction, not from the west. Involuntarily, his right hand drifted down to his hip, where the Beretta was holstered. The butt was covered by the lower edge of his T-shirt. A magazine was loaded, of course, 14 rounds plus one in the chamber, and he had two spare mags as backup. He suspected he might well need them; 15 rounds might not be enough to take out Nazeri, Vanderveen, and the truck. Once he saw the vehicle approach, he’d have to fire through the windshield as fast as possible. It wasn’t an ideal scenario, but at this point, he had little other choice. What worried him most were the police officers in the area. He hadn’t seen any, but he knew they were there. The minute he pulled the gun, he’d become a target, but there was no way he could explain the situation in time. He had no proof of anything he had to tell them, and the first thing they would do is take his gun and hold him for questioning. Bringing them into the loop simply wasn’t an option.