Peavy pivoted. Wally gave him a new range, which he punched into the optical ranging system computer. The mark had been moving right to left, pushing his cart, moving at a slow rate. When he took off running with the bag in hand, Peavy exhaled and kept him in his sights.

“Tell me,” he said to Wally, who was hooked up to Fisk.

“Nothing yet.”

The mark was darting in and out of people, and Peavy had him all the way. The sniper’s motto was “Don’t Bother Running—You’re Already Dead.”

Wally tracked him with the glasses. “What’s he got in the bag?”

“Nothing much,” said Peavy. “Just a few pounds of boom.” He watched the rabbit run, needing to rerange. “Dammit, Fisk.”

Shah turned and took off, and Gersten broke into a run after him.

He hoisted the gym bag strangely, running with it held behind his head.

Gersten had just dodged a surprised and unaware cop when, all at once, two men in suits tackled her.

FBI agents, yelling that she was under arrest.

“NYPD!” she said, trying to kick the assholes off her.

Fisk arrived, grabbing the agents by their collars, waving his shield and yelling. Then he continued on, forgetting his pain now.

He looked beyond the intersection, searching for Shah’s target. When he cut to the right, staying on Seventh Avenue, Fisk knew.

“The Forty-second Street subway entrance!” he said into the small mic in his sleeve.

Wally heard something. His head swiveled slightly, his right middle finger fine focusing the binoculars.

“Six eighty at the subway entrance . . .”

Peavy adjusted the scope one click without taking his eye off the target, who was running with the gym bag behind his head. A 400-grain solid brass 50 caliber round leaves a Barrett at 3,200 feet per second. Shock and blood loss make a hit anywhere on the body a kill shot, but only a head shot guaranteed immediate neurological and muscular shutdown. And Peavy was a perfectionist with 127 confirmed kills. Through the scope, he held Shah in the crosshairs as he sprinted toward the stairs. Wally gave the command.

“Send it.”

“I want the head.” Peavy’s trigger finger tightened with ball-bearing smoothness.

Fisk saw Shah knock over a child, running full-out for the subway entrance. His momentum caused him to stumble, reaching out with the hand that held the gym bag for balance.

Fisk heard nothing: no report, no echo.

At the top step, Shah’s head disappeared in a pink mist. The terrorist’s body twisted midstride and pitched forward headlessly, coming to a stop.

The gym bag landed near him—not softly, but softly enough.

Fisk stopped, stunned. He was estimating the blast radius of the explosive.

Gersten caught up to him, FBI agents passing them, rushing to the dead terrorist. She looked at Fisk. “How did you do that?”

Fisk turned and looked back toward Times Square. He did not know where Peavy was set up—only that he was probably gone from the firing spot already.

He said, “Friends in high places.”

Part 2

October 2009

Abbottabad, Pakistan

Chapter 8

Arshad Khan, a heavyset, fiftyish man in a blue nylon tracksuit and Puma high-top basketball sneakers, looked very much out of place among the gamers and tourists at the All-Joy Internet Café.

He sipped his hot tea and prowled the Web for newspaper stories, YouTube videos, and blog postings about the Bassam Shah incident in New York City. There was little information of value, but it satisfied his curiosity.

Photographs of sunflowers culled from a Google image search filled another open window on the monitor bike-locked to the café counter. He spotted eight new ones that he did not recognize from previous downloads, and saved them to a two-gigabyte Lexar flash drive, its activity light flickering as it stored the images.

Finally, after shifting his posture to cover the screen from casual observers, he opened a third window—a small one—and quickly browsed familiar pornography sites, ones not blocked by the café. He captured free JPEG images and video clips almost at random—lactating women, lesbian sex, gay men masturbating—until the thumb drive was full.

He unplugged the drive, paid the teenager at the door for his hour at the machine, and wished him peace. Khan spoke Urdu with a Pashtun accent, but given his casual appearance he could have been from anywhere in the Arab world. He crossed the street, savoring the cooler air beneath the canopies of the ancient oriental plane trees as he strolled. Many of the trees were five hundred years old, a fact he found reassuring. Modern life was full of so many tentative realities, but time and history belonged to no man. The future, however, was always in play.

He entered the parking lot of a squash complex, home to the game that Pakistanis had seized from their English colonial masters and dominated for fifty years. Khan unlocked the driver’s door of his brick-red Suzuki minivan, heaved himself inside, and sat there with the engine on and the air-conditioning blowing.

For ten minutes, he methodically scrutinized everyone entering and leaving the café. Khan would not return to this particular Internet café for at least another month, rotating his weekly visits among the six scattered around Abbottabad. He also monitored all passing cars, bicycles, tuk-tuks, and their drivers. He scanned the rooftops of the low buildings in this part of town. Abbottabad was one of the communities hardest hit by the catastrophic earthquake four years earlier, and no one wanted to risk the construction of more than two stories of concrete block.

When he was satisfied that he was not being followed or observed, he pulled out of the parking lot, driving three miles northeast on Kakul Road to the suburb of Bilal Town, near Pakistan’s national military academy. The high, burning sun gave rise to mirage vapors in the distance, but he was content that he was unfollowed and alone. He had made this commute many times before.

His property was roughly triangular, and he entered the grounds through a gate in the twelve-foot-high concrete wall at the western point. He pulled into a narrow alley about twenty yards long, then got out to close the first gate and open the second. This admitted him into a parking apron. Khan drove the Suzuki into one of the four bays of a garage and closed the door.

Khan saw three bicycles with wicker tool panniers in the adjoining bays. He frowned. Always easier when bin Laden was alone. Outsiders did not come often. They usually disguised themselves as workmen and stayed through most of a day, leaving after Asr when the streets of the neighborhood filled with similarly homebound laborers and servants.

Still, the presence of strangers in the house made him wary. He wished he could delay his visit, but that would only raise unwarranted suspicion. He pulled from the passenger-side floor two large yellow plastic bags containing twelve-pack cans of Coke, fresh mangoes and apricots, and a jug of bleach.

With the flash drive in his trouser pocket, Khan walked through another mantrap gate into the main courtyard. He had had the house constructed soon after the earthquake. To his neighbors curious about its high walls, razor wire, and security cameras, Khan explained that the house was also home to his uncle, a gold dealer who needed the extra protection.

The main building comprised three stories over a square footprint about fifty feet long on each side. As with the outside walls, the house was constructed with steel-reinforced cinder block, which had been further strengthened with troweled concrete to a thickness of one foot. There was no telephone or Internet connection.

Khan went in through the ground-floor entrance reserved for men, so there was no risk of encountering an unveiled woman. The interior was barnlike, with very few wall coverings and no unnecessary furniture. Ahead, a narrow staircase rose through a small opening in the ceiling to the second floor.