the casino just in time to hear shots to the northeast, back toward the boardwalk and the beach, three in a cluster, and then four more shots in rapid succession. There was a break, and then a shot, and then another shot a minute later, and then multiples, a firefight.
But since then, as Potter walked farther and farther west, he’d heard only the sirens. When he saw a bus about to pull into a stop, he ran to catch it.
Potter took an empty seat, yawned, and shut his eyes. Ten stops later, he got off, went into a corner store, and bought a Bud tallboy. He drank it as he walked the seven blocks to the train station, where he bought a ticket to Newark Penn Station.
Eleven minutes passed. He was aboard the train and it was pulling out. Two stops later, he got off. He watched everyone else who’d exited the train until he was satisfied there was no tail. Then he bought another ticket, this time to Hoboken.
While he waited for that train, Potter walked down the platform, away from all the commuters. Only then did he pull the burn phone from his pocket and punch in the number of another burn phone.
“Paul?” Mary said, using the code they’d agreed on.
“Right here, Sal,” he said. “We’re good. Get him out of that hellhole now.”
He heard her break down crying.
“C’mon, now,” he said. “I need you to be strong. We’ve done it.”
“I’m just so relieved, so hopeful, is all.”
Potter smiled. “Me too.”
“You following?”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. But do not wait for me to start the therapy.”
“What about payment?”
“I got it. Now get to work.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too,” he said. He clicked off and broke the phone in two before tossing it in a trash can.
Potter pulled a USB drive from his pocket, looked at it, and imagined his son healed, on his feet, and walking again.
That will be worth the risk, he thought. Jesse is worth every risk.
He could even acknowledge that, sooner or later, U.S. federal agents would track him down. Sooner or later, he’d have to tell them he’d done the job in Texas alone, that his wife had no idea he’d assassinated the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state using two identical rifles set side by side on bipods.
Mary had no idea what Jesse’s stem-cell treatments cost. He’d been the one to go to Panama to learn about it. His wife had zero to do with any of it.
He’d say all that, and then he’d die somehow, death by cop or suicide to seal the deal and keep Mary free to raise Jesse.
As his train pulled into the station, Potter was at peace with his fate. He stuck the USB drive in his pocket and got on board. He could see Jesse walking in his mind, and for that, he would accept every punishment that might come his way.
CHAPTER
102
MY HEAD SPUN A bit as the FBI helicopter lifted off from the beach by the boardwalk where Varjan had shot me high in my Kevlar vest.
The bullet at short range had been enough to knock me down and out.
But not for long. I’d come around within seconds and saw Carstensen, Mahoney, and a small army of Atlantic City police officers swarming past the bullet-ridden corpse of the Hungarian assassin.
They’d tried to make me lie still and wait for the medics, but I refused and was getting woozily to my feet when Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s director of security, staggered up to us. His face and suit were covered in blood. He held a wad of bloody napkins to his head.
“Arrest him,” Carstensen said.
“No,” Stapleton said. “I had nothing to do with this.”
“Arrest him and his bosses,” she snapped.
“They’re gone,” Stapleton said. “That’s why I came to you. They left me there for dead. I came straight here after they left.”
“Where’d they go?” Mahoney demanded.
“The airport,” Stapleton said. “They have a jet.”
“Arrest him anyway. Get him to a hospital.”
“No! Believe me. I served my country. I love my country. I would never … I faked being unconscious in there. I heard everything they said. Everything.”
Which is how Stapleton came to be sitting in the jump seat across from me and Mahoney, his wrists in handcuffs, and an FBI SWAT medic working on his head wound.
“Talk,” Carstensen said.
Stapleton didn’t stop talking as we picked up speed, and the pilot attempted to call the air traffic control tower at the Atlantic City