I, Michael Bennett

“There was an attractive, dark-haired woman with Perrine,” I said.

“Marietta?” Miguel said, looking at me. “Yes. She’s there as well.”

“Why the hell is he still hanging around?” Bedford said.

“Arrangements are being made to get them out of the country, back into Canada, where they had been living before Perrine’s arrest, but there’s some sort of problem,” Miguel said. “We need to move on this before my arrest is made public. Once that happens, he’ll send a kill team to wipe out me, my brother, and our family. That’s what he does.

“He told me many times that sweet death is the noble price every man should happily pay for failure. He thinks of dealing drugs as a religious calling and himself as a messiah figure. He’s incredibly insane. Please, you need to help us. You need to grab this sick bastard. It’s our only chance.”

“Okay, okay,” Tara said, standing. “We’ll confer out in the hall for a moment.”

“What do you think, Mike?” Tara said after the door closed. “This info sounds credible.”

“Extremely credible,” I said. “Especially the part about Perrine being incredibly insane.”

“I agree,” Bedford said, trying hard not to lick his chops. “These two are sharks, but Perrine is Moby Dick. We need to make the deal.”

“I will, Bill, on one condition,” Tara said.

“What’s that?” Bedford said.

“That Mike is brought back in on this for Perrine’s arrest and capture.”

Bedford glared at her and then at me, but behind his eyes, I could see the calculator in his brain being furiously punched.

“Okay, fine. I’ll have to talk to my boss, but I think we can work that out.”

“Okay, then,” Tara said, winking at me as she grabbed the doorknob. “Let’s go back in there and make a deal.”

CHAPTER 98

AROUND 6:00 P.M. that summer evening, I was an hour and a half north of Newburgh in upstate Greene County, New York, standing on the shoulder of a two-lane country road.

As I glanced at the seemingly endless ribbon of blacktop curving upward through the gold-tinged pines, the free-spirited maverick in me felt like sticking out my thumb and lighting out for the territories. But then I suddenly remembered that I was a cop instead of Jack Kerouac, and I followed the FBI agent I was with past a freshly road-killed porcupine into the bucket of a tree-service cherry picker.

I held onto my borrowed yellow hard hat as the bucket hummed upward through oak leaves and pine needles. Halting just at treetop level, about seven stories up, I was greeted with 360 degrees of stark, breathtaking Catskill Mountains peaks shale ridges. Since there was no man-made structure to be seen, the experience was like going back in time.

To the seventies, maybe, I thought, since on the way up, I’d actually passed a faded old billboard bearing a picture of Smokey Bear in his Park Service hat with the words ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

We were three miles due south of Perrine’s rented wooded estate on West Kill Mountain, along a section of the Catskills called Devil’s Path, which made a lot of sense, considering we were here to find the devil himself. In the five hours since we had gotten the location of Perrine’s hideout from the Puentes brothers, earth and sky had most definitely been moved. In the space of the afternoon, a sixty-member contingent of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and all their equipment had been mobilized up from their headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, to Stewart Air National Guard Base, just outside of Newburgh, on two C-130 military cargo planes.

I met with HRT briefly at the base when they arrived, and they were formidable indeed. Think of an armored, and armed to the teeth, professional football team. Only they brought their own helicopters and were dressed like ninjas. The feds didn’t just want to capture Perrine after they got egg on their faces down in Foley Square. They needed to.

In the bucket beside me, HRT leader Kyle Ginther handed me a Canon SLR camera with a huge high-power zoom lens. Thirtyish, dark-haired, and boyish, Ginther looked friendly, like the young dad next door. Only when this dad wasn’t leaf-blowing his lawn, he was emptying sniper rifles and automatic weapons into range targets.

I glassed the terrain to the north with the camera. After a moment, I spotted the roof of Perrine’s hideout halfway up the south slope of West Kill and super-zoomed it in. Through hanging motes of pollen, a shingle-and-beam chalet-style lodge house came into view. It had river-stone chimneys and a massive deck out in front to soak in the view. I’d already seen the photographs, taken an hour earlier, of Perrine and Marietta on that same deck sharing a drink.

“We’ve received the building plans from the architect and have a shoot house mocked up,” Ginther said. “We know that there are two other guesthouses on the property, along with a barn. We also just learned that Perrine’s quarters are on the lower level of the main house.”

I blinked at him in shock.

“How did you find that out?”

“Intel from the Puentes brothers,” Ginther said. “Getting the phone numbers of the people up there with Perrine was gold, Mike. With the help of the phone company, we sent software into the targets’ cell phones that turned them into microphones. Their phones don’t even have to be on. Ain’t technology grand?”

“How many people do you think are up there?” I said.

“Twenty-five to forty, as far as we can tell,” Ginther said. “They’re armed mostly with shotguns, but we have seen a few assault rifles. The men we’ve observed patrolling the perimeter seem professional, definitely trained. We’re going to have to watch our step.”

“How are you going to do the raid?” I asked.

“Wait till it’s dark, put our snipers in a tight perimeter around the facility, then cut the power and fast-rope in onto that deck from our Black Hawk and Little Bird helicopters. With snipers covering the outside with suppression fire, the airborne assault unit will split into two teams, one securing the main and upper levels, the other the basement, where Perrine is at. We’ll be ready to go by tonight.”

I wiped sweat out of my eyes as I thought about things for a minute. On the way up to Greene County, I’d stopped at a country store to answer a text message and spotted a crow moving at the parking lot’s edge. It took me a second to realize with horror that it was plucking the feathers out of a smaller dead bird. For some reason, I couldn’t shake that sickening image—the large dark bird holding down the smaller one with his talon, fastidiously plucking out its feathers one by one—as I stood there sweating on the cherry picker.

“Something bothering you, Mike?” Ginther said.

“Despite your confidence and HRT’s obviously incredible abilities,” I said, “Perrine has the high ground. He brought heavy weapons to the midtown Manhattan shoot-out we had at the begi

“Okay, I’m listening. You have any ideas?”

That’s when it hit me. I did have an idea. At least the germ of one. I let it settle in for a beat, and then I grabbed the camera and looked back up at the house peeking out between the treetops.

“That driveway is the only way in or out?” I asked.