“I see,” he said, tapping a finger to his cheek.
“If you want, you could call Tom to confirm my ID,” Emily said.
“You kidding me?” Browning said, rolling his eyes at me. “I knew you were Government before your Mary Janes hit my driveway. Shadowbox’s name was Mooney. Francis Xavier Mooney. Pale college kid. Wore glasses. Smart, smart kid from a blue-collar family in Inwood. He went to Columbia but got in with some seriously radical people. After he got busted for dope, he advised us on a case we were building on an offshoot of the Weathermen terrorist group.”
“Shit,” I said. “There’s that T word again.”
Browning nodded.
“One night he calls me late and tells me about a bomb-making factory his boys got going in an apartment in the Village. Said his buddies were about to blow up Grand Central Terminal. We go to raid the place and baboom! One of the jackasses running for the back window knocked over something he shouldn’t have and the place went up. Took down half the building. Four of them died. Mooney was torn up over it. Like he blamed himself. We took him out of the program after that. Last I heard of him.”
“When was this?”
“Oh . . . ,” the retired agent said, looking up at his garage ceiling. “It was in nineteen seventy. What’s that? Almost forty years ago?”
His expression changed. He actually looked a little ruffled for a moment.
“It was Ash Wednesday nineteen seventy. We called it the Ash Wednesday bombing. Terrorists and anniversaries. Not good.”
I beat Emily by half a thumb press of my cell phone.
“Get on this,” I told Schultz as he picked up at the task force. “The suspect’s name is Francis Xavier Mooney. Address most likely in Manhattan. He might have explosives. Tell them to beef up security at Grand Central. It may be a potential target. Call me back the second you have this guy’s address.”
“How many he kill?” Browning said as we waited for his rattling garage door to go back up.
“Two, maybe three kids,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Not surprised. Frigging nut case. Even after we hosed his friends from the rubble, he was going on about that freegan, tree-hugging crap. Be careful. Mooney’s an idealist. One thing I learned during my illustrious career is that they’re always the ones you have to watch the closest.”
Chapter 74
THE SKIES OPENED up as we tore back to the highway from the former FBI agent’s house. The thump of the speeding wipers almost managed to keep time with my racing heart. My adrenaline was jacked. Closing in on Mooney was better than drinking a case of Red Bull.
My cell rang as we hydroplaned onto the parkway entrance.
“Mike,” Chief Fleming said. “We just got the ten-seven on Mooney. He lives in Chelsea. Four-four-eight West Twenty-fifth. That’s between Ninth and Tenth about three blocks from the Fashion Institute of Technology.”
“Finally!” I screamed. I repeated the address to Emily. After all the dead ends and frustration, for the first time in the case, we were on the hunt.
“Since Mooney might still have a hold of Dan Hastings,” my boss continued, “the ADIC from the New York FBI office just authorized the Hostage Rescue Team to do the assault. They’re en route to Chelsea right now along with our bomb guys.
“We’re still working on the no-knock warrant. Harry Dobbins, chief of the DA’s Homicide Division, wrote it up himself and is going to call me from Centre Street the second he can find a judge to sign it. Where are you?”
“About thirty minutes out,” I said. “Where’d you get Mooney’s address? From a criminal record?”
“No, get this,” the chief said. “His name popped up in the city social workers registration database. I just got off the phone with them. He’s part-time, and his record says that he’s an attorney with Ericsson, Weymouth and Roth, on Lexington. I’ve heard of them. A top-flight corporate firm. ESU’s on its way over there.”
“Do you have their number?” I said.
As I dialed the firm, I spotted the agonizingly distant Manhattan skyline through a break of parkway trees. Goddammit. We needed to be there yesterday. Had Mooney struck yet? Would he hit his office? Were we too late?
“Ericsson, Weymouth and Roth. May I put you on hold?” said a pleasant female voice.
“Hell, no!” I yelled. “This is Detective Mike Bennett of the NYPD. This is extremely urgent. I need to know if Francis X. Mooney came to work today.”
“Mr. Mooney? He’s one of our senior partners. I can patch you through to his voice mail,” the voice said.
“Listen to me!” I screamed. “We have reason to believe Mr. Mooney is armed and extremely dangerous, suicidal, and homicidal. Has he come in? Yes or no?”
“Oh, my God!” the woman said. “I’m not sure.”
“Check now!” I yelled.
The phone thumped down.
“I just spoke to his secretary,” the receptionist said. “He’s not here. The office manager is right here, though.”
“This is Ted Provencal,” said a man a moment later.
“Mike Bennett from the NYPD. We have reason to believe that your coworker Francis Mooney is responsible for the rash of recent teenage killings.”
I heard the man breathing heavily. He seemed stunned.
“Francis?” he said. “Francis?!”
“I know it’s a shock. But I need as much information about him as I can gather. Where is he right now?”
“I don’t know. He has no meetings scheduled. Francis has been in and out recently. Ever since he was diagnosed with lung cancer, we rolled his casework back. He’s been on flex time.”
So that explained the drug, I thought.
“Mooney has cancer?” I said.
“Stage four, non-small-cell,” the man said. “He found out three months ago. Too far gone to even do surgery, the poor guy. He was a two-pack-a-day man. We begged him to quit. Offered him incentives. It seemed so stupid for such a brilliant man.”
“He’s smart? How smart?”
“Without question one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. And meticulous? If he ever missed a detail in a contract or a will, I never heard about it. He was the head of our Estates and Trusts division. One of the most popular people in the whole firm, too, with both colleagues and clients. He even ran our pro bono department. I mean, are you a hundred percent sure he’s involved? That horrible thing from the paper? Those kids who were shot? It’s truly unbelievable. Are you sure?”
“Believe it,” I hollered at him. “Police are on their way. Lock down your office, and tell your security chief to keep Mooney out of the building at all costs. He’s armed, and we think he might have explosives.”
Chapter 75
WE WERE SCREECHING off the West Side Highway at 23rd in Chelsea when Emily received a call on her Fed phone. We were directed to an ugly beige-brick high-rise around the corner from Eighth Avenue and 25th Street.
As we swerved down into its underground garage, a large, dirty white box truck flashed its lights at us. Emily stopped behind the truck’s graffiti-covered back gate.
The gate rolled up, revealing a spotless interior filled with racks of computer servers and screens. It seemed like every inch of the walls was layered in cables for the very complicated-looking electronics equipment. What was most surprising by far, though, were the half dozen men dressed in tactical black, securing submachine guns on a bench along both walls. They completely ignored us as they busily tightened the snaps and clips on their various weapons and gear.
“HRT’s Mobile Tactical Operations Center,” Emily explained as we climbed in. “State-of-the-art surveillance setup and command center rolled into one. There’s fiber-optic cameras and boom microphones, as well as audio and visual com links to all the forward sniper observers.”
“Welcome to your Homeland Security dollars hard at work,” a handsome young Asian agent said as he flipped up his ballistic goggles and gave Emily a quick fist tap.
“Mike, meet Tom Chow. He’s head of HRT two,” Emily said.
Chow pointed to a computer screen showing a two-story brick town house.
“Thar she blows,” he said. “We’ve been here about half an hour, and there’s been no movement in or out. We can’t confirm if he’s inside.”
From beside the computer, Chow lifted up some photographs of Mooney’s building taken from various overhead angles.
“We figure we have two breach points, the roof and the front door,” he said, pointing them out. “See this other taller building to the east alongside? That’s a warehouse. We already have a team up there ready to fast-rope down to Mooney’s roof deck and gain entry. Sniper observers across the street will cover the windows so the rest of us, the breach team, can blow the front door. EMS is around on Tenth, ready to come in once we locate the kid.”
Chow turned as an oversized NYPD van pulled in behind our car. A black Labrador wagged its tail on the front seat between two cops wearing bulky gray bombproof suits.
“Hey, now,” Chow said. “Even the Bomb Squad is here. Time to get this party started.”
Chow pulled a ringing cell phone from his fatigues a moment later. He listened briefly. He was smiling as he shut it. He lowered his goggles and pounded on the tinted Plexiglas that separated the back of the assault truck from its cab.
“That’s the green light, people. We got it. Roll this sister.”
Emily and I strapped on borrowed vests as the truck’s back gate rolled down. My stomach rolled, too, as the truck suddenly lurched forward up the ramp.
A split second later, the truck came to a whiplash-inducing stop. Its back door went up like a snapped shade, and the FBI commandos sprinted out onto the street toward the town house. Faster than they could ring the doorbell, a charge was placed by the knob, and Mooney’s door blew back into the house with a low thump.
Two men in black rappelled off the building beside the town house as the commandos on the street rushed into it behind their Heckler and Koch MP5s.
In a chaos of radio chatter and shouts, I followed them over the sidewalk with my Glock drawn. Emily was right on my heels with a Remington shotgun.
“Please be home, fucker,” she said at my back as we ran.
“Yes, fucker,” I agreed. “Please, pretty please, be home.”
Chapter 76
AS THE DOOR to his town house was being blown into tiny pieces, Francis X. Mooney stopped on the corner of Park Avenue sixty blocks to the northeast and set down his bag.
He turned toward the four-story Gothic school building that took up most of the north side of 85th Street between Park and Lexington. It was St. Edward’s Academy, the elite private school he had attended from seventh grade through senior year.
He was filthy from his scuffle, wet from the rain, and completely exhausted from the walk, but he’d made it, hadn’t he?
He’d come back full circle to the place where it had all begun.
He stood for a second, remembering his first day here. He’d stood in this same spot, sick and frozen, with the scholarship-kid certainty that his clothes, his face, and every other inch of his being wouldn’t be up to snuff.
He quickly removed the Beretta from the valise and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and smoothed his jacket over it.
The butterflies never changed, he thought, finally hefting his case with a swallow of his dry throat.
Just the reasons.
I can’t do this, he thought.
I must do this, he thought.
“Francis? Francis, is that you?”
Francis turned. A tall, lean black man about his age was stopped beside him, smiling. He wore a St. Edward’s ball cap and held a takeout bag.
“Do I know you?” Francis said.
“I hope so. It’s me, Jerry Webb. We were on varsity together, class of ’sixty-five. It’s actually Coach Webb now. I was in finance for a while, but then I came back to good old St. Ed’s to teach them how to play a little ball. Can you imagine? I can’t sometimes, especially when I get my paycheck.”
“Oh, my God. Jerry. Yes,” Francis said, recovering. He found himself smiling genuinely as he shook the tall man’s hand. They actually had been teammates. If you could really call them that. Webb had been their all-city starting power forward, while Francis had had to practically kill himself every practice just for the privilege of riding the bench.
“It’s been—,” Francis began.
“Too long,” Coach Webb said with a wink. “Ol’ Francis X. Blast from the past. I knew that was you. Not too old yet to pick an old teammate out of a crowd. Can you still drive to your left like a banshee, ma man?”
Francis’s smile immediately dissipated. He’d never been able to go to his left. It was the first string’s running joke. Had Webb been one of the ones in that incident at summer practice? Francis went over the still-raw forty-year-old memory. He nodded to himself. Indeed, he had.
“What brings you around?” the still-cocky bastard wanted to know as he gave Francis the once-over. “You’re looking a little ruffled.”
How polite of you to notice, Francis thought.
“I had an appointment with a law client around the corner. First, I slipped getting out of my taxi, then I got caught in the rain, and then the guy bailed on me,” Francis lied. “Long story short, not my day. I thought, since I was in the neighborhood, I might stick my head in the door to check on the application of one of my friends’ kids.”
“Oh, I know how that goes,” Coach Webb said. “One tradition about St. Ed’s that remains unchanged. It never seems to get any easier to get into, does it? Let’s walk in together.”
The flat-topped middle-aged guard behind the arched glass doors immediately buzzed them in when he spotted the coach. Francis swallowed again as he stepped inside. This was the hard part coming up. He hadn’t had time to do reconnaissance, and he wasn’t sure if his flimsy excuse would hold water.
“He’s with me, Tommy,” Coach Webb said, signing them both into the security register. “This here’s Francis X., a valued alum. He’s got very important business at Admissions. I’ll walk him there myself.”
“No problem, Coach,” the guard said with a thumbs-up.
Francis wiped his brow as they walked down the locker-lined hallway. He glanced into classrooms as they passed. He started to panic. What the hell? They were all empty.
“Where is everybody?” he said as casually as he could.
“Sports pep rally in the auditorium. Baseball went to the Staties last season. Now, if only I could get my guys there.”
A pep rally. Would that complicate things? Probably. No time to do anything about it. He’d just have to improvise somehow.
Coach Webb patted Francis on the shoulder as they stopped before a door marked ADMISSIONS.
“Come visit me anytime, Francis. To jaw or maybe go a little one-on-one. See if that left of yours is still in operating order. Great seeing you, ma man.”
“You, too, Jerry. Thanks for everything,” Francis said with a grin.
Thanks for helping me set in motion the blackest day in St. Edward’s history, you conceited jock moron, he thought as he watched him walk away.
Chapter 77
IT TOOK HIM thirty seconds to backtrack down the hall to the main office. An old platinum-haired woman in a Harris tweed skirt suit was typing by herself behind the counter. A soft Muzak version of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was coming from the radio beside her keyboard.
“Hello. May I help you?” the woman said in a highly polished voice. She was smiling as she turned, an attractive, bright-eyed woman in her early seventies. She lowered her bifocals.
Francis suddenly felt numb. It was one thing to do someone in a private place, to do someone in the dark, in secret. This was different, he realized. Beads of sweat stood on his hot forehead. Out here, under the blazing fluorescents with the Muzak playing, was very goddamned different.
Now! a voice in his head chided him.
/> Francis kicked the door shut behind him and breathed in loudly.
The woman was starting to stand when he leapt over the counter and grabbed her by her scratchy lapel. He fumbled the sheet from his pocket. On the printed sheet were photographs of two St. Edward’s students, along with their names. He didn’t know who was shaking more, her or him.
“D-di-did these children come to school today?” he stammered.
“What? Let go of me this instant! You can’t do this! Who are you?”
“Listen to me!” Francis yelled. He took the silenced Beretta from his waistband and put it to her head.
“Did these children come to school today?” he said again.
The old woman started to cry when she saw the gun.
“Please!” she shrieked as she tried to pull away. She’d closed her eyes and was really blubbering now. “No, please. Why do you want those students? Don’t hurt me! What are you doing?”
Damn it, Francis thought, shaking her. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
He turned at a soft rushing noise behind him. It was the door. Francis saw Coach Webb standing there, wide-eyed.
“What in the name of Holy God are you doing?” the coach said.
Francis let go of the woman. His mouth dropped open as he met his old teammate’s eyes. Caught. Holy shit. Caught.
His body and mind seemed to arrest simultaneously. He felt like his breath had been knocked out of him. The gun suddenly felt unbelievably heavy in his hand.
It was over. He was too weak. He knew it. He shouldn’t even be up on his feet at this point. Where was he now? Stage four? Deep stage four. He was a very sick man, a weak, dying old man. He should be in a hospital bed over at Sloan-Kettering.
“Put it down, Francis,” Coach Webb said. “Now, man.”
Can you still drive to your left like a banshee, ma man? Francis heard him say again. A quick memory flashed through Francis’s mind. Webb in the gym bathroom doorway, howling as he held the elastic of Francis’s torn tighty whiteys above his head.