He grabbed on to the pulse of hurt and rage that throbbed through him. It was like a second wind. Francis retightened his grip on the pistol. His resolve. He raised the gun.
“How about instead you get in here and close that fucking door, ma man,” he said. The coach looked like he was about to bolt down the hall, but then he shot a look over at Ms. Typing-to-the-Oldies and suddenly obeyed.
Webb was turning back from closing the door when Francis pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him right in his smug power-forward-all-city face. He fell back comically fast, as if he’d slipped on a banana peel. Swoosh! Nothing but net! Francis thought with a chuckle. What did they say at Knicks games again? Whoomp! There it is!
Francis felt amazingly focused as he turned back to the woman. It was as if someone had turned up the dimmer switch of his energy as far as it would go.
“Did those children come to school today?” he said again clearly and confidently, his best courtroom voice. He knocked her glasses away and placed the warm gun barrel on one of her squinted-shut eyelids.
“Yes,” she said.
The woman was weeping silently. Francis suddenly noticed that he was as well.
So much blood and still more to come, he thought. He nodded. It was worth it and then some.
“It was brave of you to try to protect the kids,” Francis whispered lovingly in the old lady’s ear. “But a higher purpose is waiting for them. That’s why I’m here. To deliver unto them the very highest purpose of all.”
Chapter 78
COUGHING IN THE flash-bang grenade smoke, I found a window in Mooney’s kitchen and threw it open.
“Goddang!” Emily rebel-yelled as she laid her pump shotgun on the granite kitchen island. “We missed his ass.”
“Damn it,” I said with disgust.
I loosened one of the Velcro straps on the heavy body armor and sat down next to her. Hostage Rescue had scoured every room on both floors, and there was nothing. No one was home. No Mooney. And even worse, no Dan Hastings.
After a quick call to my boss, I learned that Mooney still hadn’t shown up to work. Which was good in a way, since he just might be looking to kill everyone there. But if not at work, then where was he?
“Where should we toss first?” I said.
“Office,” she said.
We went up to the second floor and pooched through his office. And by pooched, I mean we tore it apart. In filing cabinets, we found trusts and estates folders, take-home work from his job probably. One of the walls was covered with photos of Francis at high-profile charity events. There were quite a few framed Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine pages. A business card in a side drawer said Mooney was something called a Philanthropy Consultant. To high-net-worth individuals, no doubt, by the gala events he was often photographed at.
One of the commandos called to us excitedly from downstairs.
“I think I found something, Em,” Chow said as we arrived in the basement. He pointed his gun-barrel-mounted flashlight at an open door. I reached in and flicked on the light switch.
I stood there, blinking, but not at the light. Against cement walls stood stack upon stack of newspapers and books. They were six feet high in some places. It looked like a pretty eclectic collection. There was a whole section of anti-Bush nonfiction. Well-thumbed tomes of Spinoza. A book called Quantum Geometry of Bosonic Strings sat on top of an autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I spotted some French-language Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville volumes that had margin notes handwritten in French. There were many books by Jean-Paul Sartre and the modern French philosopher Michel Foucault.
“This guy might be a killer and a kook,” Emily said, “but at least he’s a well-read one.”
In a metal filing cabinet drawer we found a laptop. Emily pulled on surgical gloves before she turned it on. The laptop’s whole screen was filled with numbered Word documents.
Emily clicked on a random one. It was random, all right.
“‘They must be shown,’” she read. “‘Communication is futile. Like Malcolm X, I, too, am branded with the philosophy of any-means-necessary. I, too, am a free-willed, informed human being who has gifts that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have responsibilities that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have—’”
“‘A mental disease that transcends the ordinary,’” I finished for her.
“It goes on and on,” Emily said, scrolling with the mouse. “Oh, my God, it’s five hundred pages. There must be a hundred of these documents. It’ll take months to dredge through this nonsense.”
That’s when we heard the barking.
It was the bomb dog. He was at the top of the basement stairs, barking down at us, going absolutely crazy.
“I don’t think he needs to be walked,” Chow yelled. “Clear it! Now! Everybody out!”
He didn’t have to tell us twice. We were across the cordoned-off street on the safe side of the SWAT truck when the bomb guys came out ten minutes later. Each of them was holding a cardboard box.
The older, mustached bomb tech waved me over to the back of his van. I swallowed. I didn’t think he was inviting me to tailgate with him.
“Better you than me, Mike,” Emily said, sticking her fingers in her ears.
“Found it in the crawl space next to the basement office,” the bomb cop said as I approached. I gingerly looked into the box he was holding. Inside was a stack of long white blocks that looked like they were made of Crisco.
“Relax. It’s C-four,” the veteran cop said with a dismissive wave. “Well, actually, I’m pretty sure it’s PE-four, the very similar British version of the plastic explosive. It’s totally stable. You could play stickball with it. Hell, you could light it on fire and nothing would happen. Nothing happens unless you wire it to . . .”
He paused while he showed me the other box, which contained a reel of what looked like thick green clothesline.
“A detonator. This one here is called Cordtex. It looks like rope, acts like rope, but it has an explosive core that makes it one long mother of a blasting cap. You can fell a tree with six feet of it. Or a building if you connect it with enough of the PE-four from box number one.”
The bomb cop stroked his mustache and sighed in a way that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
“What?” I said.
“The problem is the box,” he said.
“The box?” I said.
“The PE-four came in a twenty-five-pound box. There’s only six or seven pounds here. Also, I’d say about half the reel of det cord is missing.”
I didn’t have a mustache, so I rubbed my temples instead as I turned and took in the 360-degree city vista of buildings and buses and pedestrians. Targets as far as the eye could see. Mooney could be anywhere at all.
“Shit,” I said.
“You said it,” the bomb cop said.
Chapter 79
FRANCIS ADJUSTED THE St. Edward’s ball cap that he had taken from the dead coach as he walked quickly through the school’s empty corridors. He smiled as he passed his old chem lab. How the rest of them had hated him for always wrecking the curve with his near-perfect scores.
He opened a door into the empty lower school’s practice gym. It still smelled like sweat and Bengay. He gazed at the thick patina of paint on the walls, the battered gates on the tall windows. How many layups had he made across its parquet? How many laps around the dusty loft track above? Passing across, he unscrewed the silencer from the Beretta and hook-shot it at the hoop from the top of the key. It fell short by at least three feet.
“Air ball. What else is new?” he grumbled, pocketing the pistol.
The roar of the crowd hit him like a smack as he came through a door into the cavernous upper-school gym. The stands were filled with the all-boy student body. In their blazers and khakis, they looked somewhat similar to his class, though their long hair and loose ties would have earned them a detention in his oppressive day. There were a lot more brown faces now, though, so at least some progress had been
made.
“Let’s go, St. Ed’s!” the headmaster was chanting through a bullhorn. “Here we go, St. Ed’s!” Beside him, kids with baseball jerseys over their ties were pumping their fists and waving their arms upward for more noise.
The sound reminded him of the all-city semifinal. The heat and cheers and the smash of the ball against the parquet. He hadn’t played a minute in it, despite what the coach had promised. Webb had won it for them at the buzzer. He’d left as they were raising that shit heel on their shoulders. He’d certainly received a terrific education at St. Edward’s, though. It was here where he first learned how entirely shitty humanity could be.
People were staring at him as he came along the stands.
He pointed at his hat and waved at them vigorously.
“Here we go, St. Ed’s!” he yelled along with the crowd as he approached the stage.
The headmaster was jumping up and down, letting off an air horn, when Francis jumped on the stage beside him. His face scrunched in surprise as Mooney put the gun to his temple.
“I am a good person,” Francis said to him as he ripped the bullhorn from his hands.
Chapter 80
BRANDISHING THE UGLY black pistol high above his head, Mooney looked out at the students. The team members had splayed themselves flat alongside the padded wall to the gym’s rear. In the stands directly beneath the newly hung baseball championship banner, a male teacher was leaning to the side, selflessly trying to shield as many students as he could.
Mooney took a measured breath, fighting down his pounding pulse. He had their rapt attention now. The happy shouts of the six-hundred-strong student body cut off suddenly as if Mooney had pressed a Mute button.
In the sudden hush, the bald headmaster’s terrified breath beside him sounded like he was doing Lamaze. Mooney laid the four-inch barrel of the Beretta against his hairless forehead as he raised the bullhorn.
“Everybody, stay in your seats,” Mooney called out. “Anyone who tries to run will be shot dead. I don’t want to cut your young lives short, but I will. Something must be done. This is it. I’m doing it.”
Warm sweat poured freely down Francis’s face. All that remained of the ashes he had gotten that morning was a faint streak.
Some of the students in the stands seemed oddly fascinated, perhaps in shock. Several young men were fumbling two-handed with their cell phones, texting for help, no doubt. He spotted one none-too-subtle ugly blond kid at the top of the bleachers pointing his camera phone toward the stage. The situation was probably already streaming onto the Internet.
Yes. Let it go out over YouTube, he thought. Let it go out everywhere around the globe. That’s what was needed here. What better impact than something happening real time to shout his message into the deaf ears of the world?
Francis saw that some kids were crying. Tears started to stream unheeded down his own face.
“You were supposed to be the future leaders of this country,” he called to them. “I know this because I attended this prestigious academy myself. Now I’ve come to give you the ultimate test of your worthiness, the ultimate test of your character.”
The megaphone squawked grating feedback as Francis toggled its trigger.
“Listen to me!” he cried. “Question one: While you were playing the Metal Gear and Sniper Elite video games you received at Christmas, how many real-war casualties were there in Iraq and Afghanistan? In Darfur?”
Chapter 81
IT WAS FULL-OUT bedlam on 25th Street in front of Mooney’s doorless town house. The bomb techs and black-clad Hostage Rescue Team agents were now joined by another thirty or so Manhattan Task Force uniforms, who had come to secure the crime scene.
Positioned center stage on the sidewalk behind the tape, Emily and I paced like expectant parents, calling everyone and anyone we could think of to track down Mooney.
We’d sent Schultz with a team to Inwood to Mooney’s mother’s apartment. Ramirez was over at his law firm, trying to shake some new leads loose, but so far he had come up with diddly.
Every few seconds, streaks of bubbling blue-and-red light from speeding PD radio cars would blow past on Ninth, their sirens whoop-whooping.
“The commissioner has put on the department’s entire day shift and activated the NYPD Anti-Terror Task Force Hercules team,” my boss, Carol Fleming, told me. “Cars and personnel are being deployed to Times Square, Rockefeller Center, all the major population clusters in the city.”
I blew out a frustrated breath. They really had their work cut out for them, considering that Manhattan was actually one large population cluster.
“The commissioner also wants to know yesterday how the hell Mooney got his hands on British military plastic explosive,” I was told.
“I’ll be sure to ask him after I read him his rights,” I told my boss before I hung up.
“Yeah, his last rites,” mumbled Emily, who seemed even more pissed than me.
I glanced at her and came close to chuckling. I remembered way back, three days before, when Parker was a rube Fibbie. Now she was starting to sound like me.
“New York–style bitterness and sarcasm,” I said. “You’re starting to impress me, Agent Parker.”
Both ends of the narrow cross street in the heart of Chelsea were cordoned off now, but of course, more and more people kept arriving by the minute to get a gander. It looked like a street fair near the barricaded bodega on the corner of Ninth. Rent cast member look-alikes were hanging out their windows across the street, standing on their fire escapes with binoculars, gaping down from the roofs. Hadn’t they heard about the possibility of explosives? Guess not.
I hadn’t even had time to put my phone away when my boss called me back.
“Mike, this is—oh, God—something new. Get a Wi-Fi connection. Go to a website called Twitpic. There’s an almost-live podcast called School Takeover.”
“School what?!” I yelled.
Without hanging up, I raced Emily into the back of the FBI truck and found a laptop. I clicked on Internet Explorer and brought up the website.
I opened up the link.
“Tell me that’s a hoax,” Emily pleaded as she looked over my shoulder.
It wasn’t. My breath left me.
It was a still photo of Mooney. He was standing on a gym stage, holding a megaphone in one hand and a gun in the other. The gun was pressed to the head of another man—a teacher?—in a suit. In front of him were hundreds of male high school students wearing private school blazers.
Staring at the man and the terrified children in front of him, I felt an almost out-of-body anger. This was it. Mooney’s last stand. I noticed a large bag beside him. The bomb tech told me that a pound of the PE-4 could blow up a truck. I didn’t even want to think about what nineteen pounds of it could do to all those kids.
“Came in five minutes ago. It’s real,” my boss said.
“What school is it?” I cried.
“We’ve had three calls into nine-one-one in the past ten minutes from mothers whose kids go to St. Edward’s Academy on the Upper East Side. Kids have been texting that a man with a gun just came into their school gym during a pep rally.”
My head dropped until it was practically between my knees. Now Mooney had taken over a school full of children. This was our absolute worst nightmare come true.
“What school?” Emily said.
She jumped back as I punched the side of the truck.
“St. Edward’s. It’s an all-boys private prep school off Park Avenue. The richest schoolkids in the city.”
“We have radio cars arriving on scene right now,” my boss said. “Get up there!”
Chapter 82
IT WAS ONE long yellow blur of taxis outside the windshield as we zipped up Park Avenue. Uniformed doormen and pedestrians stood frozen under the sidewalk awnings, staring after us fearfully. I don’t know which was louder, our siren or the static from the FBI radio as its frequency was flooded with citywide emergency calls.
/> We skidded to a stop by the armada of blacked-out Chevy Suburbans that had taken up position across East 81st Street.
The SUVs belonged to the NYPD’s intimidating Anti-Terror Hercules Squad. The Special Forces–like team of cops was positioned behind mailboxes and parked cars, aiming their M4 assault rifles at an imposing Gothic-style school building halfway down the block.
A Bentley Continental shrieked to a stop beside us. A sleek silver-haired man in pinstripes and silk suspenders jumped out, leaving the door open. A uniformed cop stiff-armed him as he tried to push over an NYPD sawhorse.
“Let me go. My son’s a St. Edward’s student. He’s in there!” he yelled, tussling with the officer.
I noticed that a rail-thin woman in Jackie O shades was already at the opposite corner, standing beside a Range Rover Westminster with a uniformed chauffeur. A diamond-encrusted hand covered her mouth.
“Please,” she said with a Russian accent to the closest officer. “His name is Terrence Osipov. Please, where is he? He’s in the seventh grade.”
“How exclusive is this school again?” Emily said, doing a double-take at the woman’s gems.
“You kidding me?” I said. “Kindergarten at St. Edward’s is thirty K according to the latest New York magazine. Not only is it practically as expensive as Harvard, it’s harder to get into.”
I found a youthful black precinct captain directing cops underneath an apartment house awning on the north side of the street.
“We spoke to the security guard,” the young chief said. “He said the kook came in about half an hour ago to go to the Admissions office. Apparently he’s got a gun, and he’s locked himself inside the gym with the students. There was some kind of pep rally going on. The entire school is in there.”
“First thing we need to do is evacuate the block,” Tim Curtin, the bomb tech, said, arriving behind me. “He sets off that plastic in the right place, the gas lines could go.”