Harry sits back and, in relief, peels the phony beard and stage make-up off. Now we see him clean-shaven.
Don produces a syringe, which he fills from a phial while Gootch rolls up the unconscious Radford’s sleeve …
A Middle …
The office building is a high-rise with a multi-story parking garage connecting to one side of it. Inside a fourth-story office, vacant of all furniture, Conrad and Wojack stand at the window looking down at the street below. Both wear surgical gloves. Wojack looks like a bright Ivy League college senior dressed for a job interview. He has a suction cup against a lower corner of the window; he’s working around it with a glass-cutter. Finally he pops the glass disc loose and sets it aside on the windowsill, leaving a neat, open hole in the window. We notice he leaves the glass cutter and the suction cup on the sill. He picks up that familiar 308 rifle and screws a ’scope sight onto it. Conrad doesn’t smoke here—he’s too professional for that. He wears a headset-and-mouthpiece cell phone. He listens to his headset and talks back to it: “Affirmative.” He turns to Wojack: “It’s on. It’s a ‘go.’”
Conrad looks at his watch. Wojack aims his rifle down through the hole in the glass at the street below. Conrad steps forward beside him to look down out the window. Wojack says, very dryly, “Do I get fifty points for a little old blind lady in the crosswalk?”
Down there through crosshairs he’s peering at the steps of the government building across the street. On the fringes of the ’scope’s image he can see a gathering of cops, officials and reporters with their TV cameras and microphones, all waiting for the limo to arrive …
Now Conrad and turns to look past Wojack into the darker recesses of the unfurnished office. He sees Gootch and Harry bracketing the unconscious Radford. Harry is pasting his phony beard back in place.
Conrad says to Harry, “Time to give him the upper. Wake the son of a bitch up.” Then, to Gootch, “Lock the elevator and go start the van.”
Obeying, Gootch exits.
Conrad watches Harry take a disposable syringe from its package and begins to fill it from a phial.
At the window Wojack, sighting down through the hole, tightens his aim.
In the ’scope sight he can see the windshield of the limousine—the one with the foreign flags—as it pulls up, escorted by cops on motorcycles. Reporters crowd against a cordon of cops; a wedge of security people surrounds the man emerging from the limo—that same vaguely foreign VIP from the plane. Wojack’s practiced grip zeroes in the crosshairs on the center of his torso and there is the sudden sound of the shot: the image jerks upward in recoil and then settles down again as the VIP falls dead on the steps.
By the time the VIP has fallen dead to the steps, Wojack has already wheeled back away from the window and is jacking a fresh cartridge into the chamber of the rifle.
Conrad and Harry drag Radford across the room, stooping to remain below sill-line, dragging the groggy man directly beneath the window.
In the street there’s a crowd around the body; people are pointing up this way. Cops rush across the street toward the building.
Quickly and efficiently, Wojack and Conrad prop Radford against the wall and place the smoking rifle in his hands. Harry takes a quick look out the window.
Conrad murmurs, “Let’s go …”
The three run to the door.
Radford stirs—a twitch …
In the fourth floor corridor, an elevator stands open. Gootch waits there, holding the door. Conrad, Wojack and Harry run into it. Conrad turns a key. The doors close …
Down on the ground level several cops swarm across the lobby and up the emergency stairs. Two or three stand guard in the lobby, watching the elevators. The indicator of one elevator shows that it’s descending from the 4th floor … 3rd … 2nd …
In the vacant office Radford struggles to wake up.
Cops thunder up the echoing stairs, guns up.
In the lobby, cops watch while the indicator of that descending elevator passes the ground floor. A cop punches the button in angry frustration. The indicator stops at “B.” The cops look at each other; suddenly two of them bolt for the stairs and go running down the stairs out of sight …
In the vacant office Radford lurches to his feet, dazed.
In the garage Conrad’s van roars past a doorway, heading out the exit. Its license plates, smeared with mud, are unreadable. A split second after it disappears up the ramp, the two cops come running out of the stairwell in the office building next door. They see nothing.
In the vacant office the fat cop Slade busts the door in and drops to a two-handed crouched shooting position. He sees:
—no Radford.
Nothing.
Slade has just enough time to be amazed before Radford jumps him from behind the door, slamming the buttstock of the 308 rifle against the back of Slade’s head. Slade goes down. Radford drops the rifle, scoops up Slade’s revolver and nightstick, and bolts out of the office …
Out in the corridor, he lurches groggily and stumbles out of sight around a nearby corner just before two cops come racing out of the stairwell. As they run forward, elevator doors open, decanting several more cops into the corridor. All of ’em squeeze into the vacant office, because it’s the one whose door stands open—the cops go in fast, guns up, and the first ones trip over the stunned Slade, who lies clutching his injured head.
Even more cops enter; they part to make way for a veteran sergeant, Dickinson. He takes in the scene with a quick look around. Then he makes a face; it expresses volumes.
Below, in the lobby, there’s a willy-nilly darting of cops. A uniformed bald cop, having lost his hat somewhere, burrows into a crowd of officials and reporters and cops. Among them is Dickinson. There’s a babbling racket of simultaneous conversations. The bald cop approaches Dickinson. “Who’s catching?”
“All the way to the top. Commander Clay.”
“Oh shit.” The bald guy immediately straightens his uniform and examines his brass and shoe polish.
Up in the unfurnished office the scene is very busy. A technician threads his way through the throng, struggling to reach Commander Denise Clay, forties, a black woman in immaculate uniform. She is homicide chief of detectives. She’s talking to an officer: “… Probably still in the building. I want double security on every exit—doors, windows, roof, basement, every rathole. Go.”
Now she turns to face a handsome business-suit gent—Colonel Vickers. He’s near 50—very youthfully so. A uniformed cop is talking on a walkie-talkie.
The officer behind Commander Clay talks into a cellular phone: “… Got the outside exits covered. She wants to start a sweep in the basement, work your way up—”
Vickers grabs the officer. “What’s going down?”
“Who the hell are you?”
Clay and Dickinson approach on collision course just as Vickers swings violently around in anger. They nearly butt heads. Vickers is roaring now: “What the fucking hell’s going on? You let him get loose?”
Dickinson snaps, “Who’re you?”
And Clay says to the officer with the cell phone, “Officer, show this gentleman out.”
Vickers shows his ID. “No ma’am. Not me. Colonel Vickers …”
Clay gives it a glance. She does a take and examines the ID. “White House?”
The officer with the phone is on it again. “I said he’s loose in the building! Bottle him in …”
Down there, outside the building, squad cars and motorcycles squeal into sight, bringing massive reinforcements … Cops push a growing corps of press and TV back across the street, farther from the building …