I sprinted along the north side of Boardwalk Hall and triggered my mike.
“This is Cross again,” I said, gasping. “Two of them have escaped the venue. Repeat, escaped the venue. Get that helicopter in the air. They’re on the boardwalk somewhere ahead of me. Male in angel costume. Female dressed glam.”
“Copy,” Carstensen said.
I reached the boardwalk with a stitch in my side but managed to calm down enough to look through the binoculars south toward the Tropicana.
Despite the raw conditions, there were knots of people along the boardwalk, some coming at me, some walking away. No angel. No glam girl. No cowboy either, for that matter.
I swung around to look north along the boardwalk and saw similar small groups of pedestrians braving the—
“I got a visual!” I barked into the mike as I took off again. “Heading north on the boardwalk, two blocks north of the hall, near the pier!”
I’d caught a solid look at the back of a man dressed in white robes far ahead of me, and I’d gotten a glimpse of a woman at his side. There was no chance they were getting away again, I told myself, and I picked up the pace.
For the better part of a block, I couldn’t locate either of them ahead of me, and I was starting to doubt what I’d seen. But then I spotted the angel again, still with his back to me, still heading north, going past Bally’s Beach Bar.
He was alone now and no longer running. His left arm looked useless. Sirens began to wail to my west, north, south.
My earbud crackled with static. I could tell it was Carstensen, but I could not tell what she was saying.
I hit the mike, said, “Suspect dressed as angel heading north on boardwalk north of Michigan Avenue toward Brighton Park. Suspect is alone now.”
I could barely make out Mahoney saying, “Copy.”
I ran on, trying to keep the few people on the boardwalk in front of me so the assassin wouldn’t see me gaining ground if he happened to look back.
I was less than half a block away from him when the tragedy happened.
A young Atlantic City uniformed police officer came out of the park in front of the killer. The patrol cop was moving quickly, and when he saw the angel, he started to skid down into a combat shooting position, his hands and pistol already rising.
The assassin was quicker; he threw up his gun and fired, hitting the officer square in his bulletproof vest. As the cop staggered backward, he pulled the trigger on his pistol. The bullet went wide, hit the boardwalk, and ricocheted out to sea.
The angel’s second shot caught the young policeman through the throat and dropped him in his tracks.
I was closing fast on him then. Two hysterical young women in raincoats were fleeing toward me.
“FBI!” I yelled to the angel. “Drop your gun! Put your hands up!”
The two girls dived to either side of me. The president’s assassin had already looked over his shoulder and started to spin in his tracks, his gun up.
He wasn’t quite fully turned when my first shot—in my off hand, and shaky—slapped him across the ham of his left leg. He jerked as he shot. I heard his bullet crack by my left ear, rattling me.
Because a trained assassin was not going to miss twice at this distance, I pointed the gun at him and fired again, just hoping to put him on the defensive.
But by some miracle, it center-punched him just below the sternum. He hunched over and then fell hard onto his side, gasping for air.
I ran up. When he tried to raise his gun, I kicked it out of his hand.
I squatted, pulled off the mask so he could breathe. His face was a swollen mass of stitches.
“Who are you?” I said. “Who hired you to kill Hobbs?”
He blinked at me dully, then shuddered and, through the blood that began to seep out his mouth, croaked, “I am…nobody…nowhere…in no—”
The assassin convulsed then, choked, and coughed up a gout of dark blood. He died quivering on the boardwalk.
I stared at him, hearing sirens closing on my location and a helicopter approaching, then turned to check on the two young women in raincoats.
Kristina Varjan was standing twenty feet behind me, squared off and looking at me over the barrel of a pistol.