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small mic in his sleeve.
    W ally 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.
    F isk 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
    A rshad 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