Worst Case

  HRT chief Tom Chow looked at the building through binoculars as the thump of a just-arriving NYPD Bell chopper appeared in the slot of sky above the street’s limestone co-ops.

  “We need to do this textbook,” he said. “Block off all routes of escape. Take up shooting positions on the surrounding buildings. Approach in a protected vehicle with a barricade phone. Toss it in and start negotiations. We’ll need the building plans.”

  “Sounds good,” Emily yelled over the reverberating rotor wash of the helicopter. “Except Mooney’s been flawlessly cold-blooded up to this point. I can’t believe for a second he wants to negotiate a damn thing.”

  A female cop came over with an ashen-faced woman in her seventies.

  “Cap,” the officer said. “This is the school secretary. She saw the guy who’s holding the kids.”

  “He killed Coach Webb,” she blurted between hysterical sobs. “He shot Coach Webb in the face.”

  That was it. That sealed it. He’d already started shooting. All-too-familiar gory school-shooting news footage flashed through my mind. No way. No goddamn way.

  Without further deliberation, I decided on a course of action.

  I started sprinting for the arched entrance of St. Edward’s.

  Chapter 83

  “MIKE! WAIT! WHAT the hell are you doing?” Emily called behind me.

  “I’m going to end this,” I yelled over my shoulder as I cleared my gun. “One way or another. Right now.”

  Glock firmly in hand, I burst through the school’s front door in a combat crouch. My overtaxed heart felt like it was about to burst as well when the door rattled shut behind me.

  In the glass trophy case beside me were spooky sepia photographs of smiling St. Edward’s students from the turn of the century. I took a deep breath and bit my lip as I peered down the long, even spookier empty corridor in front of me.

  “Not so fast, Bennett,” Emily whispered, coming in behind me.

  Even better, the eight members of the Hostage Rescue Team were right behind her.

  “Stay stacked and watch those corners,” Chow whispered into his tactical mic as they cut ahead. “Off the wall, Jennings bullets tend to ricochet, remember? Guns and eyeballs, people. Make me look bad, and I’ll kick your tail.”

  The obsessively trained commandos began making sure the classrooms were empty. Fast crossing thresholds, they kept low so as not to silhouette themselves from inside.

  We found the body of Coach Webb in the Admissions office three minutes later. He’d been shot once in the head. A mix of fury and sadness sizzled through me as I stared down at the cross-shaped wound in his skull. Almost like ashes, I thought.

  I was looking at Mooney’s twisted version of Ash Wednesday.

  We were coming back out into the hall when a loud thundering sound started. The door at the other end of the corridor flew open wide. I swallowed and sucked breath at the same time.

  “Hold your fire!” I yelled.

  It was the kids. Students in navy blazers, hundreds of them, were running toward us out of the gym, obviously in a panic. Many of them were crying as they rushed down the hall at full speed.

  I scanned the crowd for Mooney, for explosives or a gun. He wasn’t there. What now? And what the hell? He was letting them go?

  We directed the kids toward the front entrance and radioed outside that they were coming out. When the last one made it to the front foyer, we continued down the hallway, running now for the gym.

  “Freeze!” Chow yelled to a shocked-looking man coming around the stands.

  “Please! I’m the headmaster. Henry Joyce,” the distraught bald man said. “He’s taken two of the students. Jeremy Mason and Aidan Parrish. He called them out and handcuffed them together before telling everyone to run. There was nothing I could do. . . . Oh, God!”

  He pointed to a door at the opposite side of the basketball court.

  “I think he took them into the basement.”

  Chapter 84

  ON THE OTHER side of the gym’s parquet, I hit the basement door at a full-court sprint. I was only half a step ahead of Emily. The HRT guys were at our backs as we went down the cement stairs two by two.

  The basement was dark and stifling and smelled like chlorine. Would he try to kill the two boys down here before we got to him? Had he already? A boiler roared as we passed some industrial equipment for the school’s pool.

  I saw a slanting ray of daylight as we turned a corner. It was coming down from an open cellar grate in the ceiling. I jumped up a short steel ladder that headed up the hatch and poked my Glock out. When I didn’t get shot, I stuck my head out.

  Goddammit! There was a short Dumpster-filled alley to my right. The alley had a steel gate at its end. An open steel gate, which led out onto 80th Street at the back end of the blockwide school campus.

  From around the corner came a yell and a squeal of tires.

  “Shit! C’mon!” I yelled to Emily as I climbed out onto the cracked cement.

  A shocked-looking Filipino taxi driver wearing a white Kangol hat was standing in the street with a cell phone to his ear. A group of construction workers behind him were pointing east toward Lexington Avenue.

  “He just turned right onto Lex,” the cabbie said as he saw the badge around my neck. “Some crazy son of a bitch just jacked my taxi.”

  “Were there kids with him?” I yelled as I ran past.

  “Two of them,” the Filipino said. “They were handcuffed together. What the hell just happened?”

  I wish I knew, I thought as I booked down the middle of the street.

  I turned the corner and stood for a moment, dazed and staring. Lexington Avenue was filled with trucks, buses, cars, and taxis.

  Dozens and dozens of taxis were flowing south into the distance by the second. None of them seemed to be speeding or acting erratically. There was no way to tell which one was Mooney’s!

  I was pulling out my cell to call for a roadblock, when it rang in my hand.

  “Mike? It’s me,” a calm, educated voice said.

  Mooney! I couldn’t speak. Sweat poured off me while I fought to catch my breath. Horns honked at me as I waded out even farther into traffic, craning my neck down the block to see if he would reveal where he was. Was he going to taunt me now? Rub it in that he got away? I’d even take a shot from him at this point just to get an inkling of where he was.

  Emily arrived at the corner with a where-the-hell-is-he expression on her face.

  “Francis?” I said, pointing at my phone.

  “If anyone tries to stop me, the two boys will die.”

  “Nobody wants that to happen,” I said. “Listen, Francis. We know about the Ash Wednesday bombing where your friends died. That wasn’t your fault, man. Don’t blame yourself for that. You did the right thing. I heard about your cancer, too. That sucks.

  “We also know about the charity work and pro bono stuff. You’re a good guy. Why do you want this to be your legacy? These are defenseless kids. How does this make sense?”

  “Who says that the world has to make sense, Mike? Besides, my legacy doesn’t matter,” he said after a pause. “Only one thing matters.”

  I felt like bashing the phone off my skull. What was it with this guy? He sounded messianic, as if he thought he was on a mission from God.

  “Why?” I yelled. “Why the hell are you doing this?”

  “You’re Catholic, right, Mike? Of course you are. What New York Irish cop isn’t? Did you hear the Gospel today? Did you listen to the Gospel? If you had, you wouldn’t be asking me that question.”

  The Gospel?!

  “Take me, then, Francis. Take me in place of the kids. Whatever you need to do, you can use me instead.”

  “That wouldn’t work, Mike. You’ll see. It will all be revealed to you. To everyone. It’s not long now. I’m almost at my final destination. Our final destination. This is almost over. Relieved? I am.”

  He sobbed then. Funny, but I didn’t feel sorry for him at all
, despite his obviously fragile emotional state.

  “This is the worst thing anyone has ever done. But that’s okay. I’m probably the only one strong enough to do it.”

  Chapter 85

  MOONEY ZIPPED THROUGH the Lexington Avenue traffic quickly, but not too quickly. Cutting off a FedEx truck, he skillfully made a hairpin right onto 57th Street.

  He hadn’t planned to carjack the taxi. He actually had a rental car parked in an underground lot behind St. Edward’s. But when he saw the taxi just sitting there in traffic, as if waiting for him, he seized the opportunity.

  He now had the two students gagged and double-cuffed down on the floor. Mason was blond, and Parrish had reddish-brown hair, but the two seniors could have been brothers. Handsome, athletic-looking, and oh-so-elite in their Burberry shirts and Polo ties.

  The question wasn’t where they’d be going to college, Mooney knew. The question was, which Ivy League school? An eye-popping twenty-five percent of the students at St. Edward’s went on to Ivy League schools. In some city public schools, fewer than twenty-five percent even graduated.

  The inequality didn’t end there, of course. Parrish’s father was CEO of Mellon Zaxo, the household-product giant. He’d been the third-highest-compensated executive in the United States the year before, with over one hundred and thirteen million dollars in salary and stock bonuses. Mason’s dad was the North American chief of Takia, the monolithic Russian natural gas corporation. He’d just squeaked into the top ten by raking in a paltry sixty-one million.

  This, while the average American household income topped off at fifty-three thousand. While regular people went without health insurance and lost their houses in banking subprime swindles.

  A groan came from the backseat.

  “One more stop, now, fellas,” Mooney called to them.

  A short stop, he thought, but vitally important.

  He slowed as he arrived at the Four Seasons Hotel on the corner of 57th and Park Avenue. The opulent fifty-two-story I. M. Pei–designed midtown landmark was a favorite with movie stars and billionaires.

  A handsome college-age doorman in a nineteenth-century-inspired uniform and a top hat raced out through the brass revolving door.

  Popping open the taxi’s rear door, the hotel worker stood there in his ridiculous footman’s uniform, staring stupefied at the two students handcuffed on the floor of the backseat.

  Mooney leaned through the divider and pressed the Beretta to the doorman’s square jaw.

  The male-model look-alike took a wad of ones from his pocket.

  “Take it, bro. All yours,” he said.

  Mooney pistol-whipped the bills out of the young man’s white-gloved hands.

  “Get in now,” he said.

  “What?” the doorman said. “Get in? Me?”

  “Yes, get in the front seat or I’ll put a bullet in your chest. How’s that for a tip? I won’t tell you twice,” Mooney said as he unlocked the front door.

  Chapter 86

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Mooney let out a sigh of relief as he reached Canal Street. He made a left and then a quick right two blocks east onto Mott. He stomped down on the accelerator, barreling the Chevy taxicab down the narrow, winding Chinatown street.

  He’d made it. He was in the maze of downtown now. This was going to happen. Absolutely nothing could stop him now.

  Mooney found the Bowery and took it to St. James Place and farther south onto Pearl. He thought he would feel nervous as he neared his final destination, but it was the exact opposite. He’d never felt so elated, so clean. He was coming into contact with the sublime now.

  Stopping the stolen taxi on Pearl half a block north of Beaver, Mooney looked out on the compact downtown skyline. Austere modern glass cliff faces squeezed between soaring Beaux Arts granite facades. An entire vista built by greed, he thought. By evil and slavery and war.

  Was it any wonder that, even before the two attacks on the World Trade Center, the area had retained such a violent, bloody history? The 1970 Hard Hat Riot, where hundreds of thug blue-collar workers severely beat the members of an antiwar demonstration. The 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing by the Puerto Rican separatist group FALN, which had killed four people. As far back as 1920, a wagon loaded with iron slugs and a hundred pounds of dynamite had been set off by anarchists in front of the New York Stock Exchange, killing thirty-three people.

  History really does repeat itself, Francis thought as he opened his bag.

  He began to methodically prepare the boys and doorman and himself. Wordlessly, he stepped out with them onto the sidewalk. A pudgy Asian businesswoman coming out of an Au Bon Pain in front of them screamed before throwing herself back inside.

  Francis gazed at the monstrous American flag draped down the massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange’s famous Neoclassical facade. He looked at the maze of steel barricades and concrete car stops that provided blast cushion, to use the parlance of counter-terror circles. There was about a regiment of heavily armed law enforcement on the sidewalk. They stood beside Emergency Service panel trucks, holding rifles and black telescope-like Geiger counters. He was supposed to get by them?

  A snatch of Nietzsche came to him, comforted him.

  He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

  Mooney and the three young men were turning the corner of Exchange Place and Broad when the bomb dogs started up. He was linked to the men with strand upon strand of the det cord and strips of plastic explosive. Tangled together in the thick clothesline-like explosive, they looked strange and terrifying, a cross between performance artists and victims of a construction accident.

  The cocking of automatic rifles from the SWAT cops behind the steel barricades rang down the narrow trench of the street as Francis shuffled toward them, connected to the two boys and the doorman. The police were converging on him as he made it to the barricade closest to the Exchange’s corner employee entrance.

  An older, pugnacious-looking buzz-cut cop in a suit and trench coat was the first to reach them. His name was Dennis Quinn, and he was the Stock Exchange’s security chief for the day shift. Francis knew all about him, had done hours of extensive research on the man, in fact.

  Quinn had served ten years in the Marine Corps and another twenty in the FBI before landing the well-paying Exchange security job. The middle-aged man yelled into a collar mic as he drew a Ruger .40 caliber and pointed it at Mooney’s head.

  “I’d watch where I pointed that thing, if I were you,” Francis said with a smile. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt anyone.” He indicated the doorman tangled beside him to the right.

  “Most especially your son here, Dennis.”

  The gun in Quinn’s hand trembled as he looked at the doorman for the first time.

  “Oh, my God! Kevin?” Quinn said.

  Francis raised his hands with the electronic detonator controller taped between them. He showed Quinn where his thumb was taped down to the detonator’s charge button.

  “See the indicator light? The det cord? The plastic? We’re charged and ready to go, Dennis. All I have to do is pull the trigger.”

  Dennis Quinn’s Adam’s apple did a hard bob as he thought about that.

  Francis stared dead into the man’s eyes.

  “It’s simple. I die, we all die. You, me, these two young men here. Oh, and your only son. I know you’re a patriot, Dennis. Rah-rah, 9/11, never forget, and all that. But are you actually willing to kill your only son? Are you that crazy? Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t move the barricades to the side and let me through that door.

  “This is a test, Dennis. You can protect either A, those heartless, money-worshipping savages inside that building behind you, or B, your son. One or the other. Not both. What is it going to be?”

  Chapter 87

  AFTER MOONEY HUNG up on me, I ran as fast as I could back to the main entrance at St. Edward’s. On the way, I called for a roadblock on Lexington and for Aviation to keep an eye s
outh on Lex for erratically driving taxis. That was pretty much asking for them to keep an eye out for water in the ocean, so I wasn’t too hopeful. In fact, after the most recent events and Mooney’s messianic nutball monologue, I was deep in full-despair territory.

  A lot of blond, ladies-who-lunch, Upper East Side moms were now embracing their kids by the Park Avenue median. Other worried-looking parents were breathlessly waiting by the police sawhorses, yelling and gazing into the crowd of released schoolkids. Were Mason’s and Parrish’s mothers waiting there? I wondered.

  “Bomb Squad and the Hostage Rescue guys are still inside, securing the building,” Emily told me as she cupped her cell. “They’re searching for booby traps, making sure Mooney hasn’t left any of the explosive behind.”

  “I’m more afraid that he hasn’t,” I said, dialing my boss. “In fact, I’m much more afraid that he’s taken every ounce of it with him and those two poor kids.”

  EMTs were bringing out the body of Coach Webb as my phone rang. No one else had been hurt, thank God.

  At least not yet.

  The young black Nineteenth Precinct captain rushed over to me, holding his cell phone toward me.

  “Detective, it’s Commissioner Daly.”

  “Bennett,” I said into it.

  “Mike, it’s John Daly. Listen, bad news. Mooney just arrived out in front of the Stock Exchange. He’s wired himself to three people with the plastic explosive and is insisting on going inside.”

  I closed my eyes, resisting the urge to start screaming. The New York Stock Exchange? And what did he just say?

  “Three people?!” I said. “He only abducted two St. Edward’s kids as far as we can tell.”

  “I heard it was three, Mike. Just get down there with Agent Parker and the Hostage Rescue Team ASAP and see what you can do. You guys know him best.”

  Yeah, I thought, handing the captain back his phone. That was the problem. I knew all too well what Mooney was all about.